Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin America was a destination for miners and soldiers.
The craft of warfare (Kriegshandwerk) was an itinerant one, and in mining Germanspeaking experts had a long history of mobility. The Spanish crown, in general reluctant to admit foreigners to New Spain, during a liberal phase after 1526 leased Venezuela to the South German Welser Company.
In later centuries, German and Iberian miners brought ore-refining technology to Spanish Mexico. Other commercial connections to Latin America, originally to Dutch Suriname and Dutch Brazil, originated with a Portuguese Sephardic Jewish community from Amsterdam that had reestablished itself in seventeenth-century Danish Altona, adjacent to the port of Hamburg.Of the approximately 55 million European migrants to the Americas from the 1830s to the 1950s, about one-fifth went to Latin America. Arrivals increased from 1850 to 1885, then rose rapidly to 1914. Commerce, stock ranching, and plantation agriculture attracted settlers, merchants, entrepreneurs, and laborers in large numbers. They mingled with Flemings, Germans, Neapolitans, Genoese, Greeks, and others. Their children often migrated internally to regions of sustained economic growth or, in search of riches, to new mining districts. Some, however, chose to seclude themselves in small agricultural settlements, which sometimes have been romanticized as, for example, the German Blumenau colony in southern Brazil (f 1850). Such rural colonies professed a “Germanness” that was frozen in time because of distance, separation, and isolation.
Most of the European migrants to the Afro-Native-Latin societies originated in the Mediterranean cultures. From the 1850s to 1924, 38 percent came from Italy, 28 percent from Spain, 11 percent from Portugal, and the rest from Russia (Jews), Germany, and France. Argentina and Brazil received almost four-fifths of the newcomers. In Brazil, the first postindependence phase of European immigration from the 1820s to the 1860s brought German, Italian, and Polish settlers to the coffee plantations of Rio Grande do Sul.
Because the politically powerful planters imposed miserable working conditions, many of the immigrants fled their regime. This oligarchic rule made Brazil different from any other country in the Americas.Some 400,000 German-speaking migrants, at the most, reached Ibero-America, the German term for the countries from Mexico to Chile. Five phases of migration may be discerned: The first took place after the disastrous winter in Europe of 1816 and 1817 spurred flight from famine for a decade and a half, mainly to Brazil. The second phase was a consequence of the agrarian crisis of 1846 and 1847, which was delayed by the Revolution of 1848 and 1849, and involved a decade-long emigration to the independent states. Parallel to the initial phase of southern European mass migration from 1850 to 1885, a third phase of German migration began to grow after 1865. However, while the former rose rapidly from 1885 to 1914, German migration “boomed” only between 1885 and 1894. As in North America, a fourth—brief—migration peak after the end of World War I (86,000 from 1920 to 1924) was caused by disgust about the war, disagreement with the conditions of the Versailles Peace Treaty, or discontent with economic prospects in general. The fifth discernable phase of German migration to South America occurred from 1933 to the late 1940s. It was a new, trifurcated sizeable migration: first of German Jews, then of political and intellectual refugees, and finally of Nazi fugitives from justice after the collapse of fascism.
Diversity of destination and of patterns of insertion characterized the Germanspeaking immigrant communities. Most selected Portuguese-speaking Brazil and Spanishspeaking Argentina as destinations; smaller numbers chose Uruguay and Chile; and a few ended up in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Venezuela, and Colombia. The time lags between the five phases indicate that each cohort of newcomers came from different socio-economic conditions in Germany and, even if destined for the same regions as earlier migrants, met partly or fully acculturated immigrant populations.
In the two major receiving countries, the different cohorts also often settled in different regions. The southernmost Brazilian states were the destination of phase-one migrants; those of phase two settled in Sao Paulo, often as plantation labor, or as first settlers in southern Chile. Groups of them formed agricultural colonies similar to those in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, but numerically smaller, without special privileges, and with fewer connections to the society of origin. Geographic isolation permitted autonomy but retarded economic integration of the rural colonies. Low wages retarded integration of plantation laborers. The pre-1933 Brazilian, Argentine, and Chilean communities—often perceived in Latin America as a single German group—formed clusters of rural islands in different regions, separated from the surrounding culture; clusters of urban elites with ties to the Latin indigenous elites and a certain communality of interests; and, third, clusters of rural and urban laborers.Although in Eastern Europe and in North America the elites emerged out of the German-speaking immigrant communities, elite formation in Latin America involved a distinct movement of merchants, entrepreneurs, and financiers, as well as teachers, scholars, engineers, and military officers. The close connection of the elites to Germany was based on economic interest and the “esteem value” to be derived from German culture, merchandise, and authoritarian political rule.
These diverse communities formed neither a diaspora nor full-fledged ethnic groups. They remained an appendix. Politically and economically, the German state from 1871 to 1945, with its high level of diplomatic exchange and trade, considered the emigrants bridgeheads to fuller exploitation of the New World.
See also Argentina; Brazil; Brazil, German Exile in; Chile; Conquista; German Migration to Latin America (1918—1933)
References and Further Reading
Bade, Klaus J. Europa in Bewegung: Migration vom spdten 18.
Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Munchen: Beck, 2000.----------. Migration in European History, transl. Allison Brown. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Bade, Klaus J., ed. Deutsche im Ausland—Fremde in Deutschland. Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Munchen: Beck, 1992.
Froschle, Hartmut, ed. Die Deutschen in Lateinamerika. Schicksal und Leistung. Tubingen: Erdmann, 1979.
Hoerder, Dirk. “The German-Language Diasporas. A Survey, Critique, and Interpretation.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 11, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 7—44.
Luebke, Frederick C. Germans in Brazil: A Comparative History of Cultural Conflict during World War I. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1987.
Marschalck, Peter. Deutsche Uberseewanderung im 19. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur soziologischen Theorie der Bevolkerung. Stuttgart: Klett, 1973.
Muhlen, Patrick von zur. Fluchtziel Lateinamerika. Die deutsche Emigration 1933—1945. Politische Aktivitdten und soziokulturelle Integration. Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1988.