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but it eventually fell apart after facing severe political and legal pressure.12 One contributing factor to the Church’s weakened focus on Native American popu- lations in the United States was that LDS missionaries began to have significant success while proselyting in Latin America during the 1970s.13 Because church members and leaders understood this region also to be Lamanite in origin, LDS people began to proactively ascribe the Lamanite prophecies to Latin America.14 The problematic conflation of certain regions of the world with indigeneity (and by extension, with Lamanite identity) ironically racializes all people from these countries as indigenous regardless of an individual’s actual ancestry. LDS people tend to conceive Latin America through US paradigms of race such as the “one drop policy”, where a single drop of indigenous blood makes a per- son – or an entire nation – Lamanite.15 Spencer W. Kimball, who served as an apostle and, later, prophet of the Church from 1943 to 1985, contributed to this understanding through racialist assertions that people of (even partial) indigenous descent carried the blood of the heroes of the Book of Mormon in their veins.16 Indeed, John-Charles Duffy notes that Kimball spearheaded a concerted effort by the Church to instill a “Hemispheric Lamanite Identity” that would unite people of indigenous descent throughout the United States, Latin America, and the South Pacific.17 These projects were largely successful, espe- cially with those people for whom Lamanite identity provided spiritual strength and inspiration. The Church was largely able to foster a sense of community between people from different countries and cultures based on the appeal of Hemispheric Lamanite Identity. As a result of Kimball’s efforts, most Mormons do not equate Latin American countries with indigeneity to demean them. Rather, the Church’s emphasis on Hemispheric Lamanite identity has led many – if not most – Mesoamerican and 12 The principal critique of the Lamanite Placement Program was that, at its core, it was assimilationist. See Duffy 2008, 140; J. B. Allen 1998, 85; Garrett 2016, 180–182. Beyond the political challenges, Garrett notes that there were also controversies and disagreements between the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles; see Garrett 2016, 204–234. What is more, at least four students have sued the church more recently because they claim that they were sexually abused while staying with white foster families and that the Church did not do enough to protect them. See Fowler 2016. 13 Grover 2005, 85–88. 14 In recent years, influential Mormons like Bruce H. Porter and Rod L. Meldrum have argued that the term Lamanites refers solely to the Amerindian peoples that populated the US heartland; see Porter/Meldrum 2009. Nevertheless, theirs remains a minority view whose very title “The ‘Heartland’ Model” tends to emphasize nationalistic tendencies in the North American Church while ignoring much of the doctrine itself. Indeed, Matthew Roper provides a stinging rebuke of their book in Roper 2010. 15 For a discussion of the legal ramifications of the “one drop policy”, see Hickman 1997, 1161– 1265. 16 Kimball 1959, 57–58. 17 Duffy 2008, 143–144. On (Dang) Quesadillas and Nachos | 145www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 141–165