6 Negotiating Double Binds of
In-Between
A Gendered Perspective of Formal and
Informal Social Supports in Transnationality
Luann Good Gingrich
A French feminist playwright and theorist, Hélène Cixous, writes this about the place of in-between, of entredeux:
Entredeux is a word . . . to designate a true in-between—between a life which is ending and a life which is beginning. For me, an entredeux is: nothing. It is, because there is entredeux. But it is—I will go through metaphors—a moment in a life where you are not entirely living, where you are almost dead. Where you are not dead. Where you are not yet in the process of reliving. These are the innumerable moments that touch us with bereavements of all sorts. There is bereavement between me, violently, from the loss of a being who is a part of me—as if a piece of my body, of my house, were ruined, collapsed . . . Everything that makes the course of life be interrupted. In this case we find ourself in a situation for which we are absolutely not prepared. Human beings are equipped for daily life, with its rites, with its closure, its commodities, its furniture. When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to ‘live’. But we must. Thus we are launched into a space-time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed to. In addition, these violent situations are always new. Always. At no moment can a previous bereavement serve as a model. It is, frightfully, all new: this is one of the most important experiences of our human histories. At times we are thrown into strangeness. This being abroad at home is what I call an entredeux. Wars cause entredeux in the histories of countries. But the worst war is where the enemy is on the inside; where the enemy is the person I love the most in the world, is myself (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997: 9–10).
In this chapter, I seek understanding of places and spaces entredeux—in-between settlement and migration, in-between acculturation and separation, in-between nation and culture, in-between inclusion and exclusion. This analysis is part of a larger investigation that explores meanings and expressions of choice and agency, and the paradoxes of self-imposed or voluntary social exclusion within a social service system that promotes a commonsense version of social inclusion as a universal good. A central question guiding this programme of research and the discussion that follows is this: How do we understand and respond to individuals and groups who appear not to choose what is ‘good’ for them; who resist inclusion, integration, belonging in any measure; whose priority is to preserve the ‘foreign’ across time and place? My specific focus for this inquiry is the in-between of transnational livelihoods that are made necessary by widening economic, social, and subjective divides, and which require (im)migrant women to navigate and negotiate conflict between competing systems of social support: between, on the one hand, unfamiliar formal social supports, such as various human services in the well-developed welfare state of many destination countries; and on the other, the essential and everyday informal social supports of family, community, and work.
For Low German Mennonite women, family and community are the essence of daily life, work, home, personal and collective identity, and hope. Yet many families are leaving their colonies, or ‘sacred villages,’ in Latin America in search of a better life. In Canada, Mennonite (im)migrant1 women describe being confronted with the outside world in ways that are both freeing and formidable, as traditional cultural and religious practices conflict with the values and norms of a society that seeks to lift women out of bondage (Good Gingrich and Preibisch 2010). I propose that migration necessarily involves negotiating contradiction, confrontation, and conflict—contradictions arising in the loss of familiar means of survival; confrontation between incompatible livelihood practices; and conflict between competing values and norms and strategies for getting ahead in spaces in-between. The following is a re-telling of the stories of entredeux, of bereavement and strangeness, of interrupted lives. Specifically, through the case example of migrating Low German Mennonite women and their families, I aim to examine the ways in which the family and ethno-religious community, and women's work as vital to these informal social support systems, are adjusted and defended through voluntary and involuntary encounters with formal social supports in these transnational, transcultural—even trans-temporal—migrations. These stories of in-between also bring to the fore the dual and often contradictory functions of formal social supports, in the form of various social services, that despite a pervasive ideological commitment to individual rights and freedoms, demand a high degree of conformity to specific cultural and even religious norms, values, and daily life practices. My overall objective is to inform social work policy and practice with (im)migrant families.
This work is based on qualitative data from three recent research projects, collected through interviews and focus groups with fifty-six Low German Mennonites who migrated to Canada from Mexico or other regions of Latin America, and with forty Canadian service providers and employers who work with this population.2 These studies concentrated on issues of work or livelihoods, social policy, and social services in the everyday for this ethno-religious group of (im)migrants. I emphasise the uniquely gendered perspective of Low German Mennonite (im)migrant women who maintain varying degrees of transnationality between their colony in Latin America and rural communities in Canada.
Most of the (im)migrant respondents are members of the Old Colony church, the most traditional of the various and diverse Low German Mennonite church groups. Service providers represented a wide range of human services, including employment programmes, child welfare, social assistance (or workfare), public housing, school boards, public health, mental health, and primary health care.
WRITING IN-BETWEEN
The social relations I describe cannot be escaped, even temporarily. As a social services researcher and practitioner, and as a (Swiss) Mennonite3 mother, I am neither inside nor outside, up nor down, in the analysis that follows. Insisting on an ambiguous point of view, a consciousness and conscious in-between, I reinsert the research accounts into their social and historical contexts through a reiterative and hermeneutic approach to the data—a process of moving back and forth, between then and now; between what I know from my own life and what respondents told me; between academic socio-historical literature and lived experience. My vacillating vantage point is a self-conscious locating, as I aim to tell the story of (im)migrant women's experience of the transnational on their terms rather than my own. I also resist the familiar presumption of a “bird's-eye view,” “a position outside” (Smith 1999: 54), that tends towards judgment while falsely claiming neutrality or even moral superiority. In this way, I strive towards understanding—or at least “positive incomprehension” (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997: 16)—of spaces entredeux—of in-between—from and through in-between.
IN-BETWEEN NATION-PLACE
The roots of the Low German-speaking Mennonites from Latin America are religious, originating in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation in Europe. A small group of radical reformers became known as the Anabaptists, departing from the newly formed Protestant Church on several points of religious ideology and practice. The central tenets of the Anabaptist movement included believer's (or adult) baptism, the authority of the New Testament scriptures, the ‘priesthood of all believers,’ or communal scriptural study and shared church leadership, and definitive separation of church and state. Named after Menno Simons who in 1536 renounced the Catholic priesthood and was re-baptised as an Anabaptist elder, the first Mennonites distinguished themselves from other Anabaptists by their rejection of the use of violence, even in self-defense.
Because their radical beliefs and practices directly challenged the religious and political institutions of the day, many Anabaptists were persecuted and killed. Thus, invisibility and movement were vital to early Mennonite life. The first northward migration took one group of Mennonites from the Netherlands to the Danzig-Vistula region, then under the rule of Polish kings (Sawatzky 1971). Over two hundred years later, when the Lutheran Church imposed severe restrictions on further land purchases by Mennonites, many moved on to South Russia, where the Russian Colonial Law of 1763 offered them free land, “perpetual exemption from military and civil service, freedom of religion, the right to control their schools and churches, and the right (and obligation) of agricultural colonies to be locally autonomous” (Sawatzky 1971: 5).4 After almost one hundred years of prosperous and self-governed colony life, the Russian tsar began to withdraw privileges of cultural-religious freedom and autonomy. Most importantly, military exemption was no longer permitted, as the Mennonites were required to fulfill all responsibilities as Russian citizens. The majority of Mennonites agreed to render some form of service to the state, while others understood the compromises demanded by the tsar to be irreconcilable with Mennonite beliefs and practices.
