Immigrant communities face a variety of problems, including a lack of social, economic, and political security that has only been exacerbated by the recent economic downturn. They face problems such as discrimination, atrocious working conditions, legal issues, and difficulty finding housing and jobs, and they have few or no means of redressing these problems. Furthermore, these challenges extend back to the communities of origin, where people suffer from economic stagnation, lack of educational opportunities, poor health care, and a shortage of the technology necessary to move upward in the world.

This year, WDA decided to embark on a project that would work to address these problems, based on the guidance of the communities themselves. Through discourse with Francisco Lopez, the head of the immigrant rights group CAUSA, we discovered that while there are many extant organizations that serve the needs of immigrants, they are often working in isolation or only in conjunction with a few other local groups. The groups we talked to wanted to discover and establish connections between the current hometown associations (HTAs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the governments themselves, and a variety of other charitable, educational, and legal institutions that are highly involved in immigrant affairs. Such connections are eminently important because they allow groups to work together while increasing their capacity to serve; empowering them politically, socially, and economically; and allowing them to concentrate not only on development in countries of origin but also on integration into US communities.

WDA and CAUSA developed a project that will address this need for connection in the community of Pacific Northwest HTAs, NGOs, and other organizations working with immigrants from Oaxaca, Mexico. The project has two main components. First, WDA will map all the Oaxacan organizations in Washington and Oregon, both based on their areas of origin and on the services provided and projects undertaken. This will occur both in travel and meetings throughout the Pacific Northwest and in a research trip to visit sending communities in Oaxaca to gather information on the impacts of HTA and NGO projects in January 2010. We will also gather input on the role WDA and CAUSA can play in assisting these organizations, how cooperation between involved organizations would manifest itself, and how they would like to see a cooperative network structured. This research will be followed by the organization of a summit of leaders of HTAs, NGOs, and Oaxacan communities, along with representatives from both governments and other organizations. In this summit, the creation of a federation of these groups will be formalized by the creation of bilateral agreements between Oaxacan leaders and the associations in the Pacific Northwest, linking them all together.

We chose this project for several reasons. Hometown associations are a relatively untapped resource for integration, and most studies concentrate more on their development work in Mexico. Harnessing this potential could allow HTAs to increase their capacity to assist their communities in a variety of ways, such as helping them access legal aid, aiding with translation in Spanish and the large variety of indigenous languages spoken by many immigrants, providing youth and adult education, linking them to health care, and helping migrants stand up for their rights against discrimination in the neighborhood, workplace, and legal system. We specifically chose to work with Oaxacan HTAs and NGOs because they are already well-established, although not well-connected, and thus the creation of a network of these organizations would work well as a template for further networking in different areas of the US and Mexico.

To find out more about the Transnational Community Development Initiative, we strongly encourage you to read the concept paper, which describes the project’s background, timeline, and impact in greater detail. We also encourage you to visit the websites of our partners in this project: CAUSA, Oregon’s Immigrant Rights Coalition; and PCUN, the union of Northwest treeplanters and farmworkers.

Tags: Transnational Community Development Initiative, Updates

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