Canadian Mennonites in Mexico: Migration and Citizenship in a Changing World

Mennonites in the Mexican border

The Foreign Office records in the British National Archives reveal that a community was desperately sending correspondence to the British government ninety years ago urging for help to leave their country. These letters were coming from the Mennonite community in the north Mexican state of Chihuahua. Mennonites had settled there a decade prior, and were now seeking to leave due to ‘banditry’ and, more importantly for them, religious persecution. In 1935, the state governor Rodrigo Quevedo ordered every school teaching religion in Chihuahua to be closed, including the Mennonite schools. As these Mennonites came from Canada, they wanted passports to leave Mexico and to migrate either back to Canada or onwards to Belize or Australia. While the parents could get passports, their children could not. To the British government, they were Mexican and not Canadian. However, the agreement the Mennonites made with the Mexican government meant their children were legally seen as Canadian, not Mexican. This is a case where global history can help untangle the connections and competing identities that shaped the experience of the Mennonite colonies in the Americas.

The Mennonite colonisation of northern Mexico resulted from the conjunction of two historical trends across several continents. These were the emergence of mass migration, and the trend towards centralism among nation-states in the late-nineteenth century. Harry Sawatzky has highlighted the trend of Mennonites emigrating to avoid centralising states attempting to exert control over them – mainly through enforced military service.[1] The isolationist Anabaptist community would first leave Germany in 1789 for Russia, and then for Canada in 1874, over issues of conscription and access to land. By the First World War, the Canadian government had lost patience with the Mennonites. The community’s refusal to serve in the military, separate schools, and isolated economy alienated the colonies from the Canadian government. Mennonite elders were looking for a new land to colonise and their eyes turned to Latin America. Initially the open plains of Patagonia (Argentina) seemed to be the desired choice, but a new opportunity quickly emerged – northern Mexico.

Mennonites moving to Mexico, ‘New Beginnings: Mennonites on the Move’, mennoniteheritagevillage.com

In 1910, a revolution against Mexico’s longtime dictator Porfirio Díaz broke out toppling his regime and unleashing a wave of social change. After a decade of fighting a new regime emerged, having to reconcile itself with the demands for social justice and equality that the Revolution unleashed.[2] The new Revolutionary state was often contradictory in its socio-economic policies, but something that was consistent throughout the 1920s and 1930s was a fierce nationalist outlook and secularisation (which regionally could veer into atheism). The old dictatorship had sold significant Mexican industries and resources, especially in the north and the Yucatan peninsula, to foreign companies which the Revolutionary regime aimed to reverse. Meanwhile, the aggressive anti-clerical campaigns had even sparked a civil war in the centre-south of Mexico, which became known as the Cristiada or Cristero War. It would seem contradictory for the nationalist, secular Revolutionary Mexico to allow Mennonite colonisation in Chihuahua and Sonora, yet it was in keeping with prevailing ideologies of modern Mexico.

Both pre-Revolution and Revolutionary Mexico elites were driven by positivist ideas, although how those positivist ideas were expressed changed based on the superstructure that defined the respective states. North Mexico had historically been seen as a wild, dangerous and unproductive part of Mexico that was dominated by bandits and the so-called indios bárbaros. For Mexico to become the beacon of radical America it had to be economically vibrant, and to do that all parts of the state had to be ‘developed’ and ‘productive’. Any migrant community willing to settle the northern lands were therefore welcomed. Mexico’s anti-religious policies were, furthermore, targeted at the Catholic Church. Inheriting the anti-clericalism of nineteenth-century liberalism and fighting against the monopoly on the land, the secularisation campaign was aimed to break the hold of the Catholic Church. While Mennonites were not ideal, their Protestantism and isolation made them far less threatening. Mennonite representative J.R. Ambrosius wrote to the office of the then president Álvaro Obregón stating that Mennonite colonisation would be ‘a large aid to the solution of the Mexican agrarian question’ as they had already ‘reclaimed enormous sections of arid land in the United States.’[3] From 1922 to 1926, 7,000 Mennonites had relocated from Canada to northern Mexico with a further 500 arriving from Russia.

Part of Obregón’s agreement with the Mennonites involved the right to religious freedom, the right to administer their lands, and run their own schools. This agreement was upheld, even throughout the peak of state secularisation, until 1935. Inspired by the land reforms of the new leftist president Lázaro Cárdenas, agrarians had been doing land invasions onto Mennonite land. Nevertheless, the issue that the Mennonites flagged to the British government was the closure of their schools. Chihuahua governor Rodrigo Quevedo was no radical, being very conservative, but his ties to the Masons made him a fierce anti-clerical. What drove him to close Mennonite schools is unknown, but the closure was what caused the Mennonites to seek aid in leaving the country. Here, a gap in the historiography is present. For example, Philip Stover’s account jumps to January 1936 when Cárdenas personally ordered the schools to be re-opened.[4] The British Foreign Office archives revealed a crisis among the Mennonites. As part of the agreement with Obregón, the children born in the colonies would be seen by the Mexican government as Canadian. However, to the British these children were Mexican and, therefore, ineligible for a British passport.

This raises a further discussion about belonging and citizenship in global history. Normally, the children, being born in Mexico, would have automatic Mexican citizenship, yet the agreement in 1922 stopped this. Yet, to the British, their Mexican birth made them Mexican and not British subjects. Effectively these children were made stateless. Only thanks to the intervention of Cardenás did the Mennonite’s drop their planned exodus, but it did not solve the issue. Social versus legal citizenship ideas can be explained through a global framework – state obsession with who was a citizenship had the ability to exclude those who have historically tried to carve out their own niche.

Rodrigo Quevedo, Wikimedia.org

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Archivo General de la Nación, Presidentiales, Lázaro Cárdenas, Caja 0565, Exp. 503.11/13
• Archivos Plutarco Elías Calles y Fernando Torreblanca, AFAO, ‘Ambrosius, J.R.’, Fondo 11, Serie 03.05.00, Inv. 2952, Legajo 1
• ‘Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Mexico, 1930-1939’, Archives of Latin American and Caribbean, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century, Gale Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

• Alan Knight, ‘Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 74:3, (1994), 393-44
• Franco Savarino, El Conflicto Religioso en Chihuahua, 1918-1937, (Ciudad Juárez, CH: El Colegio de Chihuahua, 2017)
• Harry Sawatzky, They Sought a Country: Mennonite Colonization in Mexico, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971)
• Philip Stover, Religion and Revolution in Mexico’s North, (Deming, NM: Rio Vista Press, 2014)