Networks of Care: How Rural Immigrants Build Community

Immigrants on the Eastern Shore face significant challenges: demanding work, limited services, geographic isolation, and often a sense of being socially excluded despite being economically essential. During my decade of research on the Eastern Shore, from 2014–2024, I found that these networks of mutual aid aren’t just about getting by. They’re about building community in places that often feel unwelcoming, about creating bonds of trust and reciprocity that make rural life sustainable for both immigrants and rural communities as a whole.

Solving problems together

In 2013, when Maryland began issuing driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, it seemed like a breakthrough. But Dana, who works at a small community center, quickly discovered an unexpected barrier: applicants needed to show proof of residency through a lease or utility bill. In a community where many immigrants share housing, with multiple families in one unit, most people’s names aren’t on any lease.

Dana’s solution emerged from relationships she had built over years. She knew landlords who trusted their immigrant tenants—people who always paid rent on time, who took care of the properties, who were reliable. She worked with these landlords to add tenants’ names to leases temporarily, allowing them to obtain the identification they needed.

“I have clients with landlords that know them, trust them, and know that they pay their rent all the way on time,” Dana explained. “Once one person settles, the landlord will rewrite the name, so that year they do not extend it or make it fake, but they just add the person to the lease and take the one who has the driver’s license off the lease.”

This creative problem-solving required trust built over time—between Dana and the landlords, between landlords and tenants, between community members who understood each other’s situations.

Friendships that span decades

Carmen and Gabriel are naturalized U.S. citizens who work as seasonal farm laborers, traveling from Zacatecas, Mexico, to the Eastern Shore each spring and returning home each fall. Over two decades ago, Mariana, who worked for a migrant advocacy organization, helped them navigate the complex process of becoming citizens.

What started as a professional relationship became a deep friendship. Mariana visits Carmen and Gabriel frequently in Mexico. When Mariana’s husband died years ago, Carmen was one of the first people to reach out, providing emotional support during a devastating time. When Mariana’s son needed care while she worked, Carmen and Gabriel stepped in to help.

This kind of reciprocity—where help flows in multiple directions over years—characterizes many relationships I observed. People remember who helped them when they first arrived, who explained how things worked, who offered a ride or translated at an appointment. And they pay it forward, sometimes to the same people, sometimes to newcomers facing the same challenges they once did.

Solidarity across difference

Roseline, a Haitian immigrant who has lived on the Eastern Shore for close to 30 years, described how immigrant communities form bonds despite—and because of—the exclusion they face. When she first arrived, like many Haitian immigrants, she found work in factory jobs. She has since earned her licensed practical nursing degree—part of her own journey navigating rural America’s limited opportunities.

“In high school, Spanish, Haitian, we come together because we all know that we are foreigners and because there is segregation among the Americans and us foreigners,” she says. Within these broader alliances, distinct communities also maintained their own networks: “You also would see Haitian groups together, Hispanic groups together. Even though we talk among ourselves, we joke around when we are in class together.”

But in some spaces, these boundaries dissolve entirely. “In my church, there is none of that,” Roseline says. “Everybody mingles. It is multicultural.”

This pattern—solidarity forged through shared experience of being outsiders, combined with cultural spaces where differences matter less—creates overlapping networks of support. Immigrants learn from each other across language and national boundaries even as they maintain connections within their own communities.

Roseline also emphasized the practical challenges that make mutual aid essential: transportation, English classes, navigating unfamiliar systems. “If you are a new immigrant,” she says, newcomers often need “someone to give you a ride” or help accessing education. In rural areas where public transportation is scarce and services are spread across long distances, these informal networks of support become lifelines.

The informal infrastructure of daily life

Rosa came to the Eastern Shore as an immigrant decades ago. Today, she works in social services, but her help extends far beyond her job description. On her own time, she takes clients to the post office to get passport pictures or help them fill out forms. When friends give her clothing they no longer need, she distributes it to families who could use it. At Christmas, she makes sure her clients know about local programs that provide presents for children, helping them get their kids’ names on lists for backpacks and other gifts.

This kind of informal assistance—knowing which resources exist and helping people access them—constitutes an essential infrastructure in rural communities where formal services are thin on the ground.

Maria, a social worker, took this even further when her client Valeria needed major surgery. Knowing that Valeria would have no one to provide post-operative care or help with her children during recovery, Maria brought Valeria into her own home for several weeks. This wasn’t in any job description. It was simply what needed to happen for Valeria to heal.

The ethic of knowledge-sharing

Angela, a legal outreach worker on the Eastern Shore, describes her philosophy simply: “All the things that we do, my intention is to show you this year. And next year I don’t have to because you are showing someone else. Because that is what happens. You use whatever is available.”

This ethic of passing knowledge forward runs through immigrant communities in the region. Someone figures out how to access a resource, and they share that information with a neighbor. Someone who received help when they first arrived makes a point of orienting newcomers facing the same challenges.

She describes the basic awareness that underlies mutual aid: “People are very conscientious about the conditions in which we work. Sometimes, I am red like a tomato. The next thing I notice is somebody else who needs water more than me. They are human beings. You treat people with respect, and that’s all you want.”

This awareness of others’ needs, even in the midst of one’s own struggles, characterizes the mutual aid I observed: A farmworker notices a coworker suffering in the heat. A woman who figured out how to access a resource shares that knowledge with a neighbor. Someone who received help when they first arrived makes a point of orienting newcomers.

Angela acknowledges that some people need more help than others, that some “give you more gray hair.” Some arrive so broken by their experiences that even accepting help is difficult. But she insists: “You just don’t give up because eventually, good things are going to happen.” For Angela, the reward is watching someone she helped years ago now helping others—the cycle of care continuing.

Such networks of care don’t replace the need for adequate health care, fair wages, or immigration policies that recognize people’s humanity. The creativity and generosity I witnessed on the Eastern Shore emerged precisely because formal systems were inadequate or exclusionary.

But these relationships offer something that formal systems often lack: the recognition of people as whole human beings embedded in communities, not just as workers or patients or cases to be processed.

When Carmen and Gabriel help care for Mariana’s son, when Rosa distributes donated clothing, when Dana works with landlords to solve documentation problems, when Roseline’s church brings together immigrants from across the world, they’re not just meeting immediate needs. They’re weaving the social fabric that makes communities function—the informal ties of obligation, reciprocity, and care that rural places have always depended on.

In today’s climate of intensified immigration enforcement, these networks take on new urgency. Across rural America and urban centers alike, immigrants are there for each other—sharing information about ICE activity, accompanying neighbors to appointments, and maintaining the bonds of trust that help communities survive. The mutual aid Angela describes isn’t just about the past. It’s the infrastructure that makes living possible, especially now.

As Darline’s proverb reminds us: when the usual solutions aren’t available, you find another way. You make do with what you have. And often, what you have is each other.

Thurka SangaramoorthyMore by this author →

Thurka Sangaramoorthy is professor of anthropology at American University. She is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in medical anthropology and epidemiology. Her research focuses on improving care for those living with HIV, developing more effective care systems for non-citizen immigrants, amplifying local community expertise as a transformative tool for enacting policies and practices that effectively address disparate environmental risks in communities of color, and advocating for social justice. Her writings on these topics appear in a wide range of scholarly and mainstream publications. She is also the author of Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A Practical Approach and Toolkit for Collaborative Community Research (Routledge, 2020) and Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention (Rutgers University Press, 2014)