The Lawndale Choir: Singing Mennonite From The City

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The Lawndale Choir: Singing Mennonite from the CityAUSTIN MCCABE JUHNKE*Abstract: This article examines the Lawndale Choir in light of U.S.-Mennonitedenominational politics surrounding race during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Thechoir formed around 1970 at Lawndale Mennonite Church, a congregation that beganin 1934 as a mission for ethnic Mexicans in Chicago. In the context of heighteneddenominational tensions surrounding the church’s relationship to its minoritymembers, and in contrast to the newly released Mennonite Hymnal (1969), thechoir’s performances made urban, Latina/o Mennonite musical identities audible tothe broader church. Yet they also invited their audiences into a unity that transcendedtraditional boundaries of ethnic, racial, and religious identity. Drawing heavily onthe popular music of the day, the choir’s performances implicitly critiquedformulations of Mennonite identity that looked for legitimacy in European historicalroots and that presupposed a border between Mennonite religious practice and thesecular world.In 1969, at a denomination-wide Mennonite Church conference inTurner, Oregon, Mary Oyer, a well-known Mennonite musician and choirdirector, led Mennonites on a hymn-sing tour of the newly publishedMennonite Hymnal. Oyer had been the executive secretary of the HymnalCommittee that produced the songbook, a committee that includedrepresentatives from both the General Conference Mennonite Church and(Old) Mennonite Church. For the first time, these two groups hadcollaborated to create a shared hymnal. Just before the hymnal’scompletion, a committee member, Ellrose Zook, wrote to Mary Oyer,expressing his conviction that the hymnal was “more Mennonite than anyother hymnal so far published.” As the representative from the hymnal’spublisher, Zook thought the book captured a particularly Mennoniteethos so well that it would not likely find a market beyond Mennonitedenominations. “The idea that we are trying to reach some of the marketsthat [gospel hymn publishers] Hope and Rodeheaver Hall-Mack arereaching with their book does not quite reflect the true intent of the book,”he added. 1 One can understand why Zook may have sensed something*Austin McCabe Juhnke is a lecturer in musicology at The Ohio State University.Research for this article was conducted with the generous support of an Open ResearchGrant from the Mennonite Historical Society. This article is adapted from a portion of theauthor’s PhD dissertation, entitled “Music and the Mennonite Ethnic Imagination” (TheOhio State University, 2018). The author would like to thank Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Theresa309MQR 92 (July 2019)

310The Mennonite Quarterly Reviewdistinctly Mennonite in the hymnal. At a time when perceived Mennoniteacculturation into U.S. society was producing anxiety about the nature ofMennonite identity, the joint Hymnal Committee spent years in theirefforts to combine the two Mennonite denominations’ singing traditionsand to highlight their shared musical roots. 2Yet at the same moment that white Mennonites were connecting to asense of heritage through The Mennonite Hymnal, elsewhere at theassembly, John Powell, a black Mennonite pastor, demanded thatMennonites respond to a document called the “Black Manifesto.” Duringthe 1960s Powell had been involved in the Civil Rights Movement and inlabor organizing in Detroit. The “Black Manifesto,” drafted earlier thatyear at the National Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit,demanded 500 million from white Christian churches and synagogues inreparation for their role in the exploitation of black Americans. 3 Inspiredby the document, Powell called on the Mennonite Church to “confess inword and action to the sins committed against black people” and askedfor 500,000 in reparations from white Mennonite churches to supportprojects led by a Minority Ministries Council of black and LatinoMennonites. 4 Powell accompanied his demands with a critique thatAnabaptist-European Mennonite identity had been institutionalized inthe form of racialized power structures within the denomination. Hisintervention in Turner sparked conversation and controversy in thefollowing years. 5Historians Tobin Miller Shearer and Felipe Hinojosa have recently shedlight on how, in the twentieth century, “the intersections of evangelicalismand race, not peace and nonresistance, have been at the center of evolvingDelgadillo, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of thisarticle.1. Ellrose Zook to Mary Oyer (Feb. 3, 1967), Box 16, Folder 2. Mennonite Church, Musicand Worship Committee Records, 1909-1992. I-3-1. Mennonite Church USA Archives—Elkhart, Ind. [hereafter cited as MCUSA Archives].2. The Mennonite Hymnal committee and ideologies of Mennonite identity are addressedin more depth in “Music and the Mennonite Ethnic Imagination” (PhD diss., The Ohio StateUniversity, 2018), 27-73.3. James Forman, “The Black Manifesto,” The Review of Black Political Economy 1 (March1970), 36-44.4. “Urban Racial Concerns,” 1969. Box 1, Folder 1. Mennonite Board of Missions MinorityMinistries Council Records, 1969-1997. IV-21.—MCUSA Archives. See the account ofPowell’s intervention at the 1969 Mennonite General Conference in Tobin Miller Shearer, “ADemanding Conversation,” in Faith and Race in American Political Life, ed. Robin DaleJacobson and Nancy D. Wadsworth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 213215.5. On the “Manifesto Movement” in the Mennonite Church, see Tobin Miller Shearer,Daily Demonstrators: The Civil Rights Movement in Mennonite Homes and Sanctuaries (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 190-220.

