Introduction
Hometown associations, or clubes de oriundos, are organizations created by migrants and immigrants to allow them to assist the people in their communities of origin.
They began more than three decades ago with Mexican migrants in the United States who realized that their families and neighbors back home were going without essential services and infrastructure; the first hometown associations raised money and pooled donations to provide them.
Seeing the great value of these initiatives, officials in Mexico began to offer matching funds to multiply the efforts of their citizens abroad, beginning with Dos por Uno at the state level in 1992 and culminating with the federal government’s Tres por Uno program inaugurated in 2002. These programs inspired similar efforts in many countries across Latin America, and have been adopted around the world as an important economic development strategy.
The Mexican Hometown Associations Oral History Project has gathered and preserved the testimony of 23 people in Chicago directly involved in those efforts. The project unites the work of people in the migrant community with researchers at multiple universities and the staff of the Newberry Library and its Chicago Studies Program. Together they have digitally recorded, annotated, and transcribed dozens of hours of interviews with club members detailing their personal histories, arrival and lives in Chicago, and the activities of their associations on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The resultant archive, held at the Newberry, is an extraordinary record of representatives from the fastest-growing group of people in the Chicago area. The project offers community members, researchers, public officials, and many others firsthand accounts of the lives, activities, and achievements of this dynamic group of Chicagoans.
Image: Carlos Manuel Sada Solana (2nd row, 6th from right), Undersecretary for North America, Mexico´s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the inauguration of the First Binational Forum of Michoacano Migrants Living Abroad. C.F. Simmons Middle School, Aurora, Illinois, 2001. Hometown Associations of the Midwest and California were in attendance.
