This is a personal book about my time with the Old Colony Mennonites whom I photographed in rural Ontario and in Mexico between 1990 and 1999. The text is a train of thought composed of flashbacks and fixations drawn from diary notes and from the slit of memory.

Mennonites are non-conformists and have traditionally separated themselves from the world by living in settlements, or colonies, set apart from society at large. They see themselves as being entangled in a daily fist-to-cuff with the rabid dog of modernism that seeks to change and to absorb them. Adherence to a traditional lifestyle is associated with faithfulness and therefore with godliness. In the Mexican colonies, the symbols of the steadfast are represented by the horse and buggy for transport, steel-wheeled tractors for farmwork, and the rejection of electricity. Without cars and trucks, and with only steel wheels on tractors, their young are prevented from driving into nearby towns and partaking in "worldly" activities. And the only way to prevent the insidious invasion of the electronic media is to prevent electricity from entering homes. The bishops, elected for life, represent the bulwark against the pressures for change both from the world outside and from within the membership itself, which of late, has felt increasingly isolated from the ways of their fathers.

The Old Colony sect, on which this work focuses, separated from the main body of Canadian Prairie Mennonites in the late nineteenth century. Because they have no Unifying hierarchy, Mennonite churches have evolved independent of each other. The Old Colony is the most conservative and insular of the sixty or more diverse groups in existence today.

The Mennonites derive their name from Menno Simons, a sixteenth century Catholic priest who became impressed with the Anabaptist martyrs of Reformation Holland. So moved was he by their Christian example, that he left the priesthood and joined the movement. Eventually, he lead a church based on adult baptism, a strict form of pacifism, and the separation of church and state. As none of these convictions were popular at the time, several thousand of the early members were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Persecution drove Simons and his follower's underground where they lived in hiding while sharing in common what they owned. Through the process of persecution, the Mennonites became more inward-looking. Their theology was forged and their Diaspora had begun.

The movement spread from Holland throughout Europe, emerging in Switzerland, Germany, and France. In 1683, military strife and persecution drove the Swiss stream to America where they found broad religious freedom in Pennsylvania under the Quaker founder, William Penn. A century later, some began an exodus to what is now, Ontario, Canada. This contingent also produced the Amish.

The Dutch Mennonites had initially fled to Northern Germany and from there to Poland and West Prussia. With the state's reluctance to continue their military exemption, coupled with imposed restrictions to institutions of higher learning and to land acquisition, the Dutch-German Mennonites were drawn, in the 1780's, to the Volka district of the Ukraine by invitation from Catherine the great who had just expelled the Turks. A century later, 34,000 of their members were working one million acres of land in what became the breadbasket of Russia.

In 1874, because of the threat of assimilation through the compelled "Russification" of their schools, plus land collectivization, forced government service and violent upheaval, the first 18,000 immigrated from the Ukraine to North America: 7000 to Manitoba, Canada, and 11,000 to the United States. After the Russian Revolution and World War One, another 25,000 left. Many of those who remained were imprisoned, exiled, or shot. Others scattered.

Those who opted for Canada were financially assisted by the Swiss Mennonites who'd migrated to Ontario a century earlier. The new Russian immigrants who settled in Manitoba had received orders in council from the federal government promising the right to continue their colony settlement patterns developed in Russia, which conflicted with Canada's individualistic national model, military exemption, which would clash with local and provincial patriotic sentiments. But for now, the government needed thrifty farmers on the sparsely populated prairies. Some of the Manitoba Mennonites eventually moved to The Hague and Swift Current areas of Saskatchewan. In the prairies, they adopted the name "Old Colony".

Less than fifty years later, when the provincial governments attempted to force integration through a public school system, the Mennonites resisted. When land to build new government schools was expropriated, a Union Jack hoisted up a flagpole, and the Empire's teachers placed inside the classrooms, Mennonite children stayed home. Parents were fined to the point of bankruptcy. Some were imprisoned. In 1922, ten percent of their Canadian population loaded horses and buggies onto trains and headed for Mexico. Others migrated to Paraguay. The Mexico-bound contingent of 7000 disembarked at Cuauhtemoc, heart of the new Promised Land where they had again procured promises of religious freedom in exchange for farming skills. Over the next seventy years they would spawn colonies throughout Mexico from northern Chihuahua to the Guatemalan border as well as continue migrations into Bolivia, Paraguay, Belize, and Argentina, where their village structure based on Campos, or congregated houses surrounded by fields, remain intact today.

Since the 1920's, the encroaching Mexican desert has devastated water tables while recent liberalization of international trade barriers have driven farm commodity prices through the trading floor. In the 1990's, the national economy collapsed. In a social environment exacerbated by an unwillingness to adapt theologically, and a population that doubles every eighteen years, over thirty percent of the Mennonites in Mexico are now landless and tens of thousands economically marginalized. As the rich-poor gap widens, either the poor became destitute or they are forced to violate basic principles of the church. Both options nurture bitterness, alienation, and an inner scattering.

In the 1980's, members affected by improved national transportation, migration trips north, and greater economic interaction with the local economy, pushed for change. Most were ex-communicated at point blank range which meant that the door to heaven was closed and locked. Clergy and others, largely due to lack of education, found it difficult to distinguish the bad from the good influences.

The first Mennonites had begun returning to Canada in the 1950's dressed the way they had left it in the 1920's. The reality of farming in Mexico was overshadowing their ability to survive. Because most were Canadian citizens through lineage, they were not turned back at the border. It was a small trickle at first, but within three decades the floodgate was wide open and pouring. In 1989, I discovered them in my own back yard, landhungry and dirt poor. They came looking for work in the vegetable fields and fruit orchards of Lambton, Essex, Kent, and Haldimond-Norfolk counties. I liked them a lot because they seemed both otherworldly and completely vulnerable in a society in which they did not belong and for which they were not prepared. Because I liked them, they liked me and although photography was forbidden, they let me photograph them. That's all there was to it.

I was soon invited by migrant families to help drive their beat up vans and pickup trucks back to the Mexican colonies where they would spend the winter, often hiding their vehicles in nearby Spanish towns to avoid ex-communication. Over the course of the decade, I would visit most of the twenty tree settlements, some, several times.

The colonies were being torn asunder: father against son, grandfather against grandchildren, ministers against everyone. When I began this project, only eight of the colonies had abandoned the tenents of traditionalism and adopted one or more of the amenities of modernism: the pick-up truck, rubber tractor tires, and electricity, usually after a long battle with the ministers who would eventually abandon the colony for Bolivia, Paraguay, Belize, or for the more remote hinterlands of Mexico. Today, almost all colonies have modernized four in 1998 alone. Only the recently-established of Campeche State, plus the three smallest and most isolated of the north, have managed to survive the economy and the pressures for change.

When a Mennonite loses his land, a bit of his human dignity has been forfeited, so has his financial solvency. He becomes a migrant worker, an exile who will spend the rest of his life drifting among fruit trees and vegetable vines dreaming of owning his own farm some day. But for these who struggle with God at the end of a hoe, the refuge of land, church and community, may be at least a generation away.