A rising TikTok star from a Mennonite community in Mexico that once shunned rubber tires and electricity is embracing technology to give a glimpse of her life through social media.
A century after her ancestors arrived, Marcela Enns, 30, shares anecdotes and answers questions from her more than 350,000 followers with a mixture of pride, humor and sarcasm.
Known on social media as Menonita Mexicana, Enns tries to dispel misconceptions, such as that all Mennonites are religious fanatics or members of a conservative group cut off from civilization.
Photo: AFP
She describes her community as a “smoothie” — a blend of “conservatives” living frozen in time; “traditionals” who wear typical Mennonite clothes, but also use technology; and “moderners,” who due to their appearance and lifestyle are not visibly Mennonites.
Despite their differences, all Mennonites “live happily as they are,” she said.
In her videos, she sometimes dances or mimes to Rihanna songs in a break with the customs of a community that in certain parts of Mexico still rejects the trappings of modern life.
In some of her videos shot in Ciudad Cuauhtemoc in the state of Chihuahua — where her ancestors settled in 1922 — she wears traditional dress and a headscarf. In others, she appears in modern clothes, sunglasses and makeup, speaking in Spanish, English or Low German, the community’s native language.
Not all Mennonites have blue eyes and blonde hair, or shun all technology, she tells her followers.
“Often the documentaries that are made are about the most conservative groups and many people think that all Mennonites live like that,” she said.
Despite “all the videos that I’ve already made and all the content, many people tell me: ‘You can’t be a Mennonite because you have a cellphone and that’s impossible. I know that the Mennonites don’t use cellphones,’” she said.
A few hundred kilometers away in another Mennonite community, Sabinal, electricity arrived four years ago, followed by tires, cellphones and the Internet, but no one yet has a television.
It was because some young community members had access to the Internet that the villagers discovered in 2020 that the world was facing a pandemic.
Avowed pacifists, they ask visitors if the war is over yet in Ukraine.
The community used to have about 2,000 inhabitants, but the encroachment of modern life drove half of them away to the state of Campeche in southeastern Mexico.
They left because “they didn’t want electricity,” village leader Johan Friesen Brown, 42, said.
Most of those who stayed were young people, he added.
The men wear checkered shirts, denim overalls and caps.
The women wear long dresses, sandals and sometimes wide-brimmed hats — all made themselves.
Jacobo Brown, who runs a village store and a cheese factory, is happy with the changes.
“Now we use electricity for irrigation. It’s easier, and we put tires on the tractor to work more comfortably,” said the 50-year-old, who does not yet know how to use Wi-Fi.
There are estimated to be about 100,000 Mennonites in Mexico, mostly in Chihuahua.
Although their roots are in the Netherlands and Russia, the first Mennonites that immigrated to Mexico came from Canada where they had learned English.
When they arrived a century ago, then-Mexican president Alvaro Obregon “opened the door to them,” said Lawrence Taylor, historian at Mexico’s El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.
They were allowed to have their own schools and exempted from military service, Taylor said.
Agriculture was their vocation and today their attachment to the land coexists with a gradual shift to modernity, encouraged in Enns’ case by the importance her family places on education.
“My grandfather was very rebellious,” she said.
As a result, her father was the first in his community to send his children to a public school.
Later, Enns went to Canada as an exchange student.
She began to fall in love with technology at the age of 15 when she had her first camera.
Now, she manages the social media activities of two companies in Cuauhtemoc and, in addition to her TikTok account, also has 166,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel.
Enns, who describes herself as a feminist, praises the Mennonites for their industriousness and sense of solidarity, and wants her popularity to motivate others.
“For me, it means breaking a lot of rules. I hope I can inspire other Mennonite women to be more independent, to be strong and not be afraid to speak their minds,” she said.
WAKE-UP CALL: Firms in the private sector were not taking basic precautions, despite the cyberthreats from China and Russia, a US cybersecurity official said A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday. Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a ninth victim
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
A shark attack off Egypt’s Red Sea coast killed a tourist and injured another, authorities said on Sunday, with an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs source identifying both as Italian nationals. “Two foreigners were attacked by a shark in the northern Marsa Alam area, which led to the injury of one and the death of the other,” the Egyptian Ministry of Environment said in a statement. A source at the Italian foreign ministry said that the man killed was a 48-year-old resident of Rome. The injured man was 69 years old. They were both taken to hospital in Port Ghalib, about 50km north
MISSING: Prosecutors urged the company to move workers out of poor living conditions to hotels, but residents said many workers had already left the town Brazil has stopped issuing temporary work visas for BYD, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday, in the wake of accusations that some workers at a site owned by the Chinese electric vehicle producer had been victims of human trafficking. The announcement came days after labor authorities said they found 163 Chinese workers who had been brought to Brazil irregularly in “slavery-like” conditions at the BYD factory construction site in the northeastern state of Bahia. The workers were employed by contractor Jinjiang Group, which has denied any wrongdoing. Later, the authorities also said the workers were victims of human trafficking,
RSS