In 1931, a group of Russian Mennonites – recently re-settled refugees in the Gran Chaco, a vast, semi-arid, lowland frontier at the heart of South America – celebrated their first Christmas in Paraguay.Footnote 1 As successful farmers, German-speakers and pacifists, these Anabaptist ‘kulaks’ (‘large landowners’, in the language of the Russian Revolution) had been conspicuous targets for the Soviet government's collectivisation campaigns.Footnote 2 With the beginning of land expropriation in the Ukraine, large numbers of Mennonites and other ethnic Germans left their homes on the steppe and gathered outside Moscow in the winter of 1929. They demanded the right to emigrate from a region whose landscape they had thoroughly transformed since their arrival in the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century. With the support of a US–Canadian Mennonite relief organisation (the Mennonite Central Committee) and the German government, approximately 4,000 of these refugees were temporarily brought to Germany and 1,580 relocated to the Paraguayan Chaco to establish the colony of Fernheim.Footnote 3 A subsequent migration of eastern Russian Mennonites through China increased their numbers to 2,176.Footnote 4 They settled alongside 1,765 Canadian Mennonite farmers already established in 1926 after securing extensive privileges (including freedom from military service and the right to conduct private education in German) from a Paraguayan government eager to develop its contested Chaco frontier with Bolivia.Footnote 5
Colonist Nikolai Siemens revelled in the surreal quality of the Mennonites’ first Christmas in Paraguay. His neighbours slowly emerged for food and celebration only after the ‘fiery ball of the sun’ had dipped below the horizon.Footnote 6 Nearly a year into their colonisation endeavour in this unintended destination, the novel surroundings still registered a profound environmental and cultural dissonance. The familiar open plains of the Ukrainian steppe had been replaced by the Chaco's dense, thorny bush. The Mennonites had exchanged Christmas in the sub-zero temperatures of a Russian winter for the sweltering heat of the southern hemisphere's summer in a region boasting South America's highest temperatures. The contrast with the ‘unforgettable’ Christmas of 1930, which they had spent as welcome refugees in Germany, could not have been more apparent to Siemens as he rode home across the empty Chaco after the evening's festivities.
As much as an unfamiliar landscape, the Chaco was a contested one. A year later Paraguay was at war with Bolivia. Christmas 1932 saw Siemens play host to a group of lonely Paraguayan military officers who probably felt equally out of place on their country's western frontier, where few of their countrymen had ever set foot. Returning home that evening with an unexpected escort, Siemens laughed at the colourful image of himself ‘in the midst of armed warriors, a defenceless Mennonite’.Footnote 7 Inspired by this ecumenical and patriotic Christmas among Catholic Paraguayans, he found himself ‘in a good mood in spite of, or perhaps because of, the war, tropical summer and loneliness’. This oscillation between pacifist rhetoric and an emphasis on Mennonite support for Paraguayans was a feature of the colonists’ worldview for the duration of the Chaco War.Footnote 8
Three years later, on 26 December 1936, a group of 100 Mennonites gathered at their newly created mission-station. The previous Christmas they had brought food and gifts to wounded Paraguayan soldiers at nearby Fort Camacho, but with the war over the colonists directed this symbolic exchange towards their nascent missionary work with the Enlhet people.Footnote 9 After celebrating their own Christmas they joined the Enlhet for food, singing, gift-giving and a bible-reading in the Enlhet language. The serene scene was interrupted, noted Siemens, when echoes of gunfire from a nearby Enlhet hunting party stirred the still ‘wild blood’ of the congregation.Footnote 10
Eric Hobsbawm views the ‘invention of tradition’ as a crucial strategy for containing the ambivalence at the heart of the colonial encounter.Footnote 11 Ambivalence aptly describes the Mennonite experience in colonising the Chaco. In these scenes of ritualised exchange with foreign landscapes, military regimes and indigenous peoples, performance of the familiar alongside the unknown served as a powerful ceremony of possession. A sacred break in the year laden with symbolic potential, Christmas offered transplanted Mennonites one opportunity to enact several novel subject positions – as South American planters, Paraguayans, ethnic Germans and missionaries – in reassuringly familiar terms.
These festive occasions suggest three broader forms of place-making – on field, battlefield, and mission-field – that form the subject of my study. I begin by exploring colonists’ experiences with an unfamiliar environment and their attempts to adjust to new ways of farming and consuming. I then turn to their wartime experiences as both pacifists and profiteers during the Chaco War (1932–5), a period in which they simultaneously expressed patriotic affiliation with both Paraguay and Germany. I conclude with a discussion of Mennonite evangelical activities among the Enlhet. At first, these three categories may appear distinct or even contradictory, the subject for separate histories of agriculture, national identity or religion. Historians of Mennonites and other migrant communities have often taken this approach.Footnote 12 However, as I show, questions of food production and consumption cut across these distinct avenues of identity formation. Whether they were debating the relative merits of wheat and sorghum, simultaneously sending their agriculture production to the Paraguayan army and Nazi Germany, or attempting to transform indigenous diets and economies, a struggle over foodways lay at the heart of Mennonite place-making in the Chaco.
My analysis of settler life comes courtesy of Mennoblatt, the small German-language newspaper that the aforementioned Mennonite preacher and educator Nikolai Siemens established in October 1930, only a few months after arriving in Paraguay.Footnote 13 Born into a Mennonite colony in the Crimea, Siemens arrived in the Chaco as an experienced pioneer. He had moved with his family to Siberia at the age of 15, part of new Mennonite colonisation initiatives in the remote Omsk district bordering Kazakhstan. Unlike his neighbours, Siemens had been educated outside the colony school system. Studies at bible schools in the cities of Orenburg (in the Urals) and Tchongrav (Crimea) flavoured the often florid prose of his Mennoblatt contributions.Footnote 14 A tireless enthusiast for Mennonite colonisation in the Chaco, he remained Mennoblatt’s editor until 1955.Footnote 15
Unlike Argentina and Brazil, where mass migration offers historians a plethora of immigrant newspapers to draw from, few settlers arrived in Paraguay in the modern era, and of these, most settled in temperate eastern Paraguay. With no major permanent settlements, state perspectives on the region are limited; Mennoblatt is thus one of the few print sources produced in the Gran Chaco at this time. While mediated by its male authorship, the paper merits a close reading for its intimate portrayal of colony life. It served a unique function as a virtual town hall and barometer of group morale for Fernheim's 2,000 inhabitants strung out in over a dozen small villages. Whether penned by the optimistic Siemens, mayors and teachers or written in the pedestrian language of colonists identified simply as ‘a farmer’, articles indicate a contested public arena in which all questions, from household consumption to the colony's long-term survival, were subject to intense debate. Indeed, for colonists the two categories were often inseparable. In the process, Mennoblatt’s editor and authors gradually attempted to discursively render the foreign familiar, increasingly referring to ‘our Chaco’, ‘our patria’, and even ‘our Indians’.
