2006). The analysis of the job finding methods, based on data from the 2004 National Employment and Income Survey (ENEI), reveals that at the national level, indigenous peoples are almost 7 percent more likely to find a job through social contacts than the non–indigenous, controlling for demographics, educational and labor characteristics. In fact, in the rural areas indigenous peoples are 14 percent more likely to find a job through social contacts than the non indigenous. This pattern reverses, however, in the urban areas. There, the indigenous peoples are 3.5 percent less likely to find a job through social contacts than the non indigenous.

These aggregate estimates also seem to conceal substantial heterogeneity in the use of social contacts across different indigenous groups. In the rural areas, for example, the Q’eqchi are the most likely of all other indigenous groups to find a job through social contacts (30 percent for the Q’eqchi versus 10 percent for the Kiche). The two indigenous groups with a higher probability of getting a job through social contacts in urban areas are the Kiche and the Xinca.

Other interesting findings relate to the use of social networks among workers with a higher education level and workers in the informal sector (defined as workers in firms with less than 6 employees and not contributing to the social security system). Using the sample of informal workers only, it is found that in both rural and urban areas, indigenous workers are more likely than non-indigenous workers to find a job through social contacts (11.7 percent more likely in the rural areas and 1.6 percent in the urban areas). In contrast, when the sample is limited to workers with complete secondary or higher level of education, it is found that indigenous workers are less likely to find a job through social contacts. Thus, the social network of the indigenous in the urban areas is more limited than that of the non–indigenous. This is also confirmed by the fact that in urban areas indigenous people are more likely to find a job through formal methods (instead of social contacts). The relatively higher use of formal methods for finding a job by the indigenous than the non–indigenous in urban areas suggests that there is room for programs helping the indigenous find jobs in urban areas. Interestingly, indigenous people working in the public sector (either in urban or rural areas) are less likely than nonindigenous to have found their job through social contacts.

The Guatemalan survey also allows the distinction between getting help from relatives and help from friends/politicians. These two categories may be considered as analogous to the “bonding” social capital and “bridging” social capital concepts frequently encountered in the social capital literature (Woolcock and Narayan 2000). Bonding and bridging social capital may also be considered analogous to the “strong and weak ties” of Granovetter (1973). According to Granovetter (1973), the strength of a tie is a probably linear combination of the amount of time, emotional intensity, intimacy (mutual confiding), and reciprocal services which characterize the tie. The analysis reveals that the indigenous tend to use more the help from relatives (bonding social capital) than the non-indigenous. In contrast, the non-indigenous tend to use more the contacts from friends and politicians (bridging social capital). Thus, the form of social networks and the nature of social interactions among indigenous peoples suggest that the bridging social capital is relatively weak in comparison to bonding social capital.

Another trend that is changing the predominantly ‘bonding’ nature of indigenous social capital is migration. With indigenous migration to the United States on the rise, in particular from Mexico and Guatemala, traditional village-based kinship networks are turned into dynamic, transnational links. In other words, traditional ‘bonding’ social capital becomes ‘bridging’ social capital. These transnational networks are key, not only in helping more people migrate, but also 19