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maria jimenez
Gift Giving Across Borders
I am challenged by the many issues and ideas and conceptions of the gift economy
and its concrete expression throughout history and society. For someone like me,
whose time is spent in the practical realm of forming social movements (aimed at
establishing institutions that support the development of the human potential by
protecting, promoting, defending and practicing the principle that all human beings
are equal in rights and dignity), reflecting on the different theoretical constructs
of how we interpret the practice of a gift economy is an important part of what
long-term activists have known as the relationship between theory and practice.
The relationship between theory and practice guides my political work and
the work that we do in the formation of these social movements. Theory gives us
direction and practice gives us the movement, and it is the learning from theory
that enables us to actually move these movements forward in their development
in a way that will benefit people, but it is also the practice that retroalimenta (in
Spanish)—provides feedback—and enhances theoretical development.
In this article, I look at the immigrant rights movement, the human rights move-
ment, and the communities where I do my political work, to try to understand
what this theory of a gift economy is in its practical expression. And certainly one
of the most important aspects of gift restructuring and integration into the global
economy is the human right to mobility. The right to mobility is important because
it affects how gift giving is being integrated at the global economic level. Human
mobility is about the interdependence of social, economic, and political relation-
ships in the human family. Thus, in its current phase, which is being restructured
by economic and political elites worldwide, human mobility conditions the way
people live within countries, as well as those that cross borders.
The wealth created millions of people worldwide has enabled, more than ever
before in human history, the technology, the communications and the ability to
move easily across borders, a historical experience recreated within the configu-
ration of civilizations and countries throughout the globe. But that increased
capacity, given the current strategy of economic global development, has made
mobility safely and legally across borders a right for only a very few—the global
economic and political elite.
This mobility is easily seen when we observe the movement of CEOs (chief
executive officers) of corporations all over the world; the meeting of political elites
without any problem, safely and legally, across borders, to also discuss issues of
global dominance and exploitation and control; and also the movement of so-
called “refugees” such as, for example, the Marcos (Ferdinand and Imelda) of the
Philippines, Carlos Salinas de Gortari (ex-President of Mexico), and all others
who are considered the “wealthy refugees.” All of these elitist groups move legally
and safely across the world without any problems, so that their role is sustained
and maintained in the re-creation and construction of this globalization from
above.
When we look at the development of immigration policy in nation states
throughout the world, and how these define who is allowed to enter, who is al-
lowed to stay, who is allowed to become a member of the nation state, it becomes
very clear that immigration policy and border enforcement policy is about the
restriction of mobility of the international working poor and the internationally
displaced, who are also poor.
Borders, barriers, border agents, and militarized institutional violence to restrict
mobility are some of the mechanisms used to reinforce on a global scale the social,
political, gender inequalities of the very few against the very many. Institutional
violence is necessary to sustain these inequities. Therefore, those that must sustain
these inequities, like any other type of human activity, will define the movement
across borders without government inspection as a crime. A crime that has no
violence and has no victim, but that permits the construction of institutions both
internally and externally, which ensure that the strategy of economic development
of these elites persist, and that this strategy will continue to produce high profits
by maintaining low wages.
It is a mechanism that also assists in the implementation of the structural ad-
justment policies of a scorched earth policy that results in the creation of havens
for speculative capital investment circles, while curtailing investments in social
infrastructure and in human development. It is a policy that then forces millions
to opt for incorporation into a global labour market, their only option for survival.
Thus, the movement of people becomes an important aspect of challenging the
very policies that want to restrict its conditions according to plans for increasing
profits.
So when communities and families, faced with structural adjustment policies
of scarcity, opt to move to another country, the decisions to do so are made by
families in consultations to determine who must emigrate and who must stay.
These family decisions are made in communities that have a tradition of moving
across international borders, and that have established networks to receive the
migrants in the destination countries. These networks also help the migrants
move across the borders, and the migrants, in turn, help to sustain the families
and communities in their countries of origin.
The decision, in that sense, is a decision made by families to regenerate their
survival, forming strong emotional bonds that will respond to the needs, funda-
mental basic needs, to sustain their development as families and as humans. And
yet it is this very act, the act of migrating across international borders, this timeless
transnational network that operates in the context of exploitation and policies of
plundering countries of origin that actually form the networks of resistance and
rebellions to those maintained by the powerful economic elites.
These family networks facilitate migration; the family networks ensure rein-
statement of community needs, and family networks allow the instant conveying
of resources, information, and even affection. It is interesting to note the growth
and the use of, for instance, cell phones in communities of origin and reception.
There are even communities that install computers in the community so that
families can then see each other from places, for instance, as far as New York, to
places in tiny villages in Mexico or in Ecuador.
