Mexico

Since Alexander von Humboldt’s travels in the early nineteenth century portrayed Mexico as a land of vast untapped riches, Mexico has been a minor target of German immigration. Upon Mexican independence in 1823, there were approximately 200 Germans in the entire country, and in 1980 the number of ethnic Germans in Mexico probably did not exceed 15,000 (Buchenau 2004).

Nineteenth-century Mexico attracted few of the traditional immigrants that characterized German diasporas elsewhere in the Americas. Rugged and mountain­ous, the country possesses precious little farmland of the kind that encouraged im­migration to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. Much of the arable land requires hard work and irrigation, and by the coming of independence, the best lands were in the hands of a landed elite.

Beginning in the 1850s, Mexico at­tracted a growing number of Germans, as the liberal Reforma fostered free trade and individual ownership of land. Initially, the liberals’ continued struggles with their con­servative rivals precluded an implementa­tion of many of these measures. Ironically, it was the Austrian-born Emperor Maxi­milian, called onto the scene by a French­Conservative alliance, who ensured the tri­umph of the liberals’ program. In a betrayal of his backers, Maximilian supported the Reforma, and he ended discriminatory leg­islation that had discouraged immigration. Enticed by the prospect of living under the rule of Maximilian, thousands of German­speaking immigrants flocked to Mexico in the mid-1860s. The vast majority of these immigrants were young, male, and single, and many of them returned home after Maximilian’s execution in 1867.

Not surprisingly, most of the Germans considered themselves temporary residents rather than immigrants. Because most en­trepreneurs anticipated a stay in Mexico of relatively short duration, they sent their profits home rather than commit signifi­cant capital investments to the host soci­ety. Sharing the predominant view that “whiter” was better, they segregated them­selves from the society around them. Pre­vailing attitudes among the Mexican elite furthered the gulf that separated the im­migrants from their host society.

Thus, the Germans formed a sojourner community made up of temporary mi­grants with a limited personal stake in the host society. Three out of four Germans were male, and almost all of the women were married (Buchenau 2004). Although deep social divisions marked the German community, merchants unquestionably dominated the scene. Because most of them had made plans to return to their na­tive country before starting a family, their interest in social life remained slight: as their only significant social club, they at­tended the Deutsches Haus (German House) in Mexico City. Founded in 1848 in an effort to unify German expatriates di­vided in their political loyalties, the Deutsches Haus soon became the central meeting point of all Germans in Mexico. In the absence of other associations such as schools, churches, athletic clubs, and beneficent societies, the German sojourner community did not yet become a diaspora in the true sense.

By the late 1800s, the processes of Mexican modernization and German uni­fication combined to forge closer relations between the two countries. Mexico entered an era of export-led economic growth dur­ing the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1876—1911). Diaz attracted foreign in­vestments to build a network of railroads, which led to a revival of the mining indus­try and a surge in the production of tropi­cal products. He also attempted to “whiten” Mexico by a mass agrarian immi­gration—a project doomed to failure due to the continuing social conditions in the countryside. Meanwhile, German unifica­tion created the conditions for political and economic expansion into Latin America. Much as the Industrial Revolution had paved Otto von Bismarck’s way to the uni­fied German Empire, the elimination of internal borders fostered industrialization and, subsequently, the search for export markets.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the German sojourner community in Mex­ico City had transformed itself into an eth­nic enclave. According to a 1914 census by the German consul, the German popula­tion in the capital numbered 1,236 adults, not counting Austrian, Swiss, or natural­ized Mexican citizens. Thirty-two percent of the adult population was female (up from 25 percent in 1865), and, even more importantly, the census counted more than 400 children (Buchenau 2004). Therefore, the nuclear family had surpassed the single trade conquistador in importance within the German community. This larger and more socially diverse population spawned the emergence of a host of new German in­stitutions. In 1912 a German travel guide to Mexico listed a German newspaper, the Deutsche Zeitung von Mexico (German Newspaper of Mexico), as well as fourteen associations: sporting clubs devoted to rowing, horseback riding, swimming, and gymnastics; two Masonic lodges; and a German school.

