The Good Place and No Place: Reading Utopias in Old Colony Mennonite Communities and the Book of Revelation

This paper examines how the migration of Old Colony Mennonites to Maya territory in southeastern Mexico represents a form of fugitivity that simultaneously resists and reproduces colonial logics, drawing on religious myths to fuel eschatological visions of utopia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with both Mennonite and Maya communities, this paper focuses on Mennonite narrations of their relationship with land and scriptural texts to understand how Mennonites envision “a good place.” The paper explores the contradictions that arise as Mennonite communities attempt to enshrine particular freedoms through separatist communities while participating in agro-industrial systems that damage ecosystems and neighboring Indigenous communities. We interpret these contradictions through a reading of analogous visions of utopia in Mennonite communities and in the book of Revelation. In doing so, we aim to complicate binary understandings of resistance and complicity to power structures, suggesting that utopic visions of freedom can simultaneously offer possibilities for liberation and justifications of harm.