Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

De Terruño a Terruño: Reimagining Belonging through the Creation of Hometown Associations

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jax007

1945-2314

Ana Raquel Minian,

Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

As he had many times before, in 1987 Gregorio Casillas returned to Guadalupe Victoria, a small rancho in the state of Zacatecas in north central Mexico. He proudly noted how his long hours of work in the Club Social Guadalupe Victoria had made nearly unrecognizable the hometown he left when he first migrated in 1948. Migrants residing in Los Angeles formed the club in 1962 to send aid to improve the rancho. By 1987, the club had created a program that helped the town's elderly attain their basic needs, installed benches in the church, paved the main street, built a clinic, fenced the school, set up electric power lines, and brought potable water. Through these investments, Casillas could materially perceive how, despite his physical absence, he was still a presence in Guadalupe Victoria.1 Like the Club Social Guadalupe Victoria, which so transformed the small hamlet in Zacatecas, other clubs developed in Los Angeles from the 1960s onward around the idea of providing resources south of the border. During those years a club culture spawned multiple groups that raised money to support migrants' patrias chicas (hometowns). Through their activism, clubs fostered a broad-based sense of belonging that challenged exclusionary visions of who belonged where. Clubs provided migrants with a way to claim membership simultaneously in local, state, national, and transnational communities. By sending resources south of the border, migrants hoped to fight the poverty in their hometowns that had originally led them to migrate. Through their investments, they established their belonging to their communities of origin and to Mexico at large. They also claimed a place in Los Angeles and in the United States by building a strong social network there. The clubs in the United States gave migrants who had been marginalized due to class background, gender, legal status, or ethnicity tools to insist on their inclusion in multiple communities and to assert political power. As such, clubs created an aperture for an expansive vision of belonging not restricted by identity or geographic borders.