“Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua” was an oral history project conducted by Abigail Carl-Klassen and Jonathan Klassen in northern Mexico in the spring of 2018. The project is a collection of forty-two audio recorded interviews that seeks to document and explore the experiences of Cuauhtémoc area Mennonites past and present who have built relationships with the larger Mexican community, and to recognize the perspectives and contributions of Mestizo (the majority ethnic and socio-linguistic group in Mexico comprised of Spanish speaking people of mixed race, primarily Caucasian and Indigenous heritage) and Indigenous Rarámuri people who have developed close ties with the Mennonite community in the Cuauhtémoc area. The narratives of seven project participants (José Luis Domínguez, Marcela Enns, Clara Enns, Jacobo Enns, Veronica Enns, Raúl Ramírez “Kigra,” and Dr. Patricia Islas Salinas) are featured in this article because they embody the varied and complex cross-cultural dynamics that have been forged between Mestizo and Mennonite communities since the beginning of Mennonite settlement in Mexico in 1922. They are examples of how families from Mestizo and Mennonite backgrounds have built long-lasting relationships across cultures despite fears, prohibitions and/or taboos.

The first Old Colony Mennonites from Saskatchewan and Manitoba arrived in the small rancho of San Antonio de Arenales (now the city of Cuauhtémoc), Chihuahua, Mexico, on 8 March 1922, two years after the end of the Mexican Revolution. Twelve-year-old Sixta Molinar Hernández was in the crowd that had gathered “a ver los rubios grandes bajar el tren” (to see the big blondes getting off the train).¹ She thought Mexico was being invaded. In the bustle of the spectacle, someone handed her a jar of warm milk. Despite all the excitement and busyness of their arrival in a new country, the Mennonites had still been milking their cows on schedule on the train and had disembarked after many days of travel bearing gifts. In turn, many Mexicans offered food, candy, and gum, communicating through hand signals since none of the Mennonites spoke Spanish.² José Luis Domínguez, Sixta’s grandson, a Cuauhtémoc native, and celebrated author of twelve books including La otra historia de los menonitas (The Other Mennonite History) published in 2015, the only comprehensive history of Mennonite settlement in Chihuahua written in Spanish, chuckled as he recalled his grandmother’s memories of the Mennonite’s arrival in Mexico. “I felt that we owed a debt to the Mennonites. I felt we owed them this jar of milk, and a time arrived when I thought of writing the tribute to them to pay for this jar of milk. So I feel like it’s a debt we contracted, as a family, but it’s also the encounter, right? An encounter between two cultures that impacted my grandmother.”³

During his interview,⁴ José reflected on his family’s long history with the Mennonites, beginning with this famous jar of milk. A self-taught writer with no formal degree, he described his family’s humble roots and discussed his childhood experiences as a field hand in the 1970s: “Those of us who worked in the field, we were the men of the house. My uncle and I were there with the Mennonites. My connection to the Mennonites is very deep. When I was small, I would come here to the public plaza. I was hired to go cut and hoe the bean fields when there wasn’t very much machine technology. I was very young, about 9, 10 years old. Sometimes, not all the time, because I was very small, they told me I was very young to be going to work, but when the time came, well, I went to earn my daily wage of 4, 5 pesos for the work. And there were breaks during the day and they gave us Zwieback, the traditional sweet food-jam, bread, butter, frothy milk, everything—it’s clear that we lived side by side with them…. In the harvest season it was worth it when we finished they would call us to go collect what was left behind in the fields. Those same Mennonites gave it to us. And that was another way in which we lived together. We were in their field almost all day. We took lunch out there. Gathered the things that had fallen in the fields, skimmed them, cleaned them, loaded the beans up to take home. And of the sacks that belonged to the whole family, they sold half at market and ate half. And I think that made an impression on us, it made an impression on [the] Mestizo community of Cuauhtémoc. That contact was when they hardly spoke Spanish. Tall, private and hard workers…..So, I think that was [the] beginning, I wanted to demonstrate my thankfulness for that generosity they have, because the Mennonites are always very generous with the poor.”⁵

