Immigrants and Associations A Global and Historical Perspective

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
ISSN: 1369-183X (Print) 1469-9451 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjms20
Immigrants and Associations: A Global and

Historical Perspective
Jose C. Moya
To cite this article: Jose C. Moya (2005) Immigrants and Associations: A Global and
Historical Perspective, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31:5, 833-864, DOI:
10.1080/13691830500178147
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830500178147
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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Vol. 31, No. 5, September 2005, pp. 833 /864
Immigrants and Associations: A Global

and Historical Perspective
Jose C. Moya
Drawing on the international literature on migration and immigrant associations,

mainly in the context of North and South America, but also including several other
global immigration contexts, this essay highlights several main questions and issues.
It discusses the definition of voluntary associations and the principal impetus for
associational activities among immigrant newcomers. Using examples from specific types
of organisation (secret societies, credit associations, mutual benefit societies, religious
groups, hometown associations, political groups), it examines the factors that shape
immigrants’ formal sociability. The paper then addresses the class and gender
composition of memberships, compares the associative practices of the mostly European
immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the mostly Asian, Latin
American and African arrivals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and
discusses the issue of state involvement. The essay approaches the topic from a global and
historical perspective to show how quasi-universal processes on the one hand, and local
and temporal specificities on the other, shaped associational practices in a way that
transcended the ethno-national traditions and characteristics of particular immigrant
groups and host countries.
Keywords: Voluntary Associations; Global and Historical Perspective; Associational

Intensity; Pre-Migratory Continuity
Casual observers and scholars alike have consistently called attention to immigrants’
disposition to form voluntary associations. The intensity and ubiquity of the practice
has, not surprisingly, generated a vast corpus of scholarly studies. This special issue of
the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies attests to the continuing interest in the
topic. Relying on the international literature on migration and associations, this essay
aims to highlight the main questions and issues in the field. It will first discuss the
Jose C. Moya is Professor in the Department of History, University of California Los Angeles. Correspondence
to: Prof. Jose C. Moya, Department of History, UCLA, Los Angeles, California 90095-1473, USA. E-mail:
moya@history.ucla.edu
ISSN 1369-183X print/ISSN 1469-9451 online/05/0500833-32 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/13691830500178147
834 J. C. Moya
definition of voluntary associations and the principal impetus for associational

activities among newcomers. It then provides examples from specific types of
organisation (secret societies, credit associations, mutual benefit societies, religious
groups, hometown associations, and political and advocacy groups) to examine the
factors that shape immigrants’ formal sociability. Next, it addresses the class and
gender composition of memberships. Drawing on a variety of literature from around
the world, but particularly from the Americas, it compares the associative practices
of, on the one hand, European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and, on the other, Asian, Latin American and African arrivals of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Definition
As with any other topic, the primary question is one of definition. The definition
relates to two parts: ‘immigrant’ and ‘organisation’. I start with the second part. What
is a voluntary association? The answer is complicated by the multiplicity of terms
employed in the literature: private groups, public-interest groups, grass-root move-
ments, intermediary organisations, goal-oriented associations, community-based
organisations (as Cordero-Guzmán titles his essay in this collection), and non-profits
(as Chung titles hers). The most generic definition identifies voluntary associations as
secondary organisations that exist between the primary links of kinship and the
equally non-voluntary arrangements of tertiary institutions like the state. But this is a
broad spectrum. It includes global organisations such as, say, Amnesty International,
and a local school chorus. Does it include labour unions if membership is mandatory;
or voluntary local groups linked to a political party in a single-party system; or those
that form part of the state apparatus in more pluralistic milieus? Are political parties
a subset of voluntary associations? Do religious associations form ‘a special case’, as
Margaret Harris (1998) has argued, because the restrictions and prescriptions placed
on members’ actions are not comparable to those of secular voluntary groups?
As with any other social category, variety, hybridity and exceptionality undermine
general definitions. In the case of immigrant associations, a particular definitional
problem concerns the first rather than the second term, as Schrover rightly points out
in her article in this journal. Should associations founded by newcomers but whose
memberships are mixed be defined as ‘immigrant’ organisations? How about those
founded by natives but whose memberships are mostly immigrant? When do
immigrant associations stop being ‘immigrant’: when they are founded by the second
or third generations, or their memberships become mostly so? In general* as has /
happened, for example, with Jewish organisations in the United States* scholars /
(and the public) eventually begin to define them as ‘ethnic’ rather than ‘immigrant’
associations, but the point at which this shift in identification happens is not clear.
Another challenge has to do with detectability. Many secondary associations in
immigrant communities, particularly those based on village of origin or neighbour-
hood, abut the primary end of the spectrum. Can the ‘clan’ or surname associations
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 835
of overseas Chinese be categorised as secondary associations even though they are

based on primary ties? Does a group of townsfolk or neighbours who, for decades,
gather every Sunday in a café to chat or in a public park for picnics or to play soccer
form a voluntary association? They may not own a hall or have written statutes but
the gatherings are quasi-formal in their permanence and, de facto, function as
recreational clubs. Even if they had formal statutes, membership fees and other
markers of secondary associations, written records are less likely to survive for these
small associations. In my own work (Moya 1998) I found scores of this type of
association only because they were mentioned in family correspondence, or
remembered by old-timers, or because the daughter of the last long-deceased
secretary kept the membership rolls in a closet. The result is that historians tend to
focus on the larger and more institutionalised associations, particularly those that
had legal personality, engaged in formal politics, or dealt with the state. This can
produce a distorted picture because small associations actually represented the most
common form of immigrant sociability outside of the family. The problem is not
simply historical. Countless scholarly and journalistic pieces have been devoted, for
example, to the highly political, and thus highly visible, Cuban American
Foundation, but none has been written, that I know of, about the more important
(in terms of the immigrants’ actual sociability) hometown associations.
In terms of defining secondary associations that seem to abut tertiary ones,
however, the question is actually less thorny in migration studies than in the general
scholarship. Immigrants’ associations exist, after all, in a more confined space than
‘society at large’. It is true that immigrant ‘communities’ can be quite extensive, that
they are transnational by definition, and that they are not hermetic. But, no matter
how broadly defined, they are more circumscribed than an entire society or the whole
world. We are less likely to find vast global organisations. Political groups are more
likely to be local clubs, or at most national federations, than institutions like the (old)
international Communist Party or the (new) American Republican Party, whose
categorisation as voluntary associations is more problematic. Ethnic labour unions
were not as common as other forms of immigrant association and, when they existed,
they rarely had the political clout to make membership mandatory. The ruptures of
departure and the distance from the centres of ecclesiastical authority turned religious
associations less normative and more voluntary in the diaspora, making the
categorisation problem raised by Harris less significant. The fact that none of the
authors in this collection attempts to define voluntary associations does not reflect
conceptual neglect. All of the associations that they deal with, including the politically
active non-profits of Los Angeles’ Koreatown in Angie Chung’s article, easily fit the
generic definition I gave above. Those that do not, like banks and newspapers, can be
subsumed in the broader category of immigrant institutions. So, although typologies
that categorise immigrant associations according to their functions, size, member-
ship, connections with the homeland or with local politics, and so on, provide useful
heuristic devices, searches for a general definition more precise than the one
mentioned above are not likely to do so.
836 J. C. Moya
Impetus and Origins

