This issue of Preservings is unique in the history of the magazine. To commemorate the migration of approximately 8,000 Mennonites from Canada to Mexico and Paraguay that began a hundred years ago, we are publishing a translation of a memoir written by Aeltester (bishop) Isaak M. Dyck, an Old Colony leader. First published in Mexico in 1970, the year after his death, the text recalls the experiences of Mennonite communities in Canada, the decision to move to Mexico, and the early life of Mennonites in their new home. This is the first half of the memoir, Auswanderung der Reinlaender Mennoniten Gemeinde von Canada nach Mexiko, which was translated by Robyn Sneath. It gives voice to the concerns of the Old Colony and helps us to understand this period from their perspective. This was a tumultuous period in history, sharing some features with our own, in which war and a pandemic had polarized society, creating divisions within groups and mistrust towards the government. These circumstances likely served to exasperate insecurities felt by both the Old Colony and government officials as they searched for stable ground in a changing world.

Few sources have influenced our understanding of this migration more than Dyck’s memoir. Community members as well as scholars have used Dyck’s account to explore why Old Colony Mennonites decided to leave behind the prosperous farms and functioning communities they had built over the course of fifty years in Manitoba and Saskatchewan to start over again in a new country. Written in a sermonizing tone typical of an Old Colony minister, Dyck uses biblical references to offer guidance for the community’s future through an interpretation and remembrance of its past. In his account, Dyck points to both internal and external factors shaping an uncertain environment of militarism, consumerism, and worldly temptations in which the Old Colony felt their faith and community life to be threatened.

Dyck, who was born in 1889 in the village of Reinland in Manitoba’s West Reserve, offers a unique perspective on this historical period. He was the son of Maria Martens Loeppky and Isaak Dyck, who both emigrated from tsarist Russia to Canada during the 1870s. Dyck’s parents would meet and marry in the West Reserve after his mother was widowed in 1882. The family settled in Reinland as members of the Reinlaender Mennonite Church. Little is known about the family’s early years in Manitoba, but by the age of eighteen Dyck was teaching at a private Mennonite school in the village of Eichenfeld. After losing half of his students to diphtheria, Dyck moved to the Blumenfeld school, where he taught the children to read, write, count, and live with humility and piety.

A year after he married Susanna Peters, the Reinlaender congregation elected Dyck as a minister, at the age of twenty-three. Dyck must have shown gifts in both leadership and preaching to be given this important responsibility. Ten years later, the entire church, under the leadership of Aeltester Johann Friesen, began to board trains at southern Manitoba stations like Winkler, Plum Coulee, and Gretna to travel to San Antonio de los Arenales (today the city of Cuauhtémoc), in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Unwilling to comply with the provincial government’s demand that Mennonites send their children to English-language public schools instead of the German, Mennonite-run private ones, Mennonites had found a country willing to negotiate a new Privilegium (charter of privileges) that protected their right to educate their children according to their faith.

Dyck was a product of the private Mennonite educational system, who transitioned from student to teacher to community leader. As the memoir demonstrates, he had a deep knowledge of the Bible, a love of hymns (the source of nearly all the poetic verse he quotes), and a strong understanding of history; he was hardly the image of an ignorant Mennonite suggested by provincial government representatives. The example of Dyck demonstrates that Old Colony Mennonites were not against education; rather, they viewed school as an extension of the church instead of the responsibility of the state. For them, the pursuit of knowledge for material gain or personal achievement was contrary to their religious beliefs.

In the 1920s, Mennonites faced a decision that would have repercussions for future generations. As in tsarist Russia during the 1870s, a dispute with state officials forced Mennonites to take stock of their communities and consider whether they were following the right path. Mennonites had to decide whether they should consciously expose their children to the wider world by sending them to public schools, or leave. Some chose the former, finding accommodation with the government. They viewed this decision as being aligned with their religious values. Others, like Isaak Dyck, decided that they could not relegate instruction of their children to the state, and embarked on a new journey, one which would in time expand the footprint of the global Mennonite community across Latin America.