INTRODUCTION They Did Not Come to My Mexico © 2018 State
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INTRODUCTION They Did Not Come to My Mexico My great-grandmother and six great-aunts and uncles and their children emi- grated from Canada to northern Mexico, along with several thousand other Canadian Mennonites, between the 1920s and the 1940s.1 These immigrants lived on individual farms in the states of Chihuahua and Durango. These farms were grouped into villages, which were then grouped into colonies. To this day, some of my relatives live in colonies. They and their descendants aim to pursue their own educational systems and religious practices, preserve their Low German language and farm in tight-knit communities.2 They did not come to the Mexico I had learned about through my previ- ous academic work on twentieth-century Mexican literature. When I traveled to visit them, I did not know what to say. There was often a language bar- rier. So, I listened and I watched. I noticed that the land, their land, the land I almost could have come from, shaped them. I was impressed with how they used their comparative isolation to preserve their religion, language, and family structures and carefully monitored their interaction with the world beyond their communities. My work in Mexican studies has given me the remarkable privilege of meet- ing many Mormons belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS Church). I learned that there is a group of LDS people with roots in nineteenth-century Utah who live very close to several Mennonite colonies. In spite of theological differences between Mennonites and Mormons, the Mexican press and archives have confused the two groups; moreover, several academics have studied them alongside of one another. This book,Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture, explores the question of belonging as it relates to these minority reli- gious groups and Mexican nationhood: were they inside or where they outside xv © 2018 State University of New York Press, Albany xvi | Introduction of the understanding of Mexico after the 1910 Revolution?3 When? Under which circumstances? It answers these questions by examining the ways that visual and print culture, here confined to photography, film, television, comics, and archival documents, represent the relationship between these Mennonites and the outside world, or Mexican society. It will compare them to understand- ings of the groups of Mormons who live in Chihuahua, represented in similar sources. I argue throughout this book that the perception of these two groups, who theoretically occupy a space at the edges of the nation, aligns with ideas of the Mexican nation, from mestizaje [racial mixture] at the beginning of the twentieth century to violence and death in the early twenty-first. The book argues that these groups at the edges are an integral part of the nation. This emphasis on the state of exception comes out of Carl Schmitt’s foundational work on the state of exception and Giorgio Agamben’s recent interpretation of it. Schmitt famously stated that the “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” (5).4 That is, the entity in charge of the state is the one who is allowed to decide how, and under which circumstances, to enforce the constitution and the law that comes out of it. As political scientist Gabriella Slomp explains, for Agamben, “under normal circumstances, the state was still the primary entity . but under exceptional circumstances groups or parties that did not see the state as protecting their own way of life developed into political units” (59). These units could then threaten the sovereign, and challenge the application of the law. Agamben notes that the exception does not necessarily mean a dictatorship. Instead, it is “a space devoid of law . in which all legal determinations—and above all the very distinction between public and private—are deactivated” but that remains connected to the law and the legal system (50). The minority religious groups, who have developed agreements for exceptions to Mexican law, are exceptional in a different way— their communities temporarily suspend the rule of the law; in a context of a widespread suspension of the law, they are no more or less likely to be attacked or ignored than others. This book focuses on Mennonites and Mormons from 1920 to the early twenty-first century in Mexican history and culture. In so doing, it will show how these groups fit into the Mexican exception and how Mexican concepts of nationhood have been flexible enough to accommodate them. Mexican visual and print culture presents two schools of thought about these religious © 2018 State University of New York Press, Albany Introduction | xvii minorities. One idealizes both groups, stating that they are hardworking con- tributors who better their regional and national economies. The other is that they are bad for the nation because they refuse to integrate with its schools, its language, or the entirety of its laws. The idealistic