This might suggest a myopic view of an ethnic enclave in a far-flung region of Latin America. However, in addition to showcasing the adaptations of colonists, this article explores expanding neo-colonial networks that posed environmental, military and spiritual challenges to the area and its inhabitants. Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay each laid claim to the Gran Chaco – one of the Americas’ most enduring borderlands – in the century following independence. But even with the expansion of military forts, mission-stations, cattle-ranching and river-ports along its periphery, the central Chaco remained the sovereign domain of semi-nomadic indigenous groups like the Enlhet well into the twentieth century.Footnote 16
The novel presence of Russian Mennonites at the heart of the Chaco was part of a larger process of territorialisation; Mennonites engaged with many of the central architects of this transformation, who like themselves were foreigners yet served as proxies for state expansion in the region. The colonists purchased their land from Argentine businessman Carlos Casado. Casado bought huge sections of the central Chaco from a bankrupt Paraguayan government at the turn of the century and established a tannin industry,Footnote 17 along with supporting infrastructure.Footnote 18 Both colonists and the Paraguayan military would make use of his light-gauge railway and port on the Paraguay River (see Figure 1). Several foreign and national botanists, explorers and anthropologists also travelled the region in the early twentieth century, their writings constituting a form of ‘scientific nationalism’ in which the contested frontier was gradually re-imagined as Paraguayan space.Footnote 19 When German anthropologist Hans Krieg passed through the Fernheim in the early 1930s, young Mennonite men accompanied him on forays to contact indigenous groups in the region.Footnote 20 In the months before the Chaco War the colonists also became familiar with Juan Belaieff (Ivan Belyaev), a fellow exile from Soviet Russia, who was scouting the region on behalf of the Paraguayan government.Footnote 21
Location of Mennonite Colonies, Forts and Transport Routes in Contested Chaco
Until recently the Chaco War had remained the major understudied conflict in Latin American history. Several edited/co-authored collections have now moved beyond an exclusive focus on causes and tactics to assess the war's cultural, social and environmental impact.Footnote 22 Luc Capdevila et al. place the silenced history of the Chaco's indigenous inhabitants at the centre of the conflict.Footnote 23 Yet other than in works by local colony historians, the role of Mennonites in the war years has received little attention. This omission is unfortunate because the quotidian exchanges between Mennonites, the military and the Chaco's indigenous inhabitants abound in the colony newspaper and provide a micro-social perspective on the war and its aftermath rarely captured by official documents.
This article also brings the experience of Latin American Mennonites (a rapidly growing community of over a quarter of a million)Footnote 24 into greater dialogue with Latin American history. Mennonites arrived in Latin America at times, and in places, that provide a compelling window on agro-environmental change, food security and state formation. Over the last century, they settled in frontier zones like the Gran Chaco on lands that governments considered of ‘marginal’ agricultural value. While the Russian Mennonites in question arrived in Paraguay immediately prior to the outbreak of the war, Canadian Mennonites settled the frontiers of Mexico and Bolivia in the wake of national revolutions and along Belize's contested border with Guatemala as that small nation gained independence. In those regions Mennonites formed endogamous, isolated and ‘traditional’ colonies but also became ‘model producers’ for domestic economies. In doing so, they consolidated and successfully leveraged a form of agricultural citizenship to sustain a conspicuous autonomy characterised by religious, educational and military exemptions. By turns considered ‘Russians’, ‘Canadians’, ‘Dutch’ or ‘ethnic Germans’, Mennonites benefitted from a racialised ideology of immigration as ‘whitening’ even as their settlement was conditional upon a legally sanctioned refusal to assimilate into national society. They also maintained strong connections to their brethren throughout the Americas and Europe. This simultaneous engagement with a dispersed diaspora and distinct national identities might have represented an untenable paradox for earlier scholars of an assimilationist paradigm. Recently historians have adopted a more fluid approach to the complex, but often complementary, transnational–national negotiations among Latin American migrant communities.Footnote 25 As one of the earliest Mennonite settlements in Latin America, the experience of Chaco colonists remains critical to understanding this evolving state–settler bargain as Mennonites – and their accompanying foodways – expanded across Latin America.
Wheat and Wherewithal: Farming and Consuming in an Unfamiliar Landscape
How did Mennonites perceive an environment so different from the one they had left behind? Over a century removed from their forebears’ colonisation of the Ukrainian steppe, some of these settlers, including Siemens, had taken part in Mennonite settlement efforts in Siberia in the decades before they abandoned Russia. However, they were temperate-zone wheat producers transplanted into a semi-tropical and arid region. Though the Chaco's soil was fertile, frequent droughts and sudden storms challenged a century and a half of Russian agricultural adaptations. The first years in their new colony were especially difficult for these pioneers, whose sense of space, time and social tradition was in flux.
The title of a 1931 article in Mennoblatt, ‘Must it Always be so Hot in the Chaco?’, invokes this collective desperation.Footnote 26 Drastic seasonal variation on the Ukrainian steppe, with long cold winters and hot summers, was replaced by year-long growing possibilities in the Chaco that disrupted work and rest patterns. One article on the ‘Workday of a Chaco Woman’ noted that, because there was no cold winter to enforce a Winterruhe (winter's rest), ‘the woman here feels, and quite rightly, that she never gets to rest’.Footnote 27 In July 1933, at the height of a warm southern winter, Nikolai Siemens claimed that ‘much seems wrong to the European that comes here from the old world’.Footnote 28 Here he invoked the racialised malaise we can identify elsewhere in the European colonial encounter with the tropics.Footnote 29 After three years in the Chaco, Siemens longed for the Winterruhe, which, he bleakly reflected, was now deferred until one's body was interred in the ground. He doubted this central aspect of Russian Mennonite life would resonate with a younger generation that had never known a true winter.
Articles in Mennoblatt with titles like ‘Death in a Well’ or ‘Death by Lightning’ drove home the message that this was a treacherous as well as unfamiliar environment.Footnote 30 Living in improvised dwellings, Mennonites were exposed to mosquito-borne diseases like malaria.Footnote 31 In late 1930, a typhoid epidemic decimated newly arrived settlers in Fernheim. In three villages 32 of 127 residents died. Wilhelm Klassen took morbid poetic licence to evoke ‘the pitiless, dark, eerie death [that] hovered over the grey tents of the settlers’.Footnote 32 He acknowledged that the disease had probably originated not in the Chaco but in contaminated water on the long voyage up the Paraguay River. But he felt certain that a poor diet and ‘hurried work in unprecedented heat’ had contributed, making Mennonites ‘brittle, … emaciated, … battered’. ‘The body seems to be dying out’, Klassen continued, and ‘strength melts away like snow’. Here he drew an environmental metaphor that further emphasised disconnect with his Russian past. Emma Plett, a young girl at the time, remembers that, with so many casualties, desperate Mennonites made use of the ubiquitous Paraguayan palo borracho (Ceiba speciosa, known in English as the silk floss or bottle tree). With its distended trunk and soft-wood core, the tree was easily felled and hollowed into a makeshift coffin.Footnote 33
Despite the high losses of their initial settlement, colonists remained hopeful they would adapt to the Chaco. Neighbouring Canadian Mennonites assured them that the summer of 1930–1 had been unusually hot.Footnote 34 The Casado Company, whose lands they purchased, maintained an experimental farm – with test plots for a variety of crops – a short distance to the west. The Enlhet also began to work and trade with Mennonite settlers, often acting as farm labourers and guides through the dense bush.Footnote 35 Colonists absorbed much of this local knowledge about weather patterns, planting and landscape. As settlers like Gerhard Balzer, pictured in Figure 2 working with a team of oxen in Schönbrunn village (Fernheim), began to clear and farm the land, they found that some crops thrived in spite of the Chaco's seemingly harsh climate. These included sweet potatoes, manioc, peanuts, rice and sorghum. In the absence of fruit trees, Mennonite women used a variety of hibiscus to produce juice and jam. They replaced the abundant potatoes of the ‘old homeland’ with the yam and yucca of the ‘new homeland’.Footnote 36 Mennonites also embraced yerba mate, the staple Paraguayan caffeinated beverage. According to Siemens few would consider starting or finishing their workday without it.Footnote 37
Gerhard Balzer ploughing his field, Schönbrunn village (Fernheim), 1932
Taking up new foods was much easier than letting go of others. ‘The loss of “proper” foodways’ forms a persistent trope of settler discourse alongside marvel at exotic products, and such bitter laments appeared regularly in Mennoblatt.Footnote 38 Like Spanish colonists three centuries earlier, who ‘would have swapped all the pineapples in the world for a regular supply of wheat bread’,Footnote 39 Mennonites pined for wheat. After the original Canadian Mennonite exploratory commission arrived at Puerto Casado in 1921, they spent a month exploring the Chaco, during which time they sowed wheat. Every Russian Mennonite who arrived in Paraguay in 1930 was presented with a bag of wheat-seed by the Casado Company. But the crop failed to thrive. In 1931 Peter Rahn wrote longingly of the great importance of ‘wringing’ from the Chaco what it still did not offer, ‘namely, our daily bread’.Footnote 40
Mennonites’ unquestioned attachment to the grain was partly financial. As agricultural specialists, they helped sustain a world system predicated on regional mono-cropping of basic commodities. Wheat – their star crop – was intimately linked to the economic order of Russian Mennonites. Over a century and a half they had transformed the Ukrainian steppe into a granary that sustained industrialising Europe.Footnote 41 When Mennonites emigrated from Russia to the Canadian and US prairies in the nineteenth century they found it easy to transplant their agricultural practices, famously bringing Turkey Red Wheat seed with them to Kansas in 1874.Footnote 42 Through their lateral migrations across the northern hemisphere, Mennonites thus forged a global temperate wheat belt. Arriving in Paraguay few things concerned Mennonites more than the resumption of wheat production. Yet in contrast with the east–west migration between steppe and prairie, the north–south move from steppe to Chaco threatened their reputation for transforming borderlands into breadbaskets.
