Latino Mennonites

The first historical analysis of the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites. Winner, 2015 Américo Paredes Book Award, Center for Mexican American Studies and South Texas College. Felipe Hinojosa's parents first encountered Mennonite families as migrant workers in the tomato fields of northwestern Ohio. What started as mutual admiration quickly evolved into a relationship that strengthened over the years and eventually led to his parents founding a Mennonite Church in South Texas. Throughout his upbringing as a Mexican American evangélico, Hinojosa was faced with questions not only about his own religion but also about broader issues of Latino evangelicalism, identity, and civil rights politics. Latino Mennonites offers the first historical analysis of the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites. Drawing heavily on primary sources in Spanish, such as newspapers and oral history interviews, Hinojosa traces the rise of the Latino presence within the Mennonite Church from the origins of Mennonite missions in Latino communities in Chicago, South Texas, Puerto Rico, and New York City, to the conflicted relationship between the Mennonite Church and the California farmworker movements, and finally to the rise of Latino evangelical politics. He also analyzes how the politics of the Chicano, Puerto Rican, and black freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movements captured the imagination of Mennonite leaders who belonged to a church known more for rural and peaceful agrarian life than for social protest. Whether in terms of religious faith and identity, race, immigrant rights, or sexuality, the politics of belonging has historically presented both challenges and possibilities for Latino evangelicals in the religious landscapes of twentieth-century America. In Latino Mennonites, Hinojosa has interwoven church history with social history to explore dimensions of identity in Latino Mennonite communities and to create a new way of thinking about the history of American evangelicalism.

The first historical analysis of the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites. Winner, 2015 Américo Paredes Book Award, Center for Mexican American Studies and South Texas College. Felipe Hinojosa's parents first encountered Mennonite families as migrant workers in the tomato fields of northwestern Ohio. What started as mutual admiration quickly evolved into a relationship that strengthened over the years and eventually led to his parents founding a Mennonite Church in South Texas. Throughout his upbringing as a Mexican American evangélico, Hinojosa was faced with questions not only about his own religion but also about broader issues of Latino evangelicalism, identity, and civil rights politics. Latino Mennonites offers the first historical analysis of the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites. Drawing heavily on primary sources in Spanish, such as newspapers and oral history interviews, Hinojosa traces the rise of the Latino presence within the Mennonite Church from the origins of Mennonite missions in Latino communities in Chicago, South Texas, Puerto Rico, and New York City, to the conflicted relationship between the Mennonite Church and the California farmworker movements, and finally to the rise of Latino evangelical politics. He also analyzes how the politics of the Chicano, Puerto Rican, and black freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movements captured the imagination of Mennonite leaders who belonged to a church known more for rural and peaceful agrarian life than for social protest. Whether in terms of religious faith and identity, race, immigrant rights, or sexuality, the politics of belonging has historically presented both challenges and possibilities for Latino evangelicals in the religious landscapes of twentieth-century America. In Latino Mennonites, Hinojosa has interwoven church history with social history to explore dimensions of identity in Latino Mennonite communities and to create a new way of thinking about the history of American evangelicalism.

Uses cultural representations to investigate how two religious minority communities came to be incorporated into the Mexican nation. Liminal Sovereignty examines the lives of two religious minority communities in Mexico, Mennonites and Mormons, as seen as seen through Mexican culture. Mennonites emigrated from Canada to Mexico from the 1920s to the 1940s, and Mormons emigrated from the United States in the 1880s, left in 1912, and returned in the 1920s. Rebecca Janzen focuses on representations of these groups in film, television, online comics, photography, and legal documents. Janzen argues that perceptions of Mennonites and Mormons—groups on the margins and borders of Mexican society—illustrate broader trends in Mexican history. The government granted both communities significant exceptions to national laws to encourage them to immigrate; she argues that these foreshadow what is today called the Mexican state of exception. The groups’ inclusion into the Mexican nation shows that post-Revolutionary Mexico was flexible with its central tenets of land reform and building a mestizo race. Janzen uses minority communities at the periphery to give us a new understanding of the Mexican nation. Rebecca Janzen is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina and the author of The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control.

The saga of Mennonite women’s organizations is a story of struggle and triumph, productivity and misgivings, questions and celebrations. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, women’s groups have offered Mennonite women a means of serving others by sewing clothing, laboring over quilts, rolling bandages, and packing school kits. Women’s groups have also provided Mennonite women the opportunity to test their skills as leaders and give voice to callings they felt in a church that has not always valued their gifts for ministry. In this vibrant portrait of Mennonite Women USA, Anita Hooley Yoder paints with both broad and subtle strokes the one-hundred-year history of an organization that nurtures local church women’s groups and connects Mennonite women across the world.

