tilly-trust networks in migration

Trust Networks in Transnational Migration

Charles Tilly1

The sheer volume of migrant remittances to relatively poor countries, inclu-ding those of Latin America and the Caribbean, nicely dramatizes the genu-inely transnational social ties created by long-distance migration. Theevidence underlines that migration flows are serious business, not only forthe individuals and families involved, but also for whole national economies.Thinking about remittances also allows us to identify some crucial socialprocesses of which most migrants and first-hand students of migration arewell aware, but for which we have neither well-established theories, carefullycrafted concepts, nor extensive evidence. I mean the creation, use, and trans-formation of interpersonal trust networks within migration streams.

KEY WORDS: trust; networks; transnational; migration.

INTRODUCTION

My friend and former student Alex Julca migrated to New York Cityfrom Huanuco, Peru, after a long intermediate stay in Lima. He tells vividtales of his struggles to get an education in Peru, his achievement of aneconomics Ph.D. in the United States, his appointment as an economicaffairs officer at the United Nations, and his efforts to help family

This paper revises my Mead Lecture, University of Connecticut, September 2005. I haveadapted a few paragraphs from Charles Tilly, Trust and Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2005, and a few other paragraphs from Viviana A. Zelizer and Charles Tilly,‘‘Relations and Categories’’ in Arthur Markman and Brian Ross, eds., The Psychology ofLearning and Motivation, volume 47 (San Diego: Elsevier), forthcoming’’… and a few otherparagraphs from Viviana A. Zelizer and Charles Tilly, ‘‘Relations and Categories’’pp. 225-255 in Arthur Markman and Brian Ross, eds., Categories in Use. The Psychology ofLearning and Motivation, Advances in Research and Theory, Volume 47, Amsterdam: Elsevier.

1 Department of Sociology, Columbia University, 514 Fayerweather Hall, New York, NewYork 10027-6902; e-mail: [email protected]

Sociological Forum, Vol. 22, No. 1, March 2007 (� 2007)

DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2006.00002.x

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0884-8971/06/0300-0031/0 � 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

members both in Peru and in New York. Speaking of another Peruvianimmigrant he met in New York, Alex reports that:

Today I will send the remittance in kind to my mother, poor woman, she will beneeding it. ‘La Cholita’ would say, on one of the occasions on which she sent en-comiendas to her family. Even grandparents, who often had helped parents to raisethe kids, are subject to attention from Peruvian immigrants, who send them remit-tances when not sponsoring them to come to ‘Los Estados Unidos.’

Alex continues:

Sometimes remittances flow the other way and parents use their skills to help theirgrown children. For example, when parents who are construction workers mighthelp to build or improve their children’s homes, either in Lima or in New YorkCity. Maria invited her father to New York City on a tourist visa so that he couldvisit her and his grandchildren but also assist in the construction of the sewagesystem for her new house. ‘Here it is different,’ her father told me. ‘The parts aregenerally plastic, not like in Peru, where they are usually metal. But some of theparts might be interchangeable, so I am taking a few back to Peru to use with myclients’ (Julca, 2001:251).

In a recent talk, immigrant become migration analyst, Alex Julca pointsout that 75% of all remittances to Latin American and Caribbean countriescome from the United States, that the vast majority of recent migrants tothe United States from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Ecuador sendremittances regularly, and that undocumented migrants send remittancesmore regularly than their documented paisanos (Julca, 2005).

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs forwhich Alex works reports that during the 1990s remittances passed over-seas development assistance as a source of external funds for developingcountries; by the early twenty-first century officially counted remittancesalone were running about US$60 billion per year. Unofficially transmittedmoney and goods surely added billions more. By 2004, remittances hadwell surpassed international development assistance and started approach-ing foreign direct investment as sources of external financing in developingcountries. Officially counted worldwide remittance flows then amounted tosome US$182 billion, of which 69% went to developing countries. Infor-mal flows surely pushed the grand total of remittances well above foreigndirect investment itself in many poorer countries (Maimbo and Ratha,2005:3–4). Remittances have sometimes amounted to more than 60% ofinternational monetary inflows to El Salvador and Nicaragua (UnitedNations, 2004:106). In 2002, the roughly 27 billion dollars officially sentto Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for about a fifth of theworld total of official remittances and equaled 1.6% of the entire region’sgross domestic product (United Nations, 2004:107).

