EL FORTALECIMIENTO DEL CAPITAL SOCIAL A TRAVÉS DEL BILINGUISMO EN UNA SOCIEDAD MIGRANTE TRANSNACIONAL: LOS MEXICANOS DE LA ZONA SEPTENTRIONAL DEL ESTADO DE NUEVA YORK

Temporary migrants in the United States face the challenge of adapting to their host society while maintaining a cohesive social network within their newcomer communities. Among the principal factors affecting Mexican migrant social networks is bilingual competence. Most Mexican migrants plan to live in the United States for only a few years, sending money to support their families and communities in Mexico. While in the United States, they work long hours in jobs largely invisible to the public, often alongside other Spanish speakers and with little exposure to English. They have few opportunities and little motivation to integrate into the English‐speaking community. In upstate New York, where few people in the host community speak Spanish, Mexican migrants remain largely dependent on English speakers as they negotiate housing, employment, health care, and other basic resources. Lack of English language is a barrier to obtaining local cultural information essential for migrants to navigate these resources successfully. On the other hand, migrants’maintenance of a close‐knit transnational social network provides invaluable resources both for those living in the United States and those in Mexico. Young migrant children immersed in English at school with little positive valuation of Spanish are socialized in a network from which their parents are excluded, and risk losing the social capital provided by their Mexican social networks. To maintain and strengthen communal social capital in their transnational migrant communities, these temporary Mexican migrants must preserve their close‐knit internal social networks while simultaneously forming social links with outsiders in the host society. In this paper, I examine the interplay of language and social networks in a recently formed Mexican migrant community in upstate New York. I suggest that, despite the challenges Mexican migrants face in obtaining fluent Spanish‐English bilingualism, some degree of bilingual competence is well within their reach. The expansion and adaptation of local language programmes in English and Spanish could contribute significantly to migrants’bilingual competence, increasing their communal social capital and facilitating successful adaptation into their host community, as well as reintegration into their sending community.