When Rahn spoke of ‘our daily bread’ he was also indicating its deep spiritual and cultural resonance. For Russian Mennonites the quotidian consumption of wheat flour was inextricably linked to social and religious life. Mennonite cooking – from kjelke (noodles), varenyky (perogies or stuffed dumplings), rollkuchen (fried bread), portzelky (fritters) and platz (coffee-cake) – included many flour-based items accumulated over centuries of migration from Holland to Prussia and the Ukraine. Within this diasporic culinary repertoire, bread held the greatest significance for Mennonite foodways. Its production was a laborious daily activity for Mennonite women. ‘With bread and salt, God sustains you’, explained Kaethe Warkentin, born in the Russian Mennonite settlement of Chortitza (Ukraine), offering one of the many Mennonite proverbs associating bread and well-being.Footnote 43
Zwieback, a distinctive white-flour double bun in which a smaller ball of dough is adeptly stacked on a larger one, was the ‘hallmark of Mennonite baking’.Footnote 44 Prepared by Mennonite women and consumed on a weekly basis it lent an indispensable ‘sacramental’ or ‘ceremonial character’ to all festive occasions, from weddings to funerals.Footnote 45 When toasted, zwieback formed a non-perishable staple that was tightly linked to survival in the minds of migrating Mennonites. In the Mennonite exodus from Russia that intensified after 1918, Mennonite women, including those who eventually settled in Paraguay, ‘baked thousands of zwieback and roasted them for the journey’.Footnote 46 The Russian Revolution also tightened the relationship between bread and Mennonite identity. Food ‘substituted for customary religious observance … as a badge of ethnic identity’, while wheat scarcity made emigration to the Americas appear as a possible return to ‘abundance’.Footnote 47 Like the fictional Russian refugees of Alberto Gerchunoff's The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, Paraguayan Mennonites hoped to ‘work our own land and eat bread made from our own wheat’.Footnote 48 According to Mennoblatt, when Mennonite women arrived in the Chaco in 1930 they had immediately ‘kneaded clay, shaped bricks and … in a few days, a beautiful oven, which [they] regarded with great pride and joy, was soon constructed’.Footnote 49 Yet with no locally produced wheat available, settlers were forced to fill their home-made ovens with imported flour.
In 1931, the colonists – still living in tents – welcomed an Argentine agronomist, Carlos Kempski, to help them introduce new varieties of wheat to the Chaco.Footnote 50 This was not Kempski's first experience transplanting a familiar crop to a foreign clime. In the 1920s he helped Dutch authorities introduce wheat in Java. The imported flour Paraguayan Mennonites relied on was the result of another success story in Kempski's Argentine home, where settlers had converted the pampas into a sea of wheat. Yet he had little luck after repeat trips to the Chaco. To Mennonites’ dismay, Kempski emerged convinced that the region was unsuitable for wheat production and identified a host of alternatives crops, including sweet potatoes and manioc. The latter, he boasted, yielded 20 times more efficiently than wheat and was the ‘food of the poor’ across South America. As to the cultural fixation on wheat, Kempski concluded unsympathetically, ‘we have here a case that demonstrates that it is many times indispensable to obligate people to [pursue] their own happiness’.Footnote 51
Mennonites were not so easily persuaded to trade a familiar cash crop for the ‘food of the poor’, abandoning a market-oriented relationship to the land for one grounded in subsistence. However, they did experiment with one cash crop identified by Kempski. Over the following decade their annual cotton production increased from 10,000 to 700,000 kg.Footnote 52 In hopeful articles, writers regularly referred to this ‘white gold’ and marvelled at their transformation from northern grain farmers to southern cotton planters.Footnote 53 Yet the cash-poor colonists continued to spend a disproportionate amount of this meagre income importing Argentine wheat. An article on new foods didactically intoned that colonists should seek to ‘become independent from imported white flour’, while acknowledging that Mennonite women continued to bake bread on a daily basis.Footnote 54
By 1933 the issue had come to a head in a compelling juxtaposition of articles by an anonymous ‘farmer’ and ‘farmer's son’. The former expressed frustration with volatile cotton prices and high transportation costs to distant Asunción but refused to abandon wheat. Sorghum, he scoffed, ‘is a good product for cattle but not for humans’.Footnote 55 In the following edition of Mennoblatt, the ‘farmer's son’ responded stridently with what he admitted were some ‘heretical views’ – his turn of phrase acknowledging the spiritual appeal of bread among his fellow colonists. He ridiculed the obsessive consumption of bread with every meal, arguing that it was a habit of the ‘bread-rich in pre-war Russia’. He concluded this generational critique by arguing that the ‘management of consumption’ would guarantee economic survival.Footnote 56 Another article, entitled ‘Our Existence Question’, reiterated this. ‘We have to adapt to local conditions’, its author, identified anonymously as ‘a Fernheimer’, began, ‘and not necessarily want to eat what is grown abroad’.Footnote 57 Yet despite this seemingly sound advice, and the incorporation of many new products into the colonists’ diet, years later Hans Neufeldt was still chastising his fellow colonists whose indulgence in ‘the flour sack is destroying us financially’.Footnote 58
These colonists spoke with precision about whether a food-item recognisable as bread could be produced with varying portions of wheat flour. Such discussions took place in the context of extreme famine in the Soviet Union. In the Ukrainian Mennonite communities that these refugees had left behind women cooked beets ‘normally used to feed livestock’ and foraged for mushrooms. While abandoning many traditional foodways they also ‘devised ways of baking even a semblance of the fluffy white or heavy rye bread that was symbolic of better times’, with ‘sorghum, a grain hitherto disdained … added liberally’.Footnote 59 In a new hemisphere, Paraguayan Mennonites struggled with scarcity and came to similar conclusions. The ‘farmer's son’ suggested that sorghum might not leaven in a conventional way but was equally nutritious and that manioc and rice flour were acceptable substitutes for wheat. The ‘Fernheimer’ advocated for manioc flour (tapioca), the primary ingredient in the ubiquitous Paraguayan cheese bread, the chipa. Others, like the ‘farmer’, acknowledged that some sorghum could be substituted but felt it lacked consistency and that pure sorghum-bread ‘does not give strength or hold together when baking’. The author of ‘Our Existence Question’ challenged this assumption and insisted that a well-known chemist in Asunción could be enlisted to ‘scientifically’ vindicate his viewpoint. In the absence of leavening, he felt a simple high-edged cake pan would suffice. His suggestion might have proved galling to the Mennonite women who actually laboured to produce the colony's bread and were well-known for maintaining and trading their yeast cultures.Footnote 60
To the outsider these discussions about everyday consumption appear mundane. But in reality they were arguments about the nature and direction of the Mennonite colonial endeavour; this was not easily separated from the science of yeast fermentation or the structural integrity of bread. The original Canadian colonists arrived in the Chaco with the Paraguayan president's demand that they transform the ‘green hell’ of the Chaco into a ‘garden’.Footnote 61 Gardening was an appropriate metaphor, intimately linked with Protestant ‘ceremonies of possession’ in the New World.Footnote 62 Like the ‘cultural work’ of other German farmers in the South American tropics this mission intersected with ‘civilizing and whitening discourses’.Footnote 63 Yet while the Mennonite presence implied a profound transformation of the central Chaco – from a fugitive landscape into a domesticated agrarian one – others argued that a corresponding change had to take place among the transplanted colonists. This emerging discourse of self-sufficiency jarred against a cultural relationship with a product that could now only be imported.
