Hometown association

Hometown associations, (HTAs) also known as Hometown societies, are social alliances that are formed among immigrants from the same city or region of origin. Their goal is to maintain connections with and provide mutual aid to immigrants from a shared place of origin. They may also aim to produce a new sense of transnational community and identity rooted in the migrant's country of origin and extending to the country of settlement.

The total number of HTAs is hard to measure as these groups fluctuate in number every year. The United States is home to approximately 3,000 Mexican HTAs. Filipino groups may amount to 1,000, and other ethnic migrants such as Ghanaians amount to about 500 organizations. These associations are predominantly volunteer-driven, and the larger ones have official nonprofit statuses, such as 501(c)(3) registration within the United States. Smaller groups are only for family remittances and do not affiliate with any government or organizational support.

HTAs are usually led by a board of directors or elected group leaders. However, due to the voluntary nature of HTAs and the predominantly working-class profiles of their members, the amount of time devoted to HTA activities is commonly limited. For the majority of HTAs, the main activity is fundraising for ongoing programs or special needs, such as a natural disaster in the home country. Many HTA projects are oriented towards the advancement of health or educational activities and resources for the HTA's country of origin. This includes HTAs working in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa who donate school or medical supplies to local institutions, or provide basic infrastructure through the construction of clinics, classrooms, parks, and homes.

HTAs also serve to donate money for special occasions or circumstances, such as a religious celebration or to repaint or repair a local church in either their new community location or in their place of origin. The percentage of remittance, sending migrants who belong to HTAs, varies from one national origin group to another. Often, HTAs coordinate with local organizations within their community of origin to put their projects into practice. For example, in Guyana, the most common local partners are local nonprofits and churches.

Because HTAs are volunteer-based groups, getting participation outside one's family ties can be a major challenge. People who migrated from common hometowns who appreciate the public goods that HTAs produce such as community parties tend to believe that the individual cost of contributing to the collective good outweighs any benefit. The challenge of confronting the cost and benefit of HTA investments results in the involvement in associations being low and sporadic.

History

A hometown association or hometown society is a society of immigrants from the same town or region. These aid organizations were established to deal with social, economic, and cultural problems, and provided a social framework for mutual assistance. Among the most common activities was the provision of insurance policies offering sick benefits and burial cost. They regularly owned sections in cemeteries. In the early 1900s there were thousands of Hometown societies in the United States serving every immigrant ethnic group. Jewish hometown societies were known by the Yiddish term landsmanshaft. There were 20,000 landsmanshaft in the Northeast.

Chinese hometown associations

Further information: Overseas Chinese clan association and Tong (organization)

Chinese hometown associations (Chinese: 同鄉會) exist both within China and abroad in the wider Chinese diaspora. Within China these societies exist (and historically existed) to serve itinerant workers and merchants in the face of regional discrimination against those from other provinces. Networks of these societies formed to provide mutual aid to those from the same hometown, for example renting a room or compound (depending on means) to temporarily house newcomers, those unable to work through injury, and merchant caravans. They also served as burial clubs to repatriate the remains of those who had died far from home to their hometowns for burial. In the face of violence from locals, and members of other associations, the societies also acted to provide mutual defence. Oftenmost made up of young men on the margins of local mainstream society, some societies devolved into little more than gangs and fronts for gambling and other vices; for example in Qing dynasty Beijing the Cantonese societies became notorious for their revolutionary behaviour.

This pattern became a template for societies that formed outside of China, for example in Australia, Malaysia and the United States. Originally the majority of Chinese labourers who went abroad in the 19th century never intended to settle, their intention being to serve out their indentures and make some money to go home, or failing that to have their bodies sent back. However when they did settle, one concern became maintaining the Chinese identity of their children and descendants. This was done through the construction of joss houses and the organisation of schools to teach the Chinese language (usually the hometown dialect), writing, history and culture.

Hometown associations in the United States

Latino hometown associations

Kinship networks focused on the Latino community first began in the early 20th century. They arose because of the increasing use of migratory labor during that period. Mexican HTAs in the United States grew out of the historical mutual aid societies and welfare organizations created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in order to provide health care and death benefits at a time when such services were unavailable for many immigrant groups.

Contemporary Mexican HTAs have their roots in mutual-benefit associations that were active in the first decade of the twentieth century in the agricultural areas of California. Such associations were rooted in common origins and provided a base of solidarity when newcomers faced the difficulties of social integration.

Although Mexican HTAs have the longest history and are the best known, there has been an increase in the number of Dominican, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran hometown associations. These have been formed in the last decade and are actively participating in the improvement of their communities both of origin and of residence.