The point of this article is not to bludgeon readers with statistics onthe economics and demography of transnational migration. I do mean,

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however, to challenge popular images of immigrants as one-way travelers,desperate for work or welfare in a richer country, who cut home ties assoon as possible in order to take advantage of their new country. Thesheer volume of migrant remittances to relatively poor countries, includingthose of Latin America and the Caribbean, nicely dramatizes the genu-inely transnational social ties created by long-distance migration. It under-lines that migration flows are serious business not only for the individualsand families involved, but also for whole national economies.

Thinking about remittances also allows us to identify some crucialsocial processes of which most migrants and first-hand students of migra-tion are well aware, but for which we have neither well established theor-ies, carefully crafted concepts, nor extensive evidence. I mean the creation,use, and transformation of interpersonal trust networks within migrationstreams. Trust networks play central parts in the organization, mainten-ance, and transformation of long-distance migration streams across muchof the world. Within them, remittance flows reinforce commitmentsamong all participants in the stream.

‘Interpersonal trust networks’ may strike you as a mysterious term. Out of all thevarious networks that connect people, it helps to single out those that involve unu-sual amounts of mutual trust. People rely especially on those networks when theyare carrying on long-term, crucial enterprises such as procreation, child rearing,religious or political commitment, long-distance trade, and, of course, migration. Inthose networks, members bet valued outcomes on the likelihood that other peoplewill meet their responsibilities competently. Trust networks include some religiouscommunities, political conspiracies, webs of ethnic traders, and kinship groups. Forthousands of years, trust networks have performed an enormous range of political,economic, and spiritual work for human beings, especially those human beings whocould not rely on governments to provide them with sustaining services. But herewe concentrate on trust networks’ place in long-distance migration.

This brief essay can do no more than open the door on trust net-works and transnational migration. Here are the six main points:

1) Within the wide range of interpersonal networks that play some part inlong-distance migration, trust networks figure importantly in solidaritybetween people at the origins and destinations of migration streams.2) Members of such networks typically acquire long-term rights and obli-gations binding themselves to each other, which mean that the networksoperate simultaneously as sites of social insurance and of social control.3) For that very reason, migration streams attached to trust networkstend to concentrate in relatively specialized economic, geographic, andsocial niches as compared with all streams of migration.4) The operation of migrants’ trust networks creates and depends onboundaries that separate members from outsiders; as a result, membership

Trust Networks in Transnational Migration 5

inhibits assimilation of migrants at the destination and poses sharp choicesfor the second and later generations.5) In the longer run, the survival of transnational trust networks throughthe second generation and beyond depends heavily on the social segrega-tion or integration of the immigrant stream at the destination, whethersegregated through self-selection or exclusion, segregated immigrant com-munities more frequently maintain transnational trust networks.6) That segregation, however, generally confines members of trust net-works to a relatively narrow range of opportunities for work, housing,sociability, and welfare. If those opportunities connect members with richrewards, the network prospers. If not, it often suffers.

The Stakes of Trust Networks

Experts on migration will recognize immediately that these argumentsmix familiar facts with risky speculation. I hope they will stimulate discus-sion, criticism, research, and new reflection on fundamental social proces-ses, including the generation of trust. Many students of political processes,including me, believe that well-functioning democracy depends on substan-tial integration of interpersonal trust into public politics. If so, we aretalking not merely about the lives of migrants, but about the quality ofdemocratic life at large. As students of western democracies often fretabout the impact of recent immigration on public life, we touch a sensitivejunction between migration and politics.2

What is trust? We can think of trust as an attitude or as a relation-ship with practices attached. For the purpose of studying migration, ithelps to concentrate on the relationship, leaving open what sorts of atti-tudes might motivate, complement, or result from a relationship of trust.Labels such as kinsman, compadre, paisano, fellow believer, and comemberof a craft provide a first indication of a trust relationship. But we know atrust relationship more surely by the practices of its participants: If youtrust me, do not just tell me so; let me take charge of your children’s edu-cation, lend me your life’s savings for investment, take medicines I giveyou, or help me paint my house on the assumption that I will help you