Ideological dissension within the Mennonite brotherhood, coupled with intensifying problems of landlessness and inadequate alternative economic opportunities, enticed many to look to a new land. Between 1874 and 1880, over one third of the fifty thousand Mennonites in Russia immigrated to North America. Most settled in southern Manitoba, where the Canadian government offered inexpensive land to establish their closed colonies. But less than a decade later, the provincial government instituted the Manitoba Schools Act that required all instruction to be in English, and later stipulated that all public schools fly the Union Jack. Internal conflict among the Mennonites again flared. Some began moving west, and by 1911, the Canadian census reported 14,400 Mennonites in Saskatchewan and 15,600 in Manitoba (Sawatzky 1971: 18). When both the Manitoba and Saskatchewan governments implemented the School Attendance Act in 1916 in an attempt to assimilate ethnic groups and eliminate the German language in all schools, Mennonites who did not send their children to a recognised English-speaking school were fined or incarcerated. With mounting pressures of World War I, military conscription was imposed in 1917.
Even under these extreme conditions, the more ‘liberal’ among the Mennonites continued to find ways to adjust to government demands; but the more conservative groups—the Old Colony (or Altkolonier) and Sommerfelder—became increasingly disturbed by the perceived threats to church authority and community cohesiveness, and seven thousand members emigrated once again, this time to Latin America (Epp 1982; Janzen 2004; Sawatzky 1971). This migration to Latin America distinguishes Low German Mennonite groups, as I identify them, from the wide range of other Mennonite groups that remained settled after immigrating to Canada and the United States. As a result of growing concern among the Mennonite communities remaining in Canada about the possibility of mandated direct military involvement, a second wave of migrations to Paraguay and Mexico occurred when international travel was made possible following World War II, and more southern colonies were formed in the 1940s and 1950s. In the past eighty years, Mennonite colonies consisting of smaller units of numbered ‘campos’ have sought land for further settlement in the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Durango, Campeche, and Zacatecas.
Disillusioned by broken promises and economic hardship, the movement of Low German Mennonites back to Canada began as early as a decade after the first migrations south. Economic and social conditions have meant that survival within closed Mennonite colonies in Mexico and Bolivia has not been possible for everyone. Therefore, for Low German Mennonites, hope was invested in obtaining ‘papers.’ With documentation proving Canadian citizenship (by birth) for at least one adult family member, thousands of Low German Mennonites have left their communities in Latin America in the past four decades to try to ‘make a living’ in Canada.
Today, Low German Mennonites in Canada number an estimated fifty thousand to sixty thousand, most in areas close to the fertile farming fields of Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba (Janzen 1998; Loewen 2007). Some continue to migrate between Canada and their colony to the south, finding employment on Canadian farms and returning south when the work runs out and winter sets in. Others attempt to ‘settle’ more permanently in Canada, making the long drive back to Mexico only for extended vacations in the winter months. And there are some for whom any chance of return, even for a visit with family, is financially and logistically impossible.
Transnational migration is clearly not new for Low German Mennonites. Indeed, some have argued that the Mennonite ethno-cultural and religious way of life gives expression to a theology—a belief and way of life—of migration (Guenther 2000). Yet economic migration, which defines the more recent migrations from Latin America to Canada, is unprecedented in Mennonite history. These migrations, referred to by some church leaders as an “uncontrolled migration,” consist of unsanctioned, familial moves from Latin America to Canada, which sharply distinguish them from all other migrations in Mennonite history.
IN-BETWEEN SACRED/SECULAR-SPACE
In Latin America, Low German Mennonites know an integrated life, as all aspects of daily living—including school, church, clothing, language, and work—are to be preserved, with little change, within the tight boundaries of the colony. The Mennonite way of life is best described as a faith tradition. Anabaptism, and the various streams of Mennonite religious faith that emerged from it through the centuries, is a faith rooted in tradition and history, expressed in a way of life; and it is also a tradition, a history, and a way of life that is grounded in faith or religious beliefs. This was demonstrated repeatedly in the interview conversations with Low German Mennonite women. Translation of concepts of ‘faith’ or ‘belief’ proved to be difficult, if not impossible, and attempts to inquire about such were often met with uncertain and brief responses. Most women, however, were very clear about the ‘right way to live.’ Emphasis is placed on obedience to acceptable practices and behaviour, rather than private, individual beliefs. In this way, faith must be publicly demonstrated.
Work is a cornerstone of the Mennonite faith tradition, because work is vital for preserving the right way of living. For Low German Mennonites, living ‘so that God will be satisfied’ or so as to be a ‘good church person’ is to work on the land. This esteemed life is one of subsistence farming, whereby the family functions as an economic unit. Even though gender roles are usually clearly defined, the division of labour between men and women is somewhat blurred, as every member of the family contributes to daily survival and all work is valued for its part towards the continuance of their way of life. Thus, Low German people describe working until there is enough. Many Mennonite (im)migrants seem indifferent to improving their position in the Canadian labour force or aspiring to ‘make something of themselves.’ For example, Jacob and Susana,5 parents of fourteen children, described their hopes for their family, whether in Mexico or Canada:
| Jacob. | [Trans.] 6 I would wish that we could work as much that we could live good. Not overly enough, I wouldn't wish. |
| Susana. | Not that we had overly enough. That I wouldn't wish. Just so we always had enough to live. |
Low German Mennonite women know a separated life. Anabaptist/Mennonite peoples have historically defined themselves to be a people set apart. As distinct communities, Mennonites strive to be on the outside, segregated, distinct, and counter-cultural. The New Testament teaching to be ‘in the world, but not of the world’7 demands a different way—a way of peace, of community, of simple living. To resist the world is ‘to stay with what we have been taught.’ For all traditional Mennonite groups, including the Old Colony, faithfulness requires strict adherence to tradition and heritage. Change—to ‘go beyond what I was taught’—is to go the way of the world.
It seems to me, how would you say it, everything is advancing. In the last ten years how it's changed with all those cell phones and everything, so much new stuff. And the Dietsch, the children too, they go and get exactly the same things that everyone else has. They have everything—Internet, computers—and they're eager to get it. We were always taught that we should not do as the world, we shouldn't have all that. We're supposed to stay away from what the world has. Of course the world will entice us, but we don't have to have it all. We shouldn't spend money on what isn't necessary.