In this ethnic enclave—but not in rural Mexico, where Germans were few and far between—the Germans led what one eth­nic German has described as “life under the bell jar” (Buchenau 2004). Until the 1950s, this bell jar enclosed the “old” German fam­ilies to such an extent that German, and not Spanish, remained the first language even of those born in Mexico. In most families, the children were forbidden to speak Spanish inside the family home, apart from neces­sary communication with the Mexican ser­vants that tended to the family’s needs.

The foundation of the German school constituted the most important moment in the transition from loose diaspora to ethnic enclave. In 1894 the Deutsche Schule von Mexico/Colegio Aleman de Mexico opened its doors. While the school initially offered instruction in the first six grades only, in 1918 the Colegio Aleman gradu­ated its first high school class, and four years later it became the first school outside Europe to win the approval of the German authorities for the Abitur degree. The Cole­gio Aleman pursued a threefold mission: to educate German children in the tradition of their ancestors, to teach Germans what they needed to know about Mexico, and to acquaint Mexicans with German culture. This school reached out far beyond Mexico City in its enrollment of students, and many of the German coffee planters in dis­tant Chiapas sent their children to be edu­cated there.

Efforts to promote German churches experienced far greater difficulties than the school. With the option of worshipping in Mexican churches, German Catholics did not organize until the late 1910s, and by then, the revolutionary state’s attack on the organized church did not allow the foun­dation of a German Catholic Church. A majority among the Germans in Mexico, the Lutherans experienced somewhat greater success. Since 1861 they had con­gregated in a variety of buildings, including a monastery, the British Episcopal Church, and a concert hall. It was not until the 1950s that German Catholics and Luther­ans got their own church buildings in Mex­ico City.

World War I accentuated the self­segregation of the Germans in Mexico. After many decades during which the Ger­mans had coexisted with other immigrant communities, the war drew a line between the German speakers on the one hand, and the British, French, and U.S. enclaves on the other hand. While the foreigners ini­tially feared the revolution more than they did each other, the U.S.

The Germans in Mexico emerged rela­tively unscathed from the twin threats of the revolution and World War I. New pres­ident Venustiano Carranza favored Ger­man investments as a counterweight to the rapidly increasing capital flow from the United States. In fact, Carranza expressed such pro-German sentiments that U.S. and German diplomats believed that he might enter a Mexican German alliance. Hence the ill-fated Zimmermann Telegram, which proposed such an alliance, helped bring the United States into the war against Germany. Ironically, the revolution con­tributed to a process that strengthened, rather than weakened, the German colony. For all German merchants the years of tur­moil precluded a return to their home country in the foreseeable future and thus increased their stake in Mexico. By 1930 most affluent Germans had purchased a private residence, and some merchants even owned the buildings that housed their businesses. With so much capital invested in Mexico, the German merchants took a greater interest in their community and ex­pended a considerable amount of time and money to help the enclave succeed. While most Germans still envisioned an eventual return to Germany, Mexico had emerged as the focus of their lives.

Not surprisingly, their lives differed from those of their compatriots at home. While the Germans in Mexico enjoyed prosperity and a high social status despite the revolution, most of Germany saw the same period as a time of war, hunger, na­tional humiliation, runaway inflation, and sluggish economic growth. As a result of this discrepancy, the old German fami­lies cherished an image of a mother coun­try that no longer corresponded to reality. Perhaps inevitably, this desire to cling to past greatness contributed to an almost unanimous rejection of the Weimar Re­public among the Germans in Mexico. The issue that best demonstrated this con­servative opposition to the Weimar Re­public was the Flaggenstreit (debate over the German flag). The official flag of the Weimar Republic was black, red, and gold—since the Napoleonic Wars the flag of German democrats. The vast majority of Germans in Latin America refused to recognize these colors, preferring the black, white, and red flag of the empire. In 1922 a poll taken by the VDR favored the imperial over the republican flag by a vote of 1,800 to 2.

