When global capitalism prevents families from covering their basic needs, and neoliberal logics force individuals to sacrifice themselves for their families’ survival, migration is a difficult but likely path for many. The cross-border family separation that results is common enough in places like El Salvador that these families become the subject of widespread media and political discourses. On the one hand, migrants are lauded as national heroes for sending remittances, thereby keeping national economies afloat; on the other hand, they are just as likely to be vilified. Considered the destructive agents causing ‘ruptured families’, politicians self-servingly blame them for all social ills, including poverty and crime. In Living Together across Borders, linguistic anthropologist Lynnette Arnold masterfully talks back, revealing the harms of such pervasive neoliberal discourse while also underscoring the agency, creativity and care families meaningfully maintain across great distance and over many years.
Transnational families, in which core members live in different countries, are not new. In the past, however, contact between them was slow and infrequent, making communication and the maintenance of ties difficult. In the era of widespread access to mobile phones, Arnold demonstrates that not only is communication more frequent, but that these regular conversations constitute forms of care and convivencia – a kind of living together made possible through speech acts that perform multiple functions for families. First, she argues, we need to understand phone calls, video messages, even brief greetings as communicative practices of care. Yes, these families show care by sending remittances and using remittance money responsibly, but their love for each other is also present in all their communications, especially in the ways they check in on each other, ask about their ongoing lives, and reminisce together about moments when they still lived together before migration separated them. She also compellingly argues that conversations and language ‘reveal both the historical forces and global inequities that these families confront as well as their creative agency and resilience in forging cross-border life together’ (pp. 1–2).
Beginning with a thoughtful Prologue that grounds the study in personal details of her life, Arnold invites readers to consider that we are all implicated in the communication acts at the centre of the book and in language that is a form of social action performing ‘kin care’, whether we share physical space with one another or not. The Introduction chapter, ‘Communication and Care-at-a-Distance’, delves into multiple fields that she engages in her analysis. Providing some contextual history of Salvadorans in El Salvador and in the United States, of family life in rural El Salvador, and of local drivers of migration, she then reviews extant literature on care: as non-static, relational labour that for transnational families can happen discursively and along scalar hierarchies of action. She introduces the concept of communicative care to propel her argument that ‘language facilitates, enacts, and signifies care’ (p. 19) for transnational families, as she centres in the book, but also more broadly in other settings.
Chapter 1, ‘Making Family Care Political’, offers a deep dive into the dominant political discourse contextualising transnational family life in both El Salvador and the United States. In El Salvador, migrants are reduced to good neoliberal subjects as heroes of the nation for being responsible remitters, or as delinquent, selfish and irresponsible family members when they do not remit. In the United States, Salvadorans have been reduced to stereotypes as criminals and gang members. In both contexts, Arnold argues, the language in political discourse matters because it informs policies with real consequences for migrants and their families. In the remaining chapters, she analyses several brief excerpts of phone conversations and recorded video messages between the few families from the anonymised Cantón El Río in rural El Salvador. Chapters 2 (‘Transnational Care in Multigeneration Households’), 3 (‘“Les Mando Saludos”: Sending Greetings, Envisioning Family, and Grappling with Inequality’), and 4 (‘Talking Remittances: The Conversational Temporalities of Intergenerational Care’) provide compelling evidence about the role of communication in maintaining gendered and generational hierarchies, resisting those same hierarchies, and ultimately sustaining collaborative relationships of care. And she demonstrates that nonmigrants are not simply passive recipients of remittances.
I was particularly moved by Arnold's decision to deploy ‘intimacy as a methodological stance’ (p. 24), including personal reflections about her caring relationships with study participants throughout the book, but most notably in the Prologue and the Conclusion. The book serves as a model of how to be transparent about one's role as a researcher, how to locate one's interest in the work, and how to consider one's potential effects on the people in the study. She demonstrates that being guided by compassion and honesty in research allows her to simultaneously and very successfully carry out deep, useful analysis that moves theory forward. Together, these aspects of the work make for a powerful read. In the Conclusion, she calls on scholars to take action, drawing on their expertise to combat unjust immigration policies, support detained immigrants, and abolish the systems that keep global capitalism functioning at the expense of these families’ ability to share physical space together.
Arnold's primary engagement is with linguistic anthropology. As a sociologist, I found myself wanting more details about how migrants live, what else is going on in their lives, and how nonmigrants understand the macro situation. However, she writes clearly and with minimal jargon, making the work accessible far beyond her discipline. The details of the families’ lives, intentions and dreams, along with the analysis of political, social and economic contexts in which their ties are forged through language acts will be of interest to many. For the field of Central American studies and for scholars interested in transnational families based in Latin America, the details of the families’ lives provide nuanced understandings of contemporary transnational families in broad socio-political contexts that I found meaningful and intriguing. This is an important read for scholars in various fields. I especially recommend it for Central Americanists, Latin Americanists, anthropologists, and scholars of migration, gender and families.
