Drought and Diaspora: Mexican Mennonite “Braceros” and Northern Mexico’s Mid-20th-Century Drought

From the 1940s to the 1960s, as the Bracero Program brought millions of Mexican workers to the United States as seasonal laborers, a series of droughts struck northern Mexico. While augmenting the legions of braceros, this prolonged environmental disaster produced a related but distinct wave of migration among one of northern Mexico’s most conspicuous ethnic communities: horse-and-buggy Mennonites. Beginning in the 1920s thousands of these low-German speaking, pacifist Anabaptists had left their homes on the Canadian prairies to establish agrarian communities in Mexico in exchange for the right to conduct their own schooling and freedom from military service. By the 1940s El Nacional counted 106 Mennonite villages in Chihuahua with a population of 12,000 producing “milk products such as butter and cheese of excellent quality.” In response to consecutive unrelenting droughts over the following decade these Mexican Mennonites became “braceros” but rather than travel to the U.S. as guest workers, they re-activated their Canadian citizenship and pioneered a seasonal labor migration network to southern Ontario. This paper draws on migration records, newspaper articles and oral histories with Mexican Mennonite “braceros” to explore this culture of long-distance migration across the dual borderlands of North America. As I show, the drought re-shaped the dynamics of agro-industrial production in southern Ontario and village-based farming in Northern Mexico. By the early 2000s, an estimated 60,000 Mexican Mennonites and their descendants had “returned” to Canada and comprised the majority of the country’s small Mexican Canadian population. For the expanding Mennonite communities of Chihuahua, a fundamental transformation was ushered in by the drought. Energy-dependent, aquifer-based irrigation replaced rainfed cropping systems. Rather than offering a linear narrative of migration, Mexican Mennonite mobility continues to be characterized by repeated “returns” – to Chihuahua and Ontario – that encompass labor migration, family reunification, and – most notoriously – narcotrafficking.