In March 1988, the Mennonites of Spanish Lookout celebrated thirty years of life in Belize. Mennonites in Belize? To some readers this combination may represent a double obscurity--namely, who are the Mennonites and where is Belize.
The Mennonites are a relatively small Protestant Christian group comprising many divisions. All subgroups recognize a European historical heritage as Anabaptists, a religious movement that dates to the Protestant Reformation. Hostile reactions from the more established churches to such Anabaptist practices as adult baptism and to beliefs such as separation of church and state led to persecution, martyrdom and, frequently, to Mennonite migration from Western Europe.
Three hundred years ago, Mennonites were among the first German-speaking immigrants to North America, where they and subsequent immigrants became ancestors to the variety of Amish and Mennonite communities now found in the eastern United States and Canada. At the same time, other Mennonites in the Netherlands and northern Germany were fleeing persecution by settling in what is now Poland. These groups moved on to south Russia in the late eighteenth century, to the Great Plains of the United States and Canada in the 1870s, and eventually, by the 1920s, began to develop settlements in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. In 1958, two different groups of "Mexican Mennonites"--the Old Colony and the Kleine Gemeinde--made their way into what was then known as British Honduras and today is called Belize.
Tucked into the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America, Belize is small country, about 70 miles wide and 180 miles long. Though it was an important component of pre-Columbian Mayan civilizations, Belize was largely ignored by the Spanish and other European conquerors until British privateering and subsequent commercial interests developed. The region eventually became a British crown colony in the nineteenth century.
From its years as a British colony to the present (the country received independence in 1981), Belize has been something of an anomaly in Latin America. Despite Guatemalan claims of ownership, the British presence has helped Belize remain culturally, linguistically, and politically separate form its neighbors. Belize is a sparsely settled country, and much of its land is undeveloped forest, scrub, or swampland. Most inhabitants live in a few main centers or along several major roads. It is a plural society, with a coastal population dominated by Creoles and Garifuna of African descent and an interior population representing various mixtures of Spanish-speaking and Mayan-speaking peoples. The ancestors of many Belizeans came to that country either as slaves or, more frequently, as refugees from other, more volatile, societies.
Though the various Belizean Mennonite groups total fewer than 5,000 persons, they are an important component of a country whose population numbers about 165,000. Their significance lies beyond numbers, for the Mennonite communities have made special contributions to Belize's economic development during the last three decades. The Mennonites of Spanish Lookout--a colony of roughly a thousand people that has become the center of the country's chicken hatcher-and-broiler industry, as well as its chief producer and wholesale distributor of milk--are especially enterprising.
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