Some were unwilling to accept the alienation of their agricultural production and domestic consumption. In 1937, one-third of Russian Mennonites abandoned the Chaco for a new colony in East Paraguay. The desire to again grow wheat was chief among their concerns, and they were moderately successful. Those that remained in the Chaco never fully shed their attachment to wheat. When sociologist J.W. Fretz visited Fernheim in the 1950s he found that ‘many housewives mix sorghum with wheat flour to produce excellent raised breads [with] mixtures of between 25 to 50% sorghum’.Footnote 64 Yet he conceded that an excessive portion of colony income was spent on imported flour and that, given the chance, colonists would prefer to farm wheat. It is equally telling that on the seventieth anniversary of Russian Mennonite settlement in the Chaco, Edgar Stoesz – a long-serving director with the Mennonite Central Committee – recounted Fernheim's successful progress in three stages: ‘death, need and bread’.Footnote 65
‘What Sad Progress’: Pacifists and Patriots in the Chaco War
In 1932 Mennonite colonists were struggling with survival, disease and new cash crops in an isolated environment, when ‘storm clouds [appeared] on the political horizon’.Footnote 66 Juan Belaieff passed through the colony and assured Mennonites that rising tensions with Bolivia would amount to little. Shortly after, Bolivian forces surprised Paraguayans at nearby Fort Boquerón and the Chaco War began. President Eusebio Ayala's official visit, plans for which had been announced only recently and which had produced a flurry of excitement in the colony, was postponed indefinitely and the once marginal colony found itself on the frontlines of two belligerent armies and the front pages of international newspapers.
‘Fighting still continues in the Chaco, and the Mennonites, a peaceful non-combatant people, seem to be the immediate cause of all the trouble’, wrote Roland Abercrombie in an article for the Chicago-based newspaper The Christian Century. Footnote 67 In this reading, Mennonite settlement in the contested Chaco on behalf of the Paraguayan government was the final provocation that led to war with Bolivia. He lamented that these Russian refugees had fallen, once again, into harm's way. Even prior to the war, colonist Fritz Kliewer noted that this ‘irony of fate’ – that pacifist refugees had been re-settled in a conflict zone and perhaps provoked a war – was a recurring theme in journalistic coverage of the dispute.Footnote 68 Russian papers took the opportunity to suggest that Mennonite colonists were another sort of ‘pawn’, hostage to the interests of imperial powers and international oil companies.Footnote 69 Bolivian journalists too sought to discredit the colonists. Noting the visit of delegates from the League of Nations to the Mennonite colonies in 1933, La Razón argued ‘the Mennonite colonies do not deserve to be called as such’ and derided them as scarcely more than ‘ranching outposts … a tool to achieve an effective [but] false propaganda about an alleged work of colonisation’.Footnote 70 A New York Times report conceded that Paraguay had ‘relied considerably upon hoe and plow as well as upon armaments, [and] it has used [Mennonite] colonisation as a … weapon’.Footnote 71 Whether cynical or sympathetic, each article invoked a profound dissonance between Mennonites and war.
While the colonists’ pacifist theology placed them conspicuously out of place in this bellicose environment it also offered a response. Nikolai Siemens masterfully articulated this ‘anti-modern’ Mennonite critique:
Storm clouds rise and rise. Lightning cuts through the sky. In place of the sought-after peace that we have searched for since the Soviet persecutions, we are surrounded by war and the cries of battle. It seems that our Chaco Boreal has become ‘modern’ with planes, cannons, munitions, enormous trucks, uniforms, armed soldiers, and platoon after platoon heading to the front as cannon fodder. What sad progress! What misery looms over our beloved patria, how unfortunate for our virgin colonies, our fields and our children! That God send a prompt and peaceful solution to this serious conflict.Footnote 72
He brought together pathetic fallacy, the visceral sounds of war, a despairing natural world, ‘virgin’ colonies engulfed in the maelstrom, an affirmation of loyalty to country and a divine plea for peace – all these elements tied together by the possessive adjective for colony, Chaco and nation. He also included a reference to the collective memory of Mennonite persecution in Russia. Yet the Mennonite situation in the Chaco was markedly different. Over the following three years, colonists proved neither pawns nor victims. Food security, rather than pacifism, structured their wartime relationship with Paraguayan forces.
In October 1932, the Paraguayan High Command petitioned the Mennonite colonies for desperately needed wagons and ox drivers to move provisions from the terminus of Casado's railway through the colonies and up to the front. The rainy season was about to begin and motorised transport floundered in the Chaco mud. After an intense debate at a general meeting of the colony, Fernheimers agreed to the request. They felt that the privileges Paraguay had granted them required a return of good faith.Footnote 73 Mennonite animal traction joined hastily requisitioned Paraguayan mules, horses and oxen in ‘the creation of an organic army that benefitted from its own “backwardness”’.Footnote 74 Rather than petroleum, this army depended on water from a network of wells dug by Fernheim's settlers over the last two years. The colony's sorghum that a colonist scoffed was only ‘good for cattle’ made excellent fodder for military pack animals.