While non-conformity to the ways of the world is necessary for acceptance before God and church leaders, so too is conformity to the ways of the colony (Fast 2004). The communal or collective life is deeply rooted in Mennonite heritage. Low German colonies in Mexico were first established in accordance with the principles of equality and mutuality, as each family received the same amount of land to farm, and the cattle-grazing land was common to all. The tradition holds that to be Mennonite is to be part of the community, a faith community. This ideal is expressed as Jemeenschauft,8 the everyday yet deeply spiritual quality of family and community relationships that is fundamental to the Mennonite faith tradition. One's consciousness, self-esteem, and whole sense of self are collective. The community defines the individual, and the individual belongs to the community, as the church seeks to be “of one heart and one soul” (Wiebe 1981: 33). This collective or shared self-esteem has to do with staying separate and different from the world, with more emphasis on eternity than the present. “We were taught that the world is not going where we are going.”
Further, to be a part of the community, the church, is to yield—to submit—to higher authorities: the will of God, the church, elders, parents, the community, and tradition. One Mennonite author describes this collective identity and yielding as “a master cultural disposition, deeply bred in the Mennonite soul, that governs perceptions, emotions, behaviour, and architecture” (Kraybill 2001: 30). The roots of this way of thinking can be traced to the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, who believed that a dedicated heart would “forsake all selfishness,” and “Christ called them to abandon self-interest and follow his example of suffering, meekness, humility, and service” (Kraybill 2001: 30). Such selflessness requires that individuals do not strive to stand out, or think independently, or be their own person. Rather, the best is to blend, to conform, and to submit to the group. Ideals of individual rights, freedoms, and choice are not only foreign to this way of thinking; they pose a threat. The needs of the group are always considered above the needs of any one of its members.9 Low German women reported that many adults never dare to think or make decisions for themselves, as it is better to simply abide by the conventions and rules established by those in positions of higher authority.
Yielding to higher authorities means that one accepts what life brings. And life is suffering. An identity as a persecuted people seems to be genetically inscribed. All groups deriving from the Anabaptist martyrs know this identity. A certain virtue is associated with suffering, as the “pilgrim people of God” of all times have had to suffer “for living a non-conformed life of discipleship” (Guenther 2000: 169). Echoing the songs and poetry of the Old Testament, lamentations of persecution and hardship are often centrally represented in Mennonite music and literature.10 This is in keeping with the values of self-denial, self-sacrifice, and selflessness. Resignation to the realities of life may mean tolerating conditions or illness—especially mental health or emotional difficulties—that can sometimes be ameliorated or treated. Righteousness dwells in the contrite heart, the yielding spirit.
Submission and collective identity are demonstrated most clearly by Low German Mennonite women. A woman knows herself as wife and mother, and her identity is firmly rooted in the family. A woman usually identifies herself by her husband's name, according to her family relationships. Furthermore, the work of a woman, her role in life—to further the church—defines her. She may occupy a position subordinate to her husband and to God, but she is vital to the preservation of her people. Tina Fehr Kehler (2004) writes this about Low German women from Mexico:
[They] come from sacred villages—communities that are organized vis-à-vis the church. In Mexico, their life's work was geared to maintaining the church, community; that is raising children, baking bread and growing a garden were important though unrecognized ways in which the community of faith survived. Though women's work in Canada is no longer conducted in and for this sacred village, they continue to prepare the next generation for entry into the larger church. (22)
Many Low German Mennonite women demonstrated that their children and their role as mother are paramount for them. Preservation of religious tradition depends on women's work of reproduction—cultural, social, religious, and ethnic. A Low German Mennonite woman knows that her primary responsibility in life is to ‘raise her children right.’ Virtually every aspect of life (health care, housing, work, language) relates to caring work, raising children in the ways of their people. In this way, women's reproductive work is also fundamentally—and necessarily—material. This is God-ordained work with which they have been entrusted. To separate her from her family, the church, her people, is to strip her of her identity, of her self. It is to annihilate her.
Material hardship and socio-economic divides have eroded this integrated, separated, and collective life. Some families are forced into in-between places and spaces that are characterised by contradiction, confrontation, and conflict.
CONTRADICTION OF IN-BETWEEN
Outside of the security and restrictions of colony life, migration is marked by contradiction. It is common in studies of migration to consider the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that propel people out of place. Most often, these terms refer to socio-economic conditions in countries of origin, and international trade and labour agreements with destination countries. The push factors for most Mennonites from Mexico are profoundly commonplace, as they are experienced by millions of people all over the world. At least five interrelated factors are presented in the data:
• Economic restructuring in Mexico resulting from neoliberal policies, so that employment is extremely scarce, and small farmers incur rising expenses while earning dramatically declining incomes from their products
• Extreme climate conditions—drought alternating with flooding—resulting in poor crop yields year after year
• Growing pressures on the land base, so that young married couples often have no way of providing for a family within the colony
• Escalating violence and ‘lawlessness’11
• Personal financial destitution and debt
Together, these intensifying conditions result in severe material hardship and widening social and economic divides, as also seen within and between societies all across the globe. The gap between rich and poor has permeated many of the Mennonite colonies in Latin America: large and lucrative farms sit alongside dilapidated shacks. Wealth and poverty are uncommonly close neighbours, contributing to conflict, corruption, and violence—even within colonies and families.12
In the contradictory spaces of social divides, cultural and religious life is threatened, and the borders shielding the sacred from the secular cannot be secured. In Latin America, a great deal of effort is invested in protecting church members within the sanctuary of the colony, so that when Low German Mennonites are confronted with desperate economic conditions, impossible choices must be made.
In Mexico, urgency accompanies this ancestral and collective disposition as ‘foreigner’ in one's own country.
[Trans.] In Mexico, there are many villages, many villages. You can go from one to the other, go from one to the other, with horse and buggy. But we can keep the kids in the village. Yes, there's a lot of noise, shouting, they're often loud. But they're all Dietsch, all Dietsch. Nobody else has to get into a knot about it. They're all “us.”
Low German respondents expressed grave concern—even fear—for their young people, as they are increasingly engaged with Mexican society—a society generally held responsible for the growing drug and alcohol problem among Low German Mennonites (Castro 2004). Continuing the pattern of their migratory history, some families look towards a new land when worldliness begins to penetrate the borders of the colony. Individual migration—unsanctioned by the church and thus a denunciation of religious ideals—ironically also constitutes an act of religious steadfastness, as it gives expression to their traditional inclination towards preservation of separation and distinction from the world around.
Physical survival is also threatened by deepening socio-economic divides. Migration is necessity for many—a pragmatic decision that is both cause and consequence of cultural and religious alienation. Most women who have migrated to Canada reported that there was simply no way for them to make a living inside or outside the colony.
[Trans.] There, it wasn't possible for husbands to get employment. They were at home, but there wasn't enough work for them to do. So what were they supposed to do? They went to town, drank, and the wife with her small children sat at home and cried. She didn't know where her husband was. Her husband got bored at home, didn't know what to do with himself because there was no work. There wasn't enough land, there wasn't enough for them to do and they got bored. Neither did they have money. If he wanted to work at something, fix the fence or build a shed, or a new house, create work for themselves, there was never money to do it. So the little bit of money he had, he could go to town and sit in bars and drink. His wife with her little kids, sat at home and cried. She waited, it got dark, night time came, and he didn't come. She didn't know if he was still alive or what he was up to.
