Germany in the Bajío: two centuries of technique, half a century of capital

At the Smart and Sustainable Industry Summit on September 2 at Puerto Interior, Alejandro Hernández Fonseca, the state’s Deputy Secretary for Investment Attraction, put a number on the table: close to 70 German-origin projects in Guanajuato, nearly USD 4 billion, and more than 35,000 jobs.

It is a large number, and a young one. Practically everything behind it was built after 1973. That is the interesting part: the German presence in the Bajío is almost two and a half centuries old, but for most of that time Germany did not bring capital. It brought technique — and usually on someone else’s payroll.

The path here is worth retracing, because the pattern explains a good deal about the present.

1788: the Saxons arrived under contract

In June 1788 Fausto de Elhuyar sailed from Spain for New Spain with close to twenty young Saxon miners. They reached Veracruz on September 4. On October 18, Viceroy Manuel Antonio Flores decreed that they be put to work in the mines, including in the service of private owners. Elhuyar’s first field inspection was Guanajuato, in January 1789.

The eleven German mineralogists — Sonneschmidt, Fischer, Lindner, the Weinholds, the Schröders, Suhr, Adler, Vogel — were distributed among Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Taxco on ten-year contracts that guaranteed freedom of worship to a mostly Protestant group.

Their technical brief was to replace the patio amalgamation process with Baron Ignaz von Born’s barrel method, then the frontier of European metallurgy. Trials ran at Sombrerete from 1790. They failed. After ten years Sonneschmidt conceded he had not been able to introduce the method, and Elhuyar himself admitted that local mills and arrastres worked better than those of the Schemnitz district.

That is worth pausing on, because it is the first hard fact in this story: the imported technology lost to the local process, and it lost on cost and context, not sophistication. What did last was institutional. The Royal Mining Seminary opened in 1792 — the first secular institution of higher education in New Spain — and several of those expedition members ended up teaching there. Sonneschmidt’s lasting contribution was not Born’s method but a process for treating slimes and tailings, and a treatise on amalgamation completed in 1798.

1803: the Bajío’s first investment memorandum was written by a German

Alexander von Humboldt reached Guanajuato in 1803 and measured what he saw. He recorded that the Valenciana produced more than 2.8 million pesos of silver a year between 1771 and 1804, with net profits reaching 1.2 million in some years for its two owners. He counted some 5,000 people working the district, 1,896 arrastres and 14,618 mules.

His Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain turned those figures into a document read across Europe. The effect was the one a good memorandum usually has: it moved capital. John Taylor obtained first-hand information through Humboldt on Mexico’s mining assets, and much of the British investment mania of 1824–1825 followed from it.

The detail that matters: the analysis was German and the money was English.

1824: when German capital did try

There was one serious German attempt. The Deutsch-Amerikanischer Bergwerksverein was founded in Elberfeld in 1824, led by the merchant Heinrich Kamp, with 200,000 thalers of capital that rose to 500,000 within months. By late 1826 it ran four inspection districts with more than 62 German employees under the Prussian mineralogist Wilhelm Stein.

Its mines were at El Chico, Santa Rosa, Zimapán and San José del Oro in Hidalgo; Temascaltepec, Sultepec and Mineral del Cristo in the State of Mexico; and Angangueo in Michoacán. None in Guanajuato, Querétaro, Aguascalientes, San Luis Potosí or Jalisco. Between 1825 and 1830 it produced 16,960 kilos of silver and 55 kilos of gold against high costs. It went bankrupt in 1837, having lost some two million thalers.

Meanwhile German engineers kept working — for others. Hermann Joseph Burkart served from 1825 to 1834 as technical director of the Anglo-Mexican silver enterprise at Tlalpujahua, which was British-financed, and published two volumes in Stuttgart in 1836 on his time there. Franz Schmitz ran the Angangueo processing works in 1828. Meinecke implemented the barrel method in 1839.

The pattern repeats: German capital withdrew, German technique stayed, employed by whoever paid.

The century Germany missed

Between 1900 and 1970 the Bajío industrialised without Germany.

Foreign investment in Guanajuato mining between 1905 and 1914 breaks down as: United States 61.7%, France 21.8%, England 14.1%, others 2.4%. No German firm appears. The Guanajuato Power and Electric Company represented General Electric.

The German colony in Mexico — 2,564 people in 1900, around 3,000 by 1939 — concentrated in Mexico City, Veracruz, the Soconusco, the northwest and Guadalajara. There is no record of German-founded trading houses, hardware importers, mills or breweries in Guanajuato, León, Querétaro or Aguascalientes in that period.

Where Germany does appear is as a machinery supplier. In León’s footwear industry, inventories from 1939 onward record German brands — “Mohenos”, “Atlas” — alongside the American Singer and Landis. German machines, Mexican ownership.

The Second World War cut even that. In June 1942 the Board for the Administration and Oversight of Foreign Property took over German firms in Mexico; Siemens halted operations between 1939 and 1945 and did not return until 1965, as Siemens Mexicana.

1973 onward: the capital arrives

German industrial investment in the Bajío is, in historical terms, recent.

KOSTAL dates its first plant outside Germany to 1973, in Mexico, and marked fifty years at its Querétaro plant in the Benito Juárez industrial park in October 2023. It is the verifiable starting point of the German Bajío — and it predates Nissan Aguascalientes (1982) rather than following it: the German arrival was not a by-product of the Japanese automotive wave.

