Liminal Sovereignty
Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture
Format:Paperback
Publisher:State University of New York Press
Published:2nd Jul '19
Should be back in stock very soon
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£72.27(9781438471037)

Uses cultural representations to investigate how two religious minority communities came to be incorporated into the Mexican nation.
Liminal Sovereignty examines the lives of two religious minority communities in Mexico, Mennonites and Mormons, as seen as seen through Mexican culture. Mennonites emigrated from Canada to Mexico from the 1920s to the 1940s, and Mormons emigrated from the United States in the 1880s, left in 1912, and returned in the 1920s. Rebecca Janzen focuses on representations of these groups in film, television, online comics, photography, and legal documents. Janzen argues that perceptions of Mennonites and Mormons-groups on the margins and borders of Mexican society-illustrate broader trends in Mexican history. The government granted both communities significant exceptions to national laws to encourage them to immigrate; she argues that these foreshadow what is today called the Mexican state of exception. The groups' inclusion into the Mexican nation shows that post-Revolutionary Mexico was flexible with its central tenets of land reform and building a mestizo race. Janzen uses minority communities at the periphery to give us a new understanding of the Mexican nation.
"Despite the presence of Mennonites and Mormons in Mexico for almost a century, relatively little scholarly attention has been directed to these groups and Janzen's work begins to fill a critical historiographic gap." — Journal of Mennonite Studies
"Janzen has mined a rich and diverse collection of material Students and scholars of Mexico and the US-Mexico borderlands should find this book engaging and enlightening." — Mennonite Quarterly Review
"This subject matter has never been studied in this fashion before, nor with such theoretical sophistication. Not only is the book compelling, but it's also illuminating." — Pedro A. Palou, Tufts University
ISBN: 9781438471020
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
254 pages