This story was produced by the Glimpse Correspondents Programme.

We fabricated small talk as the bus bumped along Avenida Talismán through northeastern Mexico Metropolis, their blackness ties flapping confronting their pressed white shirts. I asked what they found hardest about beingness Mormon missionaries. One of them, chosen Elder Johnson, though he looked about sixteen, smiled sheepishly. "The language," he said, his ears reddening. His companion, Elder Samuels, was more frontward. "Imagine y'all had a processed bar that was really, really practiced. You lot'd want to share it with your friends. And then they tell you they don't desire to eat your candy bar. You'd feel pretty bad, right? I'd say that's the hardest thing."

We were traveling through the middle-class neighborhood of San Juan de Aragón. Laundry hung from the windows of boxy flat buildings, their distinct colors faded by the mutual tint of smog. Nosotros passed torta stands, lavanderías, pharmacies blasting Mexican stone.

Every bit we approached the Temple, I saw several passengers craning their necks to take a look. It wasn't hard to imagine why. Neatly trimmed hedges and pristine green lawns encircled the vast white building, carved with ornate motifs and bearing a golden statue at its peak. In the late morning dominicus it glowed like the Taj Mahal.

United mexican states City forms a liberal bubble in an otherwise bourgeois nation, with laws permitting same-sex wedlock and abortion through twelve weeks of pregnancy. Many Mormon principles — among them the prohibition of tobacco and alcohol — become against Mexican norms. And of course, D.F.[one] is traditionally Catholic. Some other missionary cited this as the greatest obstruction to his work here. "It's not that people are mean about it or anything," he told me, shaking his caput. "But they just say, 'Soy Católico,' and they actually believe in that."

Fifty-fifty more hitting is the fact that primal teachings of the LDS Church associate the darker peel of ethnic Americans — "Lamanites," every bit Mormons telephone call them — with moral impurity, a direct sign of a curse from God.

These factors make chilangos[2] seem like the religion's least likely converts, nevertheless the Church is growing fast in Mexico Metropolis, with a following more than than 180,000 strong. Deeply puzzled past this development, I decided to travel to the Temple to learn more.

I chosen to conform a visit and spoke with an older American missionary, his voice stern on the phone. I wouldn't be allowed to enter the Temple without a "temple recommend," a document vouching for my worthiness. He suggested I check out the adjacent visitor heart instead. I copied down the address and took the metro across the city, from Sevilla to Candelaria, Candelaria to Talismán.

Entering the middle, I was greeted by one of the immaculately groomed sister missionaries, Hermana Vargas from Peru. We shared a dainty handshake, and she led me to the reception surface area, smiling serenely. I sat on a bench earlier a massive marble Jesus, his arms outstretched, the walls around him painted with stormy sky.

Four young men walked in, too missionaries, and Hermana Vargas received them. After many handshakes and polite smiles, she asked them their reason for coming. Their reason, it turned out, was the bath. There was blushing all around every bit she pointed them to information technology.

Hermana López didn't miss a beat. "I like your answer considering it'due south honest," she said.

A man beside me scooted closer. "Serafín," he introduced himself, extending his hand with a wide, goofy grin. He was skinny, roughly 40, with a sparse moustache, his thick glasses slightly smudged. Already a fellow member of the Church, he liked to come up to the company center to reconnect, he told me, and talk to the missionaries. "They have some pretty skillful movies in here," he said.

Soon we were joined by another missionary, Hermana López, a Mexican American from LA. The sister missionaries were dressed modestly but with surprising way, wearing neat cardigans and matching jewelry. Knowing they open up the eye no afterwards than nine:00 each twenty-four hour period, I was impressed by their effort. I looked at Hermana López. Did she curl her hair this morning, I wondered? Was that glitter eye shadow?

I grew upward celebrating Chrismukkah in my mixed and loosely religious family, and my past experience with Mormons had been limited to a ski trip in Utah and scattered episodes of Big Dearest. Visiting by option, I found myself in unfamiliar territory, having always resisted missionaries on the street. I tried to lucifer their serene smiles, just the effort felt awkward. At that place was a wholesome, camp counselor perkiness to their manner, and I couldn't quite manage to get on board.

The sister missionaries offered me a tour and Serafín decided to join us. We walked along a curved wall of the round building, past murals of calm lakes and gently sloping mountains. Oil paintings of Biblical scenes hung from gold frames, and flatscreen TVs blinked with information on Mormon history. Something about the slick technology made the experience difficult to swallow. A Mexican friend who had taken the tour previously warned me it felt like a Disney manipulation.

We stopped before a plaque entitled Prophets Reveal God'southward Plan.

"Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses," Hermana López began. "What did these men have in common?"

Jews? I thought unhelpfully. She pointed to me.

"Prophets?" I ventured, and she smiled.

"And what practice you think," she asked. "Do you believe there are prophets live today?"