José’s book, La otra historia de los menonitas, primarily focuses on the growth and development of the Cuauhtémoc area Mennonite colonies. It emphasizes topics such as the creation of schools, education reform, and literary work created in Mexico by and about Mennonites; however, it also explores some of the conflicts and tensions that have arisen over the years between the Mennonite and Mestizo communities. Therefore, it offers an understanding of Mennonite migration to Chihuahua through the lens of Mexican history, especially the years following the Mexican Revolution. Tensions between the Mestizo and Mennonite communities were particularly high during that time as Mennonites had settled onto 100,000 hectares of land (a portion of the former Hacienda de Bustillos) that they had purchased from the wealthy Zuloaga family, an arrangement that came with permission and privileges from then President of Mexico, Álvaro Obregón. At the same time, campesinos (tenant farmers) returning to the Cuauhtémoc region from the revolution had not been given the land that had been promised to them in the peace treaty signed between the Mexican government and revolutionary leader General Francisco “Pancho” Villa. There were raids on Mennonite farms and the federal government had dispatched troops to the Mennonite colonies to provide security.⁶ On 3 April 1922, the Mexican City newspaper, El Excelisor, carried the complaints of the governor of Chihuahua, Ignacio Enríquez, who wrote: “No more Mennonite colonists are wanted….Chihuahuan landowners have found the way to leave our compatriots without land, selling their large estates to foreigners.”⁷

According to José, the hope for reigniting a radical, agrarian revolution in Mexico was extinguished with the assassination of Pancho Villa in Parral, Chihuahua in 1923. He maintained, however, that tensions in the Cuauhtémoc region cooled significantly between Mennonites and displaced Mestizo campesinos after the government granted the campesinos land near the railroad station in Cuauhtémoc in 1927 after a long campaign led by agricultural labor organizer Belisario Chávez Ochoa.⁸ José explained in further detail in his interview saying, “Ejido El Semaoyote and Ejido Dolores were parcels of the Zuloaga’s land that were sold to the Mennonites and many people who lived there [who were campesinos under the Zuloagas] left, but they didn’t want to leave, because they were armed people who had gone to fight the revolution. The government made an agreement with them and gave them a piece of land. So this part of Cuauhtémoc was founded by unsatisfied campesinos who had no land because their fight in the revolution had been unsuccessful. And then they were stripped of their land because the Mennonites came to settle there.”⁹ This land, officially named Ejido Cuauhtémoc, became known as Colonia de los Doscientos, (The Two Hundred Colony), named after the two hundred pesos that the government gave to each family who had resettled there.”¹⁰

In northern Mexico and the adjoining border towns in the United States, folklore surrounding the Mexican Revolution, and particularly Pancho Villa, abounds. There is hardly a corner, including in the Campos Menonitas, that is untouched by tales of raids, romance, and shootouts.

The Enns family, who lives on the border of the Swift and Manitoba Colonies has a legacy of cross-cultural relationship building and boundary pushing that goes all the way back to an early encounter between Gerhard Enns Guenther and Pancho Villa soon after the family’s arrival from Canada in 1922. The Enns’s youngest daughter, Marcela, a fourth generation resident of the Campos Menonitas and a professional photographer whose images are featured on the Darp Stories YouTube Channel,¹¹ recalled this piece of family lore during her interview, “My [great-] grandfather actually met Pancho Villa….He had come to their house and asked for two cows. And then my grandpa’s like, ‘Yeah, you can have them.’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t want them, I just wanted to know if you were going to give them to me.’” According to family legend, after that brief encounter with Pancho Villa, the Enns’s livestock was left intact and the farm was never a target for raids or unrest.¹²

Marcela’s father, Jacobo, who preferred to be interviewed in Spanish rather than English, also remembered the hospitality of his paternal grandparents, Gerhard Enns Guenther and Helena Dyck Neudorf. Lifelong members of the Old Colony Church, his grandparents were very traditional in their religious and social practices, driving a horse and buggy and managing their small farm without electricity or running water; yet, they pushed against local convention by informally adopting two Mexican orphan brothers whom they raised alongside their other children. “[They] arrived from Sinaloa and their father was murdered in Chihuahua. The poor widow couldn’t keep her children and so my grandparents adopted them. Ismael and Mónico. They grew up with my grandparents and they were always there with my grandparents. And when my grandparents died, they stayed there with my dad and all the uncles working. They taught us Spanish and from a young age we worked together with them.”¹³