The questions following that of definition in logical sequence, but probably preceding
it in importance, pertain to impetus and origins. What stimulates the formation of
associations among immigrants? And do these associations represent mainly a
continuation of pre-migratory practices or new ones acquired in the host society? For
a long time the answer to these questions seemed so obvious that they were rarely
raised in North American historiography, which traditionally produced the bulk of
migration studies. Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1831 that ‘in no
country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used . . .
than in America’ (1954: I, 198), hundreds of scholars have automatically identified
that principle with pragmatic individualism and with Anglo-American democratic
ideals. Arrivals from the Old World, particularly peasants and those from the
southern and eastern sides of Europe, were simply presumed to lack those attributes.
In his influential 1958 study of southern Italian rural society, unambiguously titled
The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Edward Banfield blamed that lack on what he
called ‘amoral familism’. This type of familism supposedly placed an excessive weight
on primary relations and on the maximisation of ‘the material, short-run advantage
of the nuclear family [assuming] that all others will do likewise’, inhibiting the
formation of secondary associations. Banfield contrasted this situation with the
associational vigour of farmers in a similarly parched area of southern Utah.
Voluntary associations were considered, thus, not only peculiarly American but also
particularly modern, and their appearance among immigrants had to reflect the
influence of the host environment and assimilation to what Max Weber called ‘the
association-land par excellence’.
In this blunt form, the argument can be easily disposed of. Abundant research has
confirmed the wide temporal and geographical spread of voluntary associations. They
were common in the ancient Middle East, Greece, Rome, India and China
(Kloppenborg and Wilson 1996; Ross 1976: 72 85; Smith 1997); in modern Africa,
/
Asia and Latin America (Hong 2001; Marks 1996; Tostensen et al. 2001; Wallerstein
1964); among the presumably unassociative peasantry of the Old World (Baker 1999);
among the even more stereotypically unassociative fishermen (Van Ginkel 1996); and
among all sorts of emigrant groups before they left their homeland (Baily 1999;
Gabaccia 1988; Lyman 1974; Moya 1998; Soyer 1997).
In the 1970s a new generation of scholars critiqued the traditional identification
of immigrant voluntary associations with Americanisation as ‘assimilationist’ and
ideologically induced. But this revisionism, like the old wisdom it pretended to
supplant, also reflected the prevailing ideological milieu. To expanding numbers in
North American academia during that decade, the US represented not a young
dynamic republic but a decadent racist empire, and pragmatic individualism not
the bedrock of democratic ideals but the embodiment of capitalist greed. The
hermeneutic status of ‘ethnic’ and ‘community’ climbed in direct measure to the
sinking prestige of ‘mainstream’ and ‘society’. In this atmosphere, immigrant
associations began to be interpreted, not surprisingly, as continuations of pre-

migratory ethnic communal practices rather than the result of Americanisation
(Briggs 1978; Mormino and Pozzetta 1987: 175 6). /
Yet, despoiled of ethnocentric assumptions or revisionist impetus, the questions

remain valid. What stimulates the formation of immigrant associations and to what
degree do they represent new practices and institutions learned and developed in the
host society? To say that voluntary associations can be found in many places and
periods does not mean that they were common everywhere and at all times. In the US
they began to appear in the middle of the eighteenth century, mushroomed between
the 1860s and the outbreak of World War I, plateaued up to the 1950s, and declined
after that (Crowley and Skocpol 2001; Gamm and Putnam 1999). In Australia they
appeared later and the period of expansion lasted longer but the pattern follows that
of the US (Keen 1999). This suggests that their growth may indeed be connected to a
particular stage of modernisation, and studies have demonstrated a positive
relationship between national levels of economic development and associational
activity (Curtis et al. 2001).
The main obstacle to answering questions about origin lies today in methodolo-
gical limitations rather than ideological presuppositions. For long, assumptions of
North American ‘exceptionalism’, of the new country’s superiority and the
assimilating power of its environment, led to a lack of scholarly interest in the pre-
arrival experiences of immigrants. After the 1960s such assumptions have been
mostly dismissed as ethnocentric. But for other reasons (lack of research funding,
linguistic limitations, travelling distances, etc.), most scholars continue to begin their
studies after the immigrants have reached their destination. This is a major
shortcoming because, as I have argued elsewhere (Moya 1998), the pre-migratory
background, the timing and rhythm of the flow, and the mechanisms of migration
strongly affect the arrivals’ adaptation to their new environment. To focus only on
their experiences in the new land is to miss half the story. It treats immigrants as
tabula rasa and can lead to over-environmentalist conclusions that miss possible
continuities and adaptations.
Nonetheless, it seems impossible, at least at first sight, to deny that the American
environment stimulated associational activities among the newcomers. Countless
scholars have stressed the point. Some have even referred to the tendency as a ‘mania’.
During his visit to the US in the 1920s, the Italian scholar Giovanni Schiavo (1928):
55) observed that among his compatriots ‘the desire to form mutual benefit societies
turned into a veritable mania’. Many years later, Alixa Naff (1985: 305) remarked that
the previously unassociative Syrians took to organising in the US ‘with a vengeance
. . . at any given time the number of organisations was out of all proportion to [their]
numbers in America’. Stanley Nadel (1990: 110 11) referred to New York Germans’
/
‘mania for forming Vereine’. German immigrants in Chicago phrased the same
argument in the form of a quip: ‘Put three Germans together and in five minutes
you’ll have four clubs’ (Hofmeister 1976: 114). Similar aphorisms have been repeated
throughout the US in many different languages.
838 J. C. Moya
A broader look at the international scholarly literature, however, casts doubts

about the specific significance of the North American environment as a stimulant of
associational activities. The mania for mutual benefit societies that Schiavo observed
among Italians in the US turns out to have been just as strong in France (Bechelloni
et al. 1995), Brazil (De Boni 1987), Uruguay (Corredera Rossi 1989), Australia
(Boncompagni 2001), Canada (Harney 1984), and even more intense in Argentina
(Baily 1999). The Syrio-Lebanese also took to organising ‘with a vengeance’ in all the
above-mentioned countries (Abdulkarim 1996; Batrouney and Batrouney 1985;
Cazorla 1995; Seluja-Cecin 1989; Truzzi 1997) and in Ecuador (Roberts 2000),
Mexico (Páez Oropeza 1984) and Senegal (Boumedouha 1990). The mania for
Vereine observed by Nadel in New York’s Little Germany was as remarkable in at least
a dozen other countries (just to take the first three letters of the alphabet, see Newton
1977 for Argentina; Müller 1994 for Brazil; Grams 2001 for Canada; Blancpain 1974
for Chile). Nor did Germans have a monopoly on this type of humour. The Issei in
southern Brazil had a similar jest: ‘Two Japanese make an association, and three
found a newspaper’ (Maeyama 1979: 589).
Does this demonstrate that immigrants actually had a disproportionately high
tendency to form associations? The only way to answer the question with certainty
would be to compare the number of associations per capita and the proportion of the
population that belonged to them among a variety of immigrant groups, among their
compatriots back home, and among non-immigrants in the host country.
Methodologically, this is a daunting task, particularly if done for large national
groups and extensive spaces, and I do not know of anyone who has attempted it. In
my own work (Moya 1998) I could only do it partially and at local levels. I contrasted
the proportion of immigrants from six specific villages and towns in Spain who
belonged to associations in Buenos Aires with the proportion who did so among
those who stayed behind in the respective localities of origin. In all but one of the
cases, the immigrants were clearly more associative than their townsfolk back home.
The exception was a Catalan industrial town with a long tradition of workers’
mutualism, middle-class civic participation, and liberal, socialist and anarchist
activism. But in this case (and the others), I could not measure the degree of
immigrant participation in host-society organisations such as labour unions and civic
clubs. On the other hand, there is a possibility that the higher relative participation of
immigrants from the other five localities may reflect socio-demographic differences.
Immigrants were seldom representative of the population of origin. Particularly
during the early stages of the flow, they tended to be of higher social background,
more educated, more likely to be male, and younger than those who stayed behind.
As the flow became more massive, these disparities narrowed, but they rarely
disappeared altogether, and I could not always control for them in my comparisons.
The lack of direct comparisons and measurements, however, is offset by the
abundance of indirect evidence in the scholarly literature. The disposition to form
associations has been observed among so many immigrant groups and places that
these observations, taken together, represent much more than anecdotal evidence
even if the individual studies do not often go beyond that. The absence in the home
countries of the humorous adages about hyper-associationism so prevalent in the
diasporas offers another indication that, at least compared to their compatriots back
home, migrants exhibited a high tendency to form and join voluntary associations.
So even if associations existed in the place of origin, the ‘mania’ for them seems in
most cases to have developed with migration. Moreover, the fact that the observations
have been made about almost every host country indicates that the impetus for
associational activity could not have come from the example of North American civic
culture, unless one would argue that the same culture also existed in places as diverse
as Senegal, Singapore and Surinam, just to use one letter of the alphabet
(Boumedouha 1990; de Bruijne 1979; Mak 1986). Nor could the stimulus have
come from particular ethno-national traditions. All over the world, it seems,
immigrants have been seen as a group who founded numerous organisations. This
was true of German, Italian and Lebanese immigrants (as we saw above), and of
Chinese (Kuo 1977; Liu 1998; Mak 1986), Spaniards (Kenny 1961, 1962; Moya 1998),
Japanese (Fukuoka 1937; Maeyama 1979; Morimoto 1999), Jews (Fausto 1995;
Mirelman 1988; Soyer 1997; Weisser 1985), Greeks (Clogg 1999), and just about every
other group that formed a widespread diaspora. Again, unless one maintains that all
of these diverse groups shared the same pre-migratory penchant for forming and
joining organisations, allusions to ethno-national traditions cannot explain the
commonality and intensity of the phenomenon.
The principal stimulus for associational activity thus derived not from the cultural
backgrounds of the emigrants or the civic habits of their hosts but from a more
universal source: the migration process itself. This process tends to intensify and
sharpen collective identities based on national, ethnic or quasi-ethnic constructs.
Being Italian in Italy, Sicilian in Sicily, or Basque in the Pyrenees obviously represents
much weaker self- and external identifiers than being Italian in Toronto, Sicilian in
Milan, or Basque in Montevideo. Because host societies rarely received immigrants
from only one source, the collective identities of arrivals were heightened not only by
contrast to those of the native population but also by contrast to those of other
newcomers. In so far as voluntary associations, by definition, depend on and
articulate collective identities or interests, it is hardly surprising that migration
stimulated their formation.
Does this mean then that, as Raymond Breton argued three decades ago (1964:
204), and Vermeulen cites in his article here, ‘The more different the people of a
certain ethnicity are from the members of the native community, the easier it will be
for them to develop their own institutions’? The statement seems so commonsensical
that most scholars have accepted it as an axiom. But commonsense can be the most
deceiving of all senses and a poor substitute for comparative analysis. The Portuguese
in Brazil (Pescatello 1970) formed as many associations as the Japanese. Spaniards in
Buenos Aires developed a denser institutional structure than their Italian neighbours
(Moya 1998), and these, in turn, outdid their compatriots in New York (Baily 1999).
Obviously, an immigrant group needs to perceive itself as different from the host
840 J. C. Moya
population and other arrivals in order to organise separately. But it does not follow
logically, and the evidence does not support, that the greater that real or perceived
difference is ‘the easier it will be for them to develop their own institutions’.
Migration also engendered disruptions that added another stimulant for secondary
organisations. Again, it is hardly surprising that, historically, they have mushroomed
in situations where neither traditional institutions* such as kinship groups and the
/
parish church* nor newer ones* such as the welfare state, insurance companies and
/ /
corporations* could satisfy social needs like health-care, leisure and companionship.
/
Functionalism offers here a more insightful explanation than arguments based on the
civic and political culture of the immigrants or their hosts.
Shaping Forces
If the civic practices of host societies did not provide the principal impetus for
associational activity among the arrivals, did they at least shape the form that this
activity took? As with the question of what stimulated the formation of associations
among newcomers, the evidence, at first sight, seems to suggest that the host
environment acted as a homogenising steamroller. The similarity between the
associational practices of immigrants in the same country is indeed striking. In his
recent book on Jewish societies in New York, Daniel Soyer (1997: 43 4) wrote:
/
‘Immigrant organisations in the United States resembled each other so remarkably