The Lawndale Choir: Singing Mennonite from the City311notions of Mennonite theology and identity.” 6 Music also played asignificant role in shaping Mennonites’ perceptions of their identity andhistory, and their place in American social and political life during thetwentieth century. As Benjamin Goossen has noted, a discourse describingMennonites as a distinct ethnic group was emerging among white NorthAmerican and European Mennonites after World War II. 7 At the samemoment, members of the Mennonite Music Committee began to talk aboutcongregational hymn-singing—especially when performed unaccompanied and in four-part harmony—as a cultural expression that connectedsingers to an “authentically Mennonite” past, an idea theyinstitutionalized in the 1969 Mennonite Hymnal. 8The Lawndale Choir, a group associated with the former MennoniteMexican Mission in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, operated atthe margins of that musically constructed identity. Beginning in the 1970s,Mennonite institutional conferences featured performing groups like theLawndale Choir to highlight the growing diversity of the MennoniteChurch beyond the white-Germanic mainstream. The music at theMennonite Board of Missions 1971 conference (“Mission ’71”), forexample, featured the Lawndale Choir alongside Burnside MennoniteChurch’s black gospel choir, and a choir from Betania Mennonite Schoolin Puerto Rico. 9 In the contexts of the ongoing fight for black and browncivil rights in the United States and the ethnoracial politics within theMennonite Church, the music of the Lawndale Choir made urban,Latina/o Mennonite musical identities audible to the broader church. Yet6. Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 2014), 12. See, e.g., Shearer’s Daily Demonstrators.7. Benjamin W. Goossen, “From Aryanism to Anabaptism: Nazi Race Science in theLanguage of Mennonite Ethnicity,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 90 (April 2016), 135-163.8. A sense of shared Mennonite musical heritage was apparent within the hymnalcommittee in three primary ways: their interest in the hymns of the sixteenth-centuryAnabaptist hymnal known as the Ausbund; a desire for “reconnecting” Mennonites to aGermanic chorale-singing tradition; and interest in highlighting the nineteenth-centuryshape-note singing-school tradition represented by Mennonite songbook publisher JosephFunk. Mary Oyer emphasized these connections in her introduction to The Mennonite Hymnal(Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1969) (unpaginated),[This hymnal] draws on various cultural backgrounds of Mennonites. Their mostdistinctive book, the Ausbund of 1564, which is still in use, is represented by brief portionsof three texts joined with tunes that the sixteenth-century Anabaptists might haveknown. Mennonites who have remained close to their German background still singLutheran chorales; chorale texts and tunes are well represented. Those who spokeEnglish in the early nineteenth century absorbed the American tradition of Watts’ texts—along with authors such as Wesley and Newton—and replaced their Germanic past withAmerican tunes and folk hymns from the singing school tradition. These strands—German and American—join in this book to enrich the resources of each.See also, McCabe Juhnke, “Music and the Mennonite Ethnic Imagination,” 27-73.9. “Mission 71: God’s Now Community,” Gospel Herald, Aug. 24, 1971.

