Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE MENNONITES
San José's most unlikely sight is the bizarre spectacle of tall white people with flaxen hair
and ruddy cheeks - the men dressed in denim dungarees and straw hats, the women in full-
length dresses and headscarves - walking around town or driving horse-drawn buggies.
Thesearethe
Mennonites
,membersofaradicalProtestantsectfoundedintheNetherlands
by Menno Simmons in the sixteenth century. For the next four centuries the Mennonites
found themselves driven from country to country as they attempted to escape religious per-
secution and conscription, and to find land on which to pursue their dreams of an agrari-
an utopia. After migrating to Germany, they moved in succession to Russia, the US and
Canada, Mexico and Belize, until finally arriving in Bolivia and Paraguay in the twenti-
eth century, attracted by the availability of cheap land and guarantees of religious freedom.
Perhaps twenty thousand Mennonites now live in communities across the
Eastern Low-
lands
, farming and raising cattle in self-contained agricultural communities.
The central tenets of the Mennonites are the refusal to take oaths or bear arms (they are
exempt from military service in Bolivia); the baptism only of believers (ie only of people
who willingly adopt the faith, which excludes infants); simplicity of dress and personal
habits; and an unwillingness to marry outside the faith. They also to varying degrees reject
most
modern technology
, including cars and computers, though faced with the difficult
agricultural conditions of Chiquitos, many Bolivian Mennonites allow the use of tractors -
though not, bizarrely, of rubber tyres, so their wheels are covered with steel spikes. Though
some speak Spanish, and a few of the older ones who grew up in North America also have
some English, among themselves they speak
Plattdeutsch
, an archaic German dialect. If
you can bridge the language barrier, many Mennonite men are happy to talk about their
lives.
However, there seems to be some level of distrust between the Mennonites and the locals,
possibly based on the Mennonite buying up of land in the area. The irony is that, two and a
half centuries after the
Jesuits
were expelled, religiously inspired utopian dreams are still
being pursued in the plains of Chiquitos, albeit by white Protestants instead of indigenous
Catholics. This isn't, however, an irony that would have been appreciated by the Jesuits
themselves - their order was set up precisely to combat Protestant sects like the Mennon-
ites.
The mission complex
Main plaza • Daily 7am-noon & 2.30-7pm • Free
The mission of San José was founded in 1696, close to the original site of the city of Santa
Cruz de la Sierra. Its
mission complex
was built in the last decades before the Jesuits' ex-
pulsion in 1767. Occupying one side of the central plaza, it's utterly distinct from the other
