Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders
A Century of Stories from Mexico's Mennonite Villages
by Abigail Carl-Klassen

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In Chihuahua, Mexico, the Tres Culturas region is a place where Mennonite, Mestizo, and Indigenous Rarámuri people live, forming a crossroad of traditions, languages, and ways of living. A landscape of convergence and divergence, breaking and reforming, where you might be labeled a rebel—or even excommunicated—for following your dreams. Through poetic vignettes and photography, Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders: A Century of Stories from Mexico's Mennonite Villages portrays one hundred years of cross-cultural encounters in the Tres Culturas region. A century that saw significant changes with intermarriage, sociopolitical pressures, and technological advances on the rise, with people pursuing higher education, economic opportunities, and different religious experiences. Race and ethnicity, gender and labor, migration and excommunication are at the heart of these stories. Some show what it’s like to leave the only community they’ve known—choosing love and education over family and tradition. While others examine what it means to push the boundaries and still decide to stay. A companion to the oral history project of the same name, Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders blends narrative nonfiction and poetry, forming prose poems from transcript excerpts that honor the original speakers, their individual experiences and voices. Intimate and deeply relevant, this is a testament to the universality of connection, belonging, and home.

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Abigail Carl-Klassen is a writer, researcher, poet, educator, and translator. She is the author of Shelter Management (dancing girl press, 2017), Ain’t Country Like You (Digging Press, 2022), and Village Mechanics (FlowerSong Press, 2025), winner of the Inaugural Bougainvillea Poetry Prize. Her poetry was a finalist for the Maverick Poetry Award in 2021. Abigail earned an MFA from the University of Texas El Paso’s Bilingual Creative Writing Program and taught at El Paso Community College and the University of Texas El Paso. During her formative years in rural West Texas, Abigail often listened to people describe what life was like in Mennonite colonies in Mexico during tumultuous times of change. These years, these stories and people, inform her creative and scholarly work with migrant workers, Mennonite communities in Mexico and Texas, social workers, homeless communities, immigrant communities along the US–Mexico border, and Central American migrants and asylum seekers in Mexico. Abigail lives in El Paso, Texas, with her husband and two children.

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Contributors

Author

Abigail Carl-Klassen

Photographer

Raúl Kigra

Photographer

Veronica Enns