Not surprisingly, most Germans in Mexico reacted with undisguised glee to Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power. Hitler’s minister, Baron Rudt von Kollenberg, had little trouble bringing the expatriate Ger­mans into line with Nazi policies, and at least 150 Germans joined the Nazi Party. Dependent on a government subsidy from Berlin, the German school, long a bastion of intercultural education, alienated scores of Mexican students and dedicated itself to teaching Nazi ideology. By 1939 all institu­tions of the German colony answered to the Auslandsorganisation (AO, Foreign Organization). The AO also supervised the activities of the small local branch of the Nazi Party, it attempted to bribe Mexican politicians, and it helped German intelli­gence operations. Nonetheless, Nazi efforts to unify all Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) encountered limited success. Nazi repres­sion created a dissident German-speaking diaspora, as more than 2,000 exiles, in­cluding hundreds of Jewish refugees, as well as novelist Anna Seghers and journal­ist Egon Erwin Kisch, soon joined a small number of German anti-Fascists in Mex­ico. These new immigrants wasted no time attacking Hitler’s totalitarian state. Given this new diversity in the German popula­tion, the Nazi goal of ideological confor­mity among German speakers in Mexico remained elusive.

World War II dealt a crushing blow to the German community. Before the Ger­man attack on France, the Nazis and the German colony had enjoyed relatively free rein in their activities. Aware of the fact that most Mexicans favored a strict posi­tion of neutrality, the strongly anti-Fascist president Lazaro Cardenas declared in May 1940 that his government did not worry about a fifth column in Mexico. But upon the German attack on France, he promised the U.S. government to support the coordination of hemispheric defense. By early 1941, his successor, Manuel Avila Camacho, had permitted U.S. agents to launch an intelligence campaign that de­stroyed the influence of the AO. Finally, the state of war between the United States and the Axis powers led to a U.S.-Mexican alliance. In December Camacho’s govern­ment froze the assets of Axis nationals as well as those of all Mexicans who traded with the Axis, and six months later Mexico declared war on Germany following the sinking of two Mexican tankers by Ger­man submarines. The Mexican govern­ment interned over 200 Germans in an old fortress in Perote, Veracruz, and it also es­tablished a public agency that administered all German-owned businesses in trust.

The postwar era witnessed a blurring of the formerly sharp lines between the German colony and Mexican society. Mex­ican society had changed too much to ac­cept the continued self-segregation of for­eign colonies. Industrialization produced a formidable Mexican middle class, whose members did not accept the artificial barri­ers existing between foreign enclaves and Mexican society. More Mexican families began to enroll their children in the schools of the foreign colonies—schools that en­joyed an excellent reputation for their stringent curriculum and their bilingual education. Finally, within the German colony the arrival of employees of multina­tional concerns marginalized the old mer­chant families. As most of these newcomers planned a relatively brief stay, the new ar­rivals further fragmented an already di­vided community.

The Mexican elites and middle classes had gained self-confidence from victory in the war, and the abyss of totalitarianism had at last discredited the supposedly su­perior German ways. In addition, follow­ing the lead of the United States, Mexico began to produce mass culture appealing to the children and grandchildren of for­eign immigrants. When young Mexicans used the new mass media to articulate their own version of the wave of counter­culture made in the United States, their peers from foreign families discovered that it was “hip” to be Mexican. Meanwhile, import-substitution industrialization pro­duced a sizable group of urban nouveaux riches who soon discovered the value and prestige of the foreign institutions such as the German Club and the Colegio Aleman. Formerly exclusively German, the Club Aleman underwent a thorough mex- icanization: of fourteen executive officers of the club in 2005, only four speak Ger­man as their native language. As Mexico City grew from a city of 1 million to a megalopolis of 20 million, the German colony became increasingly marginalized, and the use of Spanish more important. As of 2005, almost all ethnic Germans born in Mexico—whether of the first or the sixth generation—consider Spanish their native language, and most of those who have learned German speak it with a Span­ish accent. Finally, the last thirty years of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first have witnessed an increasing number of mixed marriages between Ger­mans and Mexicans, usually alumni of the German school.