Many families sell everything to finance their move, and some accrue enormous debt in order to migrate north. The day-to-day struggle for physical survival sometimes leads to despair, and some who migrate have given up the dream of an agrarian way of life.
| Luann. | And what would allow people to make that decision, to take that step? |
| Nancy. | Desperation, I think. When a person gets desperate, he will break rules, he will break laws, you know. And I think that's the biggest thing. For people that are desperate to survive, or that are desperate to . . . do something different or better. I think desperation. [Low German Mennonite service provider] |
In addition to the cogent ‘push’ factors, the ‘pull’ to Canada is increasingly apparent. The growing demand for cheap labour in the North has given rise to expanding avenues for migration—authorised and unauthorised—for workers made poor in the South (Good Gingrich 2010). For Low German Mennonites, migratory pathways between Latin America and Canada have been facilitated by the possibility of Canadian citizenship, as familial connections with Canada are several generations old. For some, migration affords family reunification. In contrast, some families are painfully divided by geography, citizenship, religious disagreement, and sometimes financial disputes.
In Canada, where the colony way of life has been left behind, many seek agricultural employment opportunities that offer housing on the employing farm property. The work that is preferred is close to home, in the fields, so that families can work together to make a living.13 In this way, the most highly valued work is domestic, in the sense that the boundaries between home, church, and community are permeable and largely undifferentiated. Providing for one's family and furthering the church are both realised primarily through work. It is right and good that the whole family works together towards their livelihood. When necessary, children go to work in the fields to help boost the family's income. When possible, the young women and girls in the family work inside the home, learning the skills of mothering and homemaking. Boys work outside, with their fathers, learning to live from and with the land. In Canada as in Latin America, church, community, family, faith, language, culture, and ethnicity are all protected as one. The Low German way of life, in place and space in-between, is political, as it sharply contradicts and thus challenges the values and beliefs of the dominant, secular world around them.
CONFRONTATION OF IN-BETWEEN
Without the material resources necessary to establish themselves as autonomous, self-sufficient—and therefore ‘integrated’—citizens promptly upon their arrival, most Mennonite (im)migrants from Latin America find themselves necessarily engaged with local social services. Ironically, it is when women and children encounter the social worker that Low German families are confronted with the full force of the market.
For many Mennonite families, considerable need follows them from the South to the North. This is disturbing for service providers in Canada, because need signifies risk in our marketised social policy and social service systems (Swift and Callahan 2009). In Canada, Mennonite (im)migrant women and their children in particular are understood to be vulnerable to the “moral hazards” of the welfare state (Martin 2004, 2010) due to a whole host of social and personal threats to their individual independence. Service providers find most aspects of their daily practices and cultural-religious norms to be problematic, interrelated, and ‘compounding,’ in that it was not possible to name issues of concern as discrete and disconnected from each other. For example, their large families, migration habits, poor language skills, work preferences, and low levels of education are all seen by service providers to contribute to difficulties for Mennonites in obtaining adequate and affordable housing, steady employment and sufficient income, education for their children, good health care, and social supports. Their strong commitment to family networks and traditional gender roles is assumed to translate into tolerance for, or even endorsement of, harsh domination of women and children. Almost always, Mennonites prefer to live ‘in the country,’ where affordable and adequate housing is quite scarce. It is common for families to live in tobacco houses, chicken coops, bunk houses, and house trailers. When the family has only one vehicle, as is often the case, many women lack any means of transportation, and remain quite isolated in their own homes. Often, Plautdietsch (Low German) is spoken in the workplace as well as the home. With little opportunity or occasion to leave the family home, many women have very poor English-language skills, even years after settling in Canada. Service providers observed that many attend their own churches, prefer their own schools (if they send children to school at all), and attempt to stay “totally separate like a colony in Mexico.”
Defining social problems is complicated work in the “social problems industry” (Loseke 2003). Social service workers seldom agree on what is wrong, much less how to make it right. This is apparent in the widely divergent—even contradictory—assessments by Canadian service providers of the economic and social circumstances of Low German families. Most service providers readily acknowledged the desperate conditions that many Mennonites left behind in Latin America. Some postulate that the Low German population represents an unusually impoverished group of immigrants:
When they come from Mexico, there is nothing there. They come from very, very poor villages and there is nothing! And it—well, a doctor called me once because he was sending a woman home having had a baby and he said, “Is the environment suitable?” I said, “Well, no. For you, no. You wouldn't consider it suitable, but for what they're used to, this is heaven. Like, they have floors; they have doors!” [English service provider]
It is recognised that even in Canada, some Mennonite (im)migrants have difficulty providing the basic necessities for their families:
When we go into families, we can have a gamut of abuse sometimes—physical abuse, and parent-teen conflict, children's behaviour being out of control, mom not able to cope if dad's not in the home. But we find we can't even address those things until we actually address the level of poverty some of them are living in. It just blows some of my staff away. I mean, you can't work on anything around parenting skills, or setting up structure, or routine in the home without first addressing, “When am I going to get food to feed my children tomorrow?” So we find that is a real core issue with quite a few families that we have. [English service provider]
On the other hand, some practitioners commented on the extraordinary potential for earnings in a single picking season when several family members contribute. One social service worker speculated that a family working together in tomato or cucumber fields could make “over ten thousand dollars in one month.” This in combination with the Child Tax Benefit14 money collected by many of these large families led some service providers to wonder what some families do with their money—that perhaps they are “hiding what they have in bank accounts,” buying properties for their sons, contributing large sums of money to the church or extended family members, or simply squandering their earnings.
While social service workers did not agree on the identification or prioritization of problems among Low German families, the thrust of interventions was articulated with noticeable consistency and resolve. Staff from employment programmes, social services, school boards, public health, mental health, and primary health care agreed that a principal goal of their work is to help people—men and women alike—get and keep a job. This is accomplished primarily through providing specific training and education programmes for client groups, with a view towards encouraging their appropriate participation in the labour market and society in general. The issue is not that Mennonite (im)migrants are considered lazy or unmotivated, or even unproductive.
I'd say one of their strengths too is their work ethic. It's very, very strong, and they're not afraid of physical labour, and menial labour. You know, they never shy away from any type of work. They'll work the long hours, the overtime. [English service provider]
Rather, employment, housing, language, education, size of families, and migration patterns form a single, coherent risk that translates into objectionable participation in the labour force. The priority, for many service providers, is to discourage the Low German preference for field work.
| Mike. | Some of the mothers have taken their children and are trying to forge a new life for them. |
| Louise. | It's a lonely life. |
| Mike. | Yeah, but I mean, in this one case, the two daughters, the mother made sure they completed their high school. One's going on to post secondary. One's working at Wendy's. At least it's not working in the fields, you know. [English service providers] |
Employment-oriented social welfare services, such as the workfare programmes that have replaced welfare in most of North America, base eligibility for benefits on some form of labour market engagement. Confronted with the limited options of an increasingly polarised labour market, social workers are routinely required to redirect their clients into equally low-paying jobs with poor working conditions in precarious sectors of the labour market. Marketised social services present dilemmas and paradox for workers and recipients alike.
