Out of Place: Social Exclusion and Mennonite Migrants in Canada by Luann Good Gingrich (review)

Out of Place: Social Exclusion and Mennonite Migrants in Canada focuses on the social interaction between state-based social service agencies and Mennonite immigrants from Mexico in Canada, with a special focus on communities in southern Alberta and southern Ontario. Here vegetable farming and agriculture in general have provided them with opportunities for economic survival. But this very life also allows them to build social boundaries, with a modicum of education and selective participation in social services. Indeed, the newcomers’ cultural and religious survival depends on social exclusion. This is the central problematic of the book. As Gingrich puts it, “What do we do with a people who prefer the margins and refuse to fit in?” (4).

The book begins with a rich ethnography, an interview by Margaretha, an integrated Mennonite immigrant, with newcomer Susanna, who has known life in both Bolivia and Mexico. Gingrich invites the readers “to move alongside Susanna, even if this may not be your inclination . . . to accompany her for a time,” but then also “to move alongside the social workers” and other government agencies “who work to make a positive difference” in the lives of the newcomers (xii). Still, Gingrich is highly sympathetic to the immigrants and seems impatient with service workers who are unable to see it any other way than that these newcomers are “at odds with, if not offensive, to Canadian society” (48). Indeed, Gingrich draws deeply throughout the book from Bourdieu’s critique of modern society. She is overtly critical of a system, for example, which presumes middle-class values as the acid test of good parenting, with the state—and both its “right hand” and “left hand”—foisting its sense of “suitable cultural engagement” on parents who have their own meaning of good parenting (96).

In a sense this volume contains two books. Much of it is not particularly accessible to the nonspecialist. On the other hand, it contains a rich ethnography, with long quotations from both immigrants and social service workers, telling their stories of social exclusion, desired by one party, denounced by the other, and reinforced by an incipient misunderstanding between both. The book is also very well researched, contextualized and referenced. Readers of Great Plains Research will welcome the author’s many insights into the multivariate objectives of the newcomers. As Gingrich argues, the Mexican Mennonites are both “unique and typical” (25), holding to values “common to rural, agrarian communities and cultures” everywhere (143); most reject the typical “common sense” attitude that masquerades as liberal, individualistic middle-class culture. But in the end she gives the Mennonites a shout-out, because they are, for all their imperfections, a folk that “holds to an enduring belief in non-violent resistance and peaceful relations with others” (222).

In this sense the book is three in one: a theoretical exposé based on a complex Bourdieuesque sociology, a book on agrarian newcomers to North America, and an account of a uniquely traditionalist, nonviolent people.