Germans in the Southwest, 1850-1920

Germans in the Southwest, 1850-1920 Tomas Jaehn University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2005. Illustrations, tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index, xii + 242 pp. $24.95 cloth.

New Mexico, since the time of Erna Ferguson, has been assumed to be a tri-cultural community. In Germans in the Southwest, Tomas Jaehn subtly deconstructs that image by sowing complexity in just one of the categories. His book demonstrates that to truly understand the Southwest, one must look beyond race to ethnicity.

Although it could be argued that German immigrants were a small component of the Southwest's population (they never accounted for more than 1.1 percent of New Mexico's residents), they remain significant due to their prominence in the emerging capitalist economy. However, Jaehn's study is interesting precisely because he contrasts the Southwest to areas like Nebraska and Milwaukee that had heavy concentrations of German immigrants and observes some fascinating differences. In New Mexico prior to the arrival of the railroad, the German population "often lived alongside die Hispanic population without any overt displays of German ethnicity," and they "married into Hispanic families and their children frequently spoke Spanish as their native language" (p. 140). Jaehn's research demonstrates that the railroad changed this pattern. Once Anglo Americans arrived in large numbers, the German community disassociated itself from Hispanics, worked to establish ethnic organizations, and countered attempts at assimilation, though to a lesser extent than elsewhere.

Jaehn begins his study by examining the nineteenthcentury German travel literature that helped immigrants prepare for the territory. These guides fostered the idea that "the West was a wide open and largely uninhabited region removed from aristocratic restraint," yet they "struggled to integrate the Hispanics and Hispanic culture of the Southwest into their accounts" (pp. 19,18). In the next chapter, Jaehn provides a snapshot of the German community through the use of census data that skillfully constructs a quantitative picture of German employment in most occupations. After looking at the Germans' marginal role in politics, Jaehn returns to their economic contributions by demonstrating how German merchants transformed New Mexico's village economies by bringing them into the capitalistic world. He then analyzes attempts to foster a German identity through the preservation of "kultur" (particularly in the artist colonies of Santa Fe and Taos) that had "little sensitivity to the region's [native] cultures" (p. 126).

Jaehn's study moves inexorably to the defining era of World War I and the national distrust of the German community that came with it. While he points out the baseless accusations that affected Germans in the state, Jaehn notes that the prejudice was less severe in New Mexico than in other states. However, because immigration ended with the war, the period remained a turning point for the state's German community, and Jaehn ends his study there.

In Germans in the Southwest, Jaehn provides an impressive contribution to understanding immigration patterns and the life of minority populations on the frontier. His book deserves serious consideration by those seeking to understand the immigrant experience and those who are interested in the complex history of race relations in the American West.

Joseph Weixelman

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Joseph Weixelman

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

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