Assessing Social Capital in El Gusano, Mexico (2009)

Undergraduates: Lauren Williams, Sandra Hinderliter, Tatiana Brezina

Faculty Advisor: Hannah Gill
Department: Economics

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El Gusano is a small and rather isolated community profoundly impacted by migration and thusly comprised primarily of women and children. Its population has been depleted of a valuable resource—its working aged members, especially men—but we wanted to assess to what degree the available social capital was sustaining the community’s function. In order to interpret the effects of our group’s presence and the implementation of this project, we needed to comprehend the social forces already at work within El Gusano. To do so, we investigated El Gusano’s stock of social capital—the connections and social networks formed between individuals, communities and organizations, given that such relationships hold considerable implicit value for each participant. We found that while a good number of community-based organizations—from cooperatives to a seniors’ group—do exist here, we found that many times these groups and their activities were extremely beneficial exclusively to their members. While their operation is not detrimental to the community’s function, it would be highly advantageous, especially in a community so small, if the energy put into fueling a social organization were able to produce a more widely beneficial byproduct—be it the productivity of a cooperative or the cohesion of a parent group—on a larger, community-wide scale. Ultimately, we came to understand the salience of the interaction of each of the networks that define social capital.