Profiles Online - March 1998 - Features: God... at the End of a Hoe

God... at the End of a Hoe
Photographs and text by Larry Towell

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I met my first Mennonite immigrant in my father's auto-body repair shop in Ontario. David Reddekop wore plastic netting salvaged from a bag of oranges over his hair and his gums were bleeding. The night before, David had pulled out two of his badly infected teeth with a pair of pliers. His fourteen-year-old son, the eldest of 10 children, had recently broken his arm; David shaped a cast from a cardboard box and wrapped it in masking tape. He was working for minimum wage sanding cars and sweeping the floor. At 5 p.m., he leaned the broom against the wall and drove off in his unlicensed and uninsured pickup truck.

In 1874, 8,000 Old Colony Mennonites left Russia to establish Canadian settlements in southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Less than 50 years later, nearly 7,000 of the most conservative members migrated from the Canadian prairies to newer reserves in northern and central Mexico.

Some of Bernardo Smyth's 12 children,
Nuevo Ideal, Durango, 1994.

In recent years, the inability of the Mexican colonies to sustain themselves in a limited space has created a landless peasantry. An uncompromising church that excommunicates those who work outside of the colonies, coupled with a collapsing Mexican economy, has forced many of the faithful out of the cloister and into the seasonal labour market of the U.S. and Canadian vegetable farms. The hope of abundant tomato fields and regular wages prompts many to buy forbidden vans and pickup trucks for the five-day journey north.

In 1985, the Agricultural Employment Services in Kent County, Ontario, found jobs for eight Mennonite workers. In 1991 they placed 1,700. Ninety per cent of Kent County's vegetable fields are now harvested by migrant and immigrant Mennonite families. Tens of thousands of Mexican Mennonites now work in the U.S. and Canada harvesting crops at far below minimum wage. Vulnerable Mennonite families are sometimes cheated by farmers who falsify crop grades (produce is graded at the canneries and payment is accorded by quality). As Canadian laws permit farmers to pay their workers after crops have been harvested and sold, some farmers withhold wages for months. Others do not pay unemployment insurance premiums, leaving families with no winter income so welfare assistance is often their mainstay through the longest season of the year.

Adolescents who attend public schools are often ridiculed for their unconventional ways. For mothers at home, social contact is limited to other Mennonite families. Separated by distance and lack of transportation, they languish alone.

Mennonite migration from Mexico has now reached a watershed. Many families continue to live a transient life, journeying the highways between two worlds. They long for and romanticize the traditional society left behind. For those who struggle with God at the end of a hoe, the security of community church, and land may be at least another generation away.

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