Migrant Letters

The migrant letter, whether written by family members, lovers, friends, or others, is a document that continues to attract the attention of scholars and general readers alike. What is it about migrant letters that fascinates us? Is it nostalgia for a distant, yet desired past? Is it the consequence of the eclipse of letter-writing in an age of digital communication technologies? Or is it about the parallels between transnational experiences in previous mass migrations and in the current globalized world, and the centrality of interpersonal relations, mobility, and communication, then and now? Influenced by methodologies from diverse disciplines, the study of migrant letters has developed in myriad directions. Scholars have examined migrant letters through such lenses as identity and self-making, family relations, gender, and emotions. This volume contributes to this discussion by exploring the connection between the practice of letter writing and the emotional, economic, familial, and gendered experiences of men and women separated by migration. It combines theoretical and empirical discussions which illuminate a variety of historical experiences of migrants who built transnational lives as they moved across Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. This volume was originally published as a special issue of The History of Family.

This collection addresses the recent rebirth of interest in immigrant letters. As these letters are increasingly seen as key, rather than incidental, documents in the interpretations of gender, age, social class, and ethnicity/nationality, the scholars gathered here demonstrate a diversity of new approaches to their interpretation.

Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 letters exchanged between her parents and other family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia recreates and gives meaning to the hope, fear, and longing migrants experienced in their everyday lives both "here" and "there" (aqui y alla). As private sources of communication hidden from public consumption and historical research, the letters provide a rare glimpse into the deeply emotional, personal, and social lives of ordinary Mexican men and women as recorded in their immediate, firsthand accounts. Chavez-Garcia demonstrates not only how migrants struggled to maintain their sense of humanity in el norte but also how those remaining at home made sense of their changing identities in response to the loss of loved ones who sometimes left for weeks, months, or years at a time, or simply never returned. With this richly detailed account, ranging from the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s to the emergence of Silicon Valley in the late 1960s, Chavez-Garcia opens a new window onto the social, economic, political, and cultural developments of the day and recovers the human agency of much maligned migrants in our society today.

For most Norwegians in the nineteenth century, America was a remote and exotic place until the first immigrants began to write home. Their letters were among the most valuable, accessible, and reliable sources of information about the new world and the journey to it. For many immigrants, writing letters home was their most cherished opportunity to communicate their thoughts and feelings in their native language. Through vivid translations of letters written to family and friends between 1870 and 1945, In Their Own Words traces the stories of nine Norwegian immigrants: farmer, fisherman, gold miner, politician, unmarried mother, housewife, businessman, railroad worker, contractor. Their common bond was the experience of immigration and acculturation, but their individual experiences were manifested in a wide variety of forms. Solveig Zempel has thoughtfully selected and translated letters rich in personal description and observation to present each writer’s subjective view of historical events. Often focusing on the minutiae of daily life and the feelings of the individual immigrant, the letters form a complex, intimate, and colorful mosaic of the immigrant world. Solveig Zempel is chair of the Norwegian Department at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

This edited collection invites the reader to enter the diverse worlds of Australia’s migrant and minority communities through the latest research on the contemporary printed press, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to our current day. With a focus on the rare, radical and foreign-language print culture of multiple and frequently concurrent minority groups’ newspaper ventures, this volume has two overarching aims: firstly to demonstrate how the local experiences and narratives of such communities are always forged and negotiated within a context of globalising forces – the global within the local; and secondly to enrich an understanding of the complexity of Australian ‘voices’ through this medium not only as a means for appreciating how the cultural heritage of such communities were sustained, but also for exploring their contributions to the wider society.

This book provides an innovative perspective on migration, mobility and transport. Using concepts drawn from migration history, mobilities studies and transport history it makes the case for greater integration of these disciplines. The approach is historical, demonstrating how past processes of travel and population movement have evolved, examining the continuities and changes that have occurred, and arguing that many of the concepts used in mobilities studies today are equally relevant to the past. The three central chapters view past population movements through, respectively, the lenses of migration history, mobilities studies and transport. Two further chapters demonstrate the diversity of mobility experiences and the opportunities and difficulties of applying this approach in teaching and research. Extensive case study material from around the world is used, including personal diaries, which vividly recreate the everyday experiences of past mobilities. Population movement has never been of more importance globally: this book demonstrates how knowledge of past mobility experiences can inform our understanding of the present.

Scholarship on immigration to America is a coin with two sides: it asks both how America changed immigrants, and how they changed America. Were the immigrants uprooted from their ancestral homes, leaving everything behind, or were they transplanted, bringing many aspects of their culture with them? Although historians agree with the transplantation concept, the notion of the melting pot, which suggests a complete loss of the immigrant culture, persists in the public mind. The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity bridges this gap and offers a comprehensive and nuanced survey of American racial and ethnic development, assessing the current status of historical research and simultaneously setting the goals for future investigation. Early immigration historians focused on the European migration model, and the ethnic appeal of politicians such as Fiorello La Guardia and James Michael Curley in cities with strong ethno-political histories like New York and Boston. But the story of American ethnicity goes far beyond Ellis Island. Only after the 1965 Immigration Act and the increasing influx of non-Caucasian immigrants, scholars turned more fully to the study of African, Asian and Latino migrants to America. This Handbook brings together thirty eminent scholars to describe the themes, methodologies, and trends that characterize the history and current debates on American immigration. The Handbook's trenchant chapters provide compelling analyses of cutting-edge issues including identity, whiteness, borders and undocumented migration, immigration legislation, intermarriage, assimilation, bilingualism, new American religions, ethnicity-related crime, and pan-ethnic trends. They also explore the myth of "model minorities" and the contemporary resurgence of anti-immigrant feelings. A unique contribution to the field of immigration studies, this volume considers the full racial and ethnic unfolding of the United States in its historical context.