From there, the sequence:

• Bosch arrived in San Luis Potosí in 1996–97; it now also operates in Celaya, with a MXN 4.5 billion expansion for power electronics and powertrain electrification.
• Continental acquired Euzkadi in 1998, with its plant at El Salto, Jalisco. In October 2022 it announced EUR 210 million and more than 1,550 jobs in Silao, for braking and suspension control units, on a base of more than 4,000 employees in Guanajuato.
• ZF has operated in Querétaro since 1984; in February 2023 it announced EUR 240 million and more than 1,300 jobs, across three plants and 3,450 employees. Mexico is its largest workforce outside Germany.
• Volkswagen inaugurated its Silao engine plant on January 15, 2013 — the group’s 100th plant worldwide — with USD 550 million and capacity for 330,000 engines a year. In November 2020 it added USD 233.5 million for the EA211 1.5 TSI, taking cumulative investment to USD 855 million. In 2025 it produced 452,042 engines.
• BMW started production in San Luis Potosí in 2019, with close to USD 2 billion invested to date and some 3,700 direct employees. From 2027 it will build the Neue Klasse iX3 and i3 there, alongside a high-voltage battery assembly centre of more than EUR 500 million.
• Siemens announced a further MXN 1.3 billion in Querétaro in April 2026 for medium- and low-voltage switchgear, after nearly 40 years in the city.

And with the capital, the technique returned

What is notable is what these companies brought with them: exactly what arrived in 1788, this time institutionalised.

Volkswagen de México has run dual training since 1966, with some 6,000 graduates and around 430 students a year. Its second centre is in León, created in 2015, with CONALEP, CECYTEG and CAMEXA. BMW San Luis Potosí has run dual training since 2015: more than 570 graduates across ten cohorts, 95% hired directly, half of them women.

The Mexican Dual Training Model began as a pilot in 2013 with 443 students, 83 companies and nine states — Guanajuato among them — and was formalised in Accord 06/06/15, published in the Official Gazette on June 11, 2015. CAMEXA, founded in 1929 and with its regional Bajío office in Querétaro, certifies the model and also runs a German track and a Meister programme.

It is the same transfer as 1788 — technical knowledge embodied in people — two centuries later, with a legal framework behind it.

The 2026 test

The present is not a straight line. The COMPAS plant in Aguascalientes, the Mercedes-Benz and Nissan joint venture that started up in 2017, closed on May 31, 2026. On September 3, 2026, Volkswagen’s supervisory board approved a plan involving up to 50,000 job cuts globally, and the Puebla plant eliminated its night shift on August 28.

At the same time, the region kept attracting: Querétaro reported more than MXN 7 billion across eight German projects with over 1,800 jobs in April 2026, and Guanajuato reached the nearly 70 projects this piece opens with.

What changed is the composition. What is being built now is not stamping plants: it is power electronics in Celaya, on-board chargers in Querétaro, control units in Silao, high-voltage battery assembly in San Luis Potosí. Precision manufacturing — electricity-intensive and sensitive to supply quality.

That is where this history meets our work. It is worth noting how these companies solve their own power: Siemens installed 11,100 solar panels at its Querétaro plant as part of a USD 52 million expansion in 2022. We found no utility-scale generation asset in Guanajuato or Querétaro under German ownership or using German technology. The German energy footprint in the Bajío is industrial self-consumption, not merchant generation. Each plant solves its own.

Which is, in the end, the lesson of 1788 restated for 2026: what transfers well is the engineering standard. What does not transfer is supply. Firm megawatts have to be built here — plant by plant, project by project.

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A note on sources. Two points remain unresolved and should be said plainly. First, KOSTAL dates its first Mexican plant to 1973, while El Financiero (2015) puts its first Querétaro plant at 1979; we use the company’s date. Second, we could not document a single German-owned business in Guanajuato, León, Querétaro or Aguascalientes before 1973: the absence is a finding, but it could also be an archival gap. The Guanajuato figures count projects, not distinct companies.

Sources: Cluster Industrial — Guanajuato and Germany at the 2026 Summit · Guanajuato Puerto Interior — Guanajuato–Germany cooperation · Escamilla González, Boletín de la RSBAP — the Elhuyar expedition · Hausberger, Historia Mexicana — Born’s method in New Spain · INAH — the German expedition members of the Royal Mining Seminary · Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, ch. XI · Parra and Riguzzi, Historias 71 — British capital in Mexican mining · Von Mentz, UNAM — Germans in Mexico, 1824–1830 · Von Mentz, UNAM — German mining technology in Mexico · Blanco, UNAM — foreign investment in Guanajuato mining · Trace/SciELO México — the Deutsche Kolonie in Mexico · Expresión Económica, UdeG — machinery in León’s footwear industry · Istor 30, CIDE — German property intervened in 1942 · German Embassy in Mexico — Siemens in Mexico · KOSTAL — corporate history · KOSTAL — 50 years in Mexico · Volkswagen — opening of the Silao engine plant, 2013 · El Universal — VW’s 2020 investment in Silao · BMW Group — San Luis Potosí plant · Puerto Interior — Continental’s expansion in Guanajuato · Mexico Industry — ZF invests EUR 240M in Querétaro · Revista TyT — Bosch Celaya · Siemens — Querétaro expansion, 2026 · Automotive Logistics — COMPAS closure · Infobae — Volkswagen’s September 2026 restructuring · Al Diálogo — Germany, Querétaro’s fourth-largest investor · Volkswagen de México — dual training · Volkswagen Group Academy — dual training in the Bajío · BMW Group — ten years of dual training in SLP · SEP/CONALEP — the dual training experience · Official Gazette — Accord 06/06/15 · CAMEXA — about us · Mexico Business News — Siemens’ solar system in Querétaro