German Immigration To Mexico - Cultural Legacy

Cultural Legacy

Homes in the town of Nueva Alemania resemble the architectural style of northern Germany, and many of this area's settlers came from the cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck. In San Luis Potosí, Sinaloa (Mazatlán) and Veracruz, settlers from Bavaria built structures similar to those found in the Black Forest. The German Cultural Center building in San Luis Potosí is a Bavarian mansion that had been owned by the Baron of Baden-Baden.

Oktoberfest is usually held in several large cities with German-Mexican communities throughout the country, mainly in Mexico City, Chihuahua, and Victoria de Durango. German Mexicans were important in the development of the Mexican cheese and brewing industries. Also of note, the Colegio Alemán Alexander von Humboldt in Mexico City is the largest German school outside Germany.

German roots are particularly notable in Mexican music due to the large numbers of German immigrants in Texas and northern Mexico around the 1830s. The distributors of German-made accordions aggressively marketed the loud, sturdy little "boom boxes" as far back as the late 19th century. Today, various overlapping styles of music that descended in part from German music (notably polka) include tejano, conjunto, Tex-Mex, quebradita, banda, ranchera, and norteño. Such musical styles are especially popular in northern Mexico and in places of the United States where there is a large immigrant population of Mexican heritage.

The brewing industry, in Monterrey, Nuevo León, was developed in part by German immigrants. The influx of German immigrants and the brief Austrian reign (mid-19th century) of Emperor Maximilian, who never traveled anywhere without his two German brew-masters, helped cement the art of brewing as an all-Mexican endeavor. German influence has had a lasting impact on Mexican beers, with brands such as Negra Modelo and Dos Equis Ambar, both deriving from a malty subset of dark lagers known as Vienna-style.

The German-Mexican population is especially prevalent in southern Mexico, particularly the state of Chiapas, where German farmers and industrialists where encouraged to immigrate in the late 1890's following collaboration between Otto Von Bismarck and Porfirio Diaz to establish modern coffe plantations and food processing facilities in the state. German-Mexicans make up a large minority of the population of the soconusco region of Chiapas, where the German population has intermixed with the Mayan whom make up the majority of the regions population. A study by the Autonomous University of Mexico found that in the municipality of Tapachula and the surrounding Soconusco region that the mixed Mestizo population had a larger concentration of German heritage that Spanish heritage. Many of the original German farms and facilities continue to operate as both ejidos and private ventures.