Solidaridad étnica y capital social. El caso de los comerciantes migrantes kichwa-otavalo en Madrid y La Compañía

Abstract

When thinking about migrants in general and migrants described as ethnic groups concretely, there is usually a tendency to assume a kind of “ethnic solidarity” within their social networks. This presumption of the existence of ethnic solidarity takes for granted that people who are defined as “indigenous”, in this case, dispose of and profit from social capital and solidarity among each other. In this article the case of migrant entrepreneurs from Otavalo is used in order to examine ethnicity as a source of social capital and, as such, of solidarity, as well as the presumption of solidarity as something implicit within migration chains and networks, which are usually treated as equivalent to migrants’ social capital.