ProQuest Dissertations - The University of Arizona Campus Repository

During the early 1920s, Old Colony Mennonites emigrated from Canada to
Chihuahua, Mexico in order to continue their b'aditionai ways of life in nearly isolated,
agricultural communities. As their ancestors had done for centuries, they continued to
live in opposition to "the world." While the Old Colony Mennonites basically succeeded
in living their distinct, conservative ideology, economic necessities and real world
opportunities caused internal disagreements, excommunications and the fomiation of a
new, liberal church, the General Conference, among their midst.
North American Mennonite and some European scholars have recorded the history,
political economy, socio-religious organization, linguistic and cultural characteristics of
these so-called "Mexican Mennonites." What their large-scale perspectives have failed to
capture is the everyday lives of the cultural group, the lives of women in particular.
Women's worlds have been invisible in the official discourse on Mennonite history, most
of which is male-dominated.
This dissertation explores the everyday lives of Mennonites in the colonies near
Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua through Mennonite women's eyes. Women's multiple roles at
the household level in times of health and illness, and women's moral identities are its
focus. Women's habitus and discourses are cenU-al in perpetuating Mennonite gendered
and moral identities. These identities, expressed in everyday moral living, are the
foundation to Mennonite women's health work and local meanings of health. The
ethnographic descriptions of women's lives demonstrate how ideology becomes