The orchard economy: Latter-day Saints in Mexico and the entrepreneurs the record can name

The colonies were a legal strategy before they were an economy. Congress passed the Edmunds Act in 1882, criminalising polygamy and stripping those who practised it of the vote, and in 1885 Church president John Taylor bought 100,000 acres in Chihuahua and Sonora so that plural families could live outside American jurisdiction. More than 350 families went. Miles Park Romney, a St. George builder and architect who had also been chief of police, lawyer and newspaper editor, left Arizona with a party on April 7, 1885 to find the land. Colonia Juárez was laid out in 1886 in the foothills of the western Sierra Madre; Colonia Dublán followed after George M. Brown secured 73,000 acres in 1888 and George Lake began settling it in the spring of 1889. Six weeks after the first arrivals in 1885, the colonists numbered 350. Others followed at Díaz, Pacheco, García, Chuichupa and Cave Valley in Chihuahua and at Oaxaca, Morelos and San José in Sonora.

The 1890 Manifesto ended new plural marriages in the United States but let the Mexican colonies continue; the Second Manifesto of 1904 ended them everywhere. By then the colonies had become farms. The economy ran on sheep, cattle, wheat, row crops and fruit, and the railroad that reached Ciudad Juárez in 1897 turned Dublán's orchards into an export business. The same year, on September 20, 1897, the Juárez Stake Academy opened in Colonia Juárez with 291 students. It is still there, as Academia Juárez, the oldest private high school the Church owns and the only one of its nineteenth-century academies still doing its original job.

Miles Park Romney was born in Nauvoo, Illinois on August 18, 1843, took five wives between 1862 and 1897, and died in Colonia Dublán on February 26, 1904. His son Gaskell, born 1871, was the one who fled in 1912 with George, born in Dublán on July 8, 1907. The family lived on government relief in El Paso, then moved to Los Angeles, where Gaskell worked as a carpenter, and on to Idaho and Utah; George watched his parents spend more than a decade in the Depression paying back debts, and Wikipedia credits that with shaping his business views. He became president of American Motors in 1954, bet the company on the compact Rambler against what he called the competitors' "gas-guzzling dinosaurs", left in 1962 to become Governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969 and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 1969 to 1973, and served as Detroit stake president along the way. His son Mitt left Bain & Company in 1984 to found Bain Capital on $37 million, had $4 billion under management and 115 employees by 1999, then ran the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics on a $1.32 billion budget, turning a $379 million shortfall into a $100 million surplus.

Three generations from a burned orchard in Chihuahua to $4 billion under management in Boston.

The branch that stayed is the one that answers this essay's question. Smithsonian, reporting in 2012, put about three dozen Romney relatives in Colonia Juárez, a town of 1,035 people at the 2010 census known for peach and apple orchards and cattle ranches. Leighton Romney, a second cousin of the senator, then 53 and a dual citizen, ran the fruit cooperative, the packing house and the export business. Academia Juárez, where instruction is in English and Spanish from elementary school up, had about 418 students in 2012-13, 81 percent of them Latter-day Saints and 17 percent Catholic. Lester Johnson, another colonist, told the magazine, "We need to get some of our young people back here", which is the sentence every small farm town says. The Church dedicated a temple in Colonia Juárez on March 6, 1999. Only Juárez and Dublán survive of the original colonies, and Dublán's residents, Wikipedia notes, are now of Mexican descent.

The colonies are the famous part and the small part. The Mexican Church is overwhelmingly Mexican, and its growth came after 1960, which is when the first Spanish-speaking stake was organised in Mexico City.

Two cautions attach to the table. The Church counts everyone on its rolls; the Mexican census of 2010 recorded 314,932 people who called themselves members, about a quarter of the Church's figure for the same period. And the growth was institutional as much as missionary: the first converts were baptised in Hermosillo in 1877, a branch was organised in Mexico City in 1879, the Third Convention of 1936 split off members demanding a native-born mission president and came back in 1946, and Benemérito, the Church's school in Mexico City founded on land bought in 1964, closed in 2013 and became a missionary training centre. By July 2026 Wikipedia counted 231 stakes.

You would expect a membership of 1.57 million, a century of Church schools and a border economy to have produced a roster of founders that a site like this could list, and I went looking for one with the rule that every name had to come from a page I could fetch; the result is that the record is thin, and I would rather say so than pad it. The Church's own history of Mexico is a history of missionaries, schools, temples and the leaders who ran them, and the leaders who ran them were, in the cases Wikipedia documents, professionals rather than founders. Agricol Lozano (1927-1999) helped his father lay bricks as a boy, became a lawyer and the Church's chief counsel in Mexico, was made president of the Mexico City North Stake in 1967 as the first Mexican-born stake president, served as president of the Mexico City Temple from 1993 to 1997, and wrote Historia del Mormonismo en México (1983). Fernando R. Gómez, born in Monterrey in 1940, took an electrical engineering degree at BYU, was president of an electronics firm whose name Wikipedia does not give, and after presiding over the Mérida mission, the Santiago, Chile training centre and the Mérida temple founded the Museo de Historia del Mormonismo en México, which opened in Provo in 2011. That is the whole named list on the Mexican side, plus Leighton Romney's fruit cooperative in Colonia Juárez, and one of the two is an executive of an unnamed company. The Mexican-American side is older than people think and better documented as a congregation than as a business community: La Rama Mexicana, the Mexican branch in Salt Lake City, met for the first time in November 1920 in the restaurant of Juan Ramón Martínez with 19 members and 33 non-members present, became a branch in 1923 under Margarito Bautista, had 467 members when it became the Lucero Ward in 1960, and Wikipedia records that its members fared better in the Depression than other Utah Latinos because Church ties gave them networks for work, marriage and schooling. The nearest thing to a modern institution is the Suazo Business Center in Salt Lake City, founded in 2001 by Gladys Gonzalez, a member of the Church from Bogotá, which by September 2022 had helped start about 5,000 Utah small businesses, 93 percent of them minority-owned; Gonzalez told KSL, "We Latinos have an entrepreneurial spirit; it's something natural for us." Her founder is Colombian, her chief executive, Silvia Castro, is South American, and her clients are mostly anonymous, so even the best-documented Latino business institution in the Church's home city gives me no Mexican founder to name. If a reader knows of one with a page I can check, the address is on this site.

• Export from day one: the 1897 railroad made Dublán's peaches and apples a cross-border trade, and Leighton Romney's cooperative was still packing and exporting fruit in 2012.
• Two languages as infrastructure: Academia Juárez has taught in English and Spanish since 1897, which is the same asset the mission gives returned missionaries.
• A cooperative, not a corporation: the colonies' packing house is owned by the growers, the same 1868 ZCMI model that failed in Utah and survived in Chihuahua.
• A ceiling on scale: a town of 1,035 people produces orchards and a school, and its young people leave, which is the reason the record of founders is short.

The honest summary is that the Church in Mexico produced a large membership and a small business record, and that the colonies, a village against that membership, produced the only founders anyone can name because they are the only part that kept land. The question I cannot answer from the sources is whether the 1.5 million members outside the colonies have founders the English-language record has not noticed, or whether a church whose Mexican mission was led from Utah until members demanded otherwise in 1936 built congregations rather than companies. The 2010 census figure, 314,932 self-identified members against 1.1 million on the rolls, suggests the second, and I would like to be wrong.