With official support, colonists enthusiastically availed themselves of entrepreneurial opportunities afforded by war. Asunción's markets, several weeks away by wagon, rail and steamship, had quite literally arrived at their doorstep. Direct sales to Paraguayan troops provided crucial income to the cash-poor colonists. On the way to pick up another costly shipment of Argentine flour, Martin Dueck and his companion loaded their ox cart with eggs to sell to soldiers heading towards the front.Footnote 75 A note from the Fernheim cooperative in 1934 documented the sale of peanuts and beans to the army.Footnote 76 Barter was also common between Mennonites and thirsty and malnourished Paraguayan soldiers. The latter were not above selling military goods for watermelon and other produce. The combined economic importance of these anecdotal and official exchanges could be felt scarcely a year into the war. In contrast to Siemens’ grave predictions, an anonymous ‘farmer’ worried that the end of war-time markets would signal a true disaster for the colony.Footnote 77
As their decision of 1932 and Siemens’ invocation of the words ‘our beloved patria’ indicated, the Mennonite colonists felt that they owed a show of gratitude to the Paraguayan nation. With the presidential visit indefinitely postponed, colonists expressed patriotic affiliation through food. Humanitarian aid – along with Christmas meal-time hospitality to officers – fitted comfortably within a religious framework of pacifist philanthropy. In Paraguay, as with settlements in Russia, Canada and Mexico, Mennonite colonists were freed from many central aspects of modern citizenship in exchange for farming the frontier and feeding the nation. For pacifist Mennonites in wartime, feeding wounded soldiers was a performance of this agrarian – rather than legal – form of citizenship that was contingent on their transformation of the Chaco's intractable landscape into an agricultural emporium. In 1934, Dr Juan Boettner, a German-Paraguayan doctor at Isla Poi, published an official thanks on behalf of the military hospital. A colony delegation had visited with a gift of peanuts, yams, manioc, squash, sweet buns, eggs, chickens and confectionery. The food spoke to the immediate needs of the army but it also represented a symbolic fulfilment of the long-term national vision for Mennonite colonisation. The gifts, Boettner proudly stated, were a crucial contribution of ‘products of Paraguayan lands, made by Mennonite hands’.Footnote 78
When the war ended in 1935, the colonists held a festival to celebrate the Paraguayan victory.Footnote 79 The assembled crowd cheered the president of the republic. Though not there in person, Ayala would reciprocate wartime loyalty with the confidence of the nation by telling the Mennonites to invite more of their own, ‘because your people are always welcome to us’.Footnote 80 Whether disingenuous or heartfelt, loyalty to the Paraguayan cause made sense in 1935 as Mennonites were surrounded by thousands of troops and had established economic relations with the occupying force. However, another anecdote complicates this narrative. When soldiers brought news of a ceasefire to Fernheim, colonists hurriedly assembled a group of Mennonite schoolchildren to serenade victorious troops as they passed through the village. Yet unsure of the exact wording of the Paraguayan national anthem, the gathering proceeded to launch into something more familiar, a hearty rendition of the Deutschlandlied (‘Deutschland über Alles’).Footnote 81
The awkward moment was far from atypical. Throughout the war and beyond, Mennonites – who originally considered naming their main village Hindenburg – expressed persistent affection for all things German. In October 1931 Siemens narrated a typical trip to the railway where settlers collected another load of Argentine flour.Footnote 82 Around the fire at night wagon-drivers waxed nostalgic about ‘the German mother country, where we were welcomed as guests so warmly [in 1929] … ’ Germany occupied a privileged place as a waypoint in a Russian Mennonite's exodus. In Paraguay a German identity could be practical as well as nostalgic. In 1931 the German government was sending boxes of schoolbooks to the colonies and funding Mennonite teacher training in Asunción.Footnote 83 When two colony representatives travelled to Asunción and East Paraguay in 1931 they received support from Germans at every turn. The German ambassador arranged their meeting with Paraguayan officials and the two were comfortably quartered at the ‘Hotel Munich’.Footnote 84 The property in East Paraguay that breakaway Fernheim colonists would settle in 1937 was donated by a sympathetic German landowner.Footnote 85
Just as fluency in Russian proved useful for Mennonite colonists who were able to converse with ‘white Russians’ like Juan Belaieff, German was something of a lingua franca during the Chaco War. The upper echelons of the Paraguayan military contained many former German military officers and, in stories about the war, a linguistic ally always turned up at the opportune moment. When the Paraguayan army established itself at Trébol near Fernheim the 30,000-strong garrison put a great strain on Mennonite wells. Colonists captured the everyday presence of Paraguayan soldiers in photos like the one from 1932 that appears as Figure 3. They also enforced rationing through the cooperation of General Nikolai Erne, a fellow Russo-German exile who was a ‘known friend of the Mennonites, for his ancient Baltic German stock’.Footnote 86 When Siemens brought food donations to Fort Toledo's hospital he was welcomed by the German-speaking Dr Recalde.Footnote 87
Soldiers, Trébol, 1932
This string of encounters was not coincidental. Nor was the fact that Paraguayan presidents Eligio and Eusebio Ayala, with whom the colonists enjoyed privileged relationships, spoke German fluently. Germans had established themselves across Latin America over the preceding century, welcomed by countries that, in the racial ideology of the day, sought to ‘whiten’ the nation through northern European immigration. German business and trade interests challenged Anglo-American capital in the Southern Cone.Footnote 88 German officers had trained the armies of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia before the First World War and, with Germany military operations banned under the Treaty of Versailles, many returned to Latin America. The chief commander of the Bolivian forces was Hans Kundt and the upper echelons of the Paraguayan military contained many German officers. German companies like Staudt and Co. were essential to colonisation endeavours on all three sides of the Chaco.Footnote 89 Amongst ethnic Germans in the Río de la Plata region, interest in National Socialism showed a surge in the 1930s as German-speakers actively debated their place within Hitler's global Volksgemeinschaft.Footnote 90 Fernheim, for all its remoteness, was no exception.
A central figure in the colony's identification with Germany was Walter Quiring. He spent a year living in Fernheim in the early 1930s. While the agronomist Carlos Kempski was assessing the success of transplanted wheat, Quiring, a committed National Socialist working for the German Foreign Institute, took part in an increasingly politicised conversation about the status of transplanted German communities. In the regional context of the Chaco War, Mennonite colonists appeared as one more territorial incursion in a process of internal colonisation alongside ranchers, tannin industries, missions and forts. But for Quiring, they formed one part of a constellation of German satellite communities around the world.Footnote 91 The ethno-nationalist concept of ‘Volk’ suggested that colonists had a particular duty to this transnational community alongside a network of support they could draw from. Quiring arrived with a short-wave radio courtesy of the German government.Footnote 92 The Mennonite colonists could now follow dramatic developments taking place 11,000 km away.
Shortly after the Reichstag fire and Hitler's consolidation of power in June 1933, Fernheim's mayor (David Löwen) and spiritual leader (Nikolai Wiebe) signed a declaration of sympathy for his government.Footnote 93 They wanted Germans to know that ‘in the deep jungles of the Paraguayan Chaco, far away from civilisation and culture’, dedicated German settlers were engaged in a noble pioneer effort. In order that their declaration appear more than simple rhetoric, they attached evidence of their agricultural success. Even as colonists were sending humanitarian relief to wounded Paraguayan soldiers at Isla Poi – a field hospital administered by the German Dr Boettner – a 1,500 kg shipment of Mennonite peanuts left Puerto Casado, bound for German schoolchildren and high-ranking officials from Goebbels to Hitler. While Boettner rejoiced at ‘products of Mennonite hands and Paraguayan lands’, the German press effused over this display of productive farming from one wayward segment of global Volksgemeinschaft.Footnote 94
Each of these symbolic agrarian exchanges provided material possibilities as well as a particular sense of place and purpose for Mennonite colonists in their new environment. As with their professed loyalty to Paraguay, Germanness also intersected with Mennonite concerns about food production and consumption. When a Mennonite delegation visited Casado's experimental farm in 1934 they met with its manager Ernst Oehring, a German agronomist conducting trials with winter wheat they hoped would succeed on their farms. Arriving to find Oehring and family at work in the fields, Siemens enthused: ‘a German, no matter where in the world he is, cannot kill the day idly’.Footnote 95 Within the colony, National Socialism could also be mobilised in internal conflicts. When colonists chaffed against the strict control of Fernheim's cooperative or considered abandoning the Chaco, the National Socialist civic slogan that stood above Hitler's portrait in the colony hall, ‘Common Good before Self-Interest’, provided an authoritative response.Footnote 96 Hitler's political programme even surfaced in debates about self-sufficiency and imported wheat flour. As much as a symbol of perpetual or enduring displacement, Mennonites felt that their Germanness could offer a reinvigorated localism, a uniquely German way of living and farming in an unfamiliar landscape.
