"In Our Sphere of Life"

German-Speaking Immigrants in Yucatán and Their Descendants, 1876-1914

Alma Durán-Merk.

Decades long the literature about the German presence in México positioned this as an exclusively elite migration, highlighting its lack of integration into the Mexican society, and assuming that the characteristics of the capital’s population would be representative for the whole country. In this pioneering study Alma Durán-Merk breakdowns those stereotypes. Recurring to dozens of private and public archives on both sides of the Atlantic, this carefully crafted ethno-historical work examines the characteristics of origin and the life forms of the German-speaking immigrants and their descendants during the so-called Golden Time of Yucatán. The result is a highly differentiated mosaic of individual and familiar life paths.
Durán-Merk’s work is the first systematical research that inspects critically the relocation and acculturation phenomena on four generations of German origin in México. It demonstrates that is not possible to speak about a representative migration process.

Alma Durán-Merk is Research Associate of the Department of Historical Anthropology at the University of Augsburg, Germany.

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