Understanding Institutionalized Collective Remittances

This book considers the activities of migrant organizations in the face of state diaspora engagement policies in their members' countries of origin. The case study is the Programa Tres por Uno para los Migrantes in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. The research uses events - understood as festivities and work meetings - as lenses. They offer a door to access the actors' reality and furthermore serve as an object of analysis themselves. The study combines analysis of biographical interviews at the microlevel with that of organizations' work meetings at the mesolevel and the analysis of the staging in public events as way to access the macrolevel. The work concludes that institutionalizing collective remittances enhances the capital- skills (cultural capital), relations (social capital) and economic resources (economic capital)- generated by lives and practices taking place in a transnational way. The work proposes the term diasporic capital. Diasporic capital creates the identity of and nurtures the belonging to a distinct class. As a result, migrant organizations participating in the Tres por Uno Program are given legitimacy to speak in the name of all the nationals living abroad and their leaders to claim a higher social status.

Carlos Villela obtained a PhD in International Development Studies (Summa Cum Laude) and a MA in Development Management by the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. He also holds a Magister Administrationis from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and a BA in Business Management from the Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana in Honduras. Dr. Villela has worked for governmental organizations and international cooperation organizations in Honduras, Germany and Myanmar