Formal and Informal Associations: Dominicans and Colombians in New York

Abstract

It is the contention of this article that the incidence and types of voluntary associations in immigrant communities can be employed as an indicator of the differential weight of cultural-ideological and structural factors in the articulation of such communities with the receiving society. It is also held in this paper that the relative similarity of cultural-ideological variables in the Colombian and Dominican communities, revealed by the attribution of a common “Hispanic” identity, tends to have less weight in this articulation than the structural differences between their places of origin and the disparity between place of origin and destination.