312The Mennonite Quarterly Reviewchoir members also invited their audiences into a unity that transcendedtraditional boundaries of ethnic, racial, and religious identity. Drawingheavily on the popular music of the 1960s and early 1970s, the LawndaleChoir’s music implicitly critiqued formulations of Mennonite identity thatlooked for legitimacy in European historical roots and that presupposed aborder between Mennonite religious practice and the secular world.CITY MISSIONS AND THE WHITE MENNONITEETHNORACIAL IMAGINATIONMennonites in North America trace their historical origins to amovement of Anabaptist radicals in sixteenth-century European citieswho were viewed as heretics by Catholics and Protestants alike. MostAnabaptists were quickly driven out of urban centers, finding refuge inrural enclaves in Europe. When Mennonites began to settle in NorthAmerica beginning in the seventeenth century, they used their freedomand access to “empty” American space to reestablish the kinds of ruralsectarian communities they had maintained in Europe. 10 Within thesecommunities, Mennonites generally preferred to maintain a religiousnonconformity to the ways of the world. Still, although Mennonitesresisted the dominant patterns of life in the United States, they did not allsystematically reject modern U.S. cultural and religious perspectives. Bythe end of the nineteenth century, Mennonites had warmed to themissionary movement in the United States and established missions notonly in foreign countries but also in urban centers and Native Americanreservations in the United States. 11The first Mennonite city mission was the Mennonite Home Mission,established in 1893 in Chicago. But life in this modern urban metropolisoften seemed at odds with traditional conceptions of Mennonite life. 12Mennonites tended to view the separation of rural life as going hand-inhand with Mennonite nonconformity, imagining their rural communitiesas morally insulated spaces outside of the U.S. social order. They viewed10. Of course this “empty” space was actually space forcibly “emptied” of NativeAmericans. On Mennonites and historical erasure of Native American people, see JohnSharp, “Mennonites and Native Americans: A Reconciliation?,” Mennonite Life 61, no. 2(2006), 1. See Theron F. Schlabach, Gospel versus Gospel: Mission and the Mennonite Church, 18631944 (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1980) 26-42.12. On the history of the Home Mission, see Philipp Gollner, “Good White Christians:How Religion Created Race and Ethnic Privilege for Immigrants in America” (PhD diss.,University of Notre Dame, 2016), 177-232. See also his article, “How Mennonites BecameWhite: Religious Activism, Cultural Power, and the City,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 90(April 2016), 165-193.