Thus, in the current global configuration, the movement of people is a strategy
of survival, and actually a strategy of “thrival.” And this strategy of thrival is based
on an economy of “giving” that sustains economic prosperity and interconnections
between people moving North and resources coming from the South in the midst
of unbridled free trade policies that threaten the sustainability of communities
and economies, and particularly the development of human beings.
Understanding that international migrants invest in their families and com-
munity so generously, it became clear that there is a gift economy in this project of
transnationalization, of movement of communities. And what is this gift? People
who live outside their countries of origin are responsible for moving a hundred
billion dollars globally every year between the so-called “developed countries”
and the developing countries. This is the money sent back home by millions of
immigrants worldwide; 30 billion of those dollars go to Latin America, 15 billion,
half of that, to Mexico. And then there are also many unrecorded gifts in resources
to communities. It is estimated that half of the unreported and the free labour
given to development in communities has actually out-edged net, direct foreign
investments in countries of origin (“All in the Family” 2004; Orzoco 2003; Suro
2003; AlarcŪn 2000).
As often proposed to Mexican immigrants, we might as well form a co-op and
buy Mexico. So what is the gift? The gift is the at least $190 sent back to families
seven times per year. In some cases it is $100, and in some cases it is $300. In
some cases immigrants will send back 15 percent of each paycheque, and others
will send 50 percent of each paycheque, so the range is 15 to 50 percent of salaries
in labour markets of exploitation that go back to sustain the families (“All in the
Family” 2004; Suro 2003; “Importance of Remittances to Household Incomes”
1998).
Who are the senders? They tend to be migrants (emigrants), selected and agreed
to by the consensus of families, to move out of the country to seek economic op-
portunity. They are the socially excluded who transform the experience of migra-
tion as an experience of liberation for themselves and for their communities. If we
look at Latin America, some six million immigrants send money back home on a
regular basis. Six million sent 30 billion dollars. Of these, one-half have been in
the U.S. for less than ten years. Who are the senders? In a national employment
survey conducted in Mexico, it was discovered that out of 5,896 individuals who
migrated to the United States between 1997 and 2002, 70 percent had sent money
back home, 89 percent were married, 60 percent were less than 30 year old, 48
percent were of homes that also have other senders of money, and 79 percent of
these are people who entered the United States without documents ( “All in the
Family” 2004; Suro 2003).
Two-thirds of these senders have been in the United States less than ten years,
and they send money once a month. When you look at migrants that have been
in the United States less than five years, three-fourths send once per month. And
when we look at the income range of the senders in the United States, we find
that of the people who earn $50,000 or more a year, nine percent (this is talk-
ing about Mexico) send money back home. Of the people who earn $30,000
to $50,000 a year, 32 percent send money back home. And of people who earn
less than $30,000, 46 percent send money back home (“All in the Family” 2004;
Suro 2003).
So, in effect, 78 percent of the 15 billion dollars sent back to Mexico is sent
back by people who earn less than $50,000 a year, and who send 15 to 50 percent
of their paycheque back to relatives in Mexico.
Who receives? In Mexico, it is 18 percent of the adult population. Of those
who receive, the majority are women. What impact? How many households? In
Mexico, 4.4 percent of the households, or 4.3 million people receive these gifts.
Forty percent of those receiving the gifts depend on them to sustain themselves
and to not slip into dire poverty. Three to four people per household benefit from
receiving and spending. And 73.6 percent of the recipients are under the age of
15 and over the age of 65 (“All in the Family” 2004; Suro 2003; “Importance of
Remittances to Household Incomes” 1998).
As a community/family consultation strategy and method of survival, people
decide which family, and which family member, migrates, and while the majority
are men, 40 percent of those who migrate (emigrate) are women, and they sup-
port brothers and sisters, not necessarily just parents. Yet, when we look at who
receive, we see that recepients are primarily family households of women, children,
and the elderly. In the case of Mexico, these senders probably constitute those
who send remittances that, according to many sources, are not really not taken
into account by any financial institution, because these gifts are not transferred
through banks, but are taken to the communities directly through clubs and their
representatives (Orzoco 2003; AlarcŪn 2000). These tend to be immigrants who
have settled longer within the United States, but who sustain a large number of
new immigrants every year. The clubs, or hometown associations, are volunteer,
structurally organized, collective entities that consult with the community they
are from to decide on how to develop projects and mutual obligations for the
well-being of the town. Some of these projects are in response to crises, such as
a natural disaster, but others are a continual and developed interchange between
the hometown and the hometown association, or clubs, in the United States.
