'Plautdietsch' and 'Huuchdietsch' in Chihuahua: Language, literacy, and identity among the Old Colony Mennonites in northern Mexico

Some seventy years after migrating from Canada to the high plains of Chihuahua, the Old Colony Mennonites continue to live on isolated, agricultural-based colonies. Central to their efforts to remain separate and apart from the Weltmenschen is the set of practices and beliefs known as the oole Ordnunk. This 'old order' provides the mechanisms for cultural reproduction and the transmission of identity. A crucial part of this oole Ordnunk is language, as both particular language varieties and particular communicative practices lend themselves well as powerful symbols of the obedience to 'tradition' central to Old Colony Mennonite identity. The Old Colony Mennonite ideal of continuity in 'tradition', in fact, is both transmitted through language and inscribed in particular communicative practices. In particular, certain High German communicative practices and their formal characteristics have become emblematic of Old Colony Mennonite identity.;This dissertation reveals the connections Old Colonists make between language and identity by (1) exploring the dominant ideology of language that is maintained and inculcated in school and church; (2) examining the oral and written habits of the Old Colonists, with particular attention to their consumption and production of literacy; and (3) analyzing the significant linguistic conflicts that have arisen in the Old Colony Mennonite community in recent decades. Two separate, co-existing notions of literacy are outlined, 'traditional' and 'alternate', but neither these types nor past linguistic conflicts can be viewed simply as a struggle between 'tradition' and 'modernity'. The evidence here suggests that several ideologies of literacy can co-exist, that literacy can have a multiplicity of meanings because it is context-dependent, and that there can exist ideologies of language and literacy independent of the notion of a 'standard'. Previous analyses of the Old Colony Mennonites are critiqued for their failure to recognize the functional differentiation of two German varieties as culturally constructed, for their dismissal of the Old Colonists as illiterate, for their failure to see that the meaning of literacy is bound up with questions of users, uses, and contexts of use, and for their deterministic view of literacy.