The Lawndale Choir: Singing Mennonite from the City313U.S. cities—and the secular values that seemed to emanate from them—with skepticism. 13These perspectives not only resonated with Mennonites’ value ofreligious nonconformity; they also aligned with dominant ideas abouturbanization in the United States during the first half of the twentiethcentury. Within the influential Chicago School of Sociology during the1930s, for example, rural contexts were thought to preserve the personal,face-to-face aspects of community that would dissolve in inherentlyfragmented urban contexts. 14 Influenced by this thinking, Mennoniteleaders like Guy F. Hershberger and J. Winfield Fretz worried thaturbanization was threatening essential aspects of Mennonite community,and they began to warn against Mennonite urbanization during the late1930s and early 1940s. 15 Fretz was particularly concerned aboutMennonites in Chicago. He had studied for his Ph.D. in sociology at theUniversity of Chicago. Influenced by the Chicago School, Fretz wasskeptical that Mennonites’ distinctive nonconformist and separatistreligious values could be maintained in the city. In his thesis on Chicago’sMennonite missions he commented in 1940 that there was “so little that ischaracteristically Mennonite about them.” 16 Elsewhere that same year heconcluded that “[t]he urban soil is not the kind of soil in which theMennonite Church can grow. It is literally true that the city soil is too hard,stony and shallow for Mennonite ideals to take root. The corruptinginfluences of the city have choked out much of the seed there sown.” 1713. In 1940, for example, Guy F. Hershberger asserted that “the rural environment, itseems, is much better fitted for the preservation of the Mennonite way of life than is the cityenvironment,” in “Maintaining the Mennonite Rural Community,” Mennonite QuarterlyReview 14 (Oct. 1940), 195-213. This sentiment was also not new among Mennonites. In their1905 Mennonite Church History, Jonas Hartzler and Daniel Kauffman noted that someMennonites opposed the Chicago Home Mission because “they did not believe the simplicityof the gospel could be maintained in the city.”— Mennonite Church History (Scottdale, Pa:Mennonite Book and Tract Society, 1905), 348.14. On the Chicago School of sociology, see Cohen, The Symbolic Construction ofCommunity (London: Routledge, 1985), 22-38.15. See, e.g., Hershberger’s 1940 article, “Maintaining the Mennonite Rural Community,”and J. Winfield Fretz, “Mennonites and Their Economic Problems,” Mennonite QuarterlyReview 14 (Oct. 1940), 201. For a summary of the Mennonite community movement, see PerryBush, Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties: Mennonite Pacifism in Modern America (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1998), 130-136.16. Fretz as quoted in Paul Toews, “J. Winfield Fretz and the Early History of MennoniteSociology,” Mennonite Life 54, no. 2 (1999), 19.17. J. Winfield Fretz, “Mennonites and Their Economic Problems,” 201. Fretz was notalone in his thinking. In an introductory article to a 1953 issue of Mennonite Life devoted toChicago’s missions, Andrew Shelly described Chicago as a “city of contrasts”: It had the“greatest rail center in the world” and was a “Mecca for most religious beliefs,” yet the cityhad also bred “intemperate drinking and crime,” and its hurried residents often foundthemselves “in a vicious circle of thrills.”—Shelly, “This Is Chicago,” Mennonite Life 8, no. 2(1953), 52-54.

314The Mennonite Quarterly ReviewFretz helped convene a “Conference on Mennonite Cultural Problems”that met irregularly between 1942 and 1967, part of a larger Mennonitecommunity movement that aimed to address concerns about Mennonitesecularization and urbanization during the middle of the century. 18Where Fretz’s sociological perspectives on the city were indebted to theChicago School, his moral orientation to urban space aligned withlongstanding popular perspectives in the United States. Since thenineteenth century, according to Robert Orsi, a historian of religion, “thecity was cast as the necessary mirror of American civilization, andfundamental categories of American reality—whiteness, heterosexuality,domestic virtue, feminine purity, middle class respectability—wereconstituted in opposition to what was said to exist in cities.” 19 The citywas thus “rendered as the site of moral depravity, lascivious allure, andthe terrain of necessary Christian intervention.” 20 Seeing it as theirresponsibility to rescue the city from its moral failings, progressive-eraChristians—including some Mennonites—began to organize urbanmission projects like Chicago’s Mennonite Home Mission. By 1953,Chicago was home to over a dozen Mennonite missions and churches,and, as Philipp Gollner has argued, it was through this urban religiousactivism that Mennonites began to see themselves as white Protestantswithin the U.S. ethnoracial hierarchy. 21Mennonite missionaries were not the only newcomers to Chicagoduring the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Chicago’s ethniclandscape shifted dramatically in this period. During World War I, laborshortages spurred the Great Migration of African-Americans who left theSouth to find new opportunities in Northern cities. At the same time, asignificant number of Mexican migrants also moved to Chicago to findwork. Many of these new Mexican residents settled in the neighborhoodnear the Home Mission. 22 It was not until the Great Depression, however,that Mennonite Home Mission workers met many of their Spanishspeaking neighbors while distributing food and clothing in their18. See Bush, Two Kingdoms, 133-136.19. Robert A. Orsi, “Introduction: Crossing the City Line,” in Gods of the City: Religion andthe American Urban Landscape, ed. Robert A. Orsi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1999), 5.20. Ibid., 6.21. Philipp Gollner, “How Mennonites Became White,” 174-177. On Mennonite missionsin Chicago in 1953, see Shelly, “This Is Chicago.”22. Erik Gellman, “Pilsen,” in The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, ges/2477.html. See also Gabriela F.Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916-39 (Urbana, Ill.: University ofIllinois Press, 2008), 39-58.

