Mennonites lose Texas ranch on which they had staked all
David Klassen pumps $2 worth of gas into a farmer's battered pickup, takes the money and eases back onto the hood of his car. He wipes his greasy hands on his blue jeans and squints into the bright west Texas sun. "Maybe I'll go back to Mexico," he says. "I don't know. I've talked to the lawyers and the immigration people, and I just don't know who to believe any more."
Klassen, 35, a mechanic and part owner of a gas station in Seminole, Texas (pop. 7,000), is an illegal alien from Mexico. But he is different from the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who annually sneak across the border. Klassen is a Mennonite, one of 650 members of the reclusive religious sect who settled in the dusty plains country in the spring of 1977. Through a combination of bad advice and their own gullibility, the law-abiding Mennonites have since found themselves stranded on the wrong side of the law.
It all began at a Mennonite caucus in Canada where the church members decided that they would look for a new promised land, a remote country in which to found a farming colony. Such migrations are nothing new to the Mennonites, who number about 600,000 worldwide. Founded in 1525 in Zurich, Switzerland, and named for Menno Simons, a Roman Catholic priest who became their most famous leader, the group insisted on voluntary adult baptism, which earned it the hostility of both Catholics and established Protestant churches. Devout and pacifist, the Mennonites repeatedly had to flee persecution; some groups from Germany and The Netherlands ultimately migrated to Russia and then to the New World. This time, however, the reasons for moving were more secular. The Canadian Mennonites were tired of the long, cold winters, while members of an offshoot colony in Chihuahua complained of being harassed by their Mexican neighbors.
Bishop Henry Reimer, the Mennonites' spiritual leader, visited farm land in Missouri and Oklahoma before deciding on west Texas—in part because someone in Texas apparently assured him that his people would automatically receive U.S. citizenship if they bought land there. Settlers from both Canada and Mexico then sold their homes, pooled their savings and paid $455,000 down ($264 an acre, about $70 more per acre than the going price) on the $1.7 million, 6,400-acre Seven-O Ranch outside of Seminole, a town that calls itself "the city with a future." They drew lots for the land, planted a crop of cotton and converted art old ranch building into a school. Says Frank Wiebe: "All my life I have thought about the time when I would have my own land. It was like a dream come true."