that it is hard to escape the conclusion that they were largely American in form, if not
in inspiration. Their membership requirements, leadership structures, benefits,
activities, even in many cases, their names all followed like a pattern.’
Secret Societies
A comparative and transnational perspective, however, demonstrates the limits of
Americanisation. Even the most cursory glance reveals that pre-migratory associa-
tional practices influenced post-migratory ones. The Chinese founded scores of secret
societies in San Francisco and New York but their German neighbours did not.
Germans, in turn, founded dozens of rifle clubs in Buenos Aires but their more
numerous Spanish and Italian neighbours did not. The Italian Cosa Nostra was so
visible in Chicago that it became a cliché in popular culture and Hollywood films. But
if the more numerous Chicago Poles founded secret criminal societies in their
‘American capital’, they kept them so secret that scholars have not found them
(Pacyga 1991; Znaniecki Lopata 1967). The continuities here are clear. The secret
triads and tongs of overseas Chinese have been shown to descend from the hui and
kongsis of Fujian and Guangdong, the southern provinces which supplied the bulk of
Chinese emigrants (Ownby and Heidhues 1993; Wakeman 1972). The Cosa Nostra
and ‘Black Hand’ have been shown to derive from the Mafia and Camorra of the
Mezzogiorno, the southern source of 80 per cent of the Italians who departed for
North America (Arlacchi 1983: 63 4, 111 21; Nelli 1970).
/ /
Besides the clear evidence of pre-migratory continuity, the formation of these

secret and criminal societies is related to the host society in a way that has less to do
with its general traits than with the immigrants’ relative access to licit organisation,
power and status, and their length of residence or the timing of the immigrant flow.
The Italians of Buenos Aires* half of them Southerners, but, as Samuel Baily (1999)
/
has shown, more economically successful than their compatriots in North America* /
founded no Cosa Nostra. The old Chinese tongs have been mostly replaced, since the
1960s, by open societies based on pluralistic participation rather than secrecy and
‘despotic rule’ (Wong et al. 1990); and new Chinese communities emerging in the
American hinterland do not develop any secret or clan societies (Yehm 1989).
According to Robert Ernst, a pioneering historian of immigrant life in New York City,
the poorer Irish arrivals gathered in secret county societies during the middle of the
nineteenth century (1949: 122). But these societies apparently became so uncommon
with time that later scholars have often missed them. In her work on Irish immigrant
women in the US, Hasia Diner just alludes in one sentence to county-based clubs
without saying anything about their secrecy (1983: 121). Michael Funchion (1983)
does not mention a single one of these secret societies in his lengthy book on Irish
voluntary associations in the US.
Rotating Credit Associations

Rotating savings and credit associations, known in the sociological literature as
Roscas, represent another type of organisation that has less to do with pre-migratory
traditions or the general characteristics of the host society than with levels of access to
formal resources among the newcomers. Some scholars have called attention to their
positive role in the accumulation of start-up capital for prospective immigrant
entrepreneurs (Chotigeat et al. 1991; Light and Gold 2000). But others have
underlined that Roscas are developed not as a preferable alternative to bank financing
but because of its unavailability or scarcity, and that the practice declined as access to
the latter increased. Michel S. Laguerre observed that the Haitian ‘sangues’ in New
York City have a high risk of default and are mostly popular among undocumented
immigrants who do not have access to formal banking facilities because they lack a
social security number (1984: 99 102). Shelly Tenenbaum noted the diminishing
/
popularity of loan societies among Jews in the US as access to bank credit increased
(1993: 140, 158 9). At the international level, economists have argued that Roscas
/
suffer high rates of failure and represent not a preference but a world-wide response
by social groups, particularly migrants, to exclusion from credit markets (Besley et al.
1993). That has certainly been the case with internal migrants in Soweto, where about
a third of the population participated in Roscas during the apartheid years (Kramer
1975: 31 53).
/
Lizabeth Cohen maintained that, in general, immigrant workers in Chicago

preferred doing business with American banks rather than with their own credit
associations, including banks, when the option was available (1990: 276). But this
842 J. C. Moya
reflects the fact that immigrant banks in the US were often small, quasi-formal
operations. The United States Senate Commission on Immigration of 1907 09, for /
example, described Italian immigrant banks as ‘privately owned steamship agencies,

labor agencies, real estate offices, groceries and saloons which masquerade under the
name of bank’ (cited in Zucchi 1988: 104 5). We find a very different case in Latin
/
America where immigrant banks were formal and large institutions. Since in this case
ethnic loyalties and economic interest were not at odds, immigrants flocked to their
own financial institutions. Moreover, the early formation and development of bona
fide immigrant banks discouraged the emergence of Roscas and other intermediate
arrangements. Immigrants got their credit either from formal financial institutions or
informally from friends, relatives and the ubiquitous store-owning ‘uncle’, rather than
from semi-formal schemes like the glorified groceries of Toronto’s and New York’s
Italians or the ‘endless chains’ [Mujin] of the Angeleno Issei (Fukuoka 1937: 31 5; /
Moya 1998: 286 7). Local specificities clearly determined the relative importance of
/
Roscas, but the associations themselves functioned everywhere in roughly the same
way and this had less to do with either pre-migratory traditions or host society traits
than with institutional mechanisms intrinsic to this type of association.
Mutual Aid Societies