The Lawndale Choir: Singing Mennonite from the City315neighborhood. 23 As Mexican residents in Chicago began attending theMission, racist reactions from white Mennonites and other newlyevangelized whites at the Mission led church workers to establish aseparate “Mexican Mission” in 1934. 24“White” and “Mexican” were not the only perceived ethnoracialcategories at the Home Mission, however. One missionary wrote in theGospel Herald in 1935:It might be of some interest to the friends of the Mission for me toname the various nationalities in the membership here: Bohemian,German, Scotch-Irish, Mexican, Scotch-English, Slavish, Norwegian,Bohemian-Jewish, Scotch, Swedish, Bohemian-Indian, FrenchGerman, German-Irish, Bohemian-Irish, Spanish, and I must notforget that quite a number of us are just plain Pennsylvania Dutch. 25Though it comes as an off-hand comment, the idea that there were someat the Mission—evidently the missionaries themselves—who were “justplain Pennsylvania Dutch” reveals an important ethnoracial distinction inthe minds of Mennonite missionaries at the Home Mission. BeingPennsylvania Dutch in this context was an unmarked category—one was“just” Pennsylvania Dutch. The other categories of identity at the mission,then, were categories of difference. Still, it is notable that only the MexicanMission was conceived of as a project distinct from the rest of the work ofthe Home Mission. Indeed, it is evident that “Mexican” is not simply adistinction of language, as “Spanish” Europeans represented yet anotherethnic category in the mission worker’s description. At the Home Mission,European ethnic groups seemed to belong together in a way that did notextend to “Mexicans.”Establishing a separate “Mexican Mission” paralleled the ongoingnegotiation of racial categories in the United States at the time. In thesenegotiations, it was not always clear that Mexican migrants would not besubsumed under the category of whiteness. As Matthew Frye Jacobson23. Church history in Box 1, Folder 8, Lawndale Mennonite Church (Chicago, Ill.)Records, 1945-1983, III-13-001, MCUSA Archives.24. As Felipe Hinojosa notes, white congregants began a petition to stop the HomeMission from working with Mexicans. The workers agreed that the Home Mission shouldseek separate accommodations for the Mexican members, and the Illinois MennoniteConference leader F. D. King opined that he was “never was strong for mixing Mexicans intoour church building with our whites.”—Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites, 20.25. “From Our Mission Stations,” Gospel Herald, May 2, 1935. According to C. HenrySmith, Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonites migrated from Pennsylvania to Midwestern stateslike Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. It is possible that “Pennsylvania Dutch” in the mission reportrefers specifically to this large sub-group of Mennonites. Nevertheless it also functions as anindex of white-Germanic Mennonite normativity. On Pennsylvania Mennonites, see C.Henry Smith, “Pennsylvania (USA).”—http://gameo.org/index.php?title Pennsylvania(USA)&oldid 143693.

