WRITING FOR LOVE AND MONEY
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 last decade, global economic inequity has resulted in a rapid increase in labor migration. According to the UN, 244 million people currently live outside the countries of their birth. The untold 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 in-depth field research and scores of moving interviews with transnational families in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and North America, Writing for Love and Money shows how families separated across borders are increasingly turning to writing to address these problems.
Writing for Love and Money won the Edward B Fry Book Award from the Literacy Research Association and the National Council of Teachers of English / CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award.
A book of inspiration and hope, but most of all a testimony to the power of the written word, the human touch that keeps on giving. Here a scholar looks at how borders separating families cannot keep literacy from being a fundamental channel for emotional connection across miles and often years.
— Shirley B. Heath, Margery Baily Professor in English and Dramatic Literature, Emerita, Stanford University
Vieira provides an original perspective on the writing remittances from migration, which are inspired by familial love and economic needs, helping us explore the fascinating influences of affect and materiality on literacy.”
— Suresh Canagarajah, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics and English, Penn State University
Writing for Love and Money: How Migration Drives Literacy Learning in Transnational Families
Oxford University Press, 2019.
Introduction
Literacy Learning in Immigrants' Homelands
Chapter One
What's New About Writing for Love and Money?
Chapter Two
Writing for Love and Money on Three Continents
Chapter Three
Learning to Log On: From Post to Internet in Brazil
Chapter Four
Learning Languages: From Soviet Union to European Union in Latvia
Chapter Five
Teaching Homeland Family: Love and Money in the U.S.
Conclusion
Migration-Driven Literacy Learning in Uncertain Times
Afterword
The Mothers
The Study
Writing for Love and Money describes a tri-continental study that develops the concept of “writing remittances”—the literacy know-how and technologies, such as laptops, that migrants remit home to communicate with distant loved ones. At a moment of rapid globalization, in which economic circumstances and political realities are shifting underneath their feet, homeland families are learning, teaching, adapting, and using new kinds of literacies. Despite policy makers’ concerns about “brain drain,” the book argues that immigrants’ departures do not leave homelands wholly educationally hobbled. Instead, migration actually promotes literacy learning in transnational families as they write to reach the two life goals that globalization consistently threatens: economic solvency and intimacy. Writing for love and money, the book shows, are crucial—indeed inseparable—aspects of contemporary literacy.
The Communities
Jaú, Brazil
Jaú, is a mid-sized town in the interior of São Paulo, Brazil, a four-hour bus ride from the state capital. With a modest rate of outmigration, some wealthy residents send their children to study abroad in the U.S. or Canada; others attempt to gain higher education certificates abroad; and others engage in labor migration, traveling to Japan, Europe, or the U.S. to work.
While Brazil as a whole has been a notable sending country of immigrants since the 1980’s, and there are just under 2 million Brazilians living abroad (Margolis, 2013), many of Jaú’s residents do not migrate. Judging from the rate of automobile ownership (1 for every 2 residents), Jaú is riding the larger national trend of middle-class growth (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, 2013).
What highlights migration-driven literacy practices in Jaú, then, is not that everyone leaves, but that most tend to stay. Residents think of Jaú as quiet, friendly, safe, a town securely ensconced in Brazil’s interior heartland—a collective belief that makes the absence of one member of the community noteworthy.
These conditions shape the way “writing remittances,” such as laptops, are received, taken up, used, and recirculated. They shape how love and money resonate in both the literacy materials and practices that cross borders, from the hands of one family member to those of another.
Daugavpils, Latvia
Daugavpils, Latvia is is the second largest town in the former Soviet and European Union state, Latvia. Like Jaú, it is nestled in the interior of its state and is a four-hour bus ride away from the capital. Unlike Jaú, however, Daugavpils is facing mass population loss due to migration.
During the recent global recession, Latvia’s economy floundered and its unemployment rate rose above 20%. It faced what Latvian economist Hazans has called a “demographic disaster.” During 2009-2010 alone, Latvia lost between 40,000 and 80,000 inhabitants to emigration (Hazans, 2011), contributing to its net migration rate of -4 per 1,000 (Population Reference Bureau, 2012).
Both the popular press and Latvia’s prime minister have referred to this mass outmigration as “brain drain,” pointing to children being raised by grandparents, schools closing, and the iconic tragedy of Latvian civil engineers leaving Latvia to pick strawberries in England.
Daugavpils has clearly lost valuable knowledge, skills, and experiences as educated citizens emigrate. Yet in this process, other, more informal, more family based kinds of literacy learning are underway. Such literacy learning is shaped both by the historical, political, and technological shifts that Latvia’s transnational families must negotiate as they write for love and for money.
[1] Social remittances are “Local-level, migration driven forms of cultural diffusion” (Levitt, 1998, p. 926; Levitt and Lamba-Nieves, 2011).
Wisconsin
This study would not be complete without also addressing the experiences of migrant families in writing remittance circuits. Part of this study took place is a city in Wisconsin that is deeply educationally stratified along racial divides. How might the conditions of stratification, and other conditions of literacy learning in this context, shape the way migrant families remit literacy—and what remittances mean for their lives stateside?
This section of the book focuses on two intergenerational families. I find that in remitting literacy to those they loved, migrants reinforced their own beliefs in literacy’s promise for emotional connection and upward social mobility. In other words, as migrants circulated literacy globally, its value accrued.
Articles Associated with Writing for Love and Money
(Forthcoming 2020). Writing, mobility, and power. Research in the Teaching of English, “In Dialogue” section, 54.3.
(2019). What happens when texts fly. College English, Special Issue on Texts, 82.1: 77-95.
Research Team
Calley Marotta
PhD Student, Composition & Rhetoric
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Academic Webpage
Calley Marotta is a composition teacher and English graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Writing Fellows Program. Her dissertation examines the literacy practices of manual laborers.
Madina Djuraeva
PhD Candidate, Curriculum & Instruction
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Academic Webpage
Madina Djuraeva is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her research examines lived experiences of being and becoming multilingual at the nexus of language, education, policy, and identity in the contexts of post-Soviet Central Asia and transnational migration. She has published on the issues of (non)nativeness, language policy, and morality in multilingual communities.
Tim Cavnar
PhD Candidate, Curriculum & Instruction
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Tim Cavnar is a PhD student in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His research focuses on academic English, multilingualism in the US university context, and the social aspects of language acquisition. In light of systemic oppression against speakers of diverse world Englishes, he seeks to cultivate spaces in US universities—especially in writing centers and composition classrooms—that better serve writers of all linguistic backgrounds.
Maggie Black (Bertucci Hamper)
Assistant Professor of English
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Academic Webpage
Margaret Black (formerly Maggie Bertucci Hamper) is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When she worked with Kate on this project, she was a PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Coordinator of The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Online Writing Center. Before this, she served as the Assistant Director of UW-Madison's English 201 program and as Writing Program Administrator at Harrington College of Design. She is proud to have received her M.A. in English at Southern Illinois University and her B.A. in English at Eastern Illinois University. Her most recent work is published in the collection Reimagining School Reform and Innovation. Her dissertation, the culmination of archival research, classroom ethnography to understand students’ everyday experiences, literacy history interviews with nine students to investigate students’ literate and material lives, explores how students persist (or don’t) in their educational goals. (She also did the web design for this lovely website, katevieira.com)
This Work Has Been Generously Funded By:
A Spencer/National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship
A Spencer Foundation Grant
Latin American and Caribbean Studies/U.S. Dept of Ed Research Travel Grant
University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign
University of Wisconsin Research Competition
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Vilas Associates Award
University of Wisconsin, Madison