Pennsylvania's Amish County & Mennonite Communities in Mexico

Pennsylvania's Amish county in Lancaster has turned into a wonder land after the Harrison Ford movie "Witness" filmed in 1985. Thereafter each year, a large number of visitors journey to Amish land to experience the excitement.

The Amish Experience, the largest and complete interpretive touring center is located in the heart of the oldest Amish settlement in the world, the county's only designated "Heritage Site" surrounded by Amish farmlands. The customs and life-styles of simpler times still lasting with homes without electricity, and transportation limited to the horse and buggy.

Community celebrations and special events with shopping by roadside stands and quilts to furniture and hex signs, add to the area's unique allure. The Amish Experience in the area's original family-style restaurant and Plain & Fancy Farm will excite the visitors with a la carte dining and the legendary all-you-can-eat dinner of local Pennsylvania Deutsch specialties.

Aaron and Jessica's Buggy Rides and the luxurious Amish View Inn & Suites will add further excitement to visitors.

Today, Amish farming communities are generally prosperous and stable.

Agricultural exchange, a unique exchange program with an Amish order in Pennsylvania made it possible for some Low German Mennonites to survive in Mexico.
Many Low German Mennonites in Mexico are second and third generation immigrants, trying to make their living as farmers in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Their life has become difficult by the poor returns for their wheat and dairy products due to drought.

In 1994, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) helped by organizing a group of eight Amish men from US to visit Mennonite businesses, schools and churches in Chihuahua. Since then, the Amish have worked with MCC to raise a dairy herd, build a modern cheese factory and initiate a teacher training exchange in Chihuahua.
Amish in Pennsylvania along with two other groups in Ohio and Indiana enabled to reduce the poverty in the Mexican Mennonite colonies.

A large number of Mennonites have left to Canada in search of a better economic future. But there are Germans originally settled from then USSR who are very rich and influential in Mexico.

Amish and Mennonite communities are having a common Anabaptist history.
The Amish are conservative descendants of Anabaptists who fled to escape from religious persecution in southern Germany and Switzerland in the 1700s. They settled in Pennsylvania and the U.S. Midwest.

During the Reformation era in Europe the Anabaptist Christians rejected infant baptism and chose believer's baptism. Since many of them had been baptized in their infancy, they chose to be rebaptized as believing adults. So their enemies called them Anabaptists -- "re-baptizers." Mennonites are also descendants of Anabaptists.

Both the Amish and Mennonites speak German dialects, but they still require translators to communicate. As the two groups learned during an evening of singing, they share similar chant-style songs as well.

The establishment of a dialogue has helped to foster discussion. They have established enough trust to discuss painful issues such as divisions within the church. The recent introduction of electricity and rubber tires in some communities has prompted church leaders and many other residents to leave for more conservative colonies in southern Mexico and Bolivia.

German - Americans

At the student meeting, I was amazed by many of the new faces. Dietmar Doering enumerated the various activities in which students would be involved.

He turned his topic and was proudly telling about some of the German historical and notable personalities. Some of the Germans and their achievements are forgotten by the majority of German people.

Doering was continuing on Germans and German origin names around the world. Ethnic German minorities live in many countries in all six continents including the former Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Belgium, Italy, the United States, Latin America, Namibia, and Australia. These German minorities, through their ethno-cultural vitality, exhibit an exceptional level of variations.

Amongst them are small groups (such as those in Namibia) and many very large groups (such as the almost 1 million non-evacuated Germans in Russia and Kazakhstan or the near 500,000 Germans in Brazil), groups that have been greatly "folklorised" and almost completely linguistically assimilated (such as the Germans in the USA or Australia), and others, such as the true linguistic minorities (like the German minorities in Argentina and Brazil, in western Siberia or in Romania and Hungary); other groups, which are classified as religio-cultural groups rather than ethnic minorities, (such as the Eastern-Low German speaking Mennonites in Paraguay, Mexico, Belize or in the Altay region of Siberia) and the groups who maintain their status thanks to strong identification with their ethnicity and their religious sentiment (such as the groups in Upper Silesia, Poland or in South Jutland in Denmark).

Dietmar Doering was telling enthusiastically that Frankfurter, Hamburger and other famous fast food names were derived from German places and cities.

He was proud to speak of the well-to-do Americans of German ancestry. While he was telling, the students' faces took on a lively expression. They were talking to each other and nodding and exchanging notes silently among themselves.

Americans of German ancestry are the major European ethnic group in modern America.
As of a 2000 census, more than 45 million Americans claimed they had German ancestry but only 1.5 million of them spoke the language at that time.

German is the second most spoken language in the US states of North Dakota and South Dakota and the third in popular foreign language after Spanish and French in the US.

There are varieties of German dialects in the US. Texas German based in the Texas Hill Country in the vicinity of the town of Fredricksburg is a dying dialect. Hutterite communities speak Hutterite German, an Austro-Bavarian dialect in the US States of Washington, Montana, North and South Dakota and Minnesota and in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

In Canada there are people of German ancestry throughout the country and especially in the west as well as in Ontario. There is a large and vibrant community in the city of Kitchener, Ontario.

The US state Kansas is having more Mennonites and Volga German communities.
There are German commnuities in Wisconsin and Indiana.

In the early twentieth century immigrants mainly settled in St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cincinnati.

The German immigrants after World War II came primarily to New York, Los Angeles and Chicago urban areas and to Florida.

Generally, German immigrant communities in the USA have lost their mother tongue more quickly than those who moved to South America, possibly for the German speakers the Germanic based English was easier to learn than the Latin based Portuguese or Spanish. The strong anti-German sentiment and attacks on German-speakers in the US before and after the major World Wars also contributed to change their mother tongue into English.

The teaching of the German language to latter-age students has given rise to a pidgin variant which combines the German language with the grammar and spelling rules of the English language in the US. This variant is often understandable by the English and the German speakers and is called American German and often referred to as Amerikanisch or Amerikanischdeutsch. However this is a pidgin and not a dialect.

German Americans in the Amana Colonies in the state of Iowa speak Amana German.

The Amish and other Pennsylvania Germans including Mennonites speak a dialect of German known as Pennsylvania Dutch also known Pennsylvania Deutsch (a West Central German variety). The eastern Pennsylvania is a remnant of what was once a much larger German-speaking area.