316The Mennonite Quarterly Reviewhas highlighted, whiteness was an evolving category during thenineteenth and twentieth centuries. He argues that beginning in the 1920s,there was a consolidation of many European “races” into one white“Caucasian” racial category. 26 As Gabriella Arredondo argues, “becomingwhite” still seemed like a distinct possibility for Mexican migrants inearly-twentieth-century Chicago. With growing migration from Mexicoafter World War I, however, “Mexican” became a salient category ofidentity in Chicago that had taken on pejorative associations. 27 In thecontext of xenophobic backlash against Mexican immigration during thefirst decades of the twentieth century, Clare Sheridan observed thatMexicans’ “ethnic characteristics became reified and naturalized asimmutable racial ones,” foreclosing the possibility that Mexicans would“become white.” 28In the context of the city, the Mennonite mission workers viewed theethnoracial landscape of Chicago through the lens of whiteness. Thoughthe urban “Bohemians” or “Slavs” perhaps did not ethnically belong inthe Mennonite Church, Mennonites began to understand them as part ofan American white pan-ethnicity. 29 Thus the myriad European ethnicitiesrepresented at the Home Mission seemed to belong in Chicago, perhapseven in a way that “ethnic Mennonites” did not. Mexicans, by contrast,were increasingly racialized, barred from American belonging.Mennonite missionaries working among Mexicans also participated inthis conceptual othering, often describing Mexicans as “foreigners withinour borders,” “strangers within our gates,” or “Samaritans in Judea.” 30Though many Mexicans found a religious home at the Mission, a sense ofbeing “other” was a salient part of their experience. Historian FelipeHinojosa has described how, when Mexicans began attending services atthe Home Mission, some white attendees refused to worship alongsidethem, and white Mennonite leaders at the mission discouraged “mixed”marriages between white Mennonites and Mexicans. 31 For her part, Esther26. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and theAlchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 9.27. Gabriela F. Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916-39 (Urbana,Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 79.28. Clare Sheridan, “‘Another White Race:’ Mexican Americans and the Paradox ofWhiteness in Jury Selection,” Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (2003), 124-125. See also, MarkOvermyer-Velázquez, “Good Neighbors and White Mexicans: Constructing Race andNation on the Mexico-U.S. Border,” Journal of American Ethnic History 33, no. 1 (2013), 14-15.29. See Gollner, who notes, for example, that after 1924, the Home Mission’s “Fresh Air”program would allow rural Mennonite families the opportunity to select either a “white” or“Mexican” child to host.—Gollner, “Good White Christians,” 219. See also Gollner, “HowMennonites Became White,” 183-185.30. See also Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites, 19.31. Ibid., 18-24.

The Lawndale Choir: Singing Mennonite from the City317Ventura, an early member of the Mexican Mission, remembered, “I hadalways felt that I was a Mennonite in culture and religion, and at the sametime I knew I was different by the way I looked.” 32 At the MexicanMission, congregants were encouraged to conform to the conservativeways of Mennonite dress, but even in a bonnet and dress, perceptions ofracial difference remained. 33FEELING MENNONITE, LOOKING MEXICANIn the following decades, the Mexican Mission grew into a stable andmore autonomous congregation called Lawndale Mennonite Church. Bythe 1970s, Lawndale offered services in both Spanish and English, andmany of the families at Lawndale included “second generation”Mennonites—people for whom the Mennonite congregation at Lawndalewas the only church home they had ever known. One such congregantwas Dan Ventura. Ventura’s parents were Catholics, but “converted” tothe Mennonites in the 1930s, as one of the first Mexican families to join theMission. By the time Ventura was born in 1946, his family was, in hiswords, “totally entrenched in the Mennonite church.” 34As Ventura describes it, he was “born Mennonite.” Indeed, Venturaexplains his formative years by including much of what would have beenconsidered “traditionally Mennonite”: he was born into the MennoniteChurch; he went to a Mennonite high school; he sang from a Mennonitehymnal; and, despite living in Chicago, Ventura says he grew up “on thefarm.” “There was a program through several churches in Chicago andchurches in central Illinois, the Goshen, Indiana area, and Iowa—Kalona,Iowa. Mennonite strongholds. And it was called ‘Fresh Air.’ For us kids,we called it ‘going to the farm.’” 35 Fresh Air programs were commonacross the United States at the time. As Miller Shearer notes, theseprograms were based on the idea that the city was a harmful place forchildren: “[Fresh Air b]oosters repeatedly contrasted urban and ruralenvirons to demonstrate the superiority of the country and its ability torestore children to a state of wholeness, health, and purity.” 36 In thecontext of the Great Migration and subsequent white flight, these ideasincreasingly mapped onto racialized conceptions of urban space afterWorld War II. As Shearer explains, supporters of Fresh Air programs32. Quoted in ibid., 21.33. On the maintenance of “Mennonite” worship styles at the Mexican Mission, see ibid.,18-22.34. Ventura in conversation with the author, Oct. 19, 2016.35. Ibid.36. Tobin Miller Shearer, Two Weeks Every Summer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,2017), 25. See also Gollner, “Good White Christians,” 217-221.

