Migrant Longing

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 Chávez-García recreates and gives meaning to the hope fear and longing migrants experienced in their everyday lives both “here” and “there” (<i>aqui y alla</i>). 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. Chávez-García demonstrates not only how migrants struggled to maintain their sense of humanity in <i>el norte</i> 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.<br/><br/>With this richly detailed account ranging from the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s to the emergence of Silicon Valley in the late 1960s Chávez-García 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.