With the initiation of construction of the new Mazda Salamanca plant, as well as the construction of the Honda and Toyota transmission plants in the same city, the State of Guanajuato has become a major Mexico manufacturing center for Japanese companies.

Today there are approximately five thousand Japanese citizens in the State. Most of these indiividuals are engineers and technicians that are in Guanajuato temporarily to jump-start production in new manufacturing facilities.

As a result of the large influx of Japanese citizens into Guanajuato, restaurants, hotels and other service providers have made adjustments in order to cater to their teeming Asian cliente’s needs and tastes. For instance, it is not unusual that hotels in Guanajuato include the Japanese channel NHK News among their cable television offerings. Also, local restaurants have made an effort to print their menus in Japanese, to include food and drink items on them that are familiar to and suited to Japanese tastes, as well as to play Japanese music for the enjoyment of their guests.

In recent years, Guanajuato has become a the major Mexico manufacturing center for the Japanese. Sixty-two Japanese companies currently have facilities in Guanajuato, and fifty more are projected to set up production capacity in the state in the foreseeable future. The lion’s share of Japanese manufacturing investment in Guanajuato is tied to its burgeoning automotive sector. In the aggregate, automotive and automotive related manufacturing companies have invested seven billion US dollars in Guanjuato, and have generated approximately eighty-thousand jobs. In additon to Japanese automotive companies such as Mazda and Honda, investment by other OEMs that include non-Japanese OEMs such as Volkswagen and GM have made Guanajuato one of their firms’ Mexico manufacturing centers, as well.

Automotive OEMs have made Guanajuato their home due to the availability of skilled industry labor at globally competitive costs. In 2014, it is projected that automotive assemblers and suppliers in the state will produce seven hundred and thirty thousand passenger vehicles, seven hundred and fifty transmissions and one million tires. While Guanajuato is becoming the Mexico manufacturing center for the global automotive industry, Detroit is gradually becoming a  global design center. As a result, as is the case throughout Mexico, Guanajuato is experiencing a significant expansion of the Mexican middle class.

Read the primary source for this post in its original Spanish at milenio.com.