318The Mennonite Quarterly Review“focused on crafting a narrative about black and brown children restoredto full health and well-being through short stays in the country.” 37 Whilemany hosts intended well, Fresh Air programs were also ripe for abuse ofracial and gendered power dynamics. The experience of one MennoniteFresh Air child, Janice Batts, for example, presented a horrifying narrativeof sexual abuse during visits to some of the same Midwest Mennonitecommunities where Ventura spent time. 38Ventura, however, speaks in generally positive terms about hisexperience in the Mennonite Fresh Air program. For Ventura, theseexperiences validated his Mennonite identity:[I asked my mother,] ‘‘How old was I when I first went to the farm?’’And she said, well, you were in the womb. So that’s why I say I wasborn and raised Mennonite, gone to Mennonite farms in Indiana,Central Illinois, and Iowa. And so when I was out there I was in aMennonite church on Sundays, Wednesday nights for prayermeeting and singing. And Sunday night sometimes was hymn sing. 39After his childhood years spending time in rural “Mennonitestrongholds,” Ventura continued along an outwardly traditionalMennonite trajectory when he enrolled at Bethany (Mennonite) HighSchool in Goshen, Indiana. He even worked on a nearby Mennonite farmto earn his keep. Ventura remembers his classmates being surprised thata Mexican from Chicago operated with such comfort in this rural, whiteMennonite community. Ventura explains, however, that he had perhaps amore authentically “Mennonite” experience “on the farm” than did someof the children of the white-collar Mennonite professors at Goshen Collegewho also attended his high school. 40Ventura’s formative years shaped his ability to act as a Mennoniteinsider. Still, if there was a strong sense of feeling at home in ruralMennonite spaces, there were also experiences in which racial differenceskept him from fully belonging:On the farm, for example in Kalona, Iowa, I can remember walkinginto the church. Of course they were Conservative Mennonite, andthe men sat on one side of the aisle, and the women sat on the otherside. And they were very plain buildings, churches. And everybodywas blond. And I would walk in, and everybody would look at me,37. Ibid., 7.38. See Batts’s interview in “The Kindness of Strangers: A Fresh Air child hosted byMennonites breaks her silence,” published on the Our Stories Untold nce/.39. Ventura, in conversation with the author, Oct. 19, 2016.40. Ibid.

The Lawndale Choir: Singing Mennonite from the City319because by that time, by Sunday, I had a pretty good tan going, andblack hair. 41Despite living out the criteria of an authentic, if constructed, Mennoniteidentity—born into the church, living “on the farm,” singing “Mennonite”songs—Ventura’s brown skin and dark hair rendered him out of place inthe context of the Kalona Mennonites’ white, blond-haired congr

members, and in contrast to the newly released Mennonite Hymnal (1969), the choir's performances made urban, Latina/o Mennonite musical identities audible to . Research for this article was conducted with the generous support of an Open Research Grant from the Mennonite Historical Society. This article is adapted from a portion of the

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