Jacobo worked on the family farm milking cows, raising pigs, and planting and harvesting crops from a young age, completing the sixth grade at a traditional Old Colony school. He and his wife Susy left the Old Colony Church in 1980, soon after they got married. Jacobo’s desire for a truck and increased contact with the world outside the colonies fueled their decision to leave.¹⁴ Marcela described her parents’ experiences in the years after leaving the church and the differences in the reactions of her mother’s family, who shunned them for years; her great-grandfather, Gerhard Enns Guenther, who accepted them while remaining a member of the church; and her grandfather, Isaak Enns Dyck, who was also excommunicated from the church. “When my parents left the traditional church, my grandparents on my mom’s side, they did not talk to them at all. They were not invited to family gatherings, nothing. And on my dad’s side, it was a little bit more like, since my grandpa [Isaak Enns Dyck] was a total rebel, he always wanted to do things differently. He was like, ‘Oh, good for you…’ My grandpa always had friends over as well, that were Mexican. But that was not seen as okay in their community, at all. They didn’t like that at all, but he was always excommunicated anyway. So he probably just thought, like, ‘Oh well, they can’t do anything to me now I’m just going to go and invite people over.’ I don’t know why, but they were always a little different. Even my grandpa’s cousins, everybody that is a little bit related to me through that side of the family, they’re all very open-minded. And I think it has to do with how, I guess, my great-grandparents raised them. Because they thought differently back then than most people in the community.”¹⁵

Marcela’s cousin, Clara Enns, a midwife, highly sought-after seamstress, contestant on the TV show “MasterChef México” in 2016, and a cross-cultural bridge builder in her own right, who was also interviewed for “Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders,” agrees. “My grandpa just had a bigger vision of the world…in my family it was very, very normal. They [Mexican people] were very welcomed. They were family friends. Not just someone who was an outsider.”¹⁶

In the late 1980s, Jacobo started a successful seed business with his brother who lives in the United States, selling to both Mestizo and Mennonite clients. In the following years, he devoted time and resources to improving the quality of life for people of all backgrounds in the Cuauhtémoc region, including providing monetary and nutritional support to Indigenous Rarámuri communities and sitting on the board of ENLAC (Instituto de Entrenamiento para Niños con Lesión Cerebral y Trastornos del Aprendizaje) (Training Institute for Children with Cerebral Palsy and Learning Disabilities), a Cuauhtémoc based non-profit organization that provides physical therapy and family support for children with disabilities. In 2016, he was recognized by the government of Chihuahua for his charitable work in a special edition magazine titled, Hombres y mujeres menonitas destacados: Caminos inspirantes (Outstanding Mennonite Men and Women: Inspirational Journeys). The article noted, “[h]is dream is to continue to help others alongside his children and to promote the creation of a carpentry workshop and training center in the Sierra Tarahumara that would offer work to Indigenous people and provide for their needs.”¹⁷

Almost one hundred years after her great-grandfather’s encounter with Pancho Villa, Marcela is following the Enns family tradition by breaking with conventional expectations and pushing boundaries to build cross-cultural relationships. She’s lived in Vancouver and Guadalajara, has worked as a model, and is unmarried at twenty-seven, defying her community’s expectations for Mennonite women. Describing her childhood rebellion against the prohibition of women wearing pants or make-up, she laughed, “I was always in trouble for everything!”¹⁸ She showed off a family photo she posted on her Instagram account “How_Mennonites,” which shares Plautdietsch videos and photos that make humorous observations about Mennonite culture and has more than 2,800 followers, saying, “Look at that neon green dress my mom made for herself back in the ’70s. That was back when she was still Old Colony—and she says I’m a rebel!”¹⁹

In addition to running her photography business, Marcela manages one of her father’s businesses, Cabañas las Bellotas, a property of rental cabins and recreational facilities in the Campos Menonitas that serves people from a variety of backgrounds, from traditional Mennonites to Mestizo people from Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua and Juárez who want a retreat from the city. She reflected on the uncommon nature of her position saying, “I have interaction with people outside of the community on a daily basis. But most girls my age don’t…I have received very little resistance. I’m impressed. Because my dad always has treated us as equals—guys and girls. So, a lot of people are like, ‘Your daughter is going to run it, is she capable of doing it?’ And then dad’s like, ‘Yeah, of course she is.’”²⁰

