This book is a reflexive ethnography exploring how transnational Salvadoran families sustain kinship through language and care. Arnold follows two multigenerational families in El Salvador and their relatives living in Los Angeles, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Across these sites, she develops convivencia—living together while apart—as a framework for understanding how families enact care. Arnold’s methodology is immersive. Beyond participant observation, she becomes an interlocutor, translator, and godmother (comadre, p. 62) within her host community, engaging in cross-border communicative labor and even participating in acts of care and remitting. This openness yields an ethically grounded account of the entanglements between social capital, racial and linguistic privilege, and intimacy in ethnographic research. Arnold remains attentive to her positionality as a white, US-based academic, treating this awareness as a responsibility to represent collaborators faithfully and to reciprocate materially and communicatively.
Chapter 1 reframes remittances not only as material support but also as what Arnold describes as ‘communicative care’, where routine phone calls, health check-ins, and expressions of saludos serve as affective lifelines across distance. Chapter 2 focuses on linguistic intimacy, especially negotiations around vos and usted, showing how forms of address index hierarchy, affection, and her own pursuit of relational linguistic symmetry in fieldwork. Chapter 3 examines saludos as a communicative genre that sustains social recognition while also reproducing family hierarchies, privileging male breadwinners and migrant contributors within transnational moral economies. Throughout the text, Arnold connects these communicative practices to ‘moral imaginaries’ of the good life—visions of obligation, virtue, and reciprocity shaped by gendered and generational expectations of care. Women often carry the emotional and communicative labor of kin care, while men’s contributions are publicly tied to economic remittances. Arnold also illustrates how material conditions—such as crowded housing arrangements in US cities—shape communicative preferences, including a tendency to favor phone calls over video calls due to privacy concerns. Later chapters turn to rhetorics of grievance or complaints in indirect requesting of remittances and memoria histórica—or naming and remembering loved ones lost to war or violence. The final chapter follows the Mejía family’s coordination to secure a medical visa for a father with chronic kidney disease, showing how, as Arnold writes, ‘communication played a vital role not only in arranging the visa but… in helping to build and maintain the relationships’ (161) that made sponsorship possible.
Ultimately, Arnold offers a compelling model for ethical, community-centered anthropology. Language is observed from genre and discourse analysis (e.g. greetings or saludos, recollections or memorias, requesting of remittances), lexical perspective (forms of address or pronouns), and grammar. Rather than treating mundane talk as ‘trivial’, Arnold demonstrates how everyday speech acts become ‘consequential forces for care’ (164). Her work powerfully illustrates how language sustains life, belonging, and dignity across borders. This analysis remains relevant today as contemporary Salvadoran families face ongoing surveillance, legal uncertainty, and shifting immigration policies that make cross-border communication and care urgent. Arnold’s account underscores the emotional, communicative, and material labor that sustains families living in precarity.
