For Mormon offshoot groups in Mexico, a history of family traditions — and violence

The families killed Monday in an ambush in Mexico highlight the long history of fundamentalist members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who originally fled from the U.S. to Mexico to practice polygamy.

Family members said the victims, who include nine women and children, were members of a fundamentalist Mormon community in the state of Sonora and had dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship.

But the practice of polygamy has mostly been abandoned in the communities in Mexico, experts say.

Mormon families from Utah began settling in Chihuahua and Sonora in the mid-1880s as the United States began placing restrictions on polygamy on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Mormons did not want to abandon their wives and families, so they moved to Mexico, said Gordon Bluth, a Queen Creek businessman who was born in one such community in Mexico and has studied the history of Mormons in Mexico.

Under an agreement with the Mexican government, the Mormons purchased 100,000 acres of land and eventually established eight colonias, or towns, in the states of Chihuahua and Sonora.

More Mormon families from the church’s fundamentalist wing began flocking to Mexico after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially banned polygamy in 1890.

Most of the families moved back to the United States after the Mexican Revolution erupted in 1910 because of the violence, but began to return after the war, Bluth said.

Bluth was born in Colonia Dublán, the same town where former Michigan Gov. George Romney was born and raised. He was the father of Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee who is now a U.S. senator from Utah.

Bluth, 64, said he left Colonia Dublán in 1974 when he was 19 and moved to the U.S. He said he still owns a pecan orchard in Colonia Dublán and frequently returns to the town.

He said many of the people who live in colonias in Chihuahua and Sonora have roots in Mexico that go back decades.