On 12 May 2018, Marcela and her older sister Veronica, a celebrated ceramic artist and painter who works out of a studio in Campo 10, were invited to exhibit their work, “Una mirada a mi hermandad” (A Look at My Sisterhood), which explores the bonds of traditional and liberal Mennonite women across generations, at Cuauhtémoc’s Festival de Tres Culturas (Three Cultures Festival). This cultural celebration seeks to promote understanding among the region’s three cultures: Mestizo, Rarámuri, and Mennonite. Nearly one hundred years after the arrival of the Mennonites in Cuauhtémoc, a crowd gathered in the Teatro de Cámara, the local municipal event center, to witness the launching of the exhibition. Moving seamlessly between Spanish, Plautdietsch, and English, Marcela and Veronica greeted visitors, posed for pictures, and described how their work was inspired by the labor of Mennonite women and the long legacy of women artisans in the Mennonite community.²¹ Veronica contextualized her work saying, “I’ve tried to see how I can make art about my heritage and roots. I find it sculptural when the women make cookies and Werrennikje, because ceramics is the same. It’s modeling. I was very inspired by that…. For as long as I remember, I was always looking through my mom’s little Kjiste to see the drawings of my grandma. My grandma [Helena Rempel Bueckert] used to do the drawings for the children’s books. In the coloring books it’s usually the activities of the woman that are being drawn. And also the farm…but the women’s work is celebrated in the coloring books, but in ordinary life, their work isn’t celebrated.”²²

Raúl Ramírez “Kigra,” Veronica’s boyfriend and Chihuahua-based photographer who has exhibited his work throughout Mexico and in the United States and Europe, photographed the event. A full house of family and friends from the Mennonite and Mestizo communities, as well as government representatives from the Department of Tourism and the Mennonite Resource Office all celebrated the opening.²³

Before the ribbon cutting officially launched the exhibition, the Enns sisters were introduced by Dr. Patricia Islas Salinas, a professor at the Cuauhtémoc campus of the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez), a family friend, and a lifelong Cuauhtémoc resident. Dr. Islas Salinas, who researches and publishes on education, health, and women’s issues in Chihuahua’s Mennonite colonies,²⁴ has also collaborated with the Enns family on several cultural and educational projects, including the aforementioned Hombres y mujeres menonitas destacados: Caminos inspirantes.²⁵ She reflected on her family’s ties to the Mennonites and on how the relationship between the Mennonite and Mestizo communities has changed over the years. “When I was a girl it was common for my grandparents to go visit the Campos Menonitas because many people from Cuauhtémoc went to buy cream, cheese, eggs, all the products the Mennonites are known for selling. And so, I have been in contact with Mennonites since I was a girl. I remember going with my grandparents to the houses where these things were sold. And so I played with the Mennonite girls that were around. We ran around, even though we didn’t understand each other because of the language. But, like kids, we played….When I was a girl, years ago, we saw the Mennonites as strangers. The Mennonites we saw were in Cuauhtémoc, in the center, shopping and going to the bank in their buggies. And it got a lot of attention. It was a relationship, yes, like with strangers. And now it is common, very common, to see mixed marriages, for example. And twenty years ago, that was IMPOSSIBLE. Unspeakable. You were walking the line of excommunication if you stayed with a Mestizo. Now there are even churches there that have mixed marriages. And so you can already see more cross-culturalism. Now, everything has been revolutionized.”²⁶

As the centennial of the Mennonite settlement in Mexico approaches, the “Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua” seeks to document the ways in which dynamics and relationships between Mestizo, Indigenous, and Mennonite individuals and communities have changed and grown over time. It captures what members of those communities currently anticipate for future cross-cultural interactions. The project narratives featured in this article represent some of the dramatic and lasting changes that have occurred in much of the region over the last hundred years and reflect the general sense of optimism that many interviewees expressed about the future dynamics between communities.²⁷