Mutual aid societies are another type whose similar formation had less to do with
shared pre-migratory traditions or the homogenising influence of the host societies
than with the basic characteristics of the institutions. In terms of wealth and number
of members, at least up to World War II, they were the most widespread and
important type of immigrants’ associations. It has been calculated that around 1910
about a third of all adult males in the US belonged to a mutual benefit association
(Beito 2000). The proportion among the immigrant population in Argentina around
the same time was as high, and probably even higher in Uruguay (Kruse 1994; Munck
1998). As with the other associations discussed, these were not invented in the host
countries. Even in their modern form, they were already common in the Old World
before the mass exodus began in the second third of the nineteenth century (van der
Linden 1996). By the middle of the century, mutualism had become the dominant
mode of organisation in the European workers’ movement (Hopkins 1995; Morabito
1999; Turner 1994). Weintrob (1996) found that by the end of the century the
number of French workers who had joined mutual aid societies (2 million) was four
times as high as those who had enrolled in labour unions. It was often these European
workers and artisans (with typographers playing a pioneering role) who first founded
mutual benefit associations in the New World. Before the appearance of public
security systems and private employer-based insurance, these associations provided
not only a space for social interaction but also a range of material services to millions
of immigrants everywhere. In return for a monthly fee that usually amounted to a
labourer’s day wage, members received a range of services that sometimes reached
cradle-to-grave proportions: birth delivery, medical and hospital care, medicines,
unemployment and disability insurance, free repatriation or admission into old-age

asylums if indigent, burial services, and even the final plot of land among other
country folk. The range of services, however, depended on the size and wealth of the
institution.
It was the remarkable similarities between the mutual aid societies of many
different immigrants in the US that led Soyer to wonder if this pattern obeyed an
‘American model’. But I have also been struck by the resemblance between the mutual
aid societies of a variety of immigrant groups in Argentina and the similarities of
these to those in Brazil, the US, Cuba, and other host societies. Clearly, these
similarities could not have been produced by the homogenising influence of so many,
and so different, receiving countries. Because these organisations functioned on the
basis of some elemental, one is tempted to say ‘universal’, economic principles, they
simply encountered similar challenges and developed in similar ways almost
everywhere. Their survival and success depended on two basic, and somewhat
contradictory, rules. At one level they ran on the same principle of insurance
companies: only the relatively big could both provide a broad spectrum of services
and survive. Three or four sick members could deplete the social funds of a 100-
member society. A minor actuarial miscalculation could similarly wipe out their
equity. Small associations could neither accrue the capital nor muster the
organisational resources to build hospitals, clinics and asylums. At the same time,
mutual aid societies had to overcome what rational choice theorists have referred to
as ‘the tragedy of the commons’ or, more commonly, ‘the free-rider dilemma’
(Hardin 1968; McCay and Acheson 1987). If each member gained the most by
minimising his or her contributions and maximising his or her benefits, how could
the associations augment, or even preserve, the common fund? As long as the
societies remained small, tightly-knit groups, peer pressure could be enough to
prevent free-riding. As they grew into larger, less intimate institutions, more formal
mechanisms were required to prevent individual greed, abuse or fraud from depleting
jointly-held resources.
The successful societies developed these institutional mechanisms. Like HMOs
(Health Maintenance Organizations) today, they formed committees which verified
the necessity of certain services, pressured physicians to restrict prescription of
‘superfluous’ treatments (steam baths were a common culprit), demanded authorised
receipts for reimbursement, and investigated fraudulent medical or disability claims.
Visits to ailing members offered more than sympathy. They also served to verify
whether the aid recipient in fact was sick or injured. The associations often denied
entry to applicants over a certain age, and certain treatments (e.g. surgery and birth
delivery) to those with less than a specific length of membership. Moreover, as large
mutual aid societies increased their control over individual self-interest and greed,
they also found ways to exercise and benefit from personal and collective altruism.
They reserved certain types of services (e.g. pensions and repatriation) for needy
members who could prove their indigence, remunerated their directories with
communal prestige rather than money, and employed the same mechanism to obtain
844 J. C. Moya
bequests from departed benefactors and donations or low-interest loans from large
ethnic businesses and banks.
So these institutions functioned in a similar manner everywhere and the variations
had more to do with local specificities than with diverse ethno-cultural traditions or
differences in the receiving countries. In small immigrant communities or small
towns, mutual aid societies tended to be organised on the basis of national or broad
pan-ethnic loyalties because the size of the group did not make associations based on
regional or subnational identities viable. For the same reasons, they tended to be
multi-function, acting also as patriotic associations, social and recreational clubs, and
advocacy groups. On the other hand, in large urban immigrant communities they
were also often formed along subethnic lines and became more specialised, exhibiting
what scholars have identified as a sign of institutional modernisation: the transition
from multi-functionality to specialisation (Ross 1976; Smith and Freedman 1972). In
part this reflected the very success of mutual aid societies as service-providing
institutions. As they grew larger, more formal and impersonal, they became less
appealing as spaces of conviviality and companionship and as facilitators of intimate
ties with fellow townspeople and the hometowns of origin, encouraging the
formation of smaller associations to fulfil these needs. Because the success of mutual
benefit societies rested on their ability to attract the largest possible number of
affiliates, they could ill afford to alienate prospective members. Engagement in home-
or host-country political or religious debates often led to splits and decline.
Therefore, large mutual aid societies tended to shy away from any creed other than
the blandest form of patriotism, something that made them ill-equipped to act as
political or ideological organisations. Again, this reflected the nature of the
institutions rather than the specific traits of the immigrants or the host environment.
Religious Associations
Religious associations represent an expression of institutional diversification. They
were less common and widespread than mutual aid societies but a few specific factors
increased their presence in some situations. One was, as Floris Vermeulen shows in
his article in this special issue, the distance between the religion of the immigrant
group and the host society. Religious associations were more common and important
for the Muslim Turks and the Hindu Indo-Surinamese in Amsterdam than for the
Christian Afro-Surinamese. Conversion to an activist creed, such as evangelical
Christianity, can provide another impetus (which was actually the case for the few
religious organisations founded by the Afro-Surinamese). The same can be true of
conversion to traditional denominations from a different religion, a good example of
which would be Korean Christians (Kwon et al. 2001) and, as Irene Bloemraad’s
paper in this issue shows, their Vietnamese co-religionists.
However, a review of the scholarly literature indicates that the connection of
religion to ethno-national identity represented the most important impetus for
religious organisation among immigrants. The different weight of religion on the
national identity in general and on the associational life in the diaspora of Italian,
Spanish, German, Polish and Irish Catholics illustrates the point. In the respective
countries of origin, the influence of Catholicism on national identity varied
significantly during the period of mass emigration. Despite the rhetoric of the
Church, neither Italian nor Spanish national identities, particularly at the popular
level, had much to do with Catholicism. Italian nationalism was born during the
Risorgimento as part of a struggle for unification whose final act was actually a
victory over the Papacy. In Spain, by the nineteenth century, narratives about the
defence of the Faith during the Reconquista, Lepanto and the counter-reformation
had lost their currency even in official definitions of nationhood and were still less
significant in popular culture. In the latter realm, anticlericalism often trumped piety,
particularly among males and, with the exception of the Basque country, in the
regions of heavy emigration (Cruz 1997). In Germany, Catholicism did not form part
of official nationalism, but various historians have shown that it provided the key
element in southern German identity. Ronald Ross (1998) argues this Catholic
minority (which represented only a third of the total population) thwarted Bismark’s
Kulturkampf. Resistance against Prussian Protestant hegemony acquired the intensity
of an anti-colonial struggle similar to that of the Irish. According to Oded
Heilbronner (2000), Catholic associations (Vereine) ‘played a supremely important
role’ in this struggle and in fomenting a form of cultural and social separation that he
calls ‘the Catholic ghetto’. The Polish and Irish cases are more straightforward. As
Brian Porter (2001) argues in a recent article unambiguously titled ‘The Catholic
Nation’, Poland’s national identity is inextricably tied with its faith in the Western
Roman Catholic Church, a faith that has existed in opposition to Orthodox Russia,
Protestant Prussia, and, with sadder results, local Judaism.
The associational behaviour of these groups in the diaspora reflected these pre-
migratory traits more than the specific characteristics of the host environments.
Many studies have underscored the centrality of the Catholic Church in Irish
immigrant life from New York to New Zealand (Clarke 1993; Dolan 1975; Fraser
2002; Metress 1995). For the prototypical case of Boston, Donna Merwick (1973: x)
has described their Catholicism as ‘Jansenistic, tied to a village way of life, nationalist,
militantly anti-Protestant’, and opposed to the moderate theology of the Yankee
clergymen who administered the diocese for most of the nineteenth century.
Eventually, the Irish became so dominant in the American Roman Catholic Church
that Polish immigrants mockingly modified its official motto to ‘One, Holy, Irish ,
and Apostolic’. The central role of Catholicism, both in the affirmation of ethnic or
national identities and in the formation of institutions, has also been well
documented for Poles and Germans in the US (Dolan 1975; Galush 1977; Greene
1975; Kuzniewski 1980; Parot 1981; White 1980).
The case of Italians is more debatable. Silvano Tomasi (1975) and Gianfausto
Rosoli (1982, 1991) have described the Church as ‘the most relevant institution’ in
the lives of Italian immigrants in North and South America. But these two scholars
are practising Scalabrinians, the order founded in the nineteenth century to minister
846 J. C. Moya
to Italian emigrants, a situation that may give them a special insight into the role of
religion in the lives of immigrants but also an exaggerated sense of its overall
importance. Certainly for the thousands of immigrants whom they have so
generously supported and continue to support, the Church may indeed have been
the most relevant institution. But most other scholars agree that it played a lesser role
for the rest. In her seminal work on Buffalo, Virginia, Yans-McLaughlin (1977) held
that, contrary to the case of the Irish, the Church played a feeble role in the
institutional life of Italian immigrants. In a special issue of Estudios Migratorios
Latinoamericanos (a journal actually supported by Scalabrinians) devoted to religion
and immigration in Argentina, all the authors reached similar conclusions. Nestor
Auza (1990) contrasted the Italians’ apostolic apathy to the fervour and activism of
the Irish. Daniel Santamaria (1990) made a similar observation and described how
the pastoral efforts of the Church were hindered by the secular or anticlerical sectors
that dominated most of the Italian immigrants’ institutions. Fernando Devoto (1990)
questioned the habitual equation of Italian immigrants with anticlericalism, but only
to produce a more nuanced portrayal that concedes the Church’s limited influence in
the institutional life of the community. Carina Silberstein (1991) also shows the
limited importance of the Church among Italians in Rosario, Argentina. Others have
remarked on the similarly minor role the Church played in the associations of
Spanish immigrants in Argentina, Cuba and Mexico (Kenny 1961, 1962; Moya 1998:
287 8).
/
A critical point here is that the relevance of the Church in the associational life of
the immigrants echoed its significance as a marker of ethnicity, and particularly as an
embodiment of ethno-nationalist redemption, rather than the religious difference
between the new arrivals and their hosts. In Catholic Brazil, Frederick Luebke (1987:
35 47, 61) concluded that ‘[Catholic] immigrant churches quickly became the most
/
important institutions among German Brazilians’. The same was true for Poles in
southern Brazil (Gardolinski 1977). In equally Catholic Buenos Aires, the small Irish
community founded more Catholic associations than the fifty-times-more-numerous
Italians and Spaniards (Moya 1998: 287).
Religion also prompted the formation of separate associational structures within
the same national group. Although pan-German associations did exist, German
Protestants, Catholics and Jews tended to develop separate organisations, particularly
in places where they were numerous (Hofmeister 1976; Lowenstein 1989; White
1980). Religious distance and animosity, however, could lead to associational
segregation even in places where the immigrant national group was not particularly
large. The Lebanese in Senegal, for example, created separate Shi’a, Sunni and
Maronite associations (Boumedouha 1990; Winder 1967). The two factors* size of /
the immigrant group and degree of internal religious separation* could also act in
/
conjunction. So within the small Ukrainian community in Toronto during the early
twentieth century, Jews and Orthodox Christians formed separate institutions but
Byzantine and Latin-rite Catholics tended to merge (Yaworsky Sokolsky 1985).
In other cases of apparent religious segregation it is actually difficult to determine

