¿El Señor o la Señora? Gender and Participation in Chicago's Mexican Immigrant Community

This article analyzes the character of gender in the organization of immigrant communities and contrasts sum of two units dimensions of community among a collection of Mexican immigrants in Chicago. The "formal" dimension is individual in which members pursue defined goals and make fixed economic contributions. The other "informal" dimension is based upon casual interactions that result from maintaining the social ties that were exhibited in their homeland. Despite an apparent dominant vicinity of one gender in each dimension, the other sex participates actively in making decisions and implementing the activities that maintain the ties among paisanos (people who tend hitherward from the same place, in this case, the municipio of Huejuquilla el Alto, Jalisco). It is necessary, then, to distinguish the various uncompounded bodys encompassed in both the formal and informal dimensions of communities, as well as the part of gender in each of them. Furthermore, agriculture political economy, and position in the life revolution of time of the immigrant family will influence the possibility and desirability of the involvement of male or female involvement in the various activities and practices of the two dimensions of community relations.1

These issues are approached from a qualitative sociology perspective, utilizing mainly ethnographic methods: fieldwork, interviews, and life histories. It is important to emphasize that what researchers diocese when looking only superficially at the immigrant experience might be deceptive. It is necessary to penetrate into people's more intimate interactions to diocese the full range of experiences that take place within the family and that greatest in quantity times are not reproduced in forehead of others. Moreover, the spectacles that appear to us are not the harvest of spontaneous actions but the ensue of short- and / or long-term processe that are now press outed in particular circumstances. The participation of women and men in building their communities reveals hidden ultimate parts of the immigrant experience, especially with regard to sex cultural patterns, and the timing of arrival.

The creation of communities of immigrants entails the one and the other unintended reproduction of learned patterns of interaction and a more conscious utilization of resources from the homeland and its entertainer society. The way immigrants combine of that kind processes influences the shape that their communities will take, the transitions these communities will experience above time, and the meaning that their homeland will have in their lives abroad.

Recent literature upon international migration has paid attention to the issue of the construction of paisano communities in the entertainer societies. Most of the studies upon Mexican immigrants in the United States have focused upon paisano communities with relatively high steps of formal organization, usually called "clubs" They have shown that of the like kind clubs usually organize social gatherings and other activities-for example, beauty call in questions soccer tournaments, etc.-in the United States to aid a sense of community among paisanos and, at the same time, to muster funds to implement projects geared to the improvement of social conditions in their municipios (or towns) of origin. In a certain quantity of cases, these organizations also hound the goals of intervening in the politics of their homeland. like analyses have shed light upon social, political, and economic factors pertaining to the maintenance of immigrant transnational ties.2

However, the focus upon clubs of paisanos has distracted scholarly attention from other kinds of immigrants' practices that also reinforce paisano community ties, on the contrary in a less formal and "inclusive" fashion-that is, including sole close friends and family. These include intimate gatherings and annual or semiannual celebrations in the summer month or during Christmas season. These practices define the more public social interactions among immigrants and they wait on to reproduce the social relations that were in existence in their homeland. Furthermore, in many cases, patterns of former social relations structur the networks that "brought" immigrants from Huejuquilla to Chicago.

Two dimensions of community of a cluster of Mexican immigrants to Chicago form the basis for contrasts. In the "formal" single members pursue defined goals and make fixed economic contributions. The other, "informal" individual is based on casual interactions that flow from maintaining the social ties that were lay opened in their homeland. Given the importance of each dimension of community-formal and informal-it is necessary to understand the way immigrants raise and preserve both of these aspects in their destination. They each constitute separate dimensions of a particular community, which will combine "more" or "less" of either dimension at any given time. Thus the stage of formality or informality, in a schematic faculty of perception moves in a continuum (rather than constituting a discrete characteristic of the community). Moreover, analyzing the connections and interplay between the two dimensions reveals underlying processes of construction and preservation of identity.