Health care for the Mexican Mennonites in Canada

Abstract

The basic story of Canadian Mennonites is well known: During the centuries since the founding of the Mennonite church in Holland in the 1500s, religious persecution has led to group migration throughout Europe and to North America. Mennonites who came to Canada settled mainly in southern Ontario and the western provinces, where they maintained their religious practices, language, education and agrarian lifestyle. Less well known is that, in the 1920s, when the Canadian government mandated that all schools must use the provincial school curricula, some conservative Mennonites chose to leave Canada for Mexico, where they had been promised religious and educational freedom.