Market logic conflates paid work with financial security, recognition, social legitimacy and inclusion, and personal liberation—especially for women. Making a living is reduced to earning a wage. But the everyday realities of immigrant women's lives do not support such blind faith. It is here, at this point, that conflict occurs—when Low German Mennonite women are deemed lacking, and social workers and health providers seek to improve life for Mennonite women and children. It is conflict provoked by confrontation between competing ideals and aspirations, and even more, contradictory livelihood practices and sensibilities in the everyday.
CONFLICT OF IN-BETWEEN
According to market logic, all value is associated with individual bodily expressions of autonomy, competition, choice, self-sufficiency, precise whiteness, and heterosexual maleness. In marketised social services, the ideal client subject stands for lack, and provides a negative comparator for the ideal citizen subject.15
The ethnocentrism and individualism of economism in the delivery of social services acknowledge and permit only competitive self-interest and exchanges, disallowing and vilifying any evidence of a cooperative “good-faith economy” (Bourdieu 1990: 115). Such personal transactions and communal relationships, common among the Low German Mennonites, are considered suspect and even fraudulent if conducted by social service clients. Social service workers reported that Mennonite service recipients are penalised for ‘pooling family resources,’ or accepting monetary gifts or loans. Thus, any material or social cushion afforded by the remaining remnants of the Mennonite collective lifestyle is subverted. The more dispossession marks a person, the greater the potency of the forces that divide and isolate.
Field work and caring work are afforded little worth in the singular system of capital—the rules of the game—that organises the social welfare system and the market. Employment as a farm labourer is usually seasonal, unregulated, and low paying. Caring labour, when conducted in one's own home for family members, is made invisible and inconsequential. In market terms, such activity is not counted as work at all. Prince (2001) argues, “The guiding principle for reforming social programs is that they support the work ethic and economic productivity” (6). Market morality serves to define and valuate all things in its own terms. Thus, in the marketised social services system, the value of women's work and its contribution to the livelihood of the family is discounted, reduced to the wages her labour earns.
Even more, Mennonite traditional labour of making a living is associated with illegitimacy and devaluation. Particularly when children help in the fields, seasonal workers may be paid in cash, ‘under the table.’ Situated in the ‘informal economy’ and shared by all family members, such work then takes on an illicit quality. Similarly, women's traditional work is disallowed for social service clients, as only waged work—although intensely precarious, low-wage, unregulated, and dead-end—counts for anything at all. Mennonite (im)migrant women's roles and identities are not only cheapened; they are made dishonourable and ultimately costly. Such expressions of ‘proximity to necessity’ (Bourdieu 1984) mark Low German women as unworthy, and justify the denial of all possibility for social and even economic gain in both the social service system and the labour market. In this way, the livelihood strategies of Low German Mennonite women function in reverse, earning negative social and economic returns in all social arenas of Canadian society in which they must engage.
The Low German Mennonite collective sense of self—sometimes described by service providers as arrogance and even racism—poses a direct challenge to the neoliberal individual as a self-contained unit. Nancy, who is both a service provider and a member of the Low German community, looked for English words to describe this inclination towards denial of self, and she rather awkwardly settled on the familiar notion of ‘poor self-esteem.’
| Luann. | I want to back up to your concern of “poor self-esteem,” because that's something I've heard from others. How common is that among . . . |
| Nancy. | Very, very common. I mean, I think it's one of the biggest problems in our Mennonite community. It's a teaching also. From where I stand now, looking back, it's actually a teaching. You don't think much of yourself. If you were to think of yourself that you're able to do things, well, that's not right. We are being taught not to brag about ourselves. Not to think of ourselves as someone. Just simply not to think that you're somebody, you know. That would be the plainest way of explaining it. I mean, if . . . Parents are not encouraged to motivate their children, or to say, “You did really good.” Because they may become too proud. |
| Luann. | So if you can think poorly of yourself, there's almost something righteous about that. |
| Nancy. | Right. Exactly. |
In the conflict of in-between, all strength afforded through the dialectical social individual—the self-in-community—is reversed, converted to an internalised sense of individual worthlessness and even self-contempt.
Low German and English workers alike described wasted potential in Low German young people, as they are often not encouraged to imagine beyond traditional livelihood strategies and roles. Service providers attributed such values, goals, and aspirations in Low German children and young people to parenting inadequacies and incompetence. Education through the public school system, employment services, custom-designed language and health programmes, individual instruction by a range of professionals and paraprofessionals, and even educational spots delivered over the waves of the Low German radio station are all geared towards encouraging or forcing changes in the way Low German Mennonites raise their children.
Through education—the most urgent need and preferred intervention strategy identified by service providers—workers seek to “shape minds and mould desires from within” (Wacquant 1996: 161). By way of education, training, assessing, and monitoring, social services work together towards the same end—producing compliance and conformity. Low German mothers must display a submissive confidence that ‘worldly’ interventions into the lives of their families are good and necessary, and must perform an ignorant belief that ‘English’ professionals know what is best for them and their children. Enforced compliance and conformity reinforce lack and dependency. This is the ideal client subject, and it serves to sustain the myth of the opposite kind. The standard of the ‘self-made man’ and the idealisation of individualised success can be preserved only through the manufacture of dispossessed social groups and their individualised failure. Clients must demonstrate independent and personal destitution—the complete absence of resources from family or community members—to establish legitimate need. The eligible client is necessarily made individualised, commodified, conformed, and compliant—giving rise to double binds of all sorts for Mennonite (im)migrant women.
DOUBLE BINDS OF IN-BETWEEN
The Mennonite fundamental of an integrated, separated, and collective life is both undermined and intensified in migration. For example, living in closed communities in close geographic proximity is not possible in Canada, and categorical divisions between home and school and church and work come to define daily life. No longer bound by the rigid rules of the church, women (and men) have to make life decisions independent of family networks and religious authorities. Geographical, emotional, and religious separation from extended family and the church contribute to new forms of isolation for women in Canada. Women are required to conform to the ways of the world: discard her traditional dress and language, learn to read and write, find paid work, and leave her children to the secular education system. By ‘working out,’ women are challenging religious definitions of what it is to be a good mother and wife. For Mennonite (im)migrant women, the peril associated with education and knowledge goes beyond worldly change and infiltration from the outside; the danger coupled with ‘standing out,’ being different, is rejection and expulsion from within, as it unsettles the God-ordained order of authority. Furthermore, the risks of women losing their children—to the child welfare system, or to the worldly ways of the ever-encroaching secular society—are great in Canada. And in Canada, where the borders of the colony no longer exist, men are free to come and go. Some husbands and fathers find the pressures of poverty and social exclusion to be unbearable, and they flee—sometimes taking refuge in a bottle, sometimes in the desperate familiarity of life in Mexico or Bolivia.