The Colegio Aleman mirrored these changes. Between 1942 and 1948, the school was forbidden to offer instruction in German. As a result, the Mexican share of the student population increased to almost 75 percent, and Spanish became the lan­guage of currency among the students. This trend only grew stronger during the 1960s and 1970s, as the teachers con­tracted in postwar Germany increasingly failed to connect with their conservative German and Mexican students. To make matters worse, these teachers earned up to twenty times the salary of their colleagues contracted in Mexico, including those who spoke perfect Spanish and German and thus possessed the best qualifications to teach in this bicultural school. Nonethe­less, Mexican elite families, including those of former presidents Luis Echeverria and Jose Lopez Portillo, continued to send their

children to the German school. Wealthy Mexicans still believed that knowledge of German culture improved the moral fabric of their children.

While it could not dissuade either Mexicans or Germans from attending the Colegio Aleman, the issue of the teachers highlighted the postwar crisis of the Ger­man community. The citizens of imperial and Nazi Germany had held their heads high at a time when German science and military power jockeyed for world domi­nance, and they had often regarded the Mexicans as an inferior people. With Ger­man unity shattered and the two successor states a pair of pawns on the cold war chessboard, however, segregating oneself from Mexican society was hard to justify. Moreover, the colony fell to infighting and mutual recriminations. The Nazi past di­vided those who had actively participated in the dictatorship from passive observers of the situation—not to mention from the refugees from Hitler’s terror. A further gap existed between these three groups and re­turnees from Germany, who had lived through five years of aerial bombings and bitterly complained about the materialistic attitude of the Germans in Mexico. In the view of these returnees, Germans had en­joyed an easy ride in Mexico. Finally, be­tween I960 and 1990, almost 17,000 Ger­mans came to Mexico, many of them employees of multinational companies such as Volkswagen in the state of Puebla, who returned to Germany after a stint of several years (Buchenau 2004). Since World War II, the community of German speakers in Mexico has thus become a polydiaspora marked by increasing social and cultural differentiation.

Jurgen Buchenau

See also Carranza, Venustiano; German Migration to Latin America (1918-1933); Humboldt, Alexander von; Intellectual Exile; Kisch, Egon Erwin; Latin America, Nazi Party in; Seghers, Anna; Volkswagen Company and Its VW Beetle; World WarI

References and Further Reading

Bernecker, Walther L. Die Handelskonquistadoren: Europaische Interessen und mexikanischer Staat im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag, 1988.

Blancpain, Jean-Pierre. Migrations et memoire germaniques en Amerique Latine d Γepoque contemporaine: Contribution d Γetude de Γexpansion allemande outre-mer. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1994.

Buchenau, Jurgen. “Small Numbers, Great Impact: Mexico and Its Immigrants.” Journal of American Ethnic History 20, 3 (2001): 23^9.

------. Tools of Progress: A German Merchant Family in Mexico City, 1865-Present. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2004.

Gonzalez Navarro, Moises. Los extranjeros en Mexico y los mexicanos en el extranjero, 1821—1970. 3 vols. Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1993.

Katz, Friedrich. Deutschland, Diaz und die mexikanische Revolution: Die deutsche Politik in Mexiko 1870-1920. Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1964.

Pferdekamp, Wilhelm. Auf Humboldts Spuren: Deutsche im jungen Mexiko. Munich: Max Hueber, 1958.

Schuler, Friedrich E. Mexico between Hitler and Roosevelt: Mexican Foreign Relations in the Age of Ldzaro Cdrdenas, 1934-1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1998.

Von Mentz, Brιgida, et al. Los pioneros del imperialismo alemdn en Mexico. Mexico City: CIESAS, 1982.

Von Mentz, Brιgida, et al. Los empresarios alemanes, el Tercer Reich y la oposicion de derecha a Cdrdenas. 2 vols. Mexico City: CIESAS, 1987.