2 For networks in political processes, see Auyero, 2000; Bates et al., 1998; Bandelj, 2002;Bandy and Smith, 2004; Bob, 2005; Cook, 2001; Davis et al., 2005; Diani, 1995, 2003;Edelman, 1999, 2003; Elster, 1999; Elster et al., 1998; Farah, 2004; Forment, 2003; Fox,1992, 1994, 1996; Gould, 1999, 2003; Keck and Sikkink, 1998, 2000; Knoke, 1990; Lang-man, 2005; Levi, 1997; Levi and Stoker, 2000; Ngai, 2004; Ostrom, 1990; 1998; Passy,1998, 2001; Paxton, 1999, 2002; Raggio, 1990; Riles, 2000; Singerman, 1995, 2004; Skocpol,2003; Skocpol and Fiorina, 1999; Solnick, 1998; Tarrow, 2005; Tilly, 2004, 2005a.

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paint yours. If you do not trust me, prove it by doing none of these thingsand nothing like them.

Trust consists of placing valued outcomes at risk to others’ malfea-sance, mistakes, or failures (Tilly, 2005a). Trust relationships include thosein which people regularly take such risks.3 Although some trust relation-ships remain purely dyadic, for the most part they operate within largernetworks of similar relationships. Trust networks, then, consist of ramifiedinterpersonal connections, consisting mainly of strong ties, within which peo-ple set valued, consequential, long-term resources and enterprises at risk tothe malfeasance, mistakes, or failures of others.

How will we recognize a trust network when we encounter or enterone? First, we will notice a number of people who are connected, directly orindirectly, by similar ties; they form a network. Second, we will see that thesheer existence of such a tie gives one member significant claims on theattention or aid of another; the network consists of strong ties. Third, wewill discover that members of the network are collectively carrying on majorlong-term enterprises such as procreation, long-distance trade, workers’mutual aid, practice of an underground religion, or, of course, maintenanceof a long-distance migration stream. Finally, we will learn that the configur-ation of ties within the network sets the collective enterprise at risk to themalfeasance, mistakes, and failures of individual members.

Networks reach into every corner of social life (Watts, 2003, 2004).Social networks include any set of similar connections among three or moresocial sites. Connections include communication, mutual recognition, andshared participation in some activity, flows of goods or services, transmis-sion of diseases, and other forms of consequential interaction. Network sitesmay be individuals, but they can also be organizations, localities, or socialpositions. A network of connections among people you do not know andwho mostly do not know each other brings you your morning newspaper.Another transmits political information. Still others lend invisible structureto flows of money, disease, and linguistic innovation.

3 For surveys of trust-sustaining practices, relations, and institutions, including their involve-ment in migration (whether or not the analysts themselves use the language of trust), seeAlapuro and Lonkila, 2004; Anderson, 1974; Anthony and Horne, 2003; Bayon, 1999;Besley, 1995; Biggart, 2001; Biggart and Castanias, 2001; Buchan et al., 2002; Burt andKnez, 1995; Castren and Lonkila, 2004; Curtin, 1984; Darr, 2003; DiMaggio, 2001;DiMaggio and Louch, 1998; Feige, 1997; Fontaine, 1993; Gambetta, 1993; Granovetter,1995; Guinnane, 2005; Guiso et al., 2004; Haber et al., 2003; Havik, 1998; Heimer, 1985;Landa, 1994; Ledeneva, 1998, 2004; Light and Bonacich, 1988; Lonkila, 1999a,b; Marqueset al., 2001; Morawska, 1985, 1996, 2003; Muldrew, 1993; 1998, 2001; Ostergren, 1988;Pastor et al., 2002; Piipponen, 2004; Postel-Vinay, 1998; Powell, 1990; Powell and Smith-Doerr, 1994; Raddon, 2003; Rotberg, 1999; Shapiro, 1987; Stark, 1995; Tilly, 1990, 1998;Tsai, 2002; Uslaner, 2002; Warren, 1999; Weber and Carter, 2003; White, 2002; Wuthnow,2004; Yamagishi and Yamagishi, 1994; Zelizer, 2004, 2005b.