According to Gerhard Ratzlaff, early Mennonite support for National Socialism can be seen as a stop-gap measure for a people who were no longer Russian but not quite Paraguayan.Footnote 97 Yet during the Chaco War, Paraguayan and German loyalties were simultaneously enacted by Mennonite colonists who sent peanuts to Hitler and rations to wounded soldiers. Given the wide support for National Socialism among a large swath of Paraguayan society, these two forms of symbolic agrarian exchange were, if anything, actively complimentary as Mennonites negotiated, traded and conversed in what appeared to be a profoundly German Paraguay. In light of this, to patriotically sing ‘Deutschland über Alles’ to a victorious Paraguayan army trained and commanded by numerous German expatriates was less of a nationalist faux pas than it might seem. Fernheim's support for National Socialism diminished in the wake of a well-documented internal conflict and Allied victory while Paraguayan nationalists increasingly embraced a mestizo identity rooted in the use of the Guaraní language.Footnote 98 Nevertheless, Mennonites continued to engage Paraguayanness through Germanness over the following decades, especially in relation to dictator Alfredo Stroessner, himself of German descent and a strong supporter of Mennonite colonisation.Footnote 99 It was a move common to several immigrant groups across Latin America in the post-war era, when promoting ‘foreignness’ as an asset in the service of national goals marked a shift from the assimilationist stance of earlier governments.Footnote 100
Mennonite Mission and Indigenous Foodways in the Post-War Chaco
In the closing months of the war, Siemens embarked on a military-sponsored tour of the Chaco that hinted at the post-war place-making strategies of Mennonites. Waiting at Fort Camacho for his escort, he visited the cemetery and drew a comparison between the pioneer struggles of Mennonites and Paraguayan casualties. Both exercised a spatial and symbolic claim on the Chaco as they literally ‘embed the dead in this country’.Footnote 101 As much as festive occasions, funerals could also be a place-making strategy, particularly when Mennonite dead were entombed in Paraguayan palo borracho trees. While Christmas framed novel encounters in a reassuringly familiar combination of ritual and language, grave-sites made an enduring claim for what was in fact a recent and tenuous occupation of space. In this gruesome accounting, both Paraguayans and colonists had purchased their dubious claims to the Chaco through mortal sacrifice.
Paradoxically, Siemens’ travels also revealed that Paraguayans and Mennonites were not owners of an empty frontier, but occupiers of an indigenous landscape that had been violently altered by war.Footnote 102 Reaching the Pilcomayo, Siemens and his escort met with indigenous peoples of the Chaco including the displaced Toba and the Nivaclé. The culmination of the trip was a visit to a Salesian mission-station to the Nivaclé. Siemens described a productive settlement with a well-structured labour force in which everyone appeared ‘happy and satisfied in his duty’. He left convinced that the Salesians’ ‘perseverance in the work must sooner or later bear fruit’. As much a place of an utterly foreign indigenous culture, the mission environment was also a place of nostalgic return for Siemens. Before leaving Fernheim he had been unsure if the Salesian mission was run by Dutch or English missionaries, but he noted that a ‘proper German’ greeted him at the gate. At dinner that night, he was ecstatic to be offered ‘correctly marinated German pears’ for dessert. The assembled party sang German songs and an exhausted Siemens fell asleep wrapped in ‘warm German woollen blankets’.Footnote 103
At the time of Siemens’ visit Mennonite colonists stood on the verge of their own belated mission-work with the Enlhet. Over the following decades, this would expand into a large-scale evangelisation and land redistribution programme involving several indigenous groups. Scholarship on the indigenous–Mennonite encounter, largely produced by colony historians and other Mennonites, often has a ‘triumphalist or apologetic tenor’.Footnote 104 Beyond those works ‘no systematic historical research has been done on Mennonite–indigenous relations’.Footnote 105 Such an in-depth study is beyond the scope of this article, which is based to a great extent on Mennoblatt; as a source, this colony newspaper offers an inherently singular perspective on that exchange. However, I suggest that the tensions between Mennonite and indigenous foodways emerging from newspaper accounts can reveal the rationale and limits of early Mennonite proselytisation. Placed in dialogue with the above accounts of farming and war-time production, Mennoblatt’s reporting on mission-work deepens our perspective on Mennonite place-making in the Chaco as a broader struggle over foodways.
While Mennonites immediately looked to the Enlhet as a source of labour, trade and knowledge, the indigenous presence received sporadic treatment in Mennoblatt during the first years of settlement. Dr Boettner's deft linkage of sovereignty and labour (‘Paraguayan lands, Mennonite hands’)Footnote 106 ignored the indigenous hands and lands that made possible the humanitarian donation of food to Isla Poi. The encounter between sedentary, Russian Mennonite farmers and a semi-nomadic indigenous people would seem to lend itself to hyperbole on the part of colonists. A May 1931 photo from colony archives depicts a gathering of Enlhet and Mennonites, some seated, others standing, in front of Enlhet grass dwellings (Figure 4). Mayor Franz Heinrichs (far right) stands casually with jacket open and a hand on the shoulder of the Enlhet man next to him. Two other Enlhet hold stylised poses with bows drawn and aimed towards the camera. To the viewer the photo appears orchestrated to represent a fundamental incommensurability, the unprecedented and curious meeting of two radically different cultural, spiritual and social systems. Yet such reflections are absent from early issues of Mennoblatt.Footnote 107
Early Encounter of Mennonites and Enlhet, Schönbrunn village (Fernheim), May 1931
While the 1931 photograph evokes a colonial narrative of first contact, the preceding half-century provided the Enlhet with an impressive array of experience for assessing the possibilities and perils of the Mennonite presence. The travels of anthropologist-explorers Alfred Métraux and Hans Krieg were a continuation of the host of ‘exploratory commissions’ that passed through the Chaco, alternatively forging alliances and engaging in hostilities with indigenous groups along the way.Footnote 108 The tannin industry at Puerto Casado and other key ports along the Paraguay River relied on indigenous labour, while the Anglican missionary Barbrooke Grubb conducted mission-work among the Enxhet (southern Enlhet) from 1889 as part of the broader efforts of the South American Missionary Society.Footnote 109 These extractive, exploratory and evangelical regimes coloured the Enlhet's subsequent experience with the Mennonites.
It is clear from accounts of the early days of the Chaco War that indigenous labour was already critical to the colonies. On 29 July 1932 Bolivian planes strafed Filadelfia. When planes flew over the colony again on 3 August, Siemens noted the Enlhet labourers’ panic with a paternalistic calm.Footnote 110 They ran from place to place, taking cover on Mennonite patios and woefully proclaiming in the mixture of Spanish, German and Enlhet that had become the improvised language of indigenous–Mennonite exchange, ‘Boliviano, es kaputi menonita, es kaputi lengua, todo kaputi!’Footnote 111 The phrase implied a shared suffering for Mennonite and Enlhet. In reality their wartime experiences diverged sharply. The strafing was the only direct attack on the colonies during the war. When Bolivian soldiers arrived in Fernheim in the early days of the conflict they presented colonists with a note informing them that the colony was now under Bolivian control.Footnote 112 Mennonite property and position were officially guaranteed by both the Paraguayan and Bolivian military even if, as oral histories with Mennonite colonists make clear, Mennonites were victims of sexual assault and theft on the part of Paraguayan soldiers stationed nearby.Footnote 113 In contrast, for the indigenous peoples of the Gran Chaco, the war was a demographic disaster that resulted in mass displacement.Footnote 114 While the fighting was centred near the Mennonite communities in the early years of the war, many indigenous inhabitants fled to remote regions. As the front moved away, the Enlhet returned to the relative safety of the colonies. Their decision to congregate in Fernheim and limit their traditional spatial mobility was not a free one. The choice was between two equally belligerent armies (both ‘whites that kill’) and Mennonites (‘whites that do not kill’).Footnote 115 With additional post-Chaco War migrations, a haphazard, ad hoc and largely un-narrated interaction was replaced by a profusion of discourse on indigenous life, custom and future in Mennoblatt. This emerged alongside a concerted and unabashedly paternalistic Mennonite effort to regulate indigenous labour and begin religious indoctrination.
