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  Menno Moto

  A Journey Across the Americas in Search of My Mennonite Identity

  Cameron Dueck

  Biblioasis

  Windsor, Ontario

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1: Canada: The Red River

  2: United States: Middle America

  3: Mexico: A Fight for Water

  4: Mexico: A Return to Russia

  5: Mexico: Manitoba Colony

  6: Belize: Pacifists

  7: Belize: Spanish Lookout

  8: Belize: My Own Piece of Land

  9: Belize: Lower Barton Creek

  10. Belize: Blue Creek Colony

  11. Central and South America: Fronteras

  12. Bolivia: Secrets and Silence

  13. Bolivia: Palmasola Prison

  14. Bolivia: Shunned by the Colony

  15. Bolivia: Unanswered Questions

  16. Paraguay: The Green Hell

  17. Paraguay: The Cost of Success

  18. Argentina: The Farthest Wheat Field

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  For Leonard Dueck

  my legendary father,

  a pioneer

  and adventurer

  Author’s Note

  This is a book of non-fiction. The story it tells is true to what my eyes saw, my ears heard, and my mind remembered. Many of the conversations were translated from Plautdietsch to English in my note-taking, and I remained as true to the original meanings as I understood them to be. Some people’s names have been changed or Germanized in order to reduce confusion as there are many Mennonite men named John or Peter, and Loewen is a very common family name. For example, Johann, my great-grandfather, was actually named John W. Dueck. In some cases, such as conversations involving numerous people, I have combined characters. However, when dealing with controversial or strong views, I did my best to attribute them to the people who shared them.

  Prologue

  The Mennonites were nearly there.

  “God has given us a new home in Canada, a place where we can live our own way, undisturbed, without the Russians telling us what to do,” Pa said.

  Johann, who had to stand on his tiptoes to see over the railing of the ship, nodded. This dream, the utopia they talked about so often, had helped push, pull, and lure them on, for mile after thousands of miles.

  “What will it be like, Pa?”

  “It will be good. Good farming, a good life,” Pa said as he looked at the clearings on the riverbank. Rough wooden cabins surrounded by tethered horses that stamped their hoofs in frustration at the clouds of flies and mosquitoes. Many of the Mennonites on the ship were unable to afford their own land in Russia, and the opportunity to achieve this in Canada, a country newly formed and optimistic in the 1870s, had them beaming. Everyone wanted land. The young men, as soon as they were married, wanted land. Johann wanted land, or at least Pa said he would in a few years’ time, once he was old enough. Now there would be plenty of rich farmland for all. They could start over, doing things the old way.

  “But most important of all, you will never have to be a Russian soldier.” Pa tousled Johann’s light brown hair, but his eyes did not stop roving the riverbank.

  Russia was thousands of miles behind them now, but the fear was still close, like the soot the trains and ships of their journey had spewed into the sky, which clung to them and besmirched their clothing long after they’d disembarked. Fear that the Russians would take away their way of life along the Molochna River and shut their small village schools. Fear that the Russian language would replace the flat guttural Plautdietsch they spoke at home, and the proper German that the preachers and teachers used. And that, once they spoke Russian, the young boys would be marched off to war, wearing those horrible uniforms, carrying guns, as dictated by the new laws introduced a few years earlier. The slow peaceful farm life that had become synonymous with Russia’s Mennonites had come to an end.

  So Pa sold everything—the horses, the machinery, the entire farm—cheap to those who were staying in Russia. Everything except the bedding, a few small pieces of furniture, and a change of clothes for each family member. Pa’s mouth still tightened into a pointed, bitter pout when he thought about it. All those years of work, building up the farm, to have to give it all up because Russia had broken its promise to the Mennonites.

  It had taken them two months of trains and ships and waiting and transfers. The toasted zwieback they’d brought were almost gone, and the few rolls that were left had gone stale. Every morning Johann ate one of the zwieback, sometimes with a dab of butter.

  “It’s the last bit, we’re almost there,” Pa reassured Mutta. “Just a little bit farther.”

  “Then the real work will start,” Mutta said. She was exhausted. Heinrich, their sickly toddler, had spent much of the last few months in her lap, listless and becoming weaker every day. And Johann noticed Mutta’s lap had become smaller as her belly had become larger over the course of the journey—another child was on its way. But now they were on the last part of the journey. The International was a flat-bottomed, double-decked sternwheeler with grubby white topsides and two tall, blackened smokestacks. They had boarded the ship in the United States and sailed down the Red River, into Canada.

  The riverbanks were a tangle of green forest that leaned in on the narrow river. The branches scraped and slapped and tickled across the steamboat, robbing one man of his hat as they chugged northward. Elms, oaks, maples, and poplars crept to the river’s edge and kissed above the water. But the better the shade, the bigger the mosquitoes. They’d known mosquitoes in Russia, but not this big, not this thirsty. The men waved their hats, the women slapped at fleshy backs, and the children scratched until they bled. It would be a good story, another one about Mennonite perseverance that they could tell during the long evenings on their new farms.

