This article analyzes sociocultural transnational linkages among Colombian, Dominican, and Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. It emphasizes the importance of comparative analysis and yields three main findings. First, participation in any particular transnational activity is low, but participation over all the different forms of transnational practices is extended. Second, the process of incorporation does not weaken transnational participation. Third, there is more than one causal path that can account for the rise of transnational sociocultural practices. The different paths can be explained by reference to the context of reception and the mode of incorporation of each group.

This article analyzes the emergence and the institutional structure of contemporary immigrants’ transnational politics. It poses three questions: 1) How is transnational politics structured? 2) How can we explain the current emergence of transnational political linkages? 3) Who participates and who benefits from political transnationalism. The article focuses on the cases of the Dominican Republic, Haiti and El Salvador and argues that they share an institutional pattern of transnational politics in which there are three main actors: the state apparatus of the country of origin; the political parties of the country of origin; and migrant organizations in the country of reception. The article links the rise of this pattern of transnational politics to the need of the states of origin to guarantee the flow of remittances, the organization of immigrants in the country of reception, and the consolidation of competitive politics in democratic regimes. Although the analysis is based on the experiences of Latin American and Caribbean countries and their emigrants in the United States, the article argues that this institutional pattern may transcend this particular region.

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This article analyzes immigrant incorporation and transnational participation as gendered experiences. The results indicate that the incorporation of immigrants is a complex process affected negatively by class and racial exclusion and positively by their knowledge of U. S. society. The analysis also indicates that incorporation and transnational participation are concurrent and intertwined processes. Our results show that gender matters in the analysis of immigrant incorporation. The experiences of immigrant men and women share a lot in common as they confront similar challenges, but are also affected differently by the most relevant factors in the process of incorporation and transnational participation.

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