"Ehhh…." I hesitated. "I'grand non sure."

Hermana López didn't miss a crush. "I like your respond because it's honest," she said. Her voice turned reassuring. "Don't worry, I know in that location are prophets alive in our time. God didn't honey people in the age of Moses whatsoever more than he loves us today."

Serafín spoke up, telling us it was a vision of God that ultimately prompted him to bring together the Church. Hermana López appeared slightly uncomfortable, perhaps sensing my skepticism. "At that place's nothing in the Book of Mormon that mentions visions explicitly," she informed us. "Some people have them and others don't. I never take, for example."

As we made our fashion to the side by side room, I considered what it was that made people convert, to the LDS Church or any religion. Serafín walked abreast me, eager to chat. He alluded to a troubled by. "I had a lot of problems," he said. He didn't go into specifics. "I hateful, I was actually in a jam." At the suggestion of a cousin, he began reading the Book of Mormon. Serafín was interested, but not notwithstanding convinced.

"The devil was still tugging at me," he revealed, his tone whispery and conspiratorial. He wiggled his hips and mimicked a tugging motion. "He was saying, 'Let'due south become! Permit's accept fun!'" He gave me a knowing look, equally if, non-Mormon that I am, I might exist on close terms with the devil myself. He told me he prayed for God to make known to him whether the Volume of Mormon was true. Then one dark he had a vision, parted ways with the devil once and for all, and was baptized as a fellow member of the Church.

"Did you convert from Catholicism?" I asked.

"Sure," he replied, "but I wasn't a very practicing Cosmic."

Serafín'due south answer is non surprising. While United mexican states City is still more than Cosmic than anything else — 81% by a contempo approximate — there is no doubt that the Cosmic Church is losing power here and throughout Latin America. Ane Mormon elder drew a line between the 2 faiths past stressing the LDS belief in the eternal spousal relationship of family — the idea that families remain together afterwards decease — stating pragmatically: "That's one affair we can offer that nobody else can offering."

We entered an area of the visitor centre designed to expect like a cozy kitchen and living room: softly lit, with plush, inviting couches and a table set for six. On the wall hung a doily embroidered with the words "Las familias son para siempre," families are forever.

But when I asked Serafín why he left his Catholic faith, he didn't mention family unit. "'To be poor is to be dignified,'" he said. "That's what the Catholics ever tell yous."

"What exercise Mormons say?" I asked.

"Well…" he replied, "they don't say that."

Indeed, Mormon leaders take a very different approach to wealth than Catholics do. "Nosotros expect to not only the spiritual but likewise the temporal, and we believe that a person who is impoverished temporally cannot blossom spiritually," Keith McMullin, a former LDS leader and CEO of a Church-owned belongings company, told Businessweek last twelvemonth.

This thin line between the spiritual and the temporal is one of the well-nigh unique features of the LDS Church. Every bit historian D. Michael Quinn explained to Businessweek, "In the Mormon worldview, information technology'south as spiritual to give alms to the poor, as the onetime phrase goes in the Biblical sense, as information technology is to make a meg dollars." With little distinction betwixt the spiritual and worldly, the Church seems to assign a moral value to making money. Later I spoke with a mission leader who told me, "We see aught necessarily noble near poverty. We tend to encourage self-reliance."

Due to controversial policies in the early days of their Church — polygamy beingness the nigh notable — throughout the 1830s, Mormons were chased across the US from New York to Ohio, Missouri to Illinois. They set up their sights on Utah, at that time "Alta California," part of Mexico. Utah gained statehood just once the exercise of plural marriage had been renounced. This history has made Mormons particularly neat to downplay their otherness. "We are not a weird people," former Church president Gordon Hinckley told 60 Minutes in a 1996 interview.

In less than 200 years, they've gone from pariahs to a powerful grouping with their ain presidential candidate. The Church's annual gross income of an estimated $7 billion makes it the wealthiest per capita church building in the US. Many contend that in a land where the mighty dollar overshadows all manner of differences, it is their affluence that has allowed Mormons to finally bridge the gap with mainstream America.

The American Dream has a powerful hold on many residents of Mexico City, and there are tangible benefits that come with joining the Church. Mexican missionaries who apply to Brigham Immature University receive recommendations from their American mission leaders. Once accepted, they take out low-interest loans from the Church'due south Perpetual Pedagogy Fund. And members in D.F. can attend vocational training and costless English language classes. Equally one mission leader told me, "English is the linguistic communication of the Church. I e'er tell our members it'south only like being a airplane pilot. English is the language of flying, correct? You lot're not going to land your aeroplane in China speaking Castilian!"

These options present real opportunities to those who might not otherwise have them. "That'south fine," a Mexican friend told me, "but I wish they'd telephone call it what it is. To me it's no unlike than Catholic missionaries teaching farming techniques to Indians five hundred years ago. Some things shouldn't be a tradeoff."