  The dark-skinned, long-haired crew of the ship spat out their curses in a babble of tongues. Several wore beaded leather thongs in their hair. Some of them wore buckskin shirts and smelled of campfire smoke and life in the woods.

  “They’re those Indians, the ones we heard about,” Pa said when Mutta asked if he was sure they were in good hands. The agents who had arranged their passage, patching together ship-to-train-to-carriage-to-riverboat, had told them about the Indians who lived on the land. Their land.

  “They’re no good at farming, I heard,” Pa said.

  One of the Indians wore a red sash around his waist and winked at Johann when he caught him staring. They had a reckless, can-do air about them that made Johann want to copy them and spit tobacco juice over the railing and laugh, open throated, like these weltmensch.

  “Johann,” Pa called. “Those are not our people. You stay here, with the rest of us.”

  In the afternoon of the third day Johann was on the forward deck when the International slowed, stopped, and its great dripping wheel went into reverse. The ship crab-crawled across the current towards a muddy bank. A smaller river joined the Red River right where the helmsman was aiming the International. This was Canada, the place they’d talked about for two years, where the Queen had promised the Mennonites land and peace and freedom. There was no dock or town, just a break in the trees. Then, through the trees, on a slight rise, Johann saw wagons and horses, stacks of gleaming raw lumber. Several long, low buildings that shone with newness. And on the riverbank, where the earth had been torn by trampling horses, a group of men, shirtsleeves rolled up, muddy to their knees, waving their hats.

  The ship listed to starboard as more than three hundred silent Menn
onites pressed against the railing for a glimpse of their new land. Hours earlier, as they passed a few open fields and signs of development, the men had eagerly taken note of the greenness of the pasture, the thickness of the oak trees. Now they silently stood along the rail and nervously cleared their throats as they stared at the riverbank.

  Long warps were run out and wrapped around the tree trunks. A gangplank landed just short of the shore with a splash. The young men leapt across the muddy gap onto the bank. Extra planks were found and tied together with a few logs to reach dry land.

  And then it was Johann’s turn. He followed Pa down the steep gangplank. The rich mud clung to his shoes as he struggled up the riverbank, into the trees, to a place where they could start over.

  CHAPTER 1

  Canada

  The Red River

  The faces around the campfire were all familiar to me. Not only because I’d known them my entire life, but because many of them looked like me. Most had a prominent hooked nose and a body short in stature that, with age, carried the round Dueck belly. Our Mennonite genes still ran strong three and four generations after Johann had brought us here.

  Here, on the riverbank where my great-grandfather had stepped ashore on August 1, 1874, after his long voyage from Russia. Johann’s feet had slipped in the same cloying black mud that now stuck to my motorcycle boots. Here, where the Rat River, a sloughy and overgrown tributary, weakly joined the Red River in southern Manitoba. Now it was a popular fishing spot marked by crushed beer cans, a few tangled balls of fishing line, and a thousand boot prints in the mud. Not a very impressive place for the Mennonites to have begun their wanderings across two vast continents of virgin land to leverage accommodating governments and elicit promises to be left alone. Free to live our own way, to start a whole new saga of moves and migrations, bitter feuds and fresh departures.

  The riverbank that had been Johann’s point of arrival would be my point of departure and my family had come to say goodbye. I had pitched my tent on the bank, ready to be away early the next morning. There were no riverboats to take me south, so instead I’d steer my motorcycle down the highway, across the United States border just a few hours from there, and then keep riding.

  I was going on an epic journey to find out who I was. I didn’t say that, though, at least not out loud. When people asked why I wanted to ride a motorcycle the length of the Americas, all the way to Argentina, I answered that I liked adventure and that I wanted to learn more about Mennonite culture. My culture. I knew there were tens of thousands of my people down south, and I’d never been, so I wanted to go take a look.

  Johann had come to Canada, he had been allowed into Canada, because he was a Mennonite and being a Mennonite in Russia had become dangerous. Calling myself a Mennonite meant something to me, but I wasn’t sure what. There was the Christian faith part of the culture, a cornerstone to be sure, but I was more interested in the culture itself. The thing you describe when someone asks, “Where are you from?”

  Deep down, so deep I wasn’t sure I could even admit it to myself, I was setting off to find out if I was still a Mennonite. I wanted to find out if my definition of Mennonite was still relevant. I called this my culture, but I’d lived outside of its communities for most of my adult life. How much of the culture had remained in me? How Mennonite was I, after all these years?

  I had left my own Mennonite community two decades ago. Not wilfully or consciously, but because opportunities and wanderlust drew me away. I became a journalist and travelled widely, and wildly. At first my family thought I’d return after a few years, but with time that became less likely. I loved the diversity and excitement of New York, London, Hong Kong, and all the cities in between. I’d found my calling, I was living my dream. I left the community simply by choosing new opportunities over the safety of a familiar community. My father expressed concern that I was losing my religion, but no one tried to prevent me from leaving. My family listened to my stories with interest, and always welcomed me back when I returned to the farm for holidays. They visited me in different cities, and told their friends about my adventures. But there was also a slight hesitance to their enthusiasm, as leaving, exploring a different life, meant leaving a life that was intrinsically linked to our religion. To being Mennonite. Other cousins, nephews, and nieces also left, but few wandered so far or took up a lifestyle so foreign to that of their community. So I became a sort of curiosity back home: the guy who moved to Asia.