Although segments of such networks may overlap with or even con-stitute trust networks, taken as wholes they do not qualify as trust net-works. They do not qualify because their participants do not generallyplace their major valued collective enterprises at risk to malfeasance, mis-takes, or failures by other members of the same networks. In that precisesense, members do not trust each other. Most or all members of trust net-works, in contrast, place major valued collective enterprises such as thepreservation of their faith, placement of their children, provision for theirold age, and protection of personal secrets at risk to fellow members’ mal-feasance, mistakes, or failures. Accordingly, trust networks constitute onlya tiny subset of all networks.

Over thousands of years, nevertheless, ordinary people have commit-ted their major energies and most precious resources to trust networks notonly migration streams, to be sure, but also religious solidarities, lineages,trade diasporas, patron–client chains, credit networks, societies of mutualaid, youth groups, and some kinds of local communities. We participantsin kinship and other trust networks usually take them for granted. Butthey pose important mysteries: How do they maintain cohesion, control,and, yes, trust when their members spread out into worlds rich with otheropportunities and commitments?

Their limiting cases, isolated communes and religious communities,seem easier to explain because their very insulation from the world facili-tates continuous monitoring, mutual aid, reciprocity, trust, and barriers toexit. But geographically dispersed trust networks somehow manage to pro-duce similar effects, if not usually at the emotional intensities of isolatedcommunities. Maintaining the boundary between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ clearlyplays an important part in trust networks’ continued operation (Tilly,2005b).

Trust networks figure in many migration streams, especially thoseorganized in continuous chains linking limited origins to limited destina-tions. In fact, chain-linked long-distance migration provides a privilegedlaboratory for study of transformations in trust networks.4 Long-distancemigration poses serious risks. Those risks dispose potential migrants who

4 Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo, 2005; Bodnar, 1985; Borges, 2003; Conway and Cohen, 1998;Cordero-Guzman et al., 2001; Curran et al., 2005; Curran and Cope Saguy, 2001; Durandet al., 1996; Le Espiritu, 2003; Fussell and Massey, 2004; de la Garza and Lindsay Lowell,2002; Georges, 1990; Gordon, 2005; Grasmuck and Pessar, 1992; Green, 2002; Grimson,1999; de Haas and Plug, 2006; Hagan and Rose Ebaugh, 2003; Heer, 1996; Hodagneu-Sotelo and Avila, 2002; Hoerder and Page Moch, 1996; Kamphoefner, 1987; Kamphoefneret al., 1991; Kurien, 2002; Massey et al., 1998; McKeown, 2001; Meisch, 2002; Moch,2003; Mooney, 2003; Parrenas, 2005a,b; Poros, 2001; Portes, 1995, 1996; Portes and Rum-baut, 1990, 2001; Roberts and Morris, 2003; Sanders, 2002; Singh, 2005; Smith, 2000, 2003,2005; Tilly, 1990; 2000; VanWey, 2004; Vertovec, 2003; Waldinger, 1996; Waldinger andBozorgmehr, 1996; Winters et al., 2001.

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do not have extensive professional connections or official sponsors to relyon members of their trust networks for information and advice. The samerisks inhibit potential migrants who lack the mediation of trust networksfrom migrating at all. Instead of a broad distribution across destinationsas a function of economic opportunities at those destinations, chainmigration channels long-distance moves into a few origin-destinationstreams; large numbers of people from the same village end up in thesame towns or urban neighborhoods thousands of miles away.

Networks persist in the process, but change structure and geographicdistribution. As participants generally rely on strong ties to others withwhom they are carrying on consequential long-term enterprises and pla-cing those enterprises at risk to the malfeasance, mistakes, or failures ofothers, the networks in question commonly qualify as trust networks.Chain migration organized around trust networks contributes to the ‘‘seg-mented assimilation’’ that Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut see ascharacteristic of recent migration to the United States (Portes andRumbaut, 1990).