And what do they do? They collect money through simple activities, such as
dances and bake sales, very grassroot types of activities, and they invest in the
community, but they also send goods. There are certain goods that they will buy in
the United States and then transfer to the community. For example, ambulances,
medical equipment, school buses and supplies, machinery for the development
of the town well, equipment that may lead to the construction of a particular
hospital. They invest in social projects, scholarships for students in the town,
health clinics, childcare facilities, homes for the elderly. And they even invest
in job creation such as supporting vocational schools that permit the youth to
acquire skills necessary to operate in the economy.
How many of these are there? We really do not know. It has been estimated
that there are approximately 600 associations in 30 U.S. cities; 218 in Los Ange-
les alone (AlarcŪn 2000). Many groups also form state federations. Some of the
strongest in different states are La FederaciŪn de Clubes del Sur de California
(the Federation of Clubs of Southern California), the Federation of Clubs of the
State of Michoacan, and the Federation of Clubs of Jalisco.
And how do they collect the resources and the monies to be able to invest
in the town? This is done through membership dues, through quotas, through
fundraising activities, donations, and sometimes, in the case of the oldest and
strongest, like the FederaciŪn de Clubes del Sur de California, they even enter
into arrangements with local and state governments. Some of the federations
have even entered into arrangements with the North American Development
(NAD) Bank in order to create pools of resources to increase support for their
communities (Orzoco 2003).
For instance, the Federation of Clubes of Zacatecas, in 1995, convinced the
governor of the state that if they invested one dollar, the municipal government
should invest one dollar and the state government should invest in another dol-
lar. And thus was created the program known as “Dos por Uno” (Two for One).
Among the Federation clubs they gathered $600,000, which they took to Za-
catecas, and with the investment of municipal and state governments, were able
to fund 56 projects in 34 towns. Four hometown associations of the Mexican
state of Michoacan, based in Illinois, also raised $650,000 for projects in their
localities around the same time.
There are concrete examples of this kind of support also being provided by
individual clubs. There are 100 families in Anaheim, California that formed a club
called El Club Tom·s Titi·n that has organized various health projects in Tom·s
Titi·n because there is a sanctuary in the town, El SeŅor de los Reyes, which many
people throughout Mexico visit in the hopes of being healed. The townspeople
observed that visitors seeking the spiritual healing of El SeŅor de los Reyes would
often experience a health crisis, and there was no infrastructure in the town to care
for the sick. The club, therefore, invested in building a house to serve as a heath
center that medical schools around Mexico could send student doctors to who
could then practice and train in the town. The club bought surgical equipment,
and even installed a water pump to assist the clinics of the area.
Another example is Club Pesqueros. One of the inhabitants of Pesqueros died
because there was no ambulance, so the families of Pesqueros, Jalisco in the
U.S. joined together and bought the ambulance. Now the club has a fund that
provides scholarships for middle and high school students, a strategy they imple-
mented to prevent drop-outs, and to support 57 children with developmental
problems. Every year one of their fundraising activities in the United States is to
hold a banquet, a baile (dance), and a rodeo, where they crown a Reina of the
Club Pesqueros (Queen of the Club Pesqueros). This young woman, however, is
not the most beautiful young woman, but the one that can raise the most funds
for the collective fund that pays for work in the town. I have been thinking of
suggesting to the Club Pesqueros that instead of “Queen” they call that young
woman “The Goddess of Gift Giving.”
These are examples, then, of community; the poorest of the poor on the inter-
national global scales, the most exploited, the women you see cleaning our rooms,
the people cutting our lawns, the people working in the restaurants, these are the
ones who are gift giving, despite the conditions of exploitation.
What are the impacts? There are impacts within many spheres. First, these remit-
tances are not actually considered to be “good” investments. While remittances
might bring 15 billion dollars into the country, it is money that is not invested in
productive projects, or capital-generating projects. The money simply supports
families. And this goes to the heart of some of the theories put forth in the gift
economy of how the sustaining of families and the sustaining of communities,
like the infrastructure projects that many of these clubs have undertaken, are not
considered valuable from the capitalist point of view, although they are a valuable
form of gift giving to the community.
I came across a paper presented by John B. Taylor, the Under Secretary of Trea-
sury for International Affairs at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, in which he
states: “In my remarks I would like to discuss, number one, why the Bush admin-
istration cares so much about remittances.” Why does the Bush administration
care so much about remittances? That is, as the capitalist financial establishment
and corporations begin to understand the volume of gift giving that is being sent
back by individuals and communities, the question becomes, “How do we take
advantage of it? How does this gift giving contribute to our own interests and
developments?” The Federal Reserve Bank now needs to find ways to facilitate
easy wire transfers between immigrant communities and countries of origin, and
a way to profit from this.