Yet, women expressed sincere gratitude for the abundance of their lives in Canada. Employment in farming fields, which is readily available during harvest seasons in rural Canada, offers an approximation of the agrarian life and work that represents hope (Kasdorf 1995). Even more, when confronted with the secular in migration, women's work takes on new meaning. Outside the structures of the colony, the family home rather than the church is the centre of economic, cultural, religious, and educational activity; and women become the ‘keepers of the faith.’ In spaces entredeux, women's work is the essence of their very survival.
The devalued necessity of women's work is central to the paradox of transnational livelihoods for Low German Mennonite women. I suggest that when we consider the ways in which transnational livelihoods impact women's households, it becomes apparent that this paradox is more than a sort of contradiction in terms—it is conflict, strife, brought on by all sorts of double binds in places and spaces in-between. Work sustains and divides; life outside the colony isolates and connects; new freedom is opportunity and burden; laws protect individual women and children, and threaten collective family life; waged work offers some economic liberation for women, and compromises and devalues their traditional roles and identities; and ultimately, migration preserves and destroys (Good Gingrich and Preibisch 2010). To migrate is to turn one's back on a tradition, on a heritage, on a life that has let you down.
[Trans.] Right way, we got married, had children. We were taught that we should have children, and we shouldn't use birth control [literally: use something for it] because they were a gift from God. That's what we wanted. But there wasn't land. Why didn't they [church leadership] prepare for it so that their people could stay there?
And migration severs relationships with the living and the dead. Migration is an act of self-betrayal.
[Trans.] I moved away from my parents, I didn't have any family here [in Canada]. Later one of my sisters moved here as well. My mother cried a lot, “My children are gone, are gone. They are living where they aren't supposed to.” My sister felt bad about my mother. But what are you supposed to do? My parents were perhaps two, three years old when they moved from Saskatchewan to Mexico. They taught us that we weren't supposed to return; they had removed us from there and we weren't supposed to return. But because there wasn't land—people just didn't have land—there wasn't work. So people were returning anyway. And we often feel bad about that. Mostly, we worry about that. We didn't obey. We didn't do as they taught us, but we had to! We also wanted to provide for our family. Our parents died long ago. Did we do right? They told us not to, but we did. It's confusing, isn't it?
Caught in the contest between physical and cultural/religious survival, women find themselves in spaces entredeux—in-between tradition and rapid change, steadfastness and destabilisation, desperation and excess. For Mennonite (im)migrant women, transnational livelihoods require navigating necessity and absurdity, hope and hopelessness, faithfulness and condemnation. In this context of market neo-liberalism, in which choice and self-determination and individual autonomy are at once a unified ideal and illusion, the double bind of transnational livelihoods is the day-to-day reality of having no choice in every act of choosing (Good Gingrich and Preibisch 2010). To be forced to choose without really choosing—over and over—is to vacillate between, always in-between, colony life and the transnational life, in-between migration and settlement. It is to be caught in the nothing of entredeux, to be nowhere.
A STORY OF IN-BETWEEN
The everyday realities of these conflicted places and spaces in which women live are best illustrated through a story—a true story, of a Low German Mennonite woman. Sarah came to Canada with her husband and their two young children over ten years ago. They left their colony in Mexico to find work. Land in their colony was scarce, and very expensive. Their extended families were poor, and didn't own enough land to provide for the families of their many children. Sarah and her husband couldn't afford to buy a house, much less enough land to sustain themselves. Her husband could find only short-term, poorly paid jobs outside of the colony, and their parents were continually critical of him mixing with Mexicans. It seemed there was no hope for them there. So they migrated to Canada, hoping to earn enough money to some day return to a Mennonite colony and begin their life together again. For the first three years or so, Sarah, her husband, and often their young children worked together in the cucumber and tomato fields in Ontario. The money was good during the harvest season, and there was always plenty of work. But after five years in Canada, their dream of colony life seemed dim.
Sarah had become a cooperative and eager social services client and student. She made the most of the services that were provided to her. With the help of social workers and health professionals, she was able to make significant changes in her life since arriving in Canada. She was no longer helping her husband in the fields. Instead, three days a week she attended an English-language programme for Low German women, and in this way met the job preparation requirements of the local workfare programme so that she could collect a monthly welfare cheque. She learned to speak English well enough to communicate with cashiers in the grocery store and even teachers at school. She was learning to read, for the first time in her life. She was receptive to information and advice about birth control, and made the unusual decision to have only three children. While she continued to wear a skirt and a head covering, she stopped sewing traditional dresses for herself. As her children reached school age, she kept the attendance counsellor at bay by ensuring that they regularly attended the local public school—even when the cruelty of other children left them fearful, begging to stay home. And most importantly, she left her controlling and abusive husband, and made a home for herself and her children.
I met Sarah when I was visiting this English-language programme for Low German Mennonite women in preparation for conducting my research. In her high-heeled boots, jean skirt, and long hair left flowing down her back, her appearance was more similar to the English teachers and staff than the Low German Mennonite students. My role that day was to teach a class on child nutrition, and I needed a translator. Sarah was a somewhat shy but willing volunteer. It was clear that her language skills were well beyond most of the other women attending the programme. She approached me after the class, an extraordinarily daring gesture for a Low German woman, and we chatted.
I was interested in interviewing Sarah for my research, because she seemed to be such an unusual woman in her community. When I asked about her at the end of the day, I learned that, like most Low German women who leave their husbands, she had become an outcast among her own people. Women and men alike refused to speak with her. Especially among more traditional groups, men regard single women to be available. When she feared for her own safety and the safety of her children, she had gone into hiding. She moved. She changed and unlisted her phone number. The teachers and social workers at the programme were pleased, however, as she and her children seemed to be managing quite well. With the occasional use of the food bank, she was able to get by on welfare. She was appearing more self-assured, making good decisions, acquiring new skills and knowledge, and demonstrating increasing independence. In contrast to many Old Colony Mennonite women around her, she was doing everything ‘right.’
I returned a few months later, ready to begin my research. When I asked if Sarah might be contacted to request her participation in my study, I was told that she had disappeared. No one had heard anything from her for several weeks. Her regular attendance at English-language classes had suddenly stopped, which triggered cancellation of her social assistance cheques, her only source of income. Without warning or explanation, her children were no longer attending school. Several years later, there is still no word from Sarah. The social service workers who knew her best assumed that she returned to Mexico, to colony life, to desperate poverty, to the security of her extended family, to corruption and seeming lawlessness, to the life she believes to be faithful, and to her abusive husband.