Without using the term, my former colleague Robert Smith hasamply documented the importance of trust networks in the connectionsmigrants form between Mexican villages and New York City. His 15 yearparticipant observation of the migration stream connecting the Puebla vil-lage, he calls Ticuani to mainly Mexican concentrations within New Yorkdocuments both creation of a far-reaching network of trust and deeptransformation of the network as a result of interaction among peoplemoving back and forth between the two locales (Smith, 2005). By now,roughly 60% of all living people born in Ticuani live in the United States,mostly in New York (Smith, 2002:147). Many New York-based Ticuanen-ses, including those born in New York, actually returned frequently toMexico and spent significant portions of their time in Ticuani. Modestincomes in New York made it possible to cut fine figures in Mexico.

Remittances within Trust Networks

At the same time, remittances from New York money earners toTicuanense relatives, building of vacation houses in Ticuani, participationof returning emigrants in public ceremonies, direct intervention of emi-grants (whether returned or not) in Ticuani politics, establishment of NewYork-style youth gangs in Ticuani, and entrusting of New York-born chil-dren to their grandmothers in Mexico all help transform social structuresconnecting New York with Puebla. These changes have triple effects:


• Deeply altering the organization of power and wealth in Ticuani.• Reshaping the lives of Ticuanenses in both locales.• Creating a new transnational set of trust networks.

Without a continuous flow of earnings from mostly modest occupa-tions in New York, the continuously changing system would collapse. Butfed by those resources and by new generations of migrants in both direc-tions, the process sustains boundaries between Ticuanenses and others,shapes relations across those boundaries in both Mexico and the UnitedStates, and increases the relative prominence of network segments closelyconnected to the Ticuanense population in New York. In the mediumrun, then, the partial success of chain migration has reinforced the viabil-ity of trust networks at its core.

Smith objects strongly to analyses of transnational migration thattreat it primarily as an assault of globalization on receiving countries.Instead, he insists on the degree to which continuous flows in both direc-tions transform sending communities as well as connections between ori-gin and destination. He also stresses the importance of descending fromthe national to the local level. As he declares,

Transnational life if lived, in intimate experience, not as ‘transcendence’ ofnational borders but, rather, as a maintenance of links between one’s own or one’sparents’ hometown, and what it comes to represent, via concrete practices or com-mon imaginings. These evolve, like all cultural practices, in relation to their chan-ging material and institutional contexts. Transnational practices and institutionsare thus, in the proximate sense, products of other locally lived processes and cus-toms. In the cases I have studied, transnational life is both quotidian—mailing orreceiving remittances or phone calls—and also dramatic, attending feasts and dan-ces and fighting in the hometown, building a school in the hometown, anddemanding recognition and political power from hometown authorities (Smith,2000:205).

Smith shows, among other things, that a hometown association oper-ating from New York City regularly intervenes in Ticuani’s local affairs tothe extent of financing the water supply and backing candidates for publicoffice.

Since the 1970s, in fact, many Ticuanense New Yorkers fulfill theirvillage work obligations, or faenas, by means of financial contributionschanneled to Mexico through a powerful New York-based committee ofemigrants. Smith tells the story of accompanying committee members toJFK airport in 1993 as they went off to consult with Ticuani authoritiesand contractors about a new water system for the village. For this, hereports,

the largest Ticuani project ever, the Committee raised more than two-thirds of the$150,000 cost of the project, exceeding the Mexican federal, state, and local contri-butions combined. The Committee has also become involved in Ticuani politics

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helping to fashion a set of rules and practices for participating in transnationalpublic life. Fund raising in New York by Ticuanenses has become increasinglyimportant in Ticuani electoral politics (Smith, 2005:3).

In New York, the Committee had assessed each household in NewYork or Ticuani it judged able to pay a $300 tax they called a ‘‘cooper-ation,’’ threatening delinquents that their Ticuani houses would notreceive water; almost everyone paid, regardless of how long they had beenaway from Ticuani (Smith, 2000:212). By competing with local Mexicanauthorities, the New York Committee’s activity was undermining the oldstructure of local power. It was also converting a segment of the migra-tion-formed trust network into a transnational political institution.

