Bridging or bonding? The nature of the social capital of Latin American immigrants in Spain and the U.S.

Latin American immigrants to Spain are, in many ways, in a privileged position among all non EU immigrants. They share the language of the country of reception, in most cases they are of the same religious background, and they have a privileged access to Spanish nationality. All these aspects would lead us to expect that they will very rapidly ‘mingle’ with autochthonous Spaniards and their process of social integration should be relatively smooth. Yet, results from the comparative European project LOCALMULTIDEM indicate that this is not quite the case, as Latin American immigrants (of Bolivian, Colombian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian background) in Barcelona and Madrid show comparatively high levels of ‘bonding’ social capital along various indicators. This paper seeks to describe the nature of Latin American immigrants’ social capital in Spain, and to examine the factors that account for the prevalence of bridging and bonding patterns of social interaction, by comparing it to the other country were they are a large immigrant population: the United States. For this purpose, we primarily draw the data on Spanish Latinos from a study of Bolivian, Colombian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian immigrants in Barcelona and Madrid conducted in 2007-2008 within the LOCALMULTIDEM project. We complement this information with data from the Spanish Immigration National Survey (Encuesta Nacional de Inmigración, ENI) conducted shortly before in 2006-2007. The US data are obtained from the 2006 US Latino National Survey.