1. Domínguez, José Luis, La otra historia de los menonitas (Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua: Editorial Kleidi, 2015), 68. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. José Luis Domínguez, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, February 26, 2018, Interview 23, “Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua” Oral History Project, Mennonite Heritage Archives. ↩︎
4. The “Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua” Oral History project is a research project consisting of forty-two oral history interviews conducted in Mexico by the author, in both Spanish and English, in the spring of 2018. The project was funded by a research grant from the D.F. Plett Historical Research Foundation and the oral interviews and research materials are archived at the Mennonite Heritage Archives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. ↩︎
5. Domínguez, interview by Carl-Klassen, February 26, 2018. ↩︎
6. Domínguez, La otra historia de los menonitas, 95. ↩︎
7. Ibid., 93. ↩︎
8. Ibid., 109. ↩︎
9. Domínguez, interview by Carl-Klassen, February 26, 2018. ↩︎
10. Programa de Apoyo a las Culturas Municipales y Comunitarias (PACMyC), Fundación del Ejido Cuauhtémoc Chihuahua, directed and performed by Ariadne Lozano (Chihuahua: Secretaría de Cultura del Estado de Chihuahua, 2015), YouTube. ↩︎
11. The Darp Stories YouTube Channel showcases selected interviews from the “Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders” Oral History Project for the general public. It is available at www.youtube.com/channel/UCGy9sd_xNDQTwffveCOhvhg. ↩︎
12. Marcela Enns, interviewed by Abigail Carl-Klassen, February 6, 2018, Interview 11, “Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders.” ↩︎
13. Jacobo Enns, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, March 3, 2018, Interview 28, “Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders.” ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. Enns, interview by Carl-Klassen, February 6, 2018. ↩︎
16. Clara Enns, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, February 7, 2018, Interview 12, “Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders.” ↩︎
17. Angélica Chávez Licón, Patricia Islas Salinas, Maria Olivia Treviso Nevárez, et al., Hombres y mujeres menonitas destacados: Caminos inspirantes (Chihuahua: Secretaría de Desarollo Social, Gobierno del Estado de Chihuahua, 2016), 31. ↩︎
18. Enns, interview by Carl-Klassen, February 6, 2018. ↩︎
19. Marcela Enns, conversation with Abigail Carl-Klassen, March 20, 2018. ↩︎
20. Enns, interview by Carl-Klassen, February 6, 2018. ↩︎
21. “Verónica y Marcela Enns exponen su obra ‘Una mirada a mi hermandad,’” Heraldo de Chihuahua (Chihuahua, CH), May 15, 2018. ↩︎
22. Veronica Enns, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, March 11, 2018, Interview 29, “Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders.” ↩︎
23. Raúl Ramírez “Kigra,” conversation with Abigail Carl-Klassen, May 14, 2018. ↩︎
24. Dr. Patricia Islas Salinas, Mujeres menonitas: Miradas y expressions [Mennonite Women: Looks and Expressions] (Chihuahua: Instituto Chihuahuense de la Cultura, 2016); Islas Salinas, La colonia menonita en Chihuahua: Escenarios para el bienestar social [The Mennonite Colony in Chihuahua: Scenes for Social Welfare] (Chihuahua: Centro de Estudios Multidisciplinarios en Investigación Intercultural, 2016); Islas Salinas, Menonitas del noreste de Chihuahua: Historia, educación y salud [Mennonites in Northeastern Chihuahua: History, Education and Health] (Chihuahua: Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, 2017). ↩︎
25. Dr. Patricia Islas Salinas, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, January 26, 2018, Interview 7, “Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders.” ↩︎
26. Ibid. ↩︎
27. The complete audio interviews, transcripts, translations (for interviews conducted in Spanish) and supplemental donated materials (photos, newspapers, books, and government publications) are available at the Mennonite Heritage Archives in Winnipeg. Selected interviews and clips from the project, accompanied by landscape images of the Campos Menonitas provided by local photographers and project interviewees Marcela Enns, Veronica Enns, and Raúl Ramírez “Kigra,” are available on YouTube as part of the Darp Stories Project, which seeks to make “Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders” available to a wider audience, particularly to people from Old Colony origin communities throughout the Americas. ↩︎