Members of the second generation born in New York, Smith reports,also maintain contact with Ticuani, with the young men importing NewYork street gang styles, getting respect they cannot command in NewYork, and adopting macho manners in the village their sisters and girl-friends do not tolerate in New York. Nevertheless, on the average second-and third-generation Ticuanenses establish far broader connections outsidethe hometown community than did their first-generation forebearers(Smith, 2002).

In the longer run, we can speculate that further New York success ofMexican emigrants will increase differentiation within the network,enhance involvement of New York emigrants in competing projects,reduce the average commitment of emigrants and their offspring to enter-prises operating in Ticuani, and thereby undermine the system. They willprobably multiply external connections with different segments of themigrant population, erode the group boundary, reduce collective controlover means of sustenance, and fragment internal relations. So far, how-ever, Ticuanense transnational trust networks remain viable.

Similarly, Sarah Mahler’s ethnographic study of migration between ElSalvador and New York’s Long Island suburbs documents the profoundeffect of remittances on sending communities, maintenance of transnationalties into the second generation, the frequent care of U.S. born children bytheir relatives in El Salvador, and the investment of people at both ends ofthe migration stream in maintaining their trust network. More numerousthan permanent return migrants, Mahler reports that Salvadorans:

Are who enjoy legal immigrant status in the United States and who return forfamily and community events, such as marriages, baptisms, funerals, and villagefestivals. Increasingly visible are older returning migrants, generally men in theirforties to sixties who fled El Salvador during the war, leaving behind their spousesand young children. With limited education and skills for advancing economicallyon Long Island, many of these men desired to return home—indeed their familiesbegged them to return—but the families had also grown too dependent uponremittance income to forsake migration altogether. So, before returning, migrants


first sponsor the migration of at least one child, grooming him or her in the basicsof migrant life—housing and job. The children ensure that remittances will con-tinue to flow homeward, cash that even highly self-sufficient farmers need to pur-chase fertilizers and pay for clothing, medical care, and so on (Mahler, 2001a:120–121; see also Mahler, 2001b; for the terrible toll of the Salvadoran civil war,see Brockett, 2005; Wood, 2003).

While in New York, moreover, Salvadoran immigrants maintain con-tinuous contact with their places of origin by means of letters, dollarremittances, and gifts that flow in both directions. Specialized viajeroswho travel frequently between the two countries, Mahler reports, play cru-cial parts in moving goods, money, and information between Long Islandand El Salvador (Mahler, 2001a:117). Salvadorans’ reliance on those inter-mediaries indicates that they connect via a trust network with the capacityto limit malfeasance, mistakes, and failures.

Clearly such trust networks go beyond simple means-end instrumental-ism. They engage their members in webs of rights and obligations. Unlikethe short-term contract with Western Union for the transmission of fundsfrom New York to a Salvadoran village, relations with a viajero typicallylast from one trip to the next. More important, they articulate with larger,longer-lasting networks of social insurance and social control, especially tiesamong kin and friends at both ends of the migration stream.

Based on interviews with Hispanic migrants to Miami and Los Ange-les in 2002, a Pew Hispanic Center study documents the centrality ofremittances to connections between sending and receiving communities.Almost all respondents reported sending remittances to support familiesback home. Most gave remittances priority over their bills and expenses inthe United States. ‘‘Before anything,’’ Mexican emigrant respondentMarisela remarked, ‘‘I send them the money because they count on it.Then afterwards I pay the bills, my rent, but the first thing I do is sendit’’ (Suro et al., 2002:7).

When it came to basic family expenses back home, most migrants leftbudgetary control to their families. A Mexican emigrant, Eduardo, toldinterviewers:

One part is for savings, the other part for the primary necessities like education. Itdepends on my wife and the priorities she has. So I go ahead and send the money,and it just goes where she uses it (Suro et al., 2002:8).

When it came to investments such as buying land, however, remittingemigrants exercised extensive control over the money; they negotiatedbinding earmarks with their families in the home community. Each ofthese arrangements clearly involves mental accounting. In each, earmark-ing concerns budgeting of remitted funds into distinct categories of legit-imate expenditure.

