Village Among Nations: "Canadian" Mennonites in a Transnational World, 1916-2006

Between the 1920s and the 1940s, 10,000 traditionalist Mennonites emigrated from western Canada to isolated rural sections of Northern Mexico and the Paraguayan Chaco; over the course of the twentieth century, they became increasingly scattered through secondary migrations to East Paraguay, British Honduras, Bolivia, and elsewhere in Latin America. Despite this dispersion, these Canadian-descendant Mennonites, who now number around 250,000, developed a rich transnational culture over the years, resisting allegiance to any one nation and cultivating a strong sense of common peoplehood based on a history of migration, nonviolence, and distinct language and dress. Village among Nations recuperates a missing chapter of Canadian history: the story of these Mennonites who emigrated from Canada for cultural reasons, but then in later generations "returned" in large numbers for economic and social security. Royden Loewen analyzes a wide variety of texts, by men and women - letters, memoirs, reflections on family debates on land settlement, exchanges with curious outsiders, and deliberations on issues of citizenship. They relate the untold experience of this uniquely transnational, ethno-religious community.

Table of Contents:
Preface Acknowlegements Introduction Ch 1: Leaving the ‘British Empire’ in Canada: Promises in the South, 1916-1921 Ch 2. Drawing Lines on God’s Earth: Settlers in Mexico and Paraguay, 1922-1929 Ch 3: Dreaming of ‘Old Canada’: Nostalgia in the Diaspora, 1930-1945 Ch 4: Rethinking Time and Space: East Paraguay and Beyond: 1945-1954 Ch 5: Meeting the Outside Gaze: New Life in British Honduras and Bolivia, 1954-1972 Ch 6: Crystallizing Memory: The Return of the ‘Kanadier’, 1951-1979 Ch 7: Imagining a Pan-American Village: Reading Die Mennonitische Post, 1977-1996 Ch 8: Homing in on the Transnational Village: Women Migrants in Ontario, 1985-2006 Conclusion Bibliography

About the Author :
Royden Loewen is the Chair in Mennonite Studies and  a professor in the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg. He is an award-winning author of a number of books on Mennonites and immigrants in North America.

Review :
‘Loewen has created a sources that transcends the academy and is accessible for a broad audience….The book’s most significant contribution is that it creates a scholarly map identifying the terrain for future studies. As such, this is a path breaking work.’ - Patricia Harms (Journal of Mennonite Studies, vol 32:2014) ‘Village among Nations is a patiently pieced together patchwork of memoirs, letters, newspapers, diaries, and the research of graduate students; what emerges from the many pieces is a coherent and compelling whole, the most comprehensive portrait of the Low German world  to date.’ - Robyn Sneath (The Mennonite Quarterly Review; January 2015) ‘Royden Loewen’s monograph is a fantastic, insightful, and nuanced study… The book is an important contribution to migration history and is a must read for anybody interested in adding transnational perspectives to Canadian history.’ - Benjamin Bryce (Canadian Historical Review vol 97:01:2016)