Quote:
Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker
They have lots of German immigrants as well, even Low German (Mennonite, etc.) Especially in Brazil:
https://www.mwc-cmm.org/content/newc...nonites-brazil
And Germans were, by far, the most populous immigrant group to the United States for many decades. It was even a common second language until the World Wars. Still today, it's one of the largest at 40+ million:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans
I'm not surprised at all it'd be the Germans who are the kitsch village thing throughout the Americas. The Spanish influence is obvious, and all of southern Europe is so similar that anything Italian wouldn't really stand out all that much. |
Yeah, I guess south American cities and towns already look Iberian enough, at least in the centres, anyway. With the German thing it seems like the perfect mix of enough immigrants combined with unique architectural flourishes and cultural touchstones.
You get an echo of this when you see the onion tops of the Orthodox churches in the distance while driving toward the little Ukrainian villages in southern Manitoba, but the cultural experience is probably limited to biannual pierogi suppers and the odd night of dancing in Winnipeg or Edmonton. Maybe Ukrainian culture doesn't really lend itself to Disneyfication like Bavaria does.
Or maybe the Ukrainian population didn't reach critical mass here like the Germans did?
Funny how I overlooked this, but Chinatowns are an obvious corollary to this, except they're always in cities. And Chinatowns are a purely organic phenomenon anyway. Nobody in 1962 decided "there should be a Chinatown here to attract tourists."
Though that's also due to the quaintness factor, which you have in spades with German stuff but not really at all in East Asia, where "garish" is the more apt descriptor than anything else.