Despite the great and grave importance that the Book of Mormon places upon the Pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas–and especially the Church’s well-established presence throughout the Hispanic world–there has been a curious dearth of LDS writers emerging from Latin America. This disparity can’t just be chocked up to disparities in education access between the U.S. and Latin America; the roster of Nobel Prize worthy Latin American writers is staggering and legendary. More likely this neglect is due to the hyper-parochial Utah-centrism of Mormon culture, one that struggles to this day to view anything outside the stubborn prism of the Intermountain West, even in other parts of the United States, let alone outside of it.

Thank heavens (perhaps literally), then, that we have belatedly begun to see the green shoots of a Spanish-language Mormon literature emerge, one of which is 2018’s Estampas del libro de Mormón [Prints of the Book of Mormon], by the award-winning Uruguayan author, BYU alumnus, and UT San Antonio translation professor, Gabriel González Nuñez. A widely-published short-fiction writer in his own right (most recently with the 2021 collection Rumbos, put out by Jade Publishing), Estampas del libro de Mormón is his first apparent foray into the world of Mormon letters directly, audaciously written and published solely in Spanish.^[1]He could’ve written in English—he’s a translation professor, after all—so therefore his decision to stay in Spanish deserves our respect.

Yet despite his impressive resume, this collection is self-published—but then, where else could he take it? The Venn diagram overlap between Spanish avant-garde and Mormon literature is at present so infinitesimal as to be visible only by quantum physics.^[2]A neglect that we at Ships of Hagoth would love to rectify; escritores hispanos y mormones, mandanos tus ensayos hoy por favor! -editors Nevertheless, Estampas is not without precedent: per González Nuñez’s own introduction, this slim volume is itself a riff on Estampas de la Biblia by the famed Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou, who in 1934 published a collection of 40 brief dramatic monologues featuring characters from the Old Testament. González Nuñez, then, repeats this process with 40 characters from the Book of Mormon.

Besides the beauty and the pathos of the Spanish prose itself, the value in this collection lies in how it highlights what an old Bishop of mine once called “the B-sides” of the Book of Mormon–seemingly small yet precious voices like Omni, Zeniff, Abish, Leonti, and Limhi (the short entry for Chemish is longer than his entire one verse in the Book of Omni—and this is easily , by the way, the most attention the Book of Omni has ever gotten as a total percentage of a book)–as well as major players like Lehi, Nephi, the Almas, Mosiah, Gandionton, and of course Mormon and Moroni. Yet no one receives a longer entry than anyone else—one paragraph on one page—thus leveling all of these voices together in a democratic, anti-hierarchical unity.^[3]We kind of wish there had been an Estampa for Hagoth as well, but that is a personal preference.-editors While there is a little bit of poetic license taken here (Abinadi, for example, is presented as becoming a Prophet only after losing both his wife and children to plague), most of these Estampas germane strictly to what’s available in the Book of Mormon text.

There is as of yet no English translation; but given the high number of Spanish native-speakers and Spanish-speaking RMs in this Church, that shouldn’t be an impediment to its broader circulation. Besides, it’s high time the Latin American Saints have a literature of their own to claim, rather than wait for crumbs from the Utah-centric table. If you are Hispano-hablante yourself, then please support Spanish-Mormon literature and check out the eminently re-readable Estampas del Libro de Mormón by Gabriel González Nuñez today.