As recently as 1960, then president Spencer Kimball expressed pleasure with the progress of Native American converts to the Church: their peel, he claimed, was literally turning lighter.

The sister missionaries left us before a touchscreen with short videos of capacity from the Volume of Mormon. "You choose," Serafín offered graciously. "I've seen them all." I selected a chapter called "A New Home in the Promised Land."

The video opened with a series of illustrated stills depicting the arrival of the Mormons' ancestors in America. Internal competition before long caused the group to divide in two.

One time members of the same family, the divided groups no longer looked akin. While the Nephites remained fair and Caucasian, the Lamanites became indigenous Americans. The voiceover explained, "They became a nighttime-skinned people. God cursed them because of their wickedness. The Lamanites became lazy and would not work. The Lamanites hated the Nephites and wanted to kill them."

I turned to Serafín. "Some people would call these ideas…" I searched for the word. "Racist. What do y'all think?"

"Oh, no," he told me. "Para nothing. You take to keep watching: the Lamanites become the good ones afterward on."

It'southward no surreptitious, though, that in the short history of the LDS Church, members take on endless occasions made reference to the Lamanites in explicitly derogatory terms. Influential leader Brigham Young called them "miserable," "ungovernable," "bloodthirsty," and "ignorant." Yet Young was confident that the Lamanites would in fourth dimension embrace the Gospel and one time once again become "white and delightsome."

I asked Serafín what he fabricated of this quote. "Unproblematic misunderstanding," he assured me. "Young was talking near spiritual purity, non race."

His explanation seems dismissive. Equally recently as 1960, then president Spencer Kimball expressed pleasure with the progress of Native American converts to the Church: their pare, he claimed, was literally turning lighter.

Referring to a photo of 20 "Lamanite" missionaries, Kimball praised fifteen, calling them "lite as Anglos," and recalled a Native American kid "several shades lighter than her parents." Kimball continued, "One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated."

Simply Serafín is not solitary in his fashion of thinking. In Mexico, many converts have decided to read the Book their own way. Margarito Bautista, who joined the Church in 1901, put along a specially strong reinterpretation which glorified pre-Hispanic cultures, fifty-fifty conflating the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl — the plumed serpent, the white god who had promised to return — with Jesus Christ.

Bautista believed that the Lamanites, once converted, would regain their status as the chosen people, ensuring promotion to loftier leadership in the Church building. "Mexico," he wrote, "will be the principal place and Mexicans the chief people playing the most important role in these the last days." He compiled his theories into a book, which the Church building refused to publish. Crestfallen, Bautista published in Mexico, where his piece of work was received enthusiastically by local Mormons campaigning for Mexican Church building leaders — "de pura raza y sangre," of pure race and blood. Reprimanded for their assertiveness by leaders in Utah, Bautista and his followers soon split from the Church building.

The Book of Mormon dictates that one time the Lamanites have the Gospel, the Nephites as well should modify their way of life, including the Lamanites in their economical system, doing away with difference of race and course once and for all. Daniel Jones, the first American missionary to come to Mexico in 1875, noted that while many Mexicans were prepared to accept the Gospel, American Mormons were non set to cede their ain privilege in laurels of this ideal. To this day, nigh all Church building leaders are white American businessmen.

Hermana Vargas led us to a large theater in the back of the visitor center. The sister missionaries drew dorsum the curtains, red velvet with gold tassels, and began another motion-picture show. On screen, early on converts trudged through the bright snow of a Massachusetts winter. I glanced at Serafín and saw that he was leaning forward, eyes wide.

I kept waiting for the awkward moment when the missionaries would try to print their behavior upon me — to my pleasant surprise, it never came.

"Can we have your contact information?" asked Hermana Vargas later on the film. "Maybe you'd like to accept some missionaries visit your home."

"No thank you," I replied simply, and she nodded. Her calm response felt almost anticlimactic. Serafín offered a hearty farewell handshake, and I made my way out of the company middle, through the palatial Temple grounds, and to the street.

A few weeks later, while walking through the Zócalo[3], I bumped into four missionaries, three Mexican and one Peruvian. We chatted for a few minutes and I mentioned the Lamanite question, which still troubled me.

One of the missionaries held his arm next to mine. "God gave us darker skin considering our ancestors were sinners," he told me. "Merely actually, we feel lucky considering nosotros are the chosen people, even more than then than our American brothers." In the side by side breath, he told me how much he wanted to go to Utah, to written report at BYU.

[Annotation: This story was produced past the Glimpse Correspondents Program, in which writers and photographers develop in-depth narratives for Matador.]

[1] Distrito Federal, a mutual term for United mexican states City
[ii] United mexican states Urban center residents
[3] The chief plaza in Mexico Urban center's celebrated center