the relevance of this factor. Religion is only one among many possible markers of
ethnicity and not always the most important one. Vermeulen’s article in this issue of
JEMS provides a case in point. How important were Hinduism and Christianity in
the associational segregation of Indo- and Afro-Surinamese in Amsterdam? After all,
secular or non-practising members of both groups also belonged to separate
associations.
Hometown Associations
In the above cases, associational separation within a national group resulted from
supranational identities (religion, or religion and race in the case of the Surinamese).
But supra- and subnational identities could overlap. For instance, German Catholics
formed their own associations also based on their regional identities as southerners
or Bavarians. Basques in Argentina founded associations that were subnational (for
those from the four Basque provinces of Spain) but also supranational (for Basque
ethnics whether they were Spanish or French citizens) (Moya 1998: 318 21, 328 9).
/ /
African slaves in early-nineteenth-century Cuba founded cabildos de naciones, which,

despite the name, were neither national nor subnational, insofar as this preceded the
formation of nation-states in Africa. These associations congregated first- and
second-generation slaves according to language and place of origin or ‘tribe’ (Howard
1998).
In a sense, the cabildos de naciones exemplified the phenomenon that students of
the Italian diaspora have called campanilismo. It is true that, at least after 1860,
Italians came from a nation-state and African slaves had not. But, as Gramsci once
put it, ‘the Italian people’ was ‘just a rhetorical expression’ long after the political
unification of the peninsula. So in this case the difference may have been more formal
than real. African villages may not have had campaniles but the slaves’ cabildos
similarly congregated those who came from an area where the bells, or in their case
the drums, could be heard. Immigrants’ ‘campanilist’ associations, after all, were
often based on socio-geographic areas bounded by natural features rather than on
administrative units and political demarcations.
The omnipresence of these hometown or locality-based associations is so
remarkable that at first glance it would seem to embody a universal law and a
primordial attachment to birthplace rather than, as the mantra goes, historically
embedded social constructions. Italian campanilist societies mushroomed everywhere
from Boston to Buenos Aires (Briggs 1978: 146, 161 [on Kansas City, Utica and
Rochester]; DeMarco 1981: 66 8, 114; Gabaccia 1988: 111, 136 8 [for Louisiana and
/ /
Brooklyn]; Sturino 1990: 133 5 [for Toronto and Chicago]; Tricarico 1984: 7 8;
/ /
Yans-McLaughlin 1977: 110 11, 130 1; Zucchi 1988: 92 4, 159). The cabildos de
/ / /
naciones of African slaves in Cuba appeared also, under different names, in Brazil and
Jamaica (Nishida 1998). The corresponding kenjinkai of the Japanese appeared in
places as far from each other as Hawaii, California, Sao Paulo and Lima (Maeyama
848 J. C. Moya
1979; Morimoto 1999); and the Chinese hui kuan in no-less-diverse Seattle, Toronto,
Vancouver, Sonora (Mexico), Manila, Singapore, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Rome and
Paris (Johnson 1971; Lyman 1974: 17 22; Mak 1986; Marks 2000; Nyı́ri 2001; Ownby
/
and Heidhues 1993: 82 5, 121, 137; Romero 2003; Tan 1972: 203 6; Thompson
/ /
1989: 71 83; Wilmott 1964; Wong et al. 1990). The phenomenon reached such
/
intensity among Ashkenazi Jews in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires
and, for that matter, Israel, that Landsmanshaftn became an accepted synonym for
hometown associations in the historical literature (Dobkowski 1986; Kliger 1992;
Lowenstein 1989: 105 6, 254; Mirelman 1988: 314, 334 6; Soyer 1997; Weisser 1985;
/ /
Zenner 1967). They also appeared, under the same German Yiddish name, among
/
the Gentile residents of Manhattan’s Kleindeutschland (Nadel 1990: 110 11, 116 17,
/ /
159) and* under different appellations* among such diverse immigrants and places
/ /
as Greeks in Boston, New Zealand and Toronto (Burnley 1970: 121 2; Douramakou-
/
Petroleka 1985: 267; Treudley 1949: 49); Lebanese in Detroit, Sao Paulo and
Montevideo (Naff 1985: 307 8; Seluja-Cecin 1989; Truzzi 1997); Croats in Steelton,
/
Pennsylvania (Bodnar 1977: 111); Syrians in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (Naff 1985: 308); the
Filipinos and Guatemalans of Los Angeles (Almirol 1978: 74; Popkin 1995);
Ghanaians in Toronto (Owusu 2000); Salvadorians in Washington DC (Itzigsohn
and Saucedo 2002); Igbo migrants in Calabar, and Igbo and Yoruba in Kano, Nigeria
(Morrill 1963; Osaghae 1998); Haitians in New York (Laguerre 1984: 63); and the list
could go on. Not even the best-known champion of cosmopolitan internationalism
could apparently resist the pull of this most primary and particularist form of
‘tribalism’. Upon entering the University of Bonn in 1853, Karl Marx joined the
landsmanshaft from his hometown of Trier (Weisser 1985: 14).
Hometown associations’ functional similarity reinforces the appearance of a
universal, quasi-natural(ised) process. Everywhere, and more so than any other type
of immigrant institution, they aimed to preserve and promote connections with the
area of origin. They supported all sorts of civic projects back home, from the
construction of sewer drains to the renovation of bell towers* a symbolically
/
appropriate task for ‘campanilist’ societies. But none was as popular as the support of
schools. In the few cases where hometown associations did not keep ties with the
place of origin it was due to exceptional circumstances. For example, the six Polish
landsmanshaftn in Israel studied by Kliger (1992: 109 19) did not keep ties with the
/
hometowns after the Second World War because the Jewish population in Poland was
virtually exterminated or fled the country. But they do keep connections with
townsfolk elsewhere in the diaspora. The same is true of hometown associations
among Cuban refugees in Florida, because of the lack of diplomatic relations between
the US and Cuba and because any support for hometowns would have to be
channelled through the communist state. But even in these cases, as in many others,
the associations published periodical magazines with news of the hometown and the
community in the host country and elsewhere in the diaspora. The magazines follow
a similar formula everywhere: announcements of births, marriages, rites of passage
(first communions, bar mitzvahs, graduations, etc.), obituaries (which become
increasingly numerous as the immigration flow ebbs and the community ages), news
about arrivals and departures and about immigrants’ ‘triumphs’, photographs of the
hometown and of the dances and picnics organised by the association, and nostalgic
stories and poems by amateur writers. Be they Jews in New York, Cubans in Miami,
or Italians in Buenos Aires, the style and content of these publications did not vary
much.
The other main function of hometown associations, perhaps even more important
than that of preserving links with the place of origin, was to provide, in the place of
destination, a space for paesani (as Italians call people from the same micro-region)
to gather, chat, dance, play and reminisce. Hometown associations organised dances,
concerts, games, plays, picnics, and celebrations of the town’s patron saint day or
other local holidays. Indeed, some of these localist societies, despite their formal
constitutions, regulations, statutes, pompous-sounding titles and offices, and other
paraphernalia of secondary associations, were in a sense magnified primary
institutions. Their modest halls (often named with terms related to ‘home’ or
‘hearth’) attempted to recreate the atmosphere of Old World villages in New World
metropolises. It was in these ‘homes’ where romances flourished between townsfolk
in the diaspora, where young single arrivals overcame loneliness, where older-
established immigrants satisfied their leadership ambitions, where revered matrons
concocted marital unions between and among paesani and the new immigrant
generations.
If the striking ubiquity of hometown associations makes them appear at first glance
as an embodiment of a universal and primordial phenomenon, a closer look at the
scholarly literature reveals diverse historical and geographical patterns. Hometown
associations were more likely to appear in large urban immigrant communities where
arrivals from a variety of localities were numerous enough to make this type of
organisation viable. For example, unlike the majority of their compatriots elsewhere,
the few Chinese and Spaniards of Detroit imitated their Irish and Polish neighbours
and founded pan-ethnic organisations only (see Brown 1975: 27 43, 52 81, 93 100
/ / /
for Irish, Poles and Chinese respectively; Rueda 1993: 98, 233 4 for Spaniards).
/
When localist associations appeared in smaller or rural communities, for example