Like Mexican Americans and Dominican Americans, Central Americans also participate in a growing number of hometown associations. There are an estimated 164 Guatemalan HTAs in the United States. Most of these HTAs have been focused on responding to the numerous natural disasters that have hit Guatemala since 1991. There are an estimated 200 Salvadoran HTAs. Most focus on assisting one town and hold dinners, pageants, and other events to raise funds for community-based development projects. Scholars argue that HTAs are important not only because of their contributions to local development but also because they help to foster and support positive ethnic-racial identities among immigrant communities in the US.

Mexican and Mexican-American hometown associations

The migration flows and long-term economic connections between the United States and Mexico have led to the growth of transnational political organizing within Mexican immigrant communities. Although these kinds of organizations have existed in Mexican communities since the 1950s, the numbers have expanded dramatically over the past two decades. There are now well over 600 Mexican hometown clubs and associations registered in 30 different cities throughout the United States. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that Mexicans send about $20 billion in remittances to Mexico in 2009, which makes remittances one of Mexico's top three sources of foreign exchange.

Domestic affairs

The majority of hometown associations are relatively new and concentrated mainly in four states: California, New York, Texas, and Florida. Approximately two-thirds (63%) of Latino HTAs rely on donations. Although the total number of Latino hometown associations is unmeasured, there are about 4,000 HTAs that have received legal status in accordance with the Internal Revenue Service in the past decade.

According to the IRS, among the HTAs that have formalized their status for tax purposes, about 62% operate on less than $25,000 per year, another 14% on $25,000-99,999 and 23% on $100,000 or more. The majority of Latino associations have an inside view of Latino problems and possible solutions, and they have a special role in identifying community needs.

HTAs have attempted to influence public policy. According to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, a study of 176 associations of Colombian, Dominican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan origin found that these groups deal with a wide range of issues including housing, healthcare, education and jobs. Since the late 1980s, Latino hometown associations have primarily served local U.S. Latino communities.

Raising money for improvements in their hometowns has long been a key migrant organizing strategy, originally in cooperation with either the hometown church or local authorities. This took on a new character in towns like Zacatecas, where the state government began matching the funds provided by the migrants for a number of projects in the late 1980s. This funds-matching program is an example of how migrant interaction with Mexican policy produced migrant activism, bi-national migrant 'civil society' and migrant leadership networks in the 1990s.

Transnational sociopolitical influence

In the 2010s, policy and political academia are seeing hometown associations as a phenomenon of vital import in sociopolitical influences and financial gain in countries of origin. Concerning the interest of the political world is the rapidly emerging awareness of immigrant remittances and their impact on developing countries.

Kinship networks were the first to emerge and facilitate the Mexican diaspora that has prevailed in the US since the early twentieth century. As further development of HTA continued, there was an increase in "Mexicanist" mutual aid societies and other organizations, in contrast with the Hispano and 'Latin' formations such as the AHA and the Mexican American forerunners of LULAC.

Nevertheless, due to the new political challenges that arose in the late twentieth century, the Mexican government devised methods of encouraging the non-political organization of Mexican immigrant communities, particularly by utilizing its consulates and the new Program for Mexican Communities Abroad (PCME), established under the Salinas administration in 1990. The Mexican government, acting through its consulates, boosted the development of the PCME. The consulates have long provided a number of important services to the immigrant population, including the identification card known as the matriculate consular.

Mexican consulates in the US increased their support of Mexican immigrant associations in the 1990s and sponsored the creation of new ones, often utilizing visits by hometown mayors (president municipals) to convent migrants of common origin and encourage them to organize themselves. The Mexican government has persistently acted to encourage the development of the Diaspora network in a manner that has set the standard for transnational cooperation. Consequently, this policy has evolved over a dozen years from fostering the organizations of hometown associations to sponsoring the creation of a continental assembly for the integration and strategic direction of the Mexican network as a whole and its linkage to the state.

As a result, HTAs have played a major component in institutionalizing programs to help serve the Mexican community in America in relation to the Mexican government such as the creation of the Institute of Mexicans Abroad in 2002. The Mexican HTAs, while powerful forces for social support in the United States, and political empowerment and philanthropy in Mexico, have been little involved in political activity in California. Their active mobilization during the fight against California Proposition 187 was an exception to their usual mode of behavior rather than a turning point in their orientation.

Despite the prevailing anti-immigrant sentiment in California during the 1990s, HTAs have not played a significant role in developing a collective response to attacks on Mexican or Latino immigrants. When there is a longer history of community organizing for ornamental works and other actions for the well-being of the community, an HTA becomes not only a space where migrants can preserve their hometown culture but also a vehicle to channel claims and demands on the state of origin.