Learning Languages

Based on fieldwork in Latvia, a former Soviet and new European Union state, this chapter details the results for experiences of literacy learning not only when people move across borders but also when borders themselves shift and change. Building from critiques of place-based literacy ethnographies, it documents three kinds of informal literacy learning—print literacy learning, digital literacy learning, and anticipatory literacy learning—resulting from the movement of people across shifting spatial and temporal fields. It draws from participants’ memories of living in Latvia during Soviet times, during independence, and under the EU to tell the story of how generations of family members have used literacy to sustain family ties across borders—borders that have crumbled and have been redrawn.

Writing for Love and Money on Three Continents

This chapter tells the story of the research. It first lays out the research question: How do transnational families’ experiences with migration-driven literacy learning shift across their lifespans in relation to changing political borders, economic circumstances, and technologies? It then describes the field sites in which the question was addressed: Latvia, Brazil, and the United States. Next, it outlines the reasoning behind the author’s methodological choices. Specifically, it elaborates on the author’s use of a comparative case study approach to develop the book’s central concept, “migration-driven literacy learning.” In doing so, the chapter describes how the project entailed both “reasearching across lives” and “researching across continents.” Finally, it offers a brief overview of the rest of the book.

What’s New about Writing for Love and Money?

Chapter 1 tells of writing’s enduring entanglement in love and money across selected historical and contemporary periods and cultures. It argues that writing for love and money is not new. It suggests that taking both a sociohistorical and ethnographic perspective on migration-driven literacy learning allows one to explore which legacies of writing for love and money people activate or discard given their particular historical moments, their particular geo-political contexts, and their particular relationships, goals, and lives. Such an exploration can be undertaken through the kind of comparative, transnational analysis that the subsequent chapter outlines.

Afterword

The short afterword addresses the role of mothers in transnational families. Here is a sample: In a context of the rapid movement of people and of writing, I have tried in these pages to momentarily bring into focus the blurred images that can result from going too fast. In this process, I have fished for a through line, a narrative, a story that would in some way bind together the meanings that are often rearranged by familial separation. I have written these pages as a hopeful gesture, as a way to participate in the possibility of wholeness. To guide me in this work, I have looked to the mothers.

Teaching Homeland Family

Based on U.S.-based fieldwork with two multigenerational families, this chapter details the implications of participating in writing remittance circuits for migrants themselves. For both families, the ties to home they concretized through writing remittances enriched their literacy and language learning stateside, both as means to meet their goals in conditions of injustice and as an expression of familial love. As members of these families circulated literacy from host country to homeland and back, it appeared to accrue, amounting to a grassroots transnational family network of literacy “funds” that they could call on in support of their aspirations in a hostile U.S. context. In this way, this chapter builds on and expands concepts of “funds of knowledge” to reveal migration, and the communicative practices associated with it, as a family-based pedagogical resource.

Learning to Log On

Based on fieldwork in Brazil, this chapter develops the concept of “writing remittances”—the hardware, software, and knowledge about literacy that migrants often remit home to communicate with loved ones. As objects of emotional and economic value, writing remittances demand literacy learning as one condition of their exchange. Because such learning, like money, is fungible, homeland residents often circulate and reinvest it locally, with varying returns. This chapter brings together two fundamental aspects of literacy—its imbrication in economic trends and its materiality—to show how they interact in families’ relationships across borders. It does so by offering snapshots of experiences of writing remittances taken from various angles: an aerial view of writing remittances across social class; a narrative view of writing remittances across one man’s life; historically oriented views across the changing technologies of print and digital writing remittances; and future-oriented views as women and men described the payoffs (or not) of migration-driven literacy learning.

Conclusion

The conclusion emphasizes that when one takes migrants’ desires, histories, family, and community relationships into account, migration can be seen not as a detriment to literacy education, but instead as an instigator of it. Specifically, as literacy travelled transnationally among family members, it appeared to amass ideological, emotional, and financial values—values that amplified eachother in material sites and practices of written communication. Harnessing the informal transnational literacy learning that results from migration has potential for making literacy pedagogy relevant for students’ familial and economic realities. Outlining implications for researchers and educators, the conclusion details how writing for love and money can matter not only for transnational families but also for students with more apparently nationally bounded lives.

Introduction

The introduction lays out the premise of the book: to describe how families who are separated across borders write—and learn new ways of writing—in pursuit of both love and money. It introduces the concept of writing remittances—the communication hardware, software, writing practices, and literacy knowledge that migrant family members circulate across borders to keep in touch. It then poses the question the book will answer: What are migrant and nonmigrant family learning about literacy through these cross-border exchanges? Ulitmately, the introduction makes the case that understanding literacy as a human and economic activity can best uncover how people use writing to sustain their families through times of hardship and change.