I love finding out about key people in the history of the Church of whom I was previously unaware. Signature Books’s latest entry in its Brief Mormon Lives project, Eduardo Balderas: Father of Church Translation, 1907–1989, by Ignacio M. Garcia, is a great example of this.

For much of the mid-twentieth century, Eduardo Balderas was the primary lifeline between Spanish-speaking members and Church leaders in Salt Lake City, serving as the first professional translator for the Church. His translations included the endowment session, the complete Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, a revised translation of the Book of Mormon, many general conference addresses, and books that were considered highly important at the time, like A Marvelous Work and a Wonder by LeGrand Richards; The Miracle of Forgiveness by Spencer W. Kimball; The Articles of Faith, Jesus the Christ, and The House of the Lord by James E. Talmage; Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Essentials in Church History by Joseph Fielding Smith; and Gospel Doctrine by Joseph F. Smith. His later service as a patriarch among Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints further endeared his memory in the Church. Yet, he has remained relatively unknown among Anglophone Latter-day Saints.

Garcia is able to deliver a well-researched and informative biography about his subject. His background in Chicano studies is on full display throughout, much as it was in his own excellent memoir Chicano While Mormon: Activism, War, and Keeping the Faith. As such, Garcia is able to not only contextualize Balderas in church history but was also able to contextualize him within the experiences and movements of Mexican-Americans more broadly during his lifetime.

While I’ve spent a fair amount of time and effort reading about the history of the Church in Mexico, and was thus familiar with many of the key mission presidents and other figures in Balderas’s life, I felt like learning more about Balderas filled in a lot of pieces of the puzzle that I didn’t even realize were missing from the story. For example, I knew that one of the key complaints that led to the Third Convention was that there wasn’t much church literature available in Spanish, including the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. I hadn’t had insight into how the Church responded to the pressure created by the Third Convention by hiring Balderas to work on fulfilling that need for Spanish literature. I also found it interesting to see that there were debates about whether the endowment session should be allowed to be translated into a different language, as Balderas worked to create the first non-English version of the ceremony.

Eduardo Balderas was a key member of the Church who facilitated the global expansion in the mid-to-late-twentieth century through his efforts as a translator, but he has been largely overlooked. For that reason alone, I feel like Eduardo Balderas: Father of Church Translation, 1907–1989, by Ignacio M. Garcia may be the most important entry into the Brief Mormon Lives series to date.