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  • Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Miroslava Chávez-García
  • Kathrin Levitan
Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Miroslava Chávez-García
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018
278 pp., $90.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper); $19.99 (ebook)

In Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.- Mexico Borderlands, Miroslava Chávez-García analyzes a collection of her own family’s letters in order to explore the experience of Mexican migrants and their families in the 1950s and 1960s. This fascinating family history follows the lives of several interconnected families from the rural Mexican town of Calvillo, Aguascalientes. The five substantial chapters, each of which is based on one set of correspondence or one side of a correspondence, address courtship and romance, relations between friends, and the experiences of trying to maintain family relationships across the border. Relevant historical information about the Mexican and US economies, changing immigration and border regimes, and cultural and social contexts is integrated into each chapter. Chávez-García is aware of the importance of “toggling between the micro and macro, that is, between the letter writers’ experiences, on the one hand, and immigration policies and practices, systems of communication, and popular media, on the other” (25). This awareness allows her to place her family history into a larger context.

Chávez-García insists on seeing postwar Mexican migrants as relevant to both United States and Mexican history. She suggests that migrants’ regular border crossing and their remaining ties in Mexico meant that they continued to be part of the Mexican story. She integrates the stories of Mexican and US postwar economic development while also focusing on a rural region of Mexico instead of the more commonly studied urban regions. She also suggests that looking at individual migrant histories allows us to see Mexico’s integration into the global economy in conjunction with far more intimate topics of love, courtship, and family ties. Scholars of migration have sometimes discussed the notion that emigrants become immigrants as they gradually cut or lessen their ties to their homeland, and as a result their identity shifts. Chávez-García looks at the moment when the ties are still there and the migrants are both emigrants and immigrants. In terms of the migrant experience, specifically in California, we learn about agricultural labor as well as migrants’ attempts to work in the service industries in larger cities. She also discusses the culture of migration. For example, in her discussion of masculinity she tells us that for young male Mexican migrants it was important to make enough money to send remittances home, to enjoy American leisure activities that included women and cars, and ultimately to marry and support a family.

The study of migrants’ letters is well established, and the question is always whether one uses letters to study the migrants’ lives or uses the migrants’ lives to study the letters. It is difficult to do both at the same time. While Chávez-García addresses the historiography of letter writing, she does not spend as much time as she might on questions of genre and physicality. Instead, she uses the letters to learn about gender, family [End Page 137] relations, courtship, and economic opportunity. Nonetheless, some of the most interesting aspects of the book address the specifically epistolary aspects of the relationships. Long-distance relationships are of a specific type; they are not simply extensions of in-person relationships. One of the couples Chávez-García analyzes barely knew each other in person and built their relationship through letters, while another relationship faltered when it shifted from in-person to epistolary. Chávez-García points out that letters could nurture, in some cases constitute, and even destroy relationships. Letter-writing relationships often are emotional roller coasters because of the unpredictability regarding when and how the communication happens. Chávez-García’s letter writers referred to classic letter-writing tropes and concepts, such as the idea that reading a letter was like being in the correspondent’s physical presence, that handwriting and other physical aspects of the...

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