Latin American-Germans & Their Early Migration to Brazil

Birget, a student on city planning was telling her experiences in Cuba. Her experiences in the Caribbean Island were quiet strange. While she was narrating some of her observations, my discussion with walker came to mind.

Walker had a marvelous experience in Belize and other Latin American countries with German descendant Latin Americans.

There are German descendant minorities in almost every South American and Central American countries including Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

In the eighteenth century some isolated and small groups of German immigrants came to Latin America mainly from Germany, but also from Switzerland, Austria and Russia. Though the US was the main destination for immigration in the 19th century, the immigration to Latin America also was significant for various other political and economic reasons. Ninety percent of them came to Latin America mainly for Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile.

When the first group of Germans arrived in 1824 to Sao Leopoldo, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul in the southern Brazil, after 4 months of traveling, there were 39 people, being 33 Lutherans and 6 Catholics. They found a country with a climate, vegetation and culture very different from those of Germany. Southern Brazil was a land of gauchos, the cattle herders who used, and still live, in the Pampas region of Southern Cone.

In the next decades, however, waves of Germanic immigrants arrived to many areas of the Southern Brazil. They mostly settled in rural areas called colonies. These colonies had been created by the Brazilian government, and the lands were distributed between the immigrants. They had to construct their own houses and cultivate the land.

Germans came to Brazil to work as farmers because there were many lands and job opportunities. The Brazilian government had promised large lands to attract the immigrants, where they could settle with their families and colonize the region. In fact, these lands were in the middle of big forests and the first Germans had been abandoned by the Brazilian Government. The first years were not easy. Many Germans died of tropical diseases, others left the colony to find a better life elsewhere.

In fact, the German colony of Sao Leopoldo was a disaster. Nevertheless, in the next years another wave of 8, 000 Germans arrived to Sao Leopoldo, and then the colony started to develop, and the immigrants established the town of Novo Hamburgo (New Hamburg). From Sao Leopoldo and Novo Hamburgo the German immigrants spread into other areas of Rio Grande do Sul, mainly close to spring of rivers. All the region of Vale dos Sinos has been populated by Germans.

During the 1830's and part of 1840's German immigration was interrupted due to the "War of the Farrapos" in Brazil. The immigration restarted after 1845 with the creation of new colonies. The most important ones were Blumenau in 1850 and Joinville in 1851, both in Santa Catarina state and attracted thousands of German immigrants to the region. Some of the mass influx was due to Revolutions of 1848 in the German states.

In the last third of the nineteenth century immigration to Brazil became so difficult with the "Heydtschen Reskript" (1859) and they started to migrate towards Argentina. In the 1880's and 1890's German immigration to Latin America once again increased with the thirty percenatage of the total emigration from Germany towards Latin America.

Until the end of the 19th century 122 German colonies were created in Rio Grande do Sul, and many others in Santa Catarina, Parana, Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. Germans had established the first middle-class population of Brazil, in a country divided between slaves and their masters. Germans immigrants in Brazil were the fourth largest immigrant community to settle in the country, after Portuguese, Italians and Spaniards.