by Roland Sawatzky
The Manitoba Museum
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Royden Loewen, Village Among Nations: “Canadian” Mennonites in a Transnational World, 1916–2006. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013,301 pages. ISBN 978-1-4426-4685-3, $23.07 (paperback)
The multinational setting of Loewen’s most recent historical meditation on Mennonite worlds includes regions in the Americas stretching from northern Canada to Argentina. At the same time the setting is profoundly “local” in the sense that the traditionalist Mennonite groups discussed in the book are deeply bound by interpersonal relation-ships and shared history. The emphasis of his study, based on research gathered by scholars and students over decades, encompasses this two-sided nature of Mennonite transnationalism in the twentieth century and beyond.
Chapters 1 to 3 explore the first generation of Canadian Mennonites leaving Canada for Mexico and Paraguay and their experiences in their new host countries. The 1916 Public School Attendance Act in Manitoba required all children within three miles of a public school to attend that school. Mennonites had arrived in Manitoba from New Russia in 1874 with the understanding that they would have the right to build their own school system and educate their own children. This was part of a larger agreement with the Canadian government in return for their settlement on the prairies. The 1916 school legislation seemed like a betrayal, and not to a small minority. Six thousand Mennonites relocated to Mexico and 1700 to Paraguay in the 1920s, after securing new agreements from those governments to settle in “remote” areas. Loewen plainly states that this was an act of resistance, one that carried emotional and economic costs, not only for the immigrants themselves, but for their descendants as well. The familial and communitarian bonds of the homeland were severed, and the new environment provided serious agricultural challenges.
The Mennonites who left Canada saw modernity as corrosive and the modern state as faceless and imperious. Both were threats to a “traditional” way of life that Mennonites believed was central to their spiritual well-being. This view of the Mennonite as a pacifist agent of resistance to twentieth-century Canadian values challenges a mainstream view of Canada as benevolently liberal and progressive.
Chapters 4 and 5 cover a period of migration out of Canada and within and throughout the Americas that is less direct than earlier migration stories. Beginning in 1948 more Manitoban Mennonites left for Mexico and Paraguay, again because of the perceived threat of modernity. In the 1950s Mennonites began to settle in British Honduras (Belize), other parts of Paraguay, and later still Bolivia. Again and again Loewen uncovers the irony in a search for isolation on a planet in which the Mennonite economic imperative (cash crops) was inseparable from global markets. The author also reveals some of the dynamics of friction and schism within Mennonite communities, usually based on issues of modernity and economic opportunity.
Chapters 6–8 trace the return migrations from Latin American countries from the 1950s onwards. This is a period of great complexity, as many of these movements were based on the individual or the family, rather than an entire colony, church or village. Many of those who left Mexico for southwestern Ontario also moved back to Mexico, and then Canada again, in pursuit of economic security. Loewen gives us a clear view of the very nature of “transnationalism,” in which neither the individual nor the group is tied to a nation (or to nationalism), but instead seeks belonging in a larger group of known individuals who neither have nor seek a particular homeland. But these Mennonites are never simply nomadic. Having now considerable investments in land (whether farmland in Mexico, or ranches in Paraguay), many of these Mennonites are deeply tied to their homes. But for thousands, it is possible and sometimes necessary to move on when life has become too tenuous (economically or for security reasons as in Mexico), or if there is a perceived need for more isolated conditions. In fact, roughly 20 percent of the settlers returned to Canada within the first few years of settlement, so the back and forth between the countries began almost immediately.
Media is often the mediating link between members of a diaspora. Loewen leans heavily on the example of Die Steinbach Post (later, and currently, Die Mennonitische Post) as a source for families and communities to stay in touch across the continents. Letters written for the Post related a world that was familiar but distant, and was used to create a shared “village among nations.”
Another core issue raised by the book is the relationships of Mennonite groups to state authorities. The book gives numerous examples of how Mennonites have historically seen themselves in direct relationship with individual leaders (whether the Czar, the British monarchy, or a Latin American president), benefitting from the (arbitrary) power of supreme authority. They have been much less comfortable with the systematic and systemic power structure of the bureaucratic state. The Privelegium, the granted privileges bestowed to Mennonites by benevolent leaders, lives large in ideas about Mennonite history and group identity.
A few questions are raised by the book that could lead to further study. Between the 1920s and the 1990s there was a clear shift away from land ownership and towards wage labour. Land ownership was a cornerstone of identity (for both individual and household) for centuries of Mennonite life. By the 1990s many of the descendants of those 1920s settlers were landless and involved in difficult wage labour on farms and in factories. It would be most interesting to understand how these changes impacted notions of individual identity, and the dispositions awakened in these new identities. Also, it seems (from the book and also from anecdotal accounts) that Mennonite women had a very powerful role in decision making about the very act of migration. Knowing to what degree this is true, and why it is the case in a clearly patriarchal society, would also make an illuminating study.
Traditionalist Mennonites have been studied by scholars and scrutinized by the media, but they have rarely received an authoritative account of their twentieth century society or history. Loewen provides this through both his central notion of transnationalism and his ability to relay the stories of individuals who constructed and experienced the transnational village.
We thank Clara Bachmann for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
We thank S. Goldsborough for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
Page revised: 2 April 2020