In late 1934, Siemens began a discussion with Walter Quiring about the status of the Enlhet as a ‘Chaco-Proletariat’.Footnote 116 The language was suggestive for Mennonites, who had been targeted as kulaks after the Russian Revolution. The ‘sinister civilisation has done its bit’, he began; ‘these are no longer the uncorrupted people from the past’. Nor were the Enlhet the pliable labour force that Mennonites had initially expected. According to Siemens, the Enlhet, once ‘innocents of the bush’, now preferred the easy target of cattle poaching to hunting deer or labouring on Mennonite farms. As a member of the Mennonite Brethren Church – which since the mid-nineteenth century had encouraged temperance among members previously known for their brewing and distilling – Siemens also criticised alcohol consumption among the Enlhet. Alcohol was an imported social evil, he began, ‘by which a strong work force gradually perishes’. The latter comment revealed the economic as well as spiritual nature of his unease.
Siemens’ references to ‘corruption’ also mirror those of anthropologist Hans Krieg, who passed through the Mennonite colonies in the years before the war in search of ‘uncontacted’ tribes and was equally dismissive of what he viewed as ‘degeneracy’ on the part of indigenous communities that had engaged with the outside world.Footnote 117 Yet corruption could also signify an increasing sophistication. It becomes clear on reading his article ‘Fernheimer Proletariat’ that Siemens was principally concerned with maintaining a steady and inexpensive labour supply. Early Enlhet work on Mennonite farms had been organised around barter. The Enlhet, he lamented, ‘now appreciate the value of money’, demanding higher prices for the baskets and rope they produced. His concern betrayed the fact that, in the minds of colonists, the ‘Indian question’, exacerbated by war, was intimately linked to their own ‘existence question’.
In March 1935, Walter Quiring offered a response to Siemens entitled ‘Masters and Servants’, in which he envisioned a new relationship between religion and labour that could govern Mennonite–indigenous relations in the Chaco.Footnote 118 ‘The era of cheap labour is irrevocably past’, he decisively proclaimed; ‘the German Mennonites have made an honourable name as colonisers, and now they have the chance to show whether they can solve a different, non-economic problem, the Indian question, satisfactorily’. In Quiring's interpretation, the Indianerfrage was a moral, rather than an economic, one. He argued that Mennonites had a duty to spread Christianity among the indigenous groups of the Chaco. Yet by his very logic the two could not be so easily separated. Rather, a paternalistic spiritual leadership stood poised to validate a problematic labour relationship.
Such paternalism was not limited to Mennoblatt. Schoolchildren who had once learned Paraguayan songs and followed the progress of ‘our patria’ in class now submitted reports about ‘our Indians’.Footnote 119 The ‘field work’ that produced this assignment might have been informed by the visit that an anonymous ‘central-schooler’ and his brother made to a new indigenous encampment, which they shared with Mennoblatt readers in an article entitled ‘A Visit to our Neighbours’.Footnote 120 The siblings rebuked an initial gesture of hospitality, expressed an anxious desire to leave, felt coerced into remaining, ate sparingly of what they later derisively described as a ‘wonderful meal’, exchanged a gift and beat a hasty retreat. The encounter reflected some of the profound discomfort and curiosity that reverberated through the colony at the large-scale presence of displaced indigenous communities.
Formal planning accompanied these unscripted exchanges. On 1 February 1935 Fernheim's mayor petitioned the Ministry of the Interior for the right to begin mission work among the Enlhet.Footnote 121 He spoke to the Mennonites’ agrarian and religious role in the spatial incorporation of the militarily secure Chaco. ‘The purpose of this exercise’, the document stated, ‘is to more firmly bind these savages [“Wilden”] to the soil in order to bring them to gradually be useful citizens of the Paraguayan state’. Mennonites insisted that to achieve this sedentarisation in ‘the right way’ it was necessary to educate the Enlhet as devout Christians. As the accompanying debate between Siemens and Quiring revealed, these concerns with regulating indigenous mobility and religious conversion could not be separated from Mennonite interests in securing reliable labour.
The colonists’ petition was approved. From late 1935 onwards, nearly every issue of Mennoblatt documented their fledgling mission. In September, the colony held a ‘Missionsfest’ fundraiser.Footnote 122 In November, Mennoblatt reported on the formation of an organisation that would become known as ‘Light to the Indians’.Footnote 123 Ninety-seven colonists representing the three church denominations in Fernheim pledged their support.Footnote 124 In the same month an Enlhet cacique named Antonio, who had given the Mennonites assurances that he would locate potential converts, brought 16 Enlhet settlers to the mission. Missionary Abraham Ratzlaff joyously narrated this arrival to Mennoblatt’s readers.Footnote 125
Despite the triumphant tone of these articles, competing understandings of mobility and landscape challenged the Mennonite attempt to graft their settled agrarian lifestyle onto a semi-nomadic indigenous community. During his post-war tour of the Chaco, Siemens reflected that Mennonites’ pioneering sacrifices and the Paraguayans’ wartime casualties both served to ‘embed’ the dead in the land and, with them, each party's spatial claim to the Chaco. The Mennonite missionaries, as Fernheimer's mayor confidently stated, were also committed to the twin goals of sedentarisation and evangelisation in order to physically ‘bind’ the semi-nomadic Enlhet ‘to the ground’. For settled agriculturalists the idea of being ‘interred in’ or ‘bound to’ the soil may have suggested an intimate connection to landscape. But these metaphors and practices of a sedentary society sat uncomfortably with Enlhet culture, which privileged mobility over property and treated the death of an individual not as a permanent claim to memorialised space but, rather, as an injunction to destroy the possessions of the deceased and vacate the site.Footnote 126 This disconnect was equally apparent in Mennonite missionaries’ attempts to discourage infanticide – a practice they viewed as ‘savage’ but which reflected the exigencies of mobile indigenous society.Footnote 127
Tensions in the Mennonite–Enlhet encounter arose most clearly around access to food. ‘The way to the heart is through the stomach’, Siemens told readers in a mission report.Footnote 128 He had certainly observed this during his earlier visit to the Nivaclé mission.Footnote 129 Yet the platitude concealed a doubt. Not all food sources were valued equally. This much was revealed in the colonists’ own struggles over consumption and their affective bond with wheat flour. It was equally evident in Siemens’ earlier criticism of alcohol consumption and poaching among the Enlhet and the revulsion of the ‘central-schooler’ at being offered an indigenous meal. Mennonites’ growing concern with indigenous foodways and ‘appropriate’ forms of consumption can be seen in the repeated distinction between food that the Enlhet obtained independently from the Chaco (bush food) and the sources controlled by the Mennonite missionaries (mission rations).
Food security formed a practical, rather than spiritual, appeal of the mission for the Enlhet. When cacique Antonio first arrived to negotiate with missionaries Abraham Unger and Abraham Ratzlaff he was offered water for his yerba mate that the missionaries had hauled to the site. The hospitable gesture masked a deeper conflict. Siemens criticised indigenous poaching of Mennonite cattle but he also acknowledged that indigenous water sources were threatened as expanding Mennonite herds consumed ground water the Enlhet traditionally stored in reinforced depressions in the bush.Footnote 130 Missionaries soon enlisted colonists to dig a well at the mission-site and offered the Enlhet daily rations including beans, yerba mate and their prized wheat flour.Footnote 131 However, when ration-supplies ran short, missionaries worried that, with little else to hold them there, the Enlhet would disperse into the bush or find work in nearby villages.Footnote 132
Indeed, the Enlhet arrived and departed at times indicating that they considered a stay in the mission-station part of their larger foraging activities. In December of 1935, seven men, four women and two children were reported as having settled in the mission, but they only did so after departing from their winter hunting grounds.Footnote 133 The same unnamed author displayed a hint of frustration when he claimed that, on occasion, the Enlhet were ‘taken by their Wanderlust’. The Wanderlust that gave rise to this particular comment was the annual harvest of algorrobo, from whose sugary pods the Enlhet produced the alcoholic brew known as chicha. Rather than the imported evil described by Siemens, local alcohol production and consumption formed a central element in Enlhet cultural practice. The missionaries’ use of the German term Wanderlust attributed a fanciful and romantic nature to what were in fact seasonal gathering practices on the part of the Enlhet. According to the Mennonites, whose own forefathers produced and consumed alcohol until a mid-nineteenth century religious move towards temperance, the Enlhet felt this movement outside the confines of the mission to be a return to their ‘golden freedom’. It left the missionaries wondering when, if ever, they might direct the Enlhet ‘to a higher purpose’.Footnote 134 The supplementing of mission rations with a host of traditionally procured foodstuffs produced further discomfort among the ration-dispensing missionaries. This much was evident in Siemens’ account of the 1936 ‘Christmas with the Enlhet’, in which he had pointedly acknowledged the gunfire from a nearby hunting party that interrupted the festive meal.Footnote 135 Ultimately the importance of the bush for foraging remained crucial for the Enlhet, while the allure of mission life was conditional.
