Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

Chapter 1. Building Up the Temple: Mennonite Missions in Mexican and Puerto Rican Barrios

T chapter 1 U Building Up the Temple Mennonite Missions in Mexican and Puerto Rican Barrios Satan has worked among the Mexicans a long time, and as we go about giving out the gospel we find the results of his work, and how difficult it is at times for these people to meet scriptural demands. —Amsa Kauffman, Mennonite missionary, Tuleta, Texas, 1941 Esta gente come mucho pan. (These people eat a lot of bread.) —Ofelia Aguilar Garcia, Mathis, Texas, 1950s Becoming Mennonite On the morning of March 10, 1936, Mennonite missionaries T. K. HersheyandWilliamG.DetweilerloadeduptheirFordV-8pickup, bid farewell to their families in Pennsylvania, and began their trip to the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. From Texas to California, Hershey and Detweiler surveyed the Southwest in hopes of beginning a mission among the growing ethnic Mexican population. After traveling more than 7,000 miles, the missionary duo decided that the South Texas region (just south of San Antonio) was an ideal spot to begin their work, as there resided a “good class of Mexicans, mostly pure Mexicans not Spanish Americans, which are harder to reach.”1 Their trip, although somewhat late in the missionary timeline, contin- 18 T missions and race U ued a long tradition of missionary activity in the Southwest borderlands dating back to the late nineteenth century.2 For Hershey and Detweiler the desire to evangelize the borderlands represented not only their own missionary zeal but also a belief that the Mennonite Church as a whole was not doing enough to spread the Gospel. Shortly before their trip, Detweiler expressed his frustration to Hershey: “I do believe that the greatest sin that we as a Mennonite Church are guilty of is the failure to render greater obedience to the Great Commission.”3 With an eye toward better understanding Latino religious identity, this chapter explores Mennonite missionary projects in Chicago, South Texas, Puerto Rico, and New York City from the 1930s to the 1960s. Mennonite missionaries entered Mexican and Puerto Rican communities cautiously. Mennonites were conflicted over their relationship to American society in general and to American evangelicalism in particular. These debatesoverreligiousandethnicidentityprominentinthemid-twentieth century were evident in mission stations throughout the country, where Mennonites practiced a two-tier approach to church missions that combined evangelicalism with an ethic of social service. For Latinos, becoming Mennonite not only led to new definitions of religious identity but also propelled them to engage questions about military service, patterns of dress, and the role of the church in society. Nevertheless , religious conversion was not an all-encompassing experience. Latinos filtered and adjusted aspects of the Mennonite faith they deemed culturally irrelevant or simply shifted religious allegiances to something that better reflected their cultural experience. These religious transitions were the breeding ground for the blending of evangelicalism and Anabaptism that formed the basis for Latino Mennonite identity in the mid-twentieth century. “The Stranger within Our Gates” Among the first three Mennonite volunteers who arrived in South Texas in 1952 was a young Mexican American from Chicago, Ray Vallarta. From the time he was a young boy in the 1930s, Vallarta attended the Mennonite Mexican Mission on Roosevelt Avenue in Chicago’s Near West Side. That Vallarta ended up in South Texas as a volunteer says a lot T building up the temple U 19 about how connected he felt to the Mennonite Church even as a young man. His experience, however, was not unique. Along with Vallarta, the small Mennonite mission to the ethnic Mexican population in Chicago attracted a good number of Mexican families, most of whom had immigrated to Chicago in the early twentieth century as a result of revolutionary turmoil in Mexico.4 With the growth of Mexican immigrant communities in Chicago, Mennonites focused their mission program in the 1920s on Mexican immigrants who settled in the city’s Near West Side. With a small following of Mexican families, the Mennonite mission in Chicago formed a congregation called La Iglesia Menonita Mexicana (the Mexican Mennonite Church) in 1942. Although the mission was initially small in scope, Chicago became a launching pad for Mennonite missionaries who were intent on founding missions among the growing population of Mexican immigrants, or what they referred to as “the stranger within our gates.”5 Between 1910 and 1930 Mexican immigrants settled in three locations in Chicago: the South Side, the Near West Side, and the Back of the Yards/Packingtown area...