Mennonites

Mennonites, a pacifist, Anabaptist sect that originated in the Low Countries in the early 1540s. Throughout their history, the Mennonites have often been victims of religious persecution because of their beliefs, including their insistence upon separation of church and state, refusal to bear arms, renunciation of participation in secular affairs, refusal to take oaths, and their insistence that their children be educated in religious schools taught in Plattdeutsch, the German spoken by members of the sect.

The Mennonites' desire to remain apart from society at large resulted in frequent mass migrations (Auswanderungen) to new lands. A large-scale Auswanderung of Mennonites to Latin America took place after World War I and a smaller one after World War II, when the Mennonites' refusal to bear arms and their Germanic ways seemed to call their loyalty into question. In 1922, over two thousand Mennonites migrated from Manitoba, Canada, to Chihuahua, Mexico, where they were joined by Mennonites from Russia fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution. By 1930, the Chihuahua colony had a population of more than six thousand and had acquired land in Durango. In the mid-1950s, a faction of the Mexican Mennonites, fearful of the government's plans to integrate the sect into the social security system, migrated to British Honduras (Belize), where they established a new colony at Santa Elena, near the Guatemalan border.

Substantial numbers of Mennonites also migrated to other parts of Latin America, most often seeking regions with sizable German populations and land policies that were amenable to the establishment of large agricultural holdings that could be privately owned by the sect. Large numbers of Mennonites emigrated to Paraná, Brazil, and to Paraguay, where, in 1926 and 1927, Canadian and Sommerfelder (South Russian) Mennonites founded the Menno colony in the Chaco Region, south of Puerto Casado. In the 1930s, German-Russians and Polish Mennonites escaped Nazi persecution and Stalinist purges by immigrating to the Chaco, where they established a colony near Menno, called Colonia Ferheim. During the 1940s, a third wave of German-Russian and Russian Mennonites escaped political turmoil in Europe by moving to the Chaco, where they founded yet another large Mennonite settlement, known as Colonia Neuland. The Paraguayan Chaco is now home to one of the largest Mennonite populations in the world.

See alsoGerman-Latin American Relations; Protestantism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Joseph Winfield Fretz, Mennonite Colonization in Mexico (1952).

Karl Ilg, Pioniere in Brasilien: Durch Bergwelt, Urwald und Steppe erwanderte Volkskunde der deutschsprachigen Siedler in Brasilien und Peru (1972).

Annemarie Elizabeth Krause, Mennonite Settlement in the Paraguayan Chaco (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1952).

Moisés Gonzáles Navarro, La colonización en México, 1877–1910 (1960); The Mennonite Encyclopedia, 4 vols. (1955–1959).

Harry Leonard Sawatzky, They Sought a Country: Mennonite Colonization in Mexico (1971).

Additional Bibliography

Bennion, Janet. Desert Patriarchy: Mormon and Mennonite Communities in the Chihuahua Valley. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004.

Epp, Marlene. Women Without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Hinkley, Katherine, and Thomas H. Guderjan. A Mennonite Landscape: The Blue Creek Community. San Antonio: St. Mary's University, 1997.

Romero Lévera, Mario Aníbal. Las tres grandes colonias mennonitas del Chaco y su influencia sobre el desarrollo económico del Paraguay. Paraguay: s.n., 2003.

Stoesz, Edgar, and Muriel Thiessen Stackley. Garden in the Wilderness: Mennonite Communities in the Paraguayan Chaco, 1927–1997. Winnipeg: CMBC Publications, 1999.

Thiesen, John D., Theron F. Schlabach, and John J. Friesen. Mennonite and Nazi? Attitudes among Mennonite Colonists in Latin America, 1933–1945. Kitchener: Pandora Press, 1999.

                             Virginia Garrard-Burnett