Partners in Organizing: Engagement between Migrants and the State in the Production of Mexican Hometown Associations

Abstract

The massive historic protests in 2006 against anti-immigrant legislation in the United States have sparked renewed interest in immigrant community mobilization. Analysts have turned to Mexican immigrants in particular, not in the least because Mexicans represent the largest immigrant group in the United States by far. In this focus, many scholars and policy makers both have trained their attention on one form of Mexican civic organization that played an important, yet somewhat unanticipated role in the pro-immigrant marches of the mid-2000s: hometown associations, often called HTAs (Bada, Fox, and Selee 2006; Garcia-Acevedo 2008; Portes, Escobar, and Radford 2007). Broadly defined as organizations formed by migrants from a same community of origin (Fox and Bada 2009), they have been roundly lauded as structures that provide migrants with a wide array of support (Ramakrishnan and Viramontes 2010). HTAs have been characterized as organizations through which migrants not only maintain their cultural identity and sustain their affective connection to their hometowns, but also as structures through which compatriots from the same community or region of origin can provide one another with social and material backing in the US (Bada 2011; Orozco 2004).