Abstract
This article offers a transnational history of migrant material culture by exploring the changing meanings of the steel-wheeled tractor. A defining innovation, the steel wheel transformed North American agriculture but by mid-twentieth century had been eclipsed by the rubber-tired tractor. But not all farming histories follow this familiar narrative. Old Colony Mennonites, who had left the Canadian prairies to establish farming colonies in Northern Mexico in the 1920s, sacralized the steel-wheeled tractor as a symbol of tradition at midcentury. To protect their culture, Old Colony stalwarts left Mexico for eastern Bolivia in the 1960s where, ironically, they were viewed as agricultural innovators. This image changed once again with environmental and religious challenges in the late twentieth century. The steel-wheeled tractor’s many transformations across space and time complicate assumptions about technological obsolescence while linking the farming histories of North and South America.
