Obregón, Álvaro (1880-1928)
Álvaro Obregón Salido was the president of Mexico from 1 December 1920 to 30 November 1924. In 1921, he welcomed both Old Colony and Sommerfelder Mennonites to Mexico by granting them a series of group privileges if they settled in Mexico. This made possible the migration of approximately 6,000 conservative Mennonites from Canada to Mexico in the 1920s and set the stage for the contemporary presence of over 100,000 conservative Mennonites in Mexico.
A popular and successful general during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), Obregón ran for president in 1919-20. He campaigned on land reforms that would break up and redistribute the massive estates of Mexico's landowning families. Obregón had also promised land to the veterans who had served under him during the war. This created the conditions around 1920 in which Mexican landowners were eager to find buyers for their land before the government liquidated their holdings.
Obregón met with a delegation of Old Colony Mennonites in January 1921. In the months prior to this, formal and informal delegations had met with his brother-in-law, Arturo J. Braniff, and other Mexican stakeholders. The delegates report receiving a warm welcome and found their negotiations with Obregón and his ministers productive.
Obregón granted the Mennonites all of the concessions they asked for in a Privilegium dated 25 February 1921. These privileges included exemption from military service and from swearing oaths and the right to maintain egalitarian practices around inheritance and mutual aid. Obregón was initially hesitant to grant the Mennonites the right to run their own religious, German-language schools, but gave in when he saw this was central to their desire to leave Canada and find a new homeland. On 4 November 1921 Obregón agreed to a similar list of provisions in a meeting with Sommerfelder Mennonites. Martina Will states that the group privileges granted the Mennonites "clearly conflicted with the Mexican Constitution's regulations on secular education and church ownership of land."[1] She documents also Obregón's seeming discomfiture when speaking about the Mennonites' privileges to non-Mennonite audiences, including some statements that appear to contradict his promises to the Mennonites.[2] Obregón furthermore did not publish the privileges he granted in the diario official, the government's formal communications, nor did he inform local officials in Chihuahua. Will argues that the "vagaries and incongruities" in Obregón's approach contributed significantly to the confusion and difficulties that would later arise between the Mennonite colonists and local and federal Mexican governments, including the schools crisis of 1935-36.[3]
In granting the Mennonites group privileges, Obregón was motivated by the desire to rebuild his country. The ten-year revolution had not only killed a million people, "but the nation's communications, commerce, and transportation were nearly destroyed."[4] For Obregón, redevelopment involved attracting wealthy, hard-working, and modern farmers and their capital. Obregón's plans for Mexico's economic development had a particular focus on agriculture; he believed that the kind of modernized and mechanized but small-scale farming the Mennonites represented would be the basis of Mexico's future wealth. There was also an explicitly racial logic to Obregón's welcome of the Mennonites: his government was especially intent on bringing in farmers who would lift up the "backward" Mexican peasants by not only introducing modern farming techniques, but by "whitening" the population as they integrated into it.
Shortly after the Mennonites began to settle in the state of Chihuahua in 1922, Obregón sent in federal troops (in 1923) to protect the Mennonites and their property from locals, many of whom had been farming the area that the Mennonites now legally owned and had anticipated receiving those lands in the expected land reforms. In taking these actions Obregón was strongly motivated to consolidate his political power and to show the outside world that Mexico was pacified and that foreign interests in his country were secure. A year later, Obregón's intervention was decisive in settling the ongoing dispute between the Mexican "agraristas" who claimed the Mennonites' new land and the land's former owners (the Zuloaga family). He granted 6,500 hectares of land to the locals and required the Zuloaga estate to pay the costs of relocation and various land improvements, conditions that the squatters found acceptable.
Obregón made a powerful impression upon Mennonite delegates and negotiators. One historian notes that the Mennonites "had a firm belief in the honesty of President Obregón. His friendly and kindly reception put the delegates at ease."[5] Delegate Johann Loeppky (later bishop of the Old Colony Mennonites in Saskatchewan) reports being moved to tears when Obregón agreed to the Privilegium. Johann P. Wall, a towering figure in the emigration movement, is reported to have said that Obregón's death in 1928 hurt him more than the deaths of his own father and mother.[6]
See Also
- Mexico
- Canadian Mennonite Land-Seeking Delegations, 1919-1922
- Emigration from Canada to Mexico and Paraguay in the 1920s
Notes and References
Bibliography
Buchenau, Jürgen. "Small Numbers, Great Impact: Mexico and Its Immigrants, 1821-1973." Journal of American Ethnic History 20, no. 3 (2001): 23-49.
Doell, Leonard. "The Move to Mexico." In Hague-Osler Mennonite Reserve, 1895-1995, edited by Jacob G. Guenter et al. Hepburn, SK: Hague-Osler Reserve Book Committee, 1995: 386-89.
Ens, Adolf. Subjects or Citizens? The Mennonite Experience in Canada, 1870-1925. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994: 208-12.
Guenter, Jacob G. "Mennonite Migration to Mexico." In Hague-Osler Mennonite Reserve, 1895-1995, edited by Jacob G. Guenter et al. Hepburn: Hague-Osler Reserve Book Committee, 1995: 372-77.
Loewen, Royden. Village among Nations: "Canadian" Mennonites in a Transnational World, 1916-2006. University of Toronto Press, 2013: 30-32.
Plett, Delbert. "The Lonely Ohm – Myth and Reality: The Pastoral Vision and Challenges of the Conservative Mennonite Ministerial/Lehrdienst." Preservings, no. 21 (December 2002): 94-108.
Sawatzky, Harry Leonard. They Sought a Country: Mennonite Colonization in Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971: 36-40, 51-54, 68-71.
Schmiedehaus, Walter. The Old Colony Mennonites in Mexico. Translated by Erwin Jost. Edited by Glenn Penner. Mennonite Heritage Archives, 2021.
Wall, Andrew, dir. Conform: The Mennonite Migration to Mexico of the 1920s. Refuge 31 Films, 2022. 34:00-38:00.
Wasserman, Mark. "Strategies for Survival of the Porfirian Elite in Revolutionary Mexico: Chihuahua in the 1920s." Hispanic American Historical Review 67, no. 1 (February 1987): 87-107.
Will, Martina E. "The Mennonite Colonization of Chihuahua: Reflections of Competing Visions." The Americas 53, no. 3 (January 1997): 353-78.
| Author(s) | Gerald Ens |
|---|---|
| Date Published | April 2025 |
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Ens, Gerald. "Obregón, Álvaro (1880-1928)." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. April 2025. Web. 10 Apr 2025. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Obreg%C3%B3n,_%C3%81lvaro_(1880-1928)&oldid=180435.
APA style
Ens, Gerald. (April 2025). Obregón, Álvaro (1880-1928). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 10 April 2025, from https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Obreg%C3%B3n,_%C3%81lvaro_(1880-1928)&oldid=180435.
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