University of North Carolina Press Migrant Longing: Letter Writing Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History)

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. Review In clear, concise prose, both interpretive and narrative, Chavez-Garcia . . . interweaves Mexican and global sociopolitical history with the history of her family and other migrants to reveal a humanized macrohistory. In her thorough research, she employs archival records, oral histories, other primary source materials, and secondary sources but relies chiefly on more than 300 letters. . . . These provide the enmeshed personal perspectives of people often unaccounted for in historical narratives--in this case, Mexican working families and individuals striving for stability.--CHOICEChavez-Garcia 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. . . . [Addressing] courtship and romance, relations between friends, and the experiences of trying to maintain family relationships across the border. . . . Chavez-Garcia follows migrants in their physical and emotional travels back and forth across the border and shows that once people have migrated they do not cut ties with the homeland.--LaborChavez-Garcia deftly makes use of her family's letters to help her readers to see Mexican migrants of the 1960s as complex people with intimate ties to family and friends on both sides of the border. Her book provides a model not only for scholars of Mexican migration but for anyone interested in exploring the history of the family, the development of transborder networks, and the ways that 'ordinary men and women' experience and negotiate gender, culture, politics, and the law.--American Historical ReviewAt the heart of Chavez-Garcia's critical approach is her desire to read the family letters not only as a record of Mexican immigrants' experience of adjusting to life in the United States, but also of the experiences of the people left behind in Mexico: parents, siblings, spouses or lovers.--American Studies in ScandinaviaChavez-Garcia's richly detailed and clearly and empathetically written book . . . shows that Mexican immigrants, rather than unthinking 'beasts of burdens, ' were and are persons with very human needs, desires, and foibles (p. 31). Now, it seems, is not a bad time to be reminded of that.--HAHRA deeply personal, yet universal, exploration of migration, social change, solidarity, and loss.--MomentumExplores the day-to-day texture of life on either side of the border in the mid-20th century as detailed in personal correspondence. . . . [An] ambitious study.--Huntington FrontiersThis study is important because . . . few histories on twentieth-century Mexico have examin