Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Miroslava Chávez-García

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...