The Mennonite–Enlhet relationship underwent a drastic reconfiguration in the years following the Chaco War. As the contradictions of their relationship grew with their proximity, the mission station emerged as one strategy for managing the different spatial demands of each group. Incorporation was to take the form of sedentarisation, permanent agriculture and housing, enclosure of private property and Christianisation. These were the stated goals of the Mennonite settlers in their 1935 petition in which they made a nimble rhetorical leap from their support of the Paraguayan forces during the war to their mission-work among the Enlhet in its aftermath. Yet Mennoblatt reveals a much greater ambivalence in the Enlhet's own dexterous juggling of the new Mennonite mission and traditional foraging in the bush. Mennonite attempts to reform Enlhet food practices also cast into high relief their own precarious culture of production and consumption. The irony was particularly apparent when Mennonite missionaries attempted to substitute locally foraged food for imported flour – a product that they repeatedly failed to produce in the Chaco. Tellingly, their continued status as ‘model farmers’ was often dependent on semi-nomadic indigenous labour. These tensions remained central as, over the following decades, Mennonites forged relationships with other indigenous groups in the Chaco based on a logic of wage-labour and settled cash-cropping.
Conclusion
In his exhaustive study of rural Paraguay J.M.G. Kleinpenning argues that the central Chaco scarcely changed from the early colonial period to the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 136 By the 1930s the situation had changed drastically. The fledgling colony of Fernheim became a node upon which the Paraguayan and Bolivian armies, missionaries, anthropologists, agronomists, national socialists and displaced indigenous groups converged, each exerting distinct but overlapping claims to place. The settler discourse of Mennoblatt provided one vision of the central Chaco as a space in which colonists, participants in this neo-colonial process, re-articulated those relationships towards their own ends. Their responses are particularly compelling because they were hardly inevitable. The Canadian Mennonites who established neighbouring Menno Colony in 1926 never founded a newspaper, refused to support the Paraguayan military, spurned connections with Nazi Germany and initiated mission-work only two decades after the founding of Fernheim's paternalistic ‘Light to the Indian’. In contrast to their isolationist neighbours, Fernheimers negotiated seemingly incompatible subject positions – as pacifists and patriots – through the notion of humanitarian aid, while acknowledging their duty to the Paraguayan nation in agrarian terms that infused their subsequent evangelical endeavour. Ironically, they interpreted an extensive list of privileges that explicitly freed Mennonites from state intervention as justification for a patriotic, and profitable, participation in the war effort. Surrounded by soldiers and then by displaced indigenous groups, these hasty articulations of colonist identity, as citizens and missionaries, were highly relevant ways of being in place.
In contrast, Fernheim's interest in Germany in the 1930s appears as a refusal of the specificity of place and a prizing of ethno-nationalism over localism. It mirrored the dietary preferences of Mennonite colonists, who soon successfully produced much of what would constitute a healthy and balanced diet in the Chaco but insisted on continuous and costly transfusions of Argentine wheat. Colonists spoke to their deep connection with Germany when they interpreted their new surroundings in reference to Schiller's poems, hung portraits of Hitler in the colony hall or celebrated ‘German nights’ in their villages. Yet their German nationalism was no more inevitable than a Paraguayan or missionary identity: the Russian Mennonites had left Prussia nearly a century before German unification. Rather, the geo-political climate of the 1930s facilitated this profitable reinvention of Germanness in Paraguay by which Mennonite colonists redefined themselves as part of a global Volksgemeinschaft. What tied this distant, comforting ideological affiliation to other forms of place-making was its everyday utility in the Chaco. Mennonites, who spoke little Spanish, confidently and intimately addressed fellow missionaries, military authorities, ministers, large landowners and even the president of Paraguay in German, and it was as fellow Germans that they informally exchanged peanuts for school materials and teacher training.
In the 1930s, the Mennonite decision to join a crowded mission-field alongside Anglicans, Franciscans and Salesians appears unremarkable. Yet for a sectarian and ethnically homogenous religious group that enforced endogamy among members and sought freedom from external influence through physical isolation and political privilege, their attention to their missionary obligations is slightly more unexpected. The missionary ‘duty’ of colonists was an invented tradition that offered linked answers to material, moral and existential questions about indigenous labour and the Mennonites’ purpose in the Chaco.
These overlapping survival strategies provided the Mennonite colonists with a range of potential resources as they struggled with crop failures, war, an ‘existence question’ and an ‘Indian question’ in the early years of their settlement. Through Christmas celebrations, burial practices and discourses of self-sufficiency colonists sought to contain that uncertainty. At times they highlighted the artificiality of new foodways, as when colonist Peter Rahn marvelled at his own rapid transition from ‘a Russian grain farmer’ to a ‘South American [cotton] planter’.Footnote 137 At other moments they insisted upon the deep historical justification for relationships that were in reality equally novel. By re-casting themselves as planters, patriots, Germans and missionaries, Mennonites also invoked a particular way of ‘being in place’ intimately connected to the ways they farmed and consumed. Mennoblatt provides a unique window on the process by which Mennonites laid claim to the foreign, and highly contested, environment of the Gran Chaco.
While this article has elected to engage in a close reading of a migrant community newspaper, it would be a mistake to overemphasise the singularity of the Mennonite case. Certainly Paraguayan Mennonites settled in a particularly remote region at an especially conflictive moment, and their early work with the Enlhet would lead to one of the largest non-governmental indigenous land redistribution projects in Latin America. Yet Siemens’ attempts to reconcile new ways of producing and consuming through print culture finds several compelling parallels, including Alberto Gerchunoff's celebration of an invented ‘Jewish Gaucho’ identity on the Argentine pampas two decades earlier. Furthermore, in their simultaneous articulation of national and transnational identities, Mennonites resembled not only fellow ‘ethnic German’ enclaves across the Río de la Plata region but also Japanese, Arab and Jewish immigrants who celebrated imperial expansion, Arab nationalism and Zionism respectively in the inter-war years. Such nationalism in the diaspora did not necessarily imply a political project of ‘return’ but, rather, offered migrants ways of reconciling themselves to new positions within Latin American nations. Finally, in negotiating a form of telluric citizenship based on their agrarian production, Mennonites adopted a place-making strategy (of agricultural work as ‘cultural work’) employed by a diverse panoply of immigrants.Footnote 138 As such, the Mennonite ‘example’ contributes directly to a broader discussion of immigrant identity and foodways in modern Latin American history.Footnote 139 By introducing, producing and adopting foods to sustain their settlements and ‘feed the nation’, such migrants sought to make their conspicuous presence more palatable to host societies and their own communities alike.
