When it comes to philanthropy at the village level, few groups can claim to leverage government dollars for infrastructure projects as effectively as the Federaci??n de Clubes Zacatecanos del Sur de California (Federation of Zacatecan Clubs of Southern California). The oldest and most successful collection of Mexican hometown associations (HTAs) – groups of recent immigrants who pool resources to improve conditions in their villages of origin – the federation now helps generate a growing annual investment that has reached roughly $16 million a year for social infrastructure projects in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas.
through its 74 separate “clubs” for philanthropic projects inside Mexico – from paving roads and building potable water systems to renovating churches, hospitals, and schools – through matching funds supplied by all three levels of government inside Mexico: municipal, state, and federal. Hometown associations constitute a novel formof philanthropy – grassroots in nature, democratic in practice, transnational in scope. Although immigrants come to the United States seeking a better life, their ancestral villages, where many family members and friends still live, remain the social hub in their lives, tugging at their heartstrings and serving as a reference point that draws them into the paisano networks that spring up in the United States.
There are currently estimated to be at least 1,000 HTAs in the United States, with the largest concentration in California and the majority focused on villages in Mexico. Other countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, also have HTAs, but the Mexican groups have been the most successful to date.
Remittances by Mexican immigrants in the United States are expected to reach close to $20 billion this year, a figure exceeded only by oil exports and tourism as Mexico’s leading source of income. The vast majority goes from individual migrants to their families to satisfy basic necessities, such as food, shelter, and medical care. There are now whole villages where remittances are the only source of income for most families. Two years ago, the Mexican census counted some 2 million families nationwide that listed remittances as their primary source of income.
But it is the collective remittances through hometown associations that are receiving increasing attention from scholars and politicians. “These types of payments are much sexier, given their potential to have a multiplier effect on local and regional development,” says Luis Escala-Rabadan, a scholar at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Mexico, who began studying the inner workings of HTAs as a doctoral student at UCLA in 1997.
HTAs typically consist of a core group of five to 15 volunteers who mobilize hundreds of fellow expatriates in their community through dances, raffles, rodeos, and the like to finance specific philanthropic projects in their towns of origin. Most clubs play an active role not only in identifying the projects that would benefit the hometown, but also in the implementation and monitoring of these efforts, working closely with counterparts in the village.
Individual donations are mostly small, around $10-$20 per month, befitting the modest incomes of most of the immigrants, but given the intense loyalty to the villages and the tangible results of past donations, participation rates are high. “When you have a lot of people giving a little bit, and it’s multiplied through the three-for-one program, you can do a lot of good in communities,” says Guadalupe Gomez, second vice president of the Zacatecan Federation of Southern California.
It’s Taken 30 Years to Build
The three-for-one matching program is the federation’s crown jewel, but it took time to materialize. The federation was established in 1972 but it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the Zacatecan state government began reaching out to federation leaders. In 1986, the then-governor of Zacatecas, Genaro Borrego Estrada, visited Los Angeles and agreed to a program to match dollar-for-dollar the funds raised by Zacatecan clubs for philanthropic projects. In 1992, the federal government joined the effort, making for a two-for-one matching program. In 1999, the federation and Zacatecan government persuaded municipalities to become involved, and the president of the Zacatecan Federation, the governor of Zacatecas, and a representative of the Mexican government signed the three-for-one program at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles.
With the added incentive of the matching funds, club participation flourished: Within two years, many new Zacatecan clubs formed all over the United States, representing nearly 50,000 members. And, because affiliation was required to participate in the three-forone program, the federations of clubs were strengthened. This year, Zacatecan clubs will send approximately $4 million back home to fund projects, with the three branches of government kicking in an additional $12 million. The Zacatecan Federation of Southern California finances more than half of these projects under the three-for-one program.
“The most successful projects are the ones that are a priority for both the community in Zacatecas and the HTA in California,” says Efra??n Jim??nez, the federation’s executive director of projects and only salaried member of the federation on the U.S. side of the border. Often, he notes, club and federation leaders will call town meetings when they visit their home village, soliciting ideas before returning to their new community to tell fellow expatriates of the needs and raise funds to address them.