  But when people in Hong Kong, New York, or anywhere else I made my home, asked me the origins of my last name I always explained it, and myself, as Mennonite. It was a very convenient label. I wasn’t just another Anglo-Saxon male, I was a Mennonite. It gave me a story to tell, because if a Mennonite travels far enough away from Manitoba he becomes exotic.

  “Menna…what’s that?”

  “A Germanic Christian culture. Sort of like Amish, but with a broader spectrum of conservatism.”

  “So, you grew up riding a horse and buggy?”

  “I didn’t, but some Mennonites do. My family is pretty normal, you wouldn’t know they’re Mennonites if you met them. But we have our own language and foods. So it’s a culture and a religion. I’m Russian Mennonite, because my family came to Canada from Russia.”

  “Russian? I thought you said it was German.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  If they bought me a drink I might get into the story, going back to Germany and the Low Countries, then Prussia and Russia, and eventually the move to the Americas. People always found it fascinating—who really knows their family history these days—so I loved to tell the story. In fact, I just loved telling stories about growing up on a Mennonite turkey farm in the Canadian Prairies, and people from Barcelona to Bangkok knew the names of my siblings and the fact that I had attended a three-room country school. These were all cornerstone details of my story—the story about me being a Mennonite.

  I no longer lived a traditional Mennonite lifestyle—I was not a farmer, nor a member of a tight, church-centred community. In fact, pacifism was one of the few bits of the religion I still called my own. I worried that by leaving the religion I’d given up my right to claim a Mennonite identity. But my family name was unmistakably Mennonite, I could still carry on a halting conversation in Plautdietsch and I liked to eat foarmaworscht, our locally-made smoked pork sausage. Was that enough?

  Some parts of Mennonite culture repulsed and embarrassed me—the closed-minded slavery to rules, the thriftiness, the superior airs, the really bad sense of fashion—but there were also bits that I hoped I still had within me. I admired the ethic of hard work, the ingenuity, and ever-ready generosity towards those in need. I liked the idea of simple living. I was proud of being a “Menno,” as we called ourselves. But maybe all those years bouncing around the globe had erased the last vestiges of my Mennonite culture. Being a straight, white, English-speaking male—a sort of baseline of ethnicity and identity in my world—made me a bit shy to talk about these things. How complicated could my identity really be? Still, I had enough questions to set off on a journey in search of it.

  I planned to ride south, through the United States and into northern Mexico, where I knew I’d find large numbers of Mennonites. I would go to Belize to visit Mennonites with close ties to my own family, and then zigzag my way through Central America. Then to South America, where I knew I’d have to ride all the way to Bolivia before finding large Mennonite communities. Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina had all been colonized by Mennonites, and once I’d driven my motorcycle that far, I might as well go to Tierra del Fuego, at the very southern tip of the Americas. My trip planning consisted of identifying the Mennonite communities sprinkled across the Americas and linking them together into a meandering route south. I’d decide which roads to take as my journey unfolded.

  A large group of extended family were there to see me off. To wish me luck on a long and dangerous trip.
We sat in folding lawn chairs around the fire, which snapped and threw sparks spiralling into the dark sky to join the stars. Our campfire was in a bluff of oak and elm. Hordes of mosquitoes buzzed around our heads. A pickup truck with its open end-gate laden with coffee and hot chocolate, an auntie’s home-baked cookies, made with extra butter and full cream, the Mennonite way. The evening was chilly, even with the fire, and the cold drew our circle tighter.

  My new Kawasaki KLR650 motorcycle was parked next to the fire. The firelight set its reflectors ablaze. My uncles appraised the bike with practical farmers’ eyes.

  “With a shiny bike like that you’ll have to pay bribes to the Mexican police for sure,” one of my uncles said.

  “Kawasaki? But that’s not from China!” another teased. They found the fact I had lived in Hong Kong both exotic and mystifying.

  “Strong and simple,” I explained. “It’s basically a big dirt bike, so it will be good on all those rough roads down there. Single cylinder with a carburetor. Something I can repair along the way if I have to. Like a good Mennonite farmer.”

  They laughed. I’d strayed pretty far from my Mennonite- farmer roots, and secretly I shared their doubts that I’d know how to fix the bike if it broke down. But that was my plan.

  My aunties plied me with food. Home-baked biscuits and a jar of honey. One of them tucked a few oranges into my pocket, another gave me a bag of freshly toasted zwieback that rustled in their paper bag. “Travelling food, just like Johann would have eaten,” my auntie said as she hugged me.

  Another auntie gave me a small angel pendant. “To keep you safe, because it’s a long road you’re travelling,” she said.

  “You think you’ll make it?” an uncle asked, his work-heavy wrinkled hand set firmly on my shoulder. “I have a cousin in Belize, on your mother’s side,” he told me, going into a long description of the bloodlines connecting me to the past.