Backyard Bankers: Immigrants, Savings Clubs, and the Pursuit of the American Dream
This book explores how migrant communities across the U.S. utilize “money clubs” to pool resources, meet urgent needs, and build long-term stability. These grassroots, trust-based networks, often spanning diverse cultural groups, provide crucial financial access where traditional banking fails.
Overview
Across the United States, immigrants have long relied on community “money clubs”—rotating savings and credit associations known by names such as tandas, susu/sou-sou, and other local variants—to save, borrow, and invest when formal financial systems are inaccessible or don’t fit their needs. These groups pool regular contributions and take turns receiving a lump sum—using trust, accountability, and social ties rather than collateral or credit history.
In practice, money clubs help families stabilize day-to-day finances and create pathways to mobility, including launching businesses and investing in major assets like housing. From modest set-ups in Iowa to intricate systems in Boston, Backyard Bankers follows these grassroots money clubs and explores how they drive immigrant success through thrift, accountability, and smart lending. Representing members from Latin American, African, and Asian communities, money clubs draw on grit and ingenuity to build financial stability and meaningful connections in a new land.
We hope this book will be useful to readers in the United States and beyond who want to understand how community finance shapes everyday mobility—and what it reveals about the larger picture of immigrant economic life and experiences.