The federation, which represents clubs in Los Angeles, Ventura, and Orange counties, operates out of a building in East Los Angeles and is run by volunteers, including a board elected by club delegates to represent their interests. The federation has also opened an office in Zacatecas, headed by an engineer, which advises the clubs on community priorities. Jim??nez travels to Zacatecas at least once a month and gives progress reports to the clubs, which ultimately make their own decisions on which projects to support.
Some mayors are more cooperative than others in giving the go-ahead on funded projects, Jim??nez notes, so the federation has learned to use its collective strength as a powerful negotiating tool. “The federation realized that having this umbrella organization would give more leverage to each of its HTAs vis-??-vis the state and local authorities when it comes to having a say in what projects are implemented,” says Escala-Rabadan. “It has worked wonderfully, making this organization a very powerful political actor in Zacatecas.”
That power is wielded in other ways as well. The federation has demanded transparency and accountability in how project funds are spent, and its leaders haven’t been afraid to raise their voices when they believe funds are being misappropriated. “People living in Mexico are often not willing to speak out on the problems that they have over there, because they feel afraid of the government,” says Gomez. “But we live here and we’re not running for office, so if we see something that is wrong, we expose it. And the press is always interested in what we have to say.”
The respect earned from its philanthropic projects and advocacy has transformed the federation and its members into opinion leaders whose support is hotly pursued by political candidates in Zacatecas. For its part, the federation remains officially nonpartisan, although when club members ask, leaders will tell them which mayors are working well with the federation and which are not.
But the Young People Still Leave
For all its success in funding important philanthropic works, however, the federation leaders remain concerned by one undeniable trend: No matter how much the infrastructures of the Zacatecan hometowns improve, young villagers continue to leave in droves. “We’ve had experiences where we build a school in a community and it remains empty,” says Felipe Cabral, the federation’s current president. “That made us start to think differently.” So, while continuing to support infrastructure upgrades, the federation has also begun to endorse what it terms “productive projects” – those that promote long-termeconomic growth and job creation in Zacatecan villages.
To that end, the federation has convened a series of multisector, binational meetings attended by members of immigrant groups, migrant entrepreneurs, Mexican producers, nongovernmental organizations, government officials, scholars, and others to develop a plan of action. Central to the federation’s strategy are a matching program with the federal government for HTA-financed job-creating projects, lobbying pressure to foster a better environment for migrants to invest, and initiatives to help communities take the steps necessary to fund their own businesses so that they can become self-sufficient.
These meetings were facilitated by funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which in 2004 awarded grants totaling $382,000 over two years to support basic staffing and technology upgrades for the federation, and to help it explore this new model for transnational philanthropic investment.
For Rockefeller, the grants – funded as part of its North American Transnational Communities program – are designed not only to bolster the federation, but also to support a larger learning agenda. With funds channeled through the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and the Tides Foundation, the grants include provisions for ethnographic and survey research in more than 20 migrantsending communities in three Mexican states.
“Mexican families are pursuing livelihood strategies simultaneously on both sides of the border,” says Salvatore LaSpada, associate director of Rockefeller’s Global Inclusion Division, “but in manyways our understanding, and certainly our policies, have not yet caught up with this foment of a very dynamic movement – a movement of people, money, ideas, and organizing.”
The Rockefeller funding is proving to be manna for the Zacatecan Federation. “The demands on these groups, from both sides of the border, are increasing to the point where they are becoming overburdened,” says Escala-Rabadan, who has provided capacity-building workshops with representatives of hometown associations as part of a team that also includes Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, an expert in Mexican and Latino HTAs and currently a visiting professor at the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights. “We have to remember that these are groups of volunteers who have other responsibilities.”
Increasing burdens notwithstanding, among federation members and the migrants they represent there is no shortage of dedication to assisting their hometowns in taking the important next steps toward a better life. Explains Jim??nez, “We want to help these communities so that migration is an option, not a necessity.”
Read more stories by Dan Gordon.