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
Market-based welfare programmes, now commonplace in developed capitalist societies all over the world (OECD 2005), aim to increase economic self-reliance by redirecting people towards paid work and market consumption, and away from state-funded social services and assistance. Policy and programme measures include curtailing benefits, tightening eligibility, mandating employment-related activities, and punishing recipients for non-compliance (Lightman, Mitchell, and Herd 2010; Martin 2010). These ‘reforms’ work to channel all goals and means of benefits and services through paid market employment, and treat all social services as marketplace commodities. This unqualified and exclusive alignment with the ethic of the economic market gives expression to a significant international ideological shift of welfare states over the past four decades. I argue that this represents more than a collaboration or partnership between the state and the market—it constitutes a corporate takeover of sorts, whereby the welfare state has been bought out by global market interests, thus imposing the market as the only game in town.
This market-state merger renders welfare policies and practices rife with contradiction. For example, Canada's social policies and related interventions and programmes—while they may be relatively generous and well-intentioned—operate to keep people—down-groups and up-groups—in place. The “possessive individualism” (Macpherson 1962) of the market-state, and all its associated hyper-valorisations, is fundamentally dependent—ironically so—on the production of various versions of ‘dispossessed individualism.’ The (im)migrant woman and her children are especially suitable for this enterprise, as her difference is seldom perceived to be strength or capacity; rather, difference is readily assessed to be lack. Her eligibility for the beleaguered and often punitive services of the market-state is evaluated monthly, and she is repeatedly made deficient and devalued. Furthermore, traditional women's work—in the home and in the fields—is made illicit for the dispossessed in the market-state. She is thus denied the strategies and roles and identities she knows to make a life, against all odds, and her dependency on the market is enforced. Even more, marketised social services paradoxically operate to augment need or lack that is reduced to the individual failure. For example, it was evidenced that processes and practices of Canada's marketised social services operate to further dispossess and devalue (im)migrant women who are marginal in the Low German community—women who are deficient and deviant according to their own cultural-religious rules for who gets ahead and who falls behind—in informal and formal systems of social support. Their material, social, and emotional suffering is intensified through voluntary or mandated engagement with a social services system that functions to sustain opposite social kinds and positions, thus deepening economic, social, and subjective divides.
For millions of people on the move, migration across national borders is survival. People are thrust into spaces in-between that are not easily escaped, even in wealthy welfare states of the world. The everyday realities of women reveal the ways in which gendered (and racialised) processes and structures are crucial in the production and reproduction of market-state social relations.16 Particularly for groups seeking to preserve traditional cultural and religious practices in transnational spaces, daily life choices are complicated by pressures to conform to conflicting social fields.17 The lives of Sarah and other Mennonite (im)migrant women provoke important questions for our consideration. How might social service workers recognise and even encourage traditional roles and identities afforded women in families and communities—roles and identities that are both confining and shielding, suffocating and fulfilling? What alternative ways of thinking and doing are required in the design and delivery of social services to utilise informal social support systems, and build on the collective know-how and capacity of families and communities to fend off all forms of social exclusion? More broadly, what reforms to national and international social policies and programmes are needed to validate and promote practices, values, and ideals that mediate rather than reproduce the inevitable contradictions of the market, towards the reconciliation of social divides?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges the expert assistance of my research associate Dr. Kerry Fast, who thoroughly reviewed and commented on previous drafts of this chapter, and continues to deepen my understanding of Low German Mennonite life through our ongoing work together.
NOTES
1. I use the term (im)migrant throughout the chapter to signify the Low German Mennonite transnational or supra-national disposition. Their migratory history that many continue today, and general resistance to ‘settlement,’ sharply distinguishes them from more conventional immigrants.
2. This research includes three projects, all funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada: Good Gingrich, L. (2006) Contesting Social Exclusion: An Interrogation of Its Self-Imposed Expressions, PhD diss., Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto; Rural Women Making Change, University of Guelph, principal investigator B. Leach, co-investigator K. Preibisch; Theorizing ‘Choice’ and Voluntary Social Exclusion: A Study of Transnational Livelihoods and Women from Mexico, York University, principal investigator L. Good Gingrich, co-investigator K. Preibisch.
3. The migration histories that have resulted in distinct Mennonite groups are described below.
4. These provisions, known as the eternal Privilegium, permitted the development of administrative and agricultural techniques that have become central to Mennonite institutions and their economic and cultural life. The Privilegium became a standard set of conditions used in seeking a new homeland in future migrations (Epp 1974).
5. All names of research participants have been changed to preserve anonymity.
6. When the words were originally offered in Low German and simultaneously transcribed and translated into English, the text is preceded by the following bracketed information: [Trans.].
7. Although a number of passages in the New Testament refer to the idea of non-conformity to the ways of the world, Romans 12:2 is commonly cited.
8. The full meaning of the Low German word Jemeenschauft is not easily captured in a single English word. The notion of ‘fellowship’ comes close in its reference to a spiritual dimension of community relationships, to something greater than the ‘everyday.’ Yet in Low German, it is also an everyday word to describe meaningful interaction between people, such as a good visit with a friend. It signifies the quality of an interaction, and the connection enjoyed through relating with each other (Fast 2011).
9. In an interview for a previous study with Old Order Mennonite informal helpers, one respondent recalled his sense of alarm and foreboding when the Human Rights Act was introduced in Canada in 1985. He described the underlying difficulty in determining whose individual rights and freedoms take precedence when they are contradictory. For him, the common good must always supersede the rights of any one individual (Good Gingrich and Lightman 2004).
10. It is said that the only book cherished more by Mennonites than the Bible is Martyrs’ Mirror. Indeed, this book occupies a prominent place in the libraries of many Mennonite homes and churches. Consisting of a rather gruesome and lengthy report, it details the martyred deaths of hundreds of Anabaptists in the sixteenth century.
11. Several Low German women described Mexico as a place of “lawlessness.” In contrast, women expressed gratitude for a greater sense of safety in Canada due to laws that protect them and their children. It is not my intention to unfairly represent the state of law enforcement and social order in a diverse and evolving society. I use the term here to indicate what I understand to be the perception of many (im)migrants who have experienced violence inside or outside their colonies in Mexico.
12. Economic disparity within Mennonite colonies has resulted in part from the traditional system for allocating land that combines collectivism and shared ownership with market competition. For example, when a new colony was established, each family was provided with the same allotted number of hectares, each piece of land straddling the village street. Because the custom is to have a house for your child when he/she gets married, families built a second house, often on the other side of the street. Thus, each family's parcel of land had to support more people, and the number of dwellings in a village increased exponentially while the number of landowners declined. Over time, land has become very scarce—and therefore very expensive—on some of the more established colonies (such as those near Durango, Mexico, and Riva Palacios Colony in Bolivia). These colonies have become overcrowded; an increasingly small proportion of families owns colony land; more are tenants of—and indebted to—a few; and more are seeking employment within or outside of the colony. Desperation leads to migration for some, and disparity is exacerbated as only wealthier families are able to purchase more land for their children or for their own expansion when land becomes available (Fast 2011).
