Word: ledesma
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This September afternoon Sister is working the back roads of Socorro, a 17th century Spanish mission hamlet, mustering turnout for a meeting with an important politician. In the doorway of a cinder-block home, she embraces a key worker, Anastacia Ledesma, but wastes no time on niceties. "Cuantas personas? Ciento, maybe?" the nun asks in her novice Spanish, inquiring how ) many supporters the area can deliver to the meeting. "Doscientos," comes the reply. "Ah, muy, muy bien," exclaims Ceasar. "Four buses. This time we'll fill four buses...
...Mike LeDesma...
...some, the years at Harvard bring growing distance from the church. Octaviano M. Ledesma Jr. '76, a Math major living in Canaday Hall, attended the Cambridge church regularly the first year after he arrived from his home in Calexico, California, a town of 11,000 near the Mexican border and about 120 miles east of San Diego. The Mormon church there had about 100 members, with only 15 or 20 Anglos. Ledesma's parents converted to Mormonism when he was four or five; missionaries had come to their home, then in Los Angeles, and, he says...
...Ledesma's church attendance dropped off his sophomore and junior years and stopped this year, although his participation in Calexico has not lagged. The dark-haired, pudgy and mustachioed senior explains that he doesn't "feel the same kind of closeness here." He attributes much of this to the reorganization of the church here several years ago, which sent some of his close Mormon friends to other wards. While the University branch is "very, very friendly" and more open than Harvard itself, Ledesma says, its members are not as tightly knit as those in the Calexico ward. "When...
...Ledesma, who hopes to become a math professor, protrays himself as someone who clashes with Mormon stereotypes. First, he says, his liberal preferences clash with the church's generally conservative leanings; "I believe in strong government intervention," he says, his hands bobbing and weaving to stress his points. Ledesma says that while he finds some church doctrines (such as eating in moderation) make a lot of sense, he follows them "only as well as I can. I recognize them as good practices, but do not regard them as gospel." Finally, many of his companions live a life that violates fundamental...