Mexico is central to two successive efforts by Mormon polygamists to find room beyond the reach of hostile authorities: first, the Saints’ westward search for a homeland in territory that then belonged to Mexico, and later, the creation of colonies inside Mexico to escape federal prosecutions in Utah. The country’s role shifts from a vast imagined refuge to a real borderland sanctuary—and to the setting for a new fundamentalist community.

The Great Basin as a Refuge

When Brigham Young considered where the Saints should go after leaving Illinois, he sought a place far from established settlements and unattractive to Gentile newcomers. He and his counselors settled on the sparsely inhabited deserts of the Great Basin, which at the time belonged to Mexico. The choice was intended to put distance between the community and the conflicts that had driven it from the United States.

That distance proved temporary. After the war with Mexico, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought the Mormon homeland into the United States. The change complicated Brigham Young’s plans for a theocratic kingdom beyond the reach of Gentile law. California’s gold rush soon brought prospectors through Salt Lake City as well, making the Mormon settlement a busy way station. Young declared allegiance to the United States and sought statehood, but Washington instead established Utah Territory in 1850, preserving federal oversight in theory.

A Borderland Sanctuary

Decades later, the pressure on plural marriage again made Mexico a destination. After federal laws expanded prosecutions of polygamists in Utah, Mormon leaders sent members to settlements across the American West and to Mexico and Canada, seeking places where men could live with multiple wives with less fear of arrest. Colonies of these polygamists, derogatorily called “cohabs,” grew in Mexico at the foot of the Sierra Madre Occidental.

In 1886, a group of polygamous Saints bought 50,000 acres along the Rio Piedras Verdes, about 150 miles southwest of El Paso, Texas. The purchase established the settlement later known as Colonia Juárez. The migration was part of a wider effort to make distance from Utah’s federal enforcement campaigns into practical protection for plural-marriage communities.

From Colonia Juárez to Colonia LeBaron

By the time the first members of the LeBaron family moved south of the border in 1902, about 3,500 Mormons already lived in the vicinity of Colonia Juárez. The Mexican presence therefore preceded the LeBarons and provided a settled community into which they arrived.

In 1944, Dayer LeBaron received a revelation commanding him to buy a tract of mesquite-covered desert about 35 miles outside Colonia Juárez. He cleared the land, planted beans, and named the settlement Colonia LeBaron. It became the operating base for his expanding fundamentalist sect, giving Mexico a lasting place in the story of Mormon fundamentalism beyond its earlier function as an escape route.

Shifting Borders and Religious Authority

Mexico’s significance lies partly in the contrast between refuge imagined and refuge established. The Great Basin seemed remote while it remained Mexican territory, but the national border moved over the Saints’ chosen homeland after the war. Later migrants crossed an existing international border in the opposite direction, seeking shelter from federal prosecution in Utah. Neither geography nor political jurisdiction remained neutral: borders shaped where religious communities could attempt to practice plural marriage, while state authority could follow or change the protection those borders appeared to offer.

The Mexican colonies also became more than temporary havens. Colonia Juárez was already home to thousands before the LeBarons arrived, and Colonia LeBaron developed into the base of a distinct sect. In this account, Mexico is thus both a place shaped by changing national boundaries and a setting where Mormon fundamentalism established new communities and institutions.