Mennonite Weekly Review

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — Laura Camden has been fascinated by Amish and Mennonites from a young age. Her journalistic curiosity led her into a particular kind of Mennonite world.

An Old Colony Mennonite girl, Sarah Funk, is the subject of one of Laura Camden’s photos.

Camden’s black-and-white photos of Old Colony Mennonite families in Seminole, Texas, is on display at Bethel College’s Kauffman Museum. The exhibit, “Mennonites in Texas: The Quiet in the Land,” remains open through Sept. 21.

Camden, a faculty member in photojournalism at the University of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, was born and raised in Austin, Texas. Her father’s family is from southwestern Pennsylvania. From about age 10, she would go for summer visits, and her grandmother often would take her to Lancaster County, Pa., where the buggy driving, plain-dressed Amish captured the girl’s imagination.

“Learning about Amish culture led me to learn more about Mennonites,” she said.

In the mid-1990s, Camden was looking for a topic for her master’s thesis in photojournalism at the University of Texas in Austin. She went to the Institute of Texan Cultures, and in the course of her research discovered articles on a group of about 500 Mennonites who had come to the Seminole area in 1977, mostly from Chihuahua, Mexico, with a smaller number from Manitoba, only to be met with broken promises and immigration difficulties.

“It was really their story that struck me,” she said, more than the fact that these were Mennonites. “I was interested in doing present-day follow-up on the group that came in the ’70s.”

In 1789, Mennonites from the Vistula Delta of Prussia (now Poland) emigrated to south Russia along the Dnieper River in what is now Ukraine. The oldest of these south Russian settlements, in the village of Chortitza, became known as the Old Colony. Less than a century later, the Russian government challenged Mennonite exemption from military service and demanded oversight of their schools. So in 1874, some Old Colony Mennonites emigrated to southern Manitoba.

Eventually, the Canadian government became less tolerant of non-public education and also introduced universal “manpower registration” (which stopped short of an actual draft). In 1922, the first Old Colony settlement was established in the state of Chihuahua. Over the next 50 years, the Mennonite population in northern Mexico grew and thrived, although internal divisions led some to move farther south to Belize and Bolivia.

In March 1977, an Old Colony Mennonite bishop from Mexico purchased a ranch southwest of Seminole, which led to the immigration of others living in Mexico, as well as Canada. The latter sought tax relief and freedom to organize their own schools. Those from Mexico wanted affordable land, isolated enough to encourage separation from “the world.”

The Old Colony Mennonites who came to Texas from Mexico in early 1977 had been falsely led to believe that buying land would allow them to enter the United States as legal immigrants. In July 1977, the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered 43 Mennonite families to be deported.