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Latin American migrants to the United States commonly use wireservices to transmit money back home. A simple search of almost anyAmerican city’s Latin American neighborhoods for stores with env-ios—remittances—among their advertised wares will verify the importanceof wire services. Many migrants also use couriers (often known as viajerosor travelers) to carry money and other valuables. Finally, migrants whoreturn home for visits regularly carry not only money but also other giftsincluding household appliances. Anyone who has ever taken an inexpen-sive flight from a U.S. airport to the Caribbean or Latin America can tes-tify to the importance of hand-carried remittances.

To be sure, all such remittance relations mix good will with extensiveobligation. Relations between emigrants and households at the origin pro-vide mutual support, as well as reinforcing the migrants’ longer-termclaims on membership in the sending community. Earmarked remittancesbuttress the crucial relations as they assert the senders’ power over thoserelations. The boundary between faithful remitters and defaulters dividesupstanding family members from dishonorable exiles, but it also separateshouseholds that regularly receive support of their migrant members fromless fortunate households at the origin.

Reporting on his extensive fieldwork in the Caribbean island ofMontserrat as well as in London, Stuart Philpott describes a powerful sys-tem of informal controls over remittances from migrants in Great Britain.He remarks,

Children are impressed with the behavior expected from the migrants from afairly early age. These expectations are implicitly taught in the home through thepraise of migrants who send remittances and through the condemnation of the‘worthless-minded’ kin who do not ‘notice their families.’ Stories such as oneabout the migrant who returned from America with 32 trunk loads of gifts fordistribution to his family and friends and another about a woman who literallysent her brother a car from America in the days when the only other cars wereowned by the wealthiest estate owners have virtually become moral precepts(Philpott, 1968:468).

Philpott documents children’s trips to the post office in hopes ofretrieving money-bearing letters, children’s visions of the future in whichthey emigrate and send back support for their families, complex alloca-tions of money received among family members, reciprocity by sending ofhomegrown products back to Britain, black magic employed to coercereluctant remitters, in short, a large array of controls backing up the gen-eral understanding that honorable emigrants meet their obligations tofamily and friends by means of remittances. The obvious consequence:Division of emigrants into the two categories of honorable and dishonora-ble (see also Roberts and Morris, 2003).


At the United States end, such trust networks offer connections withjobs, housing, sociability, and care all crucial forms of insurance for high-risk migrants. At the Latin American end, they offer opportunities toreturn home after a U.S. stint, to receive respect that runs very short inNew York or Los Angeles, to secure care for young children born in theUnited States, and to integrate older versions of the same children intothe rituals, routines, language, and interpersonal ties of the home culture(Hodagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Hodagneu-Sotelo and Avila, 2002; Levitt,2001a,b, 2004; Menjivar, 2000, 2002). All this depends on rights and reci-procity over the longer term.

Trust Networks as Obligation and Constraint

At the same time, membership in trust networks imposes stringentobligations. If you fail to help new arrivals in the United States, default inyour sending of promised remittances, or neglect fellow members of themigrant stream in favor of newfound American friends, you are likely tofind yourself criticized or shunned. In trust networks, criticism and shun-ning regularly signal that if a wayward member does not reform, she willlose access to the social insurance ordinarily provided by the network.Some of the strife and misunderstanding between first and second genera-tions stems precisely from the attempt of older members to keep youngsterswithin the web of mutual obligation. But differences by gender also arise,for example as wives discover that they actually enjoy the marital leveragethat employment and city life give them, while their husbands resist theloss of their macho authority (Grasmuck and Pessar, 1992; Hirsch, 2003).

Members of migrant trust networks reinforce the rights and obliga-tions built into those networks by traveling recurrently in both directions.As a result, ideas, practices, and symbols also flow between the UnitedStates and Latin America. Peggy Levitt describes the circulation of U.S.cultural artifacts between Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and the Domin-ican town she calls Miraflores from which a nucleus of Jamaica PlainDominicans migrated:

In Miraflores, villagers often dress in T-shirts emblazoned with the names of busi-nesses in Massachusetts, although they do not know what these words or logosmean. They proudly serve their visitors coffee with Cremora and juice made fromTang (Levitt, 2001a:2).

