When migrant women build the safety net: Mutual aid economies in American cities

A Tuesday night in Los Angeles

Twelve women have pulled their chairs up to a kitchen table. There is coffee, there is something sweet, and in the center sits a sealed envelope with this week’s contributions inside. Tonight it belongs to one of them, who will use it to close a gap in her rent. Next Tuesday it will belong to somebody else. Nothing about the arrangement is written down, and no bank is involved. It works because each woman knows how the others earn their living and whether they keep their promises.

Policy reports rarely describe evenings like this. Yet in the neighborhoods where rents climb fastest and work disappears first, such gatherings absorb shocks that public institutions leave to chance. And the people around these tables are, for the most part, women.

Nothing about the arrangement is written down, and no bank is involved. It works because each woman knows how the others earn their living and whether they keep their promises.

How a tanda works

The best-known form for this kind of gathering is the tanda, also called a cundina in some places. Economists label it a rotating savings and credit association, or ROSCA. The mechanics are plain: Everyone pays the same amount at each meeting, and the full pot goes to one member per round until every member has received it once. Nobody charges interest, and nobody signs a form.

Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, an anthropologist at Arizona State University, has studied these groups for years. In an NPR report, he described them as networks that women mainly sustain, built on a sense of mutual obligation that stands apart from the individualism of American life. The same broadcast noted that close to 70 percent of the people joining one lending-circle program were women, and it followed a tamale vendor who went from selling door to door to running a business with seven employees and a food cart.

What distinguishes a tanda from a loan is the nature of the guarantee. A bank studies a credit file; a tanda relies on reputation. According to a University of North Dakota article on a colloquium about financial interdependence, cheating is uncommon precisely because the group’s social ties make a damaged reputation harder to repair than a lost sum of money. The same article observes that these circles can suit immigrants who do not have the Social Security number banks ask for. In that sense, informal economies are as much a necessity as a choice. When one door closes, people construct another.

There is also a human side. For women from Yalalag, Oaxaca, who now live in Los Angeles, the meetings soften loneliness and make distance from home easier to carry. Cash passes around the table, and so do meals, news, and encouragement.

A global habit

It would be a mistake to treat the tanda as a purely Mexican custom. Local Peace Economy pointed out that comparable associations exist in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and India. Tandas, it said, tend to run on shorter cycles with smaller sums, and a typical group has ten to twelve members.

Informal economies are as much a necessity as a choice. When one door closes, people construct another.

The names change but the reasoning does not. Ojiugo Uzoma, a Brooklyn organizer who serves African immigrant communities, told Documented that some communities have always had mutual support networks, brought with them from home. She added that many women take part in circles where everyone contributes monthly and the pot goes to one person at a time, and that this continued through the pandemic. Seen this way, mutual aid is not an improvised reaction to emergencies. It is knowledge that travels with people.

What the pandemic exposed

When COVID-19 arrived, many of the workers who could not work from home were immigrant women. They stocked grocery shelves, staffed hospitals, sold food on the street, cleaned homes and offices, did nails, and cared for children and the elderly. Reporting from Documented and The Fuller Project, drawing on a Migration Policy Institute fact sheet, found that unemployment among immigrant women peaked at 18.5 percent in May 2020, compared with 13.5 percent for U.S.-born women. It stayed above the rate for U.S.-born men and women until July 2021. Many undocumented New Yorkers, the same reporting notes, were left out of the first rounds of federal stimulus payments.

Where comprehensive public support was missing, these women supplied their own. They pooled skills, shared information, collected funds, and organized relief for their neighbors. Some of that effort became law. On April 6, 2021, New York’s legislature included $2.1 billion for undocumented workers affected by the pandemic in its state budget. The campaign behind it included a hunger strike, in which one participant went without food for 23 days. The Fiscal Policy Institute estimated that roughly 290,000 excluded workers stood to benefit.

It is a clear example of solidarity turning into policy.

The story of paid care workers runs in parallel. In a series from the University of Bristol, sociologist Maud Perrier observed that migrant nannies and domestic workers were largely absent from mainstream feminist commentary and public debate on childcare during the pandemic, even while they were organizing. She pointed to groups such as Boston’s Matahari Women Workers’ Center, to the distribution of state aid through the National Domestic Workers Alliance in the United States, and to practical tools such as model COVID contracts and guidance on safe working conditions.

Why the work falls to women

Several factors reinforce one another.

Care is already their job. Migrant women are heavily represented in paid care, such as domestic work, elder care, and childcare, and they also carry much of the unpaid work at home. Someone who can organize a sick neighbor’s meals or a child’s school pickup can often organize a savings pool or a food distribution chain with the same skills.

Invisibility shapes the networks. For a woman who is paid in cash, lacks legal status, or struggles with English, an official institution can feel like a hazard rather than an opening. The person she trusts is the one she already knows.

Trust comes first, capital second. The “social collateral” behind a tanda is really a web of relationships, and women are very often the ones who spin and mend it.

Research outside the United States points the same way. An ethnographic study in Revista INVI on migrant women in Santiago, Chile, documented what it calls “neighboring care” (cuidados vecinales) during the pandemic. A participatory action research project in Greater Buenos Aires argued that the organizations and knowledge of migrant women filled a gap the state left open. Neither study concerns the United States, yet the lesson travels: The more serious the crisis, the more weight women’s networks carry.

Seeing it without a halo

This story is easy to tell as pure inspiration, and that would be misleading. Three cautions are in order.

First, these networks must not become an excuse for public inaction. A safety net that migrant women knit among themselves is, in effect, a public service delivered as free, voluntary labor. Admiring the solidarity should never turn into accepting the conditions that make it necessary.

Second, the risks are genuine. The North Dakota discussion notes that depending heavily on a ROSCA can look risky to people who have bank accounts. A tanda has no legal standing, so if a member leaves before her turn or disappears, there is no court to turn to. And since informal circles are not reported to credit bureaus, they usually do not help anyone build a credit history.

Third, trust networks can close doors as readily as they open them. Where everyone vouches for everyone, newcomers and people with few social ties begin at a disadvantage. To an established circle, a stranger looks like a risk.

What policy can do

Formalizing these circles can make them stronger, but it can also change what they are. Some community organizations and lenders now run tanda-inspired lending circles that report members’ payments to credit bureaus, allowing participants to build a credit record. The NPR report described one such program. This approach preserves the social bond while opening a route into the formal financial system, though it also places an institution between neighbors who used to depend on each other.

The pandemic suggested a broader lesson: Governments need ways to reach documented and undocumented workers alike. New York’s fund is one model, but it is worth remembering how it came about. According to the Fuller Project’s reporting, it was won by women who were already organized, who marched, rallied, and in some cases stopped eating to be heard. Policy tends to work best when it partners with such networks rather than looking past them.

Back to the kitchen table

Return to that Tuesday evening. The money in the envelope is modest. What moves around it is worth just as much: information on who has just lost a shift, which clinic does not ask for papers, which lawyer can be trusted, whose children can be watched on Thursday. A benefits office has a hard time reproducing that flow of knowledge.

Migrant women in American cities, working in the space between the state and the market, show how a safety net really gets made: one strand at a time, out of trust and small, regular sacrifices. Seeing that net clearly is the first step toward respecting it, and toward not asking it to hold more than it can bear.