The Mennonites, with their long tradition of peaceful protest and commitment to equality, were castigated by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. for not showing up on the streets to support the civil rights movement. Daily Demonstrators shows how the civil rights movement played out in Mennonite homes and churches from the 1940s through the 1960s. In the first book to bring together Mennonite religious history and civil rights movement history, Tobin Miller Shearer discusses how the civil rights movement challenged Mennonites to explore whether they, within their own church, were truly as committed to racial tolerance and equality as they might like to believe. Shearer shows the surprising role of children in overcoming the racial stereotypes of white adults. Reflecting the transformation taking place in the nation as a whole, Mennonites had to go through their own civil rights struggle before they came to accept interracial marriages and integrated congregations. Based on oral history interviews, photographs, letters, minutes, diaries, and journals of white and African-American Mennonites, this fascinating book further illuminates the role of race in modern American religion.

In 2005, Jaime Prieto of Universidad Bíblica Latinoamericana, San José, Costa Rica, broke new ground by being the first person to give the Menno Simons Lectures at Bethel College in Spanish. Now the Wedel Series does the same by publishing both the original Spanish and the English translation. Prieto examines the topic of "Anabaptists in Latin America" from several unusual angles. First, he looks at a typology for Anabaptist church groups in the region, dividing them into three groups: those of foreign missionary origin; those of immigrant origin (e.g., Germans who came to Paraguay in 1926, 1929 and 1947-49); and those of Latin American origin (e.g., the K'ekchi' Mennonites in Altaverapaz, Guatemala, the Amor Viviente churches in Honduras). Reflecting on the typology and the diversity of models of the church, Prieto says, helps in evaluating ongoing life and mission in Latin American contexts. Next, Prieto emphasizes the inspiration toward peacemaking, peace-building and nonviolence found in the voices of Latin American children. He recovers two of these voices, one found in a poem written in 1937 by Benjamín Hugo Luayza, the young son of an Argentinean Mennonite pastor, and the other that of Antonio Mosquera in an oral history recording his schoolboy memories of the persecution of Mennonite Brethren missionaries in Colombia in the 1940s and '50s. Prieto also highlights the importance of understanding Latin American Mennonite history from women's perspective as well as men's. He uses the biography of Melita Legiehn Kliewer Nikkel, born in Omsk in Siberia in 1924, who fled Russia with her family at age five for Germany and then the Fernheim Colony in Paraguay, finally settling in Brazil in 1952 after her second marriage. Finally, Prieto deals with the challenge of missiology and ecclesiology through the vision of Cecilia Espinoza Jiménez, an indigenous Trique woman from Oaxaca, Mexico. Cecilia's vision, says Prieto, outlines the relationship between heaven and earth and the need to view spirituality from both the vantage point of the Word and the daily struggle for survival that many experience. People like Cecilia, Prieto says, remind us of the need to reconnect to God and nature, and to the importance of collaboration on many levels.

In the current climate, and in an age of increasing hostility towards religion and the study of religion, religious education is a much-debated area. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of contributors from the USA, Britain and Ireland, and Australia, representing a variety of religious perspectives, Does Religious Education Matter? provocatively demonstrates that it is vital that religious education is presented as it ’really’ is: a valuable and rich resource that, when taught and engaged with appropriately, stimulates essential qualities for global and responsible citizenship: critical thinking, tolerance, respect, and mutual understanding.

Hair-raising escapades ranging from the heights of a windmill to utter darkness in a deep well. Staring a deadly snake in the eye and facing the menacing eyes of a snarling wolf. Delight over a sack of oranges at Christmas and the shame of begging for food. All these adventures and experiences are part of the story of Isaac Penner, an inquisitive and spirited young Mennonite boy growing up in a village in the Manitoba Colony in Northern Mexico during the years from 1941-1952. This memoir is based entirely on the reminiscences recounted often to his family by Isaac Penner, Jr., and also by his parents and siblings. “This type of book about Manitoba’s Mennonites is very popular in Local History sections” writes Isabel Monteith, who read and reviewed an early draft of the book. She adds “This may be the first one to focus on their Mexican experience from a child’s point of view. It will be of interest to adults, but easily read by teens or even younger children. Teachers would find it a great resource for local history and the study of immigration.”