13. Even though in Canada families often live on the farms where they work, their living conditions sharply contradict the meaning and experience of colony life in Mexico. For example, nuclear families live geographically and symbolically isolated from extended families and the religious community. Further, the cultural-religious norm—even imperative—of owning your own land and being your own boss is little more than a ‘broken dream’ in rural Canada.
14. The federal Child Tax Benefit is a monthly, tax-free cash supplement calculated per child—paid to eligible low- and middle-income applicants with children under eighteen years—usually issued to mothers, provided they hold status as citizens, landed immigrants, or refugees. For large families, research respondents report that the monthly benefit can amount to over C$1,000.
15. Orloff (2005) describes the universal political subject—the seemingly ungendered ideological icon—produced in social policy and related services to be “rational, autonomous, unburdened by care, impervious to invasions of bodily integrity and therefore (heterosexual and) masculine” (219). He is a producing, consuming, tax-paying citizen. Similarly, the necessary backdrop for all “incomplete,” excluded subjects of western welfare capitalism is described to be “the white, male, able-bodied, wage-earning subject,” “the ‘independent’ figure able to claim and enact legal, political and social rights” (Clarke 2003: 211).
16. See also Good Gingrich (2010).
17. For an insightful and thorough consideration of the contradictions of individual agency within the Low German Mennonite culture, see Fast (2004). Through the use of a poignant case example of a Low German Mennonite woman, Fast clearly demonstrates that questions of choice and agency are often too simply and falsely understood in narrow, individualised terms, and equated with “self-determination.” Although the focus of her work is on this seemingly peculiar traditional religious group and a social context that demands a high degree of conformity, I argue that her understanding of agency as taking place within the constraints of a life and community is equally applicable and accurate in a traditional religious society and contemporary ‘secular’ societies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Castro, P. (2004) ‘The ‘Return’ of the Mennonites from the Cuauhtémoc Region to Canada: A Perspective from Mexico.’ Journal of Mennonite Studies, 22: 25–38.
Cixous, H., and M. Calle-Gruber (1997) Hélène Cixous, Rootprints : Memory and Life Writing: London. New York: Routledge.
Clarke, J. (2003) ‘Turning Inside Out? Globalization, Neo-liberalism and Welfare States.’ Anthropologica, 45(2): 201–22.
Epp, F. H. (1974) Mennonites in Canada, 1786–1920: The History of a Separate People. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada.
Epp, F. H. (1982) Mennonites in Canada, 1920–1940: A People's Struggle for Survival. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada.
Fast, K. (2004) ‘Religion, Pain, and the Body: Agency in the Life of an Old Colony Mennonite Woman.’ Journal of Mennonite Studies, 22: 103–29.
Fast, K. (2011a) Personal communication. Toronto, 23 January.
Fast, K. (2011b) Personal communication. Toronto, 18 March.
Fehr Kehler, T. (2004). ‘A Kanadier Mennonite Woman's Experience.’ Women's Concerns Report, March-April, No. 172. Winnipeg: Mennonite Central Committee—Committees on Women's Concerns.
Good Gingrich, L. (2010) ‘The Symbolic Economy of Trans-border Governance: A Case Study of Subjective Exclusion and Migrant Women from Mexico.’ Refugee Survey Quarterly, 29(1): 161–84.
Good Gingrich, L., and E. Lightman (2004) ‘Mediating Communities and Cultures: A Case Study of Informal Helpers in an Old Order Mennonite Community.’ Families in Society, 85(4): 511–520.
Good Gingrich, L., and K. Preibisch (2010) ‘Migration as Preservation and Loss: The Paradox of Transnational Living for Low German Mennonite Women.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36(9): 1499–518.
Guenther, T. F. (2000) ‘Theology of Migration: The Ältesten Reflect.’ Journal of Mennonite Studies, 18: 164–76.
Janzen, W. (1998) Build Up One Another: The Work of MCCO with the Mennonites from Mexico in Ontario 1977–1997. Kitchener, Ontario: Mennonite Central Committee Ontario.
Janzen, W. (2004) ‘Welcoming the Returning “Kanadier” Mennonites from Mexico.’ Journal of Mennonite Studies, 22: 11–24.
Kasdorf, J. (1995) ‘Work and Hope: An Anabaptist Adam.’ Mennonite Quarterly Review, 69(2): 178–204.
Kraybill, D. B. (2001) The Riddle of Amish Culture. Revised ed. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
Lightman, E., A. Mitchell, and D. Herd (2010) ‘Cycling On and Off Welfare in Canada.’ Journal of Social Policy, 39(4): 523–42.
Loewen, R. (2007) ‘To the Ends of the Earth: Low German Mennonites and Old Order Ways in the Americas.’ Paper given at the “Amish in America” Conference, Elizabethtown, PA, 7–9 June 2007.
Loseke, D. R. (2003) Thinking about Social Problems: An Introduction to Constructionist Perspectives (Social Problems and Social Issues). 2nd ed. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Macpherson, C. B. (1962) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Martin, S. (2004) ‘Reconceptualising Social Exclusion: A Critical Response to the Neoliberal Welfare Reform Agenda and the Underclass Thesis.’ Australian Journal of Social Issues, 39(1): 79–94.
Martin, S. (2010) ‘Reconceptualising Young People's Engagement with Work and Welfare: Considering ‘Choice’’. Paper given at the XVII International Sociological Association World Congress of Sociology, Gothenburg, Sweden, 11–17 July 2010.
Orloff, A. S. (2005). ‘Social Provision and Regulation: Theories of States, Social Policies, and Modernity.’ In J. Adams, E. S. Clemens & A. Shola Orloff (Eds.), Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (pp. 190–224). Durham: Duke University Press.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2005) Policy Brief: ‘From Unemployment to Work.’ http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/44/23/35044016.pdf (accessed 28 October 2011).
Prince, M. J. (2001) ‘How Social Is Social Policy? Fiscal and Market Discourse in North American Welfare States.’ Social Policy & Administration, 35(1): 2–13.
Sawatzky, H. L. (1971) They Sought a Country: Mennonite Colonization in Mexico. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Smith, D. E. (1999) Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Swift, K. J., and M. Callahan (2009) At Risk: Social Justice in Child Welfare and Other Human Services. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Wacquant, L. (1996) ‘Reading Bourdieu's “Capital”.’ International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, 33(2): 151–70.
Wiebe, G. (1981) Causes and History of the Emigration of the Mennonites from Russia to America. Translated by H. Janzen. Winnipeg: Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society. Original edition, Ursachen und Geschichte der Auswanderung der Mennoniten aus Russland nach Amerika, 1900.