The First Presidency announced this week that two more temples will be built in Mexico, bringing to 10 the number of temples, either dedicated or planned, in that country.
The new edifices will be the Oaxaca Oaxaca Temple and the Tuxtla Gutierrez Chiapas Temple.
The Church now has 55 dedicated temples and 47 planned or under construction, a total of 102.
The new temples, announced by letters to local priesthood leaders on Feb. 23 and Feb. 25, respectively, are in archaeologically rich southeastern Mexico, situated on the band of land that might be called "Mexico's ankle" just before the country reaches the border of western Guatemala. To the southeast is the Gulf of Tehuantepec.
The Oaxaca (pronounced "wah-HAH-kah") temple district is comprised of seven stakes and one district, with 26,624 members.
Members in Oaxaca already were heartened by news that a temple would be built in Villahermosa, in the neighboring state of Tabasco. (See Church News, Jan. 23, 1999.) However, road conditions make travel difficult even for the shortest distances, so word that a temple is to be built in Oaxaca comes as particularly good news.
The Oaxaca Mission includes only part of the state of Oaxaca, because the roads make travel so difficult; part of the state is in other missions. There are than 3 million residents in the city of Oaxaca, so it compares well with other cities of the same size or larger which have only two or three stakes.
The Tuxtla Gutierrez temple district is comprised of five stakes and one district with 19,078 members.
A new stake was created in this city just last week. Now there are three in Tuxtla Gutierrez.
The new temple is expected to bless the members of Tuxtla Gutierrez, many of whom can not afford the 20-hour bus trip to Mexico City.
The land is peaceful and the Church is growing rapidly. Many new and renewed temple recommends were recently issued, and some local members are being trained in temple ordinance work at the Mexico City Temple.
Last September, more than 10,000 members in the Tuxtla and Tuxtla Grijalva stakes and the Arriaga District lost belongings or homes in the worst flooding in this area in 40 years.
Missionary work progressed in the peninsula area of Mexico in the 1960s and the first mission in the region, the Southeast Mexican Mission (now the Mexico Veracruz Mission), was created in 1963. This mission was followed by the Mexico Villahermosa Mission created in 1975 but was changed to the Mexico Merida Mission in 1978. The Mexico Tuxtla Gutierrez Mission was created in 1988.
Both states of Oaxaca and Chiapas were centers of ancient Mesoamerican (middle Americas) cultures, and are in a region known as "land of the temples" because of its many ancient ruins.
In pre-Hispanic Oaxaca, one of the most powerful groups of peoples, the Zapetecs, inhabited the Oaxaca Valley. These peoples reached the height of their civilization about A.D. 650. They had a written language and calendar system, and erected Monte Alban, a city on a hilltop. The city, which was mysteriously abandoned, has been of major interest to archaeologists.
While much of modern Mexico's population is a blending of descendants of indigenous peoples and conquering Spaniards, a majority of Oaxacans have a clearly defined ancestry of various Indian groups. Some 341,000 of Oaxaca's 3 million inhabitants are descendants of the Zapetec, comprising the largest Indian group. The second largest is the Mixtec, with about 240,000. Among Oaxacans, 14 indigenous languages are spoken in about 90 dialects. The state is about the size of Indiana.
Chiapas, which extends as far in Mexico as one can go without entering the forests of Guatemala, has fascinated archaeologists for generations with its hundreds of ancient ruins. Its main period of occupation took place before the birth of Christ; some artifacts indicate that the region had a highly developed culture in approximately 500-300 B.C.
Among discoveries in the area are carved monuments used as calendars, stone boxes, wheel-made pottery, cement, the true arch and incense burners. One stele, or upright stone, that was discovered in 1959 was carved with the representations of the sons of a legendary ancestral couple absorbing and perhaps recording their knowledge of a tree of life. A major attraction in Chiapas is a Mayan temple at Palenque dated about A.D. 650, when great Indian civilizations thrived.
Some information for this article was gleaned from Encyclopedia of Mormonism (Vol. 2, entry "Archaeology"); World Book Encyclopedia, (Vol. 13, entry "Mexico"); and National Geographic, November 1994 and August 1996.