among the Japanese in Sao Paulo’s coffee region or in Hawaii’s sugar plantations, the
immigrants tended to come from only a few prefectures (Lone 2001). In terms of
timing, the hometown associations tended to precede, or appear simultaneously with,
nationally-based organisations in cases, such as that of the Chinese and Japanese,
where the emigration flow originated from only a few specific regions (Maeyama
1979; Mak 1989; Marks 2000; Wilmott 1964); and to follow in cases where the flow
originated from separate geographical foci within the sending country (Moya 1998;
Owusu 2000). The unit on which associations were based also varied. Chinese, Syrian
and Igbo migrants formed sublocal clan, surname or blood-tie organisations that
could also be supra-local since at times they traversed village or even regional
confines, but none of the other groups mentioned in the above paragraphs did (or at
least, they are not mentioned in the literature).
850 J. C. Moya
Neither was the practice of clustering in hometown associations, despite its striking
ubiquity, universal. One could compile an extensive list of immigrants who did not
organise along hometown lines. The Basques in Bakersfield* equidistant from the
/
‘campanilist’ Filipinos and Japanese of Salinas and Los Angeles* and their brethren
/
in Buenos Aires* neighbours to the parochialist Spanish Galicians* formed no

/ /
hometown associations; nor did other Basques anywhere else in the diaspora
(Douglass and Bilbao 1975; Moya 1998; Paquette 1982). The practice seems equally
alien to the overseas British and French. Students of these two emigrant groups do
not specify that they did not form hometown associations but consistently fail to
mention them. In their study of friendly societies in Australia, Green and Cromwell
(1984) mention scores of English and Irish fraternals but none based on county or
village of origin. In Charlotte Erickson’s Invisible Immigrants: the Adaptation of
English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (1972), localist
associations are more invisible than the immigrants of the title. In Andrew Graham-
Yooll, The Forgotten Colony: A History of the English Speaking Communities in
Argentina (1981), they are as forgotten as the colony, likely because they did not exist.
The same is true in studies of the British in Brazil (Freyre 1948), Peru (Harriman
1984) and Paraguay (Plá 1976); and of the French in that last country (Pitaud 1955),
Argentina (Szuchman 1980), and Australia (Stuer 1982, who mentions only broadly-
based societies that even welcomed Francophone Canadians, Belgians and Swiss).
Hometown associations also seem to have been absent among Ukrainians in France
and Canada (Anderson and Anderson 1962; Yaworsky-Sokolsky 1985); among Poles
in the US (Pacyga 1991; Znaniecki Lopata 1967), Argentina (Lukasz 1981), Brazil
(Price 1951), Australia (Kaluski 1985) and New Zealand (Burnley 1970); and among
Mexicans in the US, at least before the Oaxacan and Pueblan inflows of the last two
decades (Amaro Hernandez 1983; Griswold del Castillo 1979: 136 8; Lane 1976). It is
/
true that in all the above cases my argument relies on silence (the authors’ lack of
mention of hometown associations). But the silence is too consistent to reflect merely
insufficient research among the various authors. It is also telling that the above-
mentioned groups shared a sharp sense of national or ethno-national identity fuelled
by either imperialist hubris or anti-imperialist grievances. Perhaps this discouraged
the formation of subethnic associations.
Political Groups
In terms of politics, hometown associations tended to avoid them for the same reason
that mutual aid societies did: the potential for divisiveness in associations that aimed
to provide mutual support and sociability to the entire group rather than to those of
a particular political persuasion. The exceptions to the rule normally surfaced in
cases, such as anti-Castro and anti-Sandinista Cuban and Nicaraguan exiles in
Miami, where almost the entire group share the same political views, or at least the
same political enemy. In these cases homeland politics tend to colour the entire
institutional structure of the group regardless of whether the specific organisations
are explicitly political or not. However, because these groups normally flee non-
pluralistic political systems, their chances of actually engaging in homeland politics
are limited. They do tend to retain the rhetoric of homeland liberation and,
particularly in the early stages of exile, to concoct conspiratorial organisations to do
so. But eventually the exile organisations end up trying to influence the host
government’s policy towards the country of origin rather than engaging in homeland
politics directly. In general, homeland politics have played a greater role in the
associational life of political exiles and of groups* such as the Irish, Poles,
/
Ukrainians, Basques, Armenians and Kurds* with ethno-national aspirations

/
(Anderson and Anderson 1962; Galush 1977; Metress 1995).

Associations related to host-society politics have been traditionally much less
common among immigrant groups than mutual benefit and cultural or recreational
societies. In part, this resulted from exclusionary policies that could range from the
withholding of citizenship to the newly-arrived to more invidious and permanent
forms of discrimination or even repression. In part, it reflected the immigrants’ own
priorities, which ranked socio-economic advancement, mutual aid, and recreation
and sociability above engagement in local politics, particularly if they perceived that
such engagement would not provide tangible benefits. Therefore, before the
development of the welfare state, immigrant involvement in local politics tended
to occur in systems of clientage, such as the municipal political machines of North
American cities that provided patronage, jobs and other tangible benefits (Kantowicz
1975). In more laissez-faire conditions, such as pre-Depression Argentina and Brazil,
where the state did not play a significant role as service provider, or repressor,
immigrant advocacy groups tended to take the form of patriotic associations
(De Boni 1987; Moya 1998). These organisations attempted to boost the national
prestige of the group in the host society rather than demand specific services or rights
from the state. Because, unlike mutual aid societies and social clubs, membership fees
did not entitle members to health benefits or recreational services, these organisations
tended to congregate the immigrant elite.
Other Critical Variables

Although just about every immigrant group in the world founded at least some of the
various types of association described above, the density and completeness of their
overall organisational structure varied significantly. As in other questions we have
examined, the determining factors here do not seem related to either the pre-
migratory practices of the arrivals or the nature of the host society. Nor did
institutional completeness result, as Raymond Breton (1964) argued, from the greater
cultural distance between the arrivals and their hosts. The critical variables seem to be
instead the size and the demographic and socio-economic complexity of the
immigrant community. Smaller and simpler immigrant communities * like those /
in provincial towns, those made up mainly by male sojourners, or those that were
relatively homogenous in terms of occupation, such as colonies of agricultural
852 J. C. Moya
labourers or merchants* tended to form a narrower organisational spectrum even if