But, so to speak, these artifacts are merely the cream on the coffee.They register the regularity of contact within migrant networks. The sameDominican villagers who display Boston-area gear also take care of the

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emigrants’ children, handle local business for them, and arrange lodgingand entertainment for them when they return to the Dominican Republic.

Back in the United States, membership in trust networks facilitatesimmigrants’ lives in some regards, but it also tends to confine them toniches created and inhabited by other immigrants. Even in the market-dom-inated U.S., most people acquire jobs, housing, and major consumer goodsthrough personal contacts (DiMaggio and Louch, 1998; Smith-Doerr andPowell, 2005; Tilly, 1998; Tilly and Tilly, 1998; Chapter 9, Zelizer, 2005).

If you live in a constricted network, your contacts confine you to alimited range of opportunities. Patricia Fernandez Kelly and RichardSchauffler describe the plight of a San Diego family from Michoacan,Mexico, the Mendozas. The family had entered the United States in a cartrunk 14 years earlier but had since become legal residents in an amnestyprogram. Fernandez Kelly and Schauffler report:

For the past 10 years, Mr. Mendoza has worked as a busboy in a fancy restaurantthat caters to tourists, a position he secured through a Mexican friend. He is ahardworking and modest man who wants his son, Carlos, to study so that he canget a good job: ‘(I want him) to be better than me, not for my sake but for hissake and that of his own family.’ Mrs. Mendoza irons clothes at a Chinese-ownedlaundry and complains bitterly that her employers are prejudiced toward her andother Mexicans.

Carlos is doing well in school; he was the only boy at Cabrillo juniorhigh to be elected to the honor society last year. He wants to become anengineer and go back to Mexico. Life in San Diego has been hard on him;the gold chain his parents gave him as a gift was ripped from around hisneck by neighborhood toughs; his bicycle remains locked up inside thehouse, because riding it would mean losing it to the same local bullies. Hisyounger sister, Amelia, is not doing as well in school and dresses like a chola(female gang member), although she insists it is only for the style. Her par-ents worry but feel helpless (Fernandez Kelly and Schauffler, 1996:38).

This account does not tell us, of course, to what extent the Mendozashave maintained their membership in the trust network that brought themto the United States. But the family’s limited opportunities and precarioussurvival in San Diego clearly depend in part on the narrowness of theircurrent networks. Even today, we affluent Americans are unsurprisedwhen we notice that the busboys in a fancy restaurant are Mexican, butimpressed when the waiter or waitress turns out to come from Mexico.Niches based on trust networks help immigrants locate themselves in anew land, all right. But they also channel opportunities into a relativelynarrow range. If the opportunities include access to capital, advanced edu-cation, or stardom, network members often do well. If they concentrate inlow-wage labor, network members suffer the consequences.


Precisely because they are shielding serious long-term enterprises simul-taneously from external predation and internal failures, trust networksalways erect tougher, sharper us them boundaries than the blurred edges offriendship and neighborhood. All such boundaries produce sharp implicitchoices. On one side of the boundary lie security, solidarity, mutual aid, andrestricted opportunity. On the other side beckon new opportunities, moreextensive connections, and escapes from tyranny. Those who stick faithfullywithin trust networks generally reach new opportunities, fresh connections,and personal independence more rarely and slowly. They also suffer moreacutely from shunning and expulsion when those punishments occur.

Whether trust networks retain their vigor into the second and latergenerations depends on the extent to which members of those generationscontinue to gain from membership. If the networks adapt, incorporatenew connections, and facilitate members’ opportunities at the migrantstream’s destination, they more frequently survive and prosper. If they donot adapt, incorporate new connections, and facilitate members’ oppor-tunities at the destination, then transnational ties decline in the long run.Whether they survive or not, nevertheless, trust networks shape the livesof successive immigrant generations.

Here is another way of putting my main point: By sniffing out theoperation of trust networks, students of Latin American migration to andfrom North America have a splendid opportunity to illuminate fundamen-tal social processes that go on throughout the world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Alex Julca, Viviana Zelizer, and a delightful Storrs,Connecticut Latin American Studies audience for vetting of previousdrafts.

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