Migration as Preservation and Loss: The Paradox of Transnational Living for Low German Mennonite Women

Abstract

Throughout history, conservative groups of Low German-speaking Mennonites have collectively migrated to preserve their religious integrity. However, their contemporary migrations to North America are not collective or church-sanctioned, but primarily economically motivated. This paper explores the intertwined processes of gender and religion in transnational social spaces through the destination experiences of Mennonite women in Canada. The paradoxes of the transnational social field—each simultaneous gain and loss—constitute a double-bind wherein choice is elusive. Caught in the contest between physical and cultural survival, women find themselves in the ‘nothing’ of in-between, as conflicting social fields and systems of capital—secular and sacred—collide.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Religion
• Transnational Migration
• Low German Mennonites
• Immigrant Integration
• Canada

Acknowledgements

Rural Women Making Change was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are grateful to Dr Belinda Leach for inviting us to participate, Margaret Peters and Anna Peters for their indispensible roles in our research, and Spencer Henson and two anonymous JEMS reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. Our greatest appreciation is to the women who had the courage to speak to us about their everyday lives.

Notes

1. For all Mennonites in Canada, 87 per cent of whom were rural residents in 1941, an agriculture-based livelihood was integral to their ethno-religious identity (Regehr 1996). Increasing pressure on small-scale farming in Canada over the past half-century has forced rural-to-urban migrations for the majority, and drastic and irreversible lifestyle changes for Mennonites.

2. A community-based researcher interviewed women one-to-one, with the exception of two cases in which husbands were also present.

3. The passage of assimilative school attendance acts in Manitoba and Saskatchewan induced 7,000 conservative Mennonites to migrate to Mexico and 1,800 to Paraguay. Another 1,200 headed to Paraguay and 800 to Mexico in 1948 due to rising concern that ‘the mid-twentieth-century world was undermining their faith and weakening their ability to guard their inherited culture’ (Loewen 2006: 169). Some stayed only a decade or two, and thriving colonies have since been established in Bolivia, Argentina and Belize ( Bender et al. 1987; Cañás Bottos 2008, 2009).

4. One notable exception is various Old Order Mennonite groups of Swiss-German descent who maintain traditional closed communities primarily in Ontario and Eastern and Mid-Western United States (Good Gingrich and Lightman 2004, Good Gingrich and Lightman 2006). While similar to their Dutch-Russian Old Colony Mennonite ‘cousins’ in conservative religious beliefs and lifestyle, their transnational migratory history ended in the mid-nineteenth century (Epp 1974).

5. Return migration to Canada gathered pace in the 1970s when a Mennonite NGO discovered an obscure loophole in Canada's citizenship law. Recognising the potential for these Mennonites to provide flexible labour in Canadian agriculture, federal officials were persuaded to change their interpretation of the 1947 Citizenship law, permitting thousands of Mennonites from Mexico to claim citizenship through the ‘delayed registration’ provision. Without this, Mexican-born Mennonites would have little chance of qualifying under Canada's human capital model for immigration. Changes to Canadian law (2009) now narrowly restrict citizenship opportunities for LGMs.

6. CCTB is a monthly, tax-free cash supplement—paid to eligible low- and middle-income applicants with children under 18 years—usually issued to mothers, provided they hold status as citizens, landed immigrants or refugees.

7. In a 1920 letter to the Canadian government citing the motives for their intended mass migration to Latin America, a Mennonite church leader wrote that, if pressures to force their children into secular schools were to continue, ‘we will be obliged to seek out a new homeland, where we and our children will be able to live by our faith’ (Guenther 2005: 188).

8. During harvest seasons, which start and end well before and after public school summer break, it is not unusual for school-age children to be working in the fields with their parents.