/
participation was often higher than in larger communities (see Almirol 1978; Barton
1975; Brown 1975: 93 100; de Bruijne 1979; Romero 2003; Seluja-Cecin 1989; also
/
Caponio’s article in this issue). The larger, more complex and longer established an
immigrant community was, the more it tended to resemble the demographic, socio-
economic, and thus institutional, diversity of the general population. Because the
early stages of the migration flow tend to be disproportionately young and male
(or disproportionately young and female in cases of, for example, domestic servants’
or nurses’ recruitment), the sex ratios and age patterns of incipient immigrant
communities are often highly skewed. However, the greater age and gender balance of
the middle and later stages of the migration flow, the normally lower rates of female
return migration, and the process of family reunification tend to balance the sex ratio
and age structure of immigrant communities with time. Large longer-established
communities also tend to become more complex in their socio-economic composi-
tion. The working class becomes more diverse as access to higher-paid, more skilled
positions increases. The middle class tends to grow and diversify as artisans become
independent tradesmen, peddlers and small shopkeepers prosper, and others move
beyond ethnic occupational niches. In the more successful cases, an upper class
appears that is rich not simply by the standards of the community, but by those of the
general population.
The higher end in this spectrum is occupied by large and long-established
immigrant communities in metropolises* such as the Germans of Chicago, the
/
Italians and Spaniards of Buenos Aires, and the Jews of New York City* whose /
numbers reached the hundreds of thousands and whose demographic and socio-
economic diversity matched that of the population as a whole. These communities
founded a range of institutions that surpassed by far* in number, diversity and
/
magnitude* those of smaller and less complex immigrant communities. They

/
founded elite clubs whose sumptuousness matched that of the most selective clubs of
the host society; banks whose capital at times surpassed that of their non-immigrant
competitors; newspapers whose readership came close to that of the mainstream
press; hospitals whose size and range of services made them prominent institutions in
the respective cities as a whole; mutual benefit societies whose funds and membership
often surpassed those of local non-immigrant counterparts. The size and demo-
graphic width of the communities stimulated the creation of children circles, primary
schools, orphanages, youth leagues, vocational academies for young girls and boys, a
range of sport, artistic and recreational societies, nursing homes and asylums for the
elderly, middle-class and elite women clubs, and so on. Occupational and socio-
economic diversity had a similar effect. It encouraged the formation of ethnic trade
associations, labour unions, chambers of commerce, industrialist unions, (‘high’)
cultural societies, freemason lodges, and ideological groups whose views ranged from
anarchism to ultramontane Catholicism. The size and wealth of the immigrant elite
stimulated the formation of what sociologists have classified as ‘instrumental
associations’, those whose declared purpose is to serve the needs of people other
than their members. And the immigrant elite’s desire for social prestige to match
economic successes that were of relatively recent mintage turned these charitable and
philanthropic institutions into instrumental/expressive associations. Exclusive mem-
bership based on prestigeful ascriptive qualities acted as a status-conferring
mechanism that expressed or served the social aspirations of immigrant socialites
as much as the social needs of their clients. The variety of associations not only
produced an uncommon degree of institutional completeness but it also stimulated a
trend toward specialisation that has been described in the literature on voluntary
associations as a transition from ‘pre-modern’ multi-function societies to ‘modern’
single-function ones (Ross 1976; Smith and Freedman 1972).
Membership
This trend towards institutional diversification, specialisation and completeness also
had an impact on the question of membership. One of the strongest points of
consensus in the literature on voluntary associations is that no matter the gauge of
socio-economic stratification employed, and no matter the society examined, lower
groups will show significantly lower rates of participation. In his classic study of
associationism in the US, Murray Hausknecht (1962: 17, 111 25) found that as
/
education, income and white-collar employment levels decreased, so did membership

in voluntary associations. In their review of the literature on the topic, Smith
and Freedman (1972: 115 54) reached a similar conclusion, and so did Lane (1976:
/
181 2) in his study of Mexican American associations in San Antonio. Even within
/
working-class organisations, P.H. Gosden (1974: 13, 46) and Mary A. Clawson (1989:
95 107) found that skilled, better-paid workers were more likely to join English
/
friendly societies and North American fraternal orders than unskilled, low-paid ones.
It is true that Jack C. Ross, in his historical survey, maintained that in ancient China
and Rome voluntary associations were prevalent among the lower classes. But his
claim that this fragmentary and impressionistic evidence from antiquity ‘may be
taken as a general invalidation of what is widely accepted as the best-grounded
universal empirical generalisation in the research area, that higher class is correlated
with more membership’ (Ross 1976: 100) seems far-fetched. We do not know if
membership in immigrant associations was more inclusive in terms of class and
gender than in the host society’s counterparts because systematic comparative studies
have not been conducted on the topic. It is clear, however, that the diversification of
the immigrants’ organisational structure broadened the spectrum of inclusiveness.
At one end of this spectrum, selective social clubs, ladies’ charitable foundations,
opera or high culture societies and similar groups obviously could only confer status
through exclusion. By their standards, success was actually measured by the degree of
exclusivity and their entry fees reflected this. Patriotic and advocacy groups aimed to
be inclusive but this goal was countered by the fact that they did not provide tangible
benefits in exchange for membership fees, which discouraged working-class
immigrants from joining. Large mutual aid societies and small social and recreational
854 J. C. Moya
clubs such as the hometown associations tended to occupy the other end of the
spectrum in terms of both gender and class inclusiveness. The first, as we saw, relied
on membership dues to augment their common funds, expand their services, and
increase their own institutional and actuarial security, just like insurance companies.
By their institutional logic, the only form of exclusion that made sense was based on
the prospective members’ likelihood of over-using medical, disability and other
services. Small social or recreational associations, particularly hometown and regional
ones, aimed to incorporate the entire group and offered a range of activities (ethnic
celebrations, feasts, dances, picnics, sport and recreational activities) that attracted
families, single men and women, and immigrants of all ages and class background.
The common photographs of these associations’ activities rarely provide evidence
about the class background of the members because even if they were manual workers
they would tend to don their ‘Sunday best’. But they clearly show a balanced mix of
men and women of all ages (with an increased presence of children, and particularly
older people, as the paesani community aged). In my own work (Moya 1998) I found
that, although small proprietors, professionals and established artisans tended to
make up the leadership of hometown associations, the membership included from 80
to 94 per cent of the immigrants from the specific localities. This high proportion
suggests that the intimacy and quasi-primary connections of hometown associations
may have turned them into the most inclusive, in terms of class and gender, of all
immigrant organisations.
Then and Now