tendencies tend to surge in periods of economic growth or revolutionary optimism, while the critical tendency approaches in times of economic downturn and uncertainty. It also rises among concerns about the rights of indigenous people, which are often in conflict with the comparatively privileged positions of the Mennonites and the Mormons. The Mormons this book discusses descendants from those who emigrated from the US to Mexico in the 1880s and eventually set up colonies in the states of Chihuahua and Sonora. It is important to note, however, that other Mormons in Mexico vastly outnumber these US-descendant Mormons. According to official LDS church statistics, there are 1.3 million LDS Mormons in Mexico (“Facts and Statistics”). Mormon colonies were and are the size of a small town surrounded by extensive landholdings used for cattle ranching, fruit trees, and crop farming. The vast majority of these Mormons left their homes in Mexico in 1912, and some of them returned to Mexico in the 1920s.5 The Mennonites, for their part, emigrated from Canada to Mexico en masse mostly between 1922 and 1926. Today there are some Mennonites in Mexico who do not live in colonies, but they are in the minority. Both groups’ migration pat- terns, then, and commitment to a level of separation from society mean that the surrounding government has had to expand some of its ideas to accom- modate them. These groups have also had to change their understanding of their separation in order to remain in their host country. EXCEPTIONALITY IN MEXICO The two religious groups suggest that Mexico’s status as a state of exception is not new.6 Indeed, the religious groups settled in Mexico in order to live out their particular beliefs, and only came to Mexico upon agreements with the Mexican government that they would have freedom to do so. The LDS Mormons who live in what are today Colonias Juárez and Dublán are pri- marily descendants of people who bought land there as part of colonization companies in the 1880s and 1890s. A contract printed in the October 12, © 2018 State University of New York Press, Albany xviii | Introduction 1893, Diario Oficial de la Federación provides us with details of their settle- ment.7 It allowed the Mormon-owned Mexican Colonization Company in the states of Chihuahua and Sonora to act as a land broker in those states as long as the land they purchased was not in a border zone (Secretaría de Fomento 3).8 The agreement provided a flexible definition of the term family. It could be any group with one or two parents and their children; it could also be a group of siblings, as long as one has reached the age of maturity. This flexibil- ity, which we see in other agreements from the time period, was likely meant to account for different constructions of family that resulted from illness and death. Conveniently for the Mormons, it allowed for polygamous families to register as independent family units without falsifying legal documents. According to Mormon historian B. Carmon Hardy’s Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (1992), early Mormons struggled in Mexico. He explains that bigamy has always been forbidden in Mexico, and private polyg- amous marriages have also fallen outside of the intent of Mexican law (Hardy 173). Hardy adds that Mexican legal “intent” also allowed for adultery in the case of men; so, polygamy in Mexico was tolerable (174).9 In addition to this semblance of permission for an alternative family forma- tion, the agreement does not force Mormons into a concept of Mexican identity. It acknowledges that the Mormons are not from Mexico and so it allows for exemption from military service and from federal and state taxes. They are only to pay municipal taxes and impuestos de timbres y estampillas [taxes on property loans or other forms of credit]. The agreement gives the Mormons a strong economic incentive for their agricultural pursuits. They will be allowed to import without restriction and will be rewarded for their economic contributions. It also gives them a tacit recognition for their own state; they are allowed to sign their own passports and avoid Mexican consular services (Secretaría de Fomento 3). The Mormons were expected to contribute to the region and would be rewarded by being able to act essentially as their own mini-state, pay limited taxes and have their own family formation. The LDS church officially abandoned polygamy in the late nineteenth century. Other religious groups that also claim the name Mormon continue to practice it, and I deal with them in chapters two and four, calling them non-LDS Mormons. These people continue to be granted unofficial exemptions from Mexican polygamy laws.10 The Mennonites, who primarily belong to the Old Colony Mennonite Church, today are spread out over the states of Chihuahua, Durango, Zacatecas, © 2018 State University of New York Press, Albany Introduction | xix Tamaulipas, Campeche, and others, were also granted their own exceptions that satisfied their particular religious beliefs.