A history of the Mennonites who settled in Latin America, the new lives they built, and the communities they formed. Mission and Migration is the first comprehensive history to be written by Latin American Mennonite historians about Mennonite church life in Central and South America from its beginnings. The story of the coming of Anabaptist-descended churches to Latin America begins, not in the Spanish colonial period, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the period following Latin American political independence from Spain and Portugal. The first Mennonite church to take root in Latin American soil gathered for worship in 1919, in the town of Pehuajo, Argentina. It was the result of North American mission efforts and represents one major impulse for the planting of Mennonite churches in Latin America. The second major impulse came with the settling of Mennonite colonists in Mexico, Paraguay, and Brazil, in the 1920s and ’30s. The Mennonite colonists did not come to Latin America as missionaries, but rather to settle as ethnic and religious communities, seeking new life and a future. This book tells their story, and delves into the variety of identities within the Latin American Mennonite Christian community.
