Writing for Love and Money

Abstract

Abstract This book tells the story of how families separated across borders write—and learn new ways of writing—in pursuit of both love and money. Over the past decades, global economic inequality has continued to promote the growth of labor migration. According to the UN, 244 million people currently live outside the countries of their birth. The human drama behind these numbers is that labor migration often separates parents from children, brothers from sisters, lovers from each other. Migration, undertaken in response to problems of the pocketbook, also poses problems for the heart. Based on field research and interviews with transnational families in Latin America (Brazil), Eastern Europe (Latvia), and North America (United States), Writing for Love and Money: How Migration Drives Literacy Learning in Transnational Families shows how families separated across borders turn to writing to address these problems. They are writing to sustain meaningful relationships across distance and to better their often impoverished circumstances. The book reveals that, despite policymakers’ concerns about brain drain, immigrants’ departures do not leave their homelands wholly educationally hobbled. Instead migration promotes experiences of literacy learning in transnational families as they write to reach the two life goals that globalization consistently threatens: economic solvency and familial intimacy. The book thus shows how migration itself can be a source of technologically savvy, emotionally attuned, globally conscious, and entrepreneurial literacy learning.