Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Mennonite Colonization of Chihuahua: Reflections of Competing Visions

1997; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1008029

1533-6247

Martina Will,

Agriculture and Rural Development Research

The administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico is famous for the enormous distribution of lands that it undertook, the prize of the bloody and protracted revolution that had promised tierra to the nation’s peasants two decades earlier. Less well remembered are the actions the administration took against the peasantry, when federal troops stationed in southwestern Chihuahua killed several Mexicans while protecting a colony of Canadian-born Mennonite fanners. This quiet display of the central government’s authority was not the first of its kind in the area around the growing town of Cuauhtémoc. President Alvaro Obregón’s administration had also sent troops to Cuauhtémoc, and their mission then as under Cárdenas was the protection of the lives and properties of the small Mennonite enclave that resided in the area south of Chihuahua City. It was Obregón who invited the religious minority to settle in Mexico shortly after his election, and it was he who pledged federal government protection of the Mennonites’ interests. The incongruities evident in the case begin therefore not with the stationing of the troops in Cuauhtémoc, but much earlier, with the very concessions that Obregón gave the Mennonites in the years after the Mexican Revolution.