Immigrant communities, faced with increasing problems around the ability to
move across borders because of tougher enforcement measures and the lack of
programs to legalize their status in recipient countries, find it much more difficult
to transfer money now because it was once done by family members and persons
going back to the community. The financial institutions are currently position-
ing themselves to see which can offer the better program, and at the same time,
charge for the transfer of these funds. Even a fee of one percent for the transfer,
or a lowering of the cost of transfers that is now in many cases done through
Western Union or Moneygram, could actually contribute one more billion dollars
to sustain families in the countries of origin.
The governments have other interests, the Fox administration particularly. It
is interesting how the current President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, has begun con-
gratulating the people in the United States for what now has become the largest
source of foreign exchange to Mexico, beyond petroleum, beyond tourism, and
again, like in other countries, has edged the net direct capitalist contribution
and foreign investment in Mexico. The Fox administration has developed several
government programs so that these funds are invested in productive projects,
which again mean capital-making projects. One of people in Fox’s administra-
tion recently stated in a public speech, “Our economy is doing great. We have
had so much success in oil, in trade, and by the way, in remittances sent by the
paisanos (countrymen),” as if they had anything to do with earning these funds
and/or sending them back.
But certainly the phenomena of remittances is being seen by the capitalist
establishment as having become a gold mine, formerly invisible—as is most gift
giving—and only recognized by those that receive these remittances and the com-
munities that have had the experience of the projects paid for by the many clubs
that exist in the United States. This is the impact of the movement of people,
and the sending back home of money, on the global economy. The very small
ant-like savings of migrant people have a tremendous aggregate effect upon the
economies that are being fed.
It is interesting to note that studies with the sophisticated analysis that econo-
mists can now do, have shown that even those micro-gifts that become aggregate
sums have a tremendous impact on the well-being of the economies, such as the
Mexican economy. For instance, in one study it was shown that the injection of
two billion dollars, as a result of remittances, increased the output of production
in Mexico by four billion dollars and increased income in Mexico to approximately
2.2 percent of total income, and resulted in the creation of 325,225 potential
jobs (“All in the Family” 2004). In other words, there can be one job created for
every $4,400 of the money sent back home by immigrants.
Remittances have a definite impact on economies and well-being, and the
capitalists are ready now to capitalize on this. When I look at the issue of gift giv-
ing and where progressive movements are in the theoretical development of such
experiences, what we see is that the experience of gift giving comes from homes that
send, comes from decisions of consensus, comes from decisions in which men and
women decide who emigrates and who makes the decisions as how to invest when
that money is received. These good people who give have the values associated
with a gift economy, which are the values of mothering, nurturing and giving, but
their actions are meaningless unless they are infused with the experience of those
who are exploited and oppressed, because that is what gives us direction. It is the
difference between the mothering and the nurturing described by the Cardinal
Ratzinger in Rome (see Paola Melchiori’s article in this volume), that character-
izes women, and the nurturing and caring that is being done by immigrants all
over the world of their families and which is a direct result of the experience of
exploitation and oppression, and how to resist, how to construct communities,
how to really live in the practical terms of globalization from below.
Maria Jimenez lives in Houston, Texas and has worked with the Latino community
in the non-profit sector over the past 20 years. She has developed human rights moni-
toring and documentation methodology and trained community groups in human
rights monitoring and documentation. She has also written numerous articles on
international migration issues. She has received many awards for her work including
the Humanitarian Award from the Mickey Leland Centre, Texas Southern University
in 2004, and the Community Leadership Award from the Houston Peace and Justice
Centre in 2005.
References
AlarcŪn, Rafael. 2000, September. “The Development of Hometown Associations in
the United States and the Use of Social Remittances in Mexico.” Departamento de
Estudios Sociales, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Online: http://www.thedialogue.
org/publications/alarcon.pdf.
“All in the Family: Latin America’s Most Important Financial Flow.” 2004, January. Re-
port of the Inter-American Dialogue Task Force on Remittances. Online: http://www.
thedialogue.org/publications/country_studies/remittances/all_family.pdf.
“Importance of Remittances in Houshold Income.” 1998. Newsletter of the National
Board on Population of Mexico.
Orozco, Manuel. 2003, September. “Hometown Associations and Their Present and Future
Partnerships: New Development Opportunities(?)” A Report Commissioned by the
U.S. International Development Bank. Online: http://www.thedialogue.org/publica-
tions/country_studies/remittances/HTA_final.pdf.
Suro, Roberto. “Remittance Senders and Receivers: Tracking the Transnational Channels.”
2003, November 24. Pew Hispanic Center Reports and Factsheets. Online: http://pe-
whispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=23.
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