The larger HTAs have official nonprofit statuses, such as 501(c)(3) registration within the United States, and have a board of directors and elected leaders.
HTAs also serve to donate money for special occasions or circumstances, such as a religious celebration or to repaint or repair a local church in either their new community or in their place of origin.
People who migrated from common hometowns who appreciate the public goods that HTAs produce tend to believe that the collective benefit outweighs the individual cost of contributing.
Mexican HTAs in the United States grew out of the historical mutual aid societies and welfare organizations created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in order to provide health care and death benefits at a time when such services were unavailable for many immigrant groups.
Contemporary Mexican HTAs have their roots in mutual-benefit associations that were active in the first decade of the twentieth century in the agricultural areas of California.
There are an estimated 200 Salvadoran HTAs, most of which focus on assisting a single town and hold dinners, pageants, and other events to raise funds for community-based development projects.
[20][21][22] The HTA Esperanza por Colombia, which formed in the 1970s, used fundraising to provide similar projects aimed at improving infrastructure and transporting equipment for their sending community.
Although the total number of Latino hometown associations is unmeasured, there are about 4,000 HTAs that have received legal status in accordance with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) during the 1990s.
This took on a new character in towns like Zacatecas, Mexico where the state government began matching the funds provided by the migrants for a number of projects in the late 1980s.
The preexisting network matches the experience of many rural origin-based HTAs and is consistent with the scholarship noting the relationship between collective remittances and high-migration states.
[28] In the United States, Overseas Chinese hometown associations (tongxianghui) have received attention for certain activities that may fall afoul of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
[29][30] In the 2010s, policy and migration scholars have focused on HTAs as a phenomenon of that contribute to sociopolitical influences and financial gain in countries of origin.
The Mexican government has persistently acted to encourage the development of the diaspora network in a manner that has set the standard for transnational cooperation.
Consequently, this policy has evolved over a dozen years: from fostering the organization of hometown associations to sponsoring the creation of a continental assembly for the integration and strategic direction of the Mexican network and its linkage to the state.
Their active mobilization during the fight against California Proposition 187[33] was an exception to their usual mode of behavior, rather than a turning point in their orientation.