Although migration has been a permanent process in human history, mass
transnational, and particularly transcontinental, movements have concentrated in
two noticeable temporal and geographical waves: that of some 50 million Europeans
and 10 million Asians between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the Great
Depression; and the mostly Asian, Latin American and African exodus of the last
three decades or so. This raises interesting comparative questions regarding
associations. In terms of the intensity of the practice, has the spread during the
last half century of state and private (non-immigrant) service-providing institutions
led to a decline in associational activity among the newer immigrants? We know that
general participation in voluntary associations has declined in industrialised
countries in the last four decades or so (Keen 1999; Putnam 2000). Has a similar
decline taken place among the new arrivals? Some scholars have argued that it has
and the culprit is clear even in the title of their works (Beito 2000, From Mutual Aid to
the Welfare State, for the US; Green and Cromwell 1984, Mutual Aid or Welfare State,
for Australia).
Breton (1991) found much higher rates of participation in ethnic associations
among older immigrant groups in Toronto (51 per cent of Ukrainians and 63 per cent
of Jews) than among more recent arrivals (12 per cent of West Indians and Chinese).
Radecki (1979) also found relatively high participation (35 per cent) among Poles,
another old immigrant group in Toronto. On the other hand, Owusu (2000) found
an even higher rate (60 per cent) among a new immigrant group, Ghanaians, in the
same city. These figures, however, are not entirely comparable because they refer to
immigrant communities at very different stages of development. The only way to
answer the question with a higher degree of certainty would be to compare the
associational intensity of a significant number of older and newer immigrant
communities diachronically rather than synchronically. Unfortunately, these types of
comparison are almost non-existent. The few cases that exist (Foner 2000, for
example) are overviews rather than detailed studies and they have not addressed this
question. Indeed, one of the most serious weaknesses in migration studies is the lack
of dialogue between scholars who study the pre-1930 and post-1960 currents. Because
the former flow is principally studied by historians and the latter by sociologists,
anthropologists and political scientists, this has hindered interdisciplinary collabora-
tion and engendered two distinct scholarly corpora that normally lead separate
existences.
Although we have little evidence on overall participation trends, a review of these
two scholarly corpora does show a series of significant changes. The expansion of
government and business social security systems has clearly discouraged the
formation of what used to be the most common and widespread form of immigrant
organisation. Indeed, mutual aid societies are almost non-existent in new immigrant
communities. None of the six authors in this issue who deal with post-1960 migrants
mentions them (Bloemraad, Caponio, Chung, Cordero-Guzmán, Hooghe, Vermeu-
len). The term mutual aid (or mutual benefit, assistance, help) continues to appear
occasionally, as in the Vietnamese Mutual Assistance Associations mentioned by
Bloemraad. But these are generic titles. These associations not only do not confer the
cradle-to-grave services that mutual aid societies provided in the past, but they do not
even have the sine qua non of mutual aid societies: the contribution of individual fees
to a common fund from which member benefits are allocated.
The trend in hometown association formation and membership is more difficult to
detect. None of the six articles on post-1960 migrants mention any hometown
associations, with the exception of Bloemraad’s reference to Portuguese social clubs
organised along regional lines. Itzigsohn and Saucedo (2002) have shown that only
20 per cent of Salvadorians, 11 per cent of Dominicans, and 9 per cent of Colombians
in the US have ever participated in a hometown association. This may actually
represent a high estimate because the query in the questionnaire was phrased in a way
that could have been misinterpreted by the immigrants as meaning associations in
their own hometowns. Orozco (2002) has described similarly limited membership
among Mexican and Central American immigrants in the US. On the other hand, he
detected an upsurge of Mexican hometown associations in the mid-1990s. Nyı́ri
(2001) noted a similar upsurge among Chinese immigrants in Europe; and so did
Owusu (2000) for the Ghanaians in Toronto, where three-quarters of the group’s
associations were based on township of origin and over half of the arrivals belonged
to one of these.
856 J. C. Moya
Governments: There and Here, Then and Now

Much clearer than trends in formation and membership of hometown associations is
the increasing activism of local home governments. Regional and municipal
governments have traditionally courted hometown associations in the diaspora for
money and support. But this activism has reached a high level in the last decade or so.
The upsurge of Mexican hometown associations in the US that Orozco (2002) noted
in the mid-1990s was directly due to the goading and support of the Mexican federal
and state governments. These governments even started a programme in which they
would each match every dollar donated by hometown associations for the
improvement of the local infrastructure. The same is true for the upsurge in Chinese
hometown associations in Europe, which have been created with the support of
provincial governments and act more as business and investment bureaux than as
social clubs (Nyı́ri 2001). In Hong Kong the political connection between provincial
governments and hometown associations has become so strong that the Fujianese
societies have been credited with the electoral victory of the DAB, the pro-China
flagship party (Ngok 2001). Control of hometown associations has also become part
of, as Paul Marks (2000) put it, ‘China’s Cambodia Strategy’. In other cases, local
governments have become sources, rather than recipients, of financial support.
Monetary injections from the lately empowered regional governments of Spain and
Italy are keeping alive what appeared to be moribund regional and hometown
associations in South America and Canada.
In the host societies, the increased activism of the state and of ethnic politics as a
mechanism for the allocation of public funds, has led to an increase in ethnic
advocacy groups. The politically active non-profits studied by Chung for Koreans in
Los Angeles (this issue) reflect this trend. The trend also explains the positive role of
government in fomenting ethnic associationism that Bloemraad found in her
comparison of the Vietnamese and Portuguese in Toronto and Boston. As Hooghe
and Vermeulen show in their articles on Flanders and Amsterdam, the trend is not
limited to North America and host governments actually subsidise ethnic associations
(which is also the case, as Bloemraad demonstrates, in Canada and for political
refugees like the Vietnamese in the US). Another new, or augmented, trait is the
growth of non-immigrant, service-providing NGOs. It is telling that, as Caponio
shows in her article, Italian pro-immigrant associations actually dominate immigrant
associations in Italy. This is the very opposite of the situation in the Italian diaspora
where immigrants’ associations by far outnumbered the host societies’ institutions
that catered to the immigrants’ needs.
The argument about whether government intervention discourages or promotes
associational activity among immigrants cannot thus be answered in yes or no terms.
The scholarly literature demonstrates that the answer can only be historical and
situational. Clearly, millions of immigrants throughout the world have developed
impressive organisational structures with little or no state support other than the
granting of associational freedom. In these cases, the Tocquevillean image of self-
sufficient and self-started civic associations, which Bloemraad and others (Skocpol
1997) have questioned, is actually quite accurate. Clearly too, the welfare state and
employment-based insurances have discouraged the formation of mutual benefit
societies to the point that they have almost disappeared. Yet, the assumption that this
represents a negative trend is often based on a Tocquevillean idealisation of mutual
aid societies. Despite their great accomplishments in providing security and
camaraderie to millions of immigrants, we should remember that other millions,
and usually the most needy, never belonged to mutual benefit associations. It is also
evident that government logistical and financial support can, and does, encourage the
formation of certain types of service-providing organisation and advocacy group, and
aids political incorporation. But government involvement has little or no effect on the
formation of social and recreational groups, which continue to represent the most
common form of voluntary association in the diasporas. Moreover, while the latter
types of association attract large numbers of immigrants and intense participation,
those sponsored by host or sending governments often have to struggle to involve
people other than the leadership (Nyı́ri 2001; Orozco 2002).
Yet, while non-political associations continue to predominate in terms of numbers,
membership and participation, a disproportionately high share of the present
scholarship on immigrant associations concentrates on politics, empowerment, social
mobilisation, non-immigrant service-providers, and immigrant clients rather than
joiners. The articles in the present issue of this journal provide an example. Hooghe
subtitled his article ‘The Political Opportunity Structure for Ethnic Mobilisation’. But
the majority of ethnic associations in Flanders do not even bother joining the
umbrella groups through which government funds are distributed. Chung deals with
formal and quasi-political non-profits. But these organisations seem to attract mainly
ideologically conscious 1.5- and second-generation Korean Americans educated in
the host society and versed in the language of North American ethnic politics. The
first sentence in Bloemraad’s article states that ‘Organisations play a key role in
political incorporation’. But the Portuguese organised mainly social clubs. The
scholarly attention to politics surely reflects the increased presence of the state in the
process and theoretical trends in academia. But the priorities of scholars (and of the
vocal political, or politicised, immigrant elites) do not seem to coincide with those of
the majority of immigrants who continue to rank sociability and recreation above
politics and mobilisation. Perhaps the discrepancy is ‘purely academic’. How many
academics do actually prefer a departmental meeting to a party, picnic or sport game
with family and friends?
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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

ISSN: 1369-183X (Print) 1469-9451 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjms20

Immigrants and Associations: A Global and

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Immigrants and Associations: A Global

Drawing on the international literature on migration and immigrant associations,

Keywords: Voluntary Associations; Global and Historical Perspective; Associational

definition of voluntary associations and the principal impetus for associational

of overseas Chinese be categorised as secondary associations even though they are

Impetus and Origins

associations began to be interpreted, not surprisingly, as continuations of pre-

Yet, despoiled of ethnocentric assumptions or revisionist impetus, the questions

A broader look at the international scholarly literature, however, casts doubts

‘Immigrant organisations in the United States resembled each other so remarkably

Besides the clear evidence of pre-migratory continuity, the formation of these

Rotating Credit Associations

Lizabeth Cohen maintained that, in general, immigrant workers in Chicago

example, described Italian immigrant banks as ‘privately owned steamship agencies,

Mutual Aid Societies

unemployment and disability insurance, free repatriation or admission into old-age

In other cases of apparent religious segregation it is actually difficult to determine

African slaves in early-nineteenth-century Cuba founded cabildos de naciones, which,

When localist associations appeared in smaller or rural communities, for example

in Buenos Aires* neighbours to the parochialist Spanish Galicians* formed no

Ukrainians, Basques, Armenians and Kurds* with ethno-national aspirations

(Anderson and Anderson 1962; Galush 1977; Metress 1995).

Other Critical Variables

labourers or merchants* tended to form a narrower organisational spectrum even if

magnitude* those of smaller and less complex immigrant communities. They

education, income and white-collar employment levels decreased, so did membership

Then and Now

Governments: There and Here, Then and Now

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