This book focuses on the literacy practices that occur outside formal educational systems. It shows how transnational families resort to writing to maintain relationships and to improve their socioeconomic situation.
The book mainly draws upon literacy history interviews (LHI), which ask people how they have used reading and writing. Vieira asked interviewees about their experience of transnational communication, memories of learning to write, and descriptions of using the acquired writing skills in daily life. She also informally discussed migration and transnational communication with participants. LHIs, which are thirty minutes to two hours each, were conducted in Brazil (sixteen individuals, nineteen LHIs), Latvia (twenty-eight individuals, twenty-seven LHIs), and the United States (five individuals from two multigenerational families). These three sites respectively represent a homeland of moderate emigration, a homeland of mass emigration, and a community of migrants in the comparative case study. In homelands, interviews involved individuals who either had families abroad or had lived abroad themselves. In Wisconsin, three participants recently emigrated from Ukraine, and two other participants emigrated from Mexico as children.
Vieira reports that migration promotes literacy learning in homelands since people learn to communicate with their far-away loved ones and to prepare for overseas economic opportunities. Throughout the book, Vieira depicts how ‘writing remittances’, ‘the communication hardware, software, writing practices, and literacy knowledge that migrant family members circulate across borders’ (4), are transmitted across space, time, and languages. One example of writing remittance is the laptops that Vieira delivered from another country to her family and friends in Brazil. A teen in the United States remitted English knowledge to her sister back home in Mexico, hoping that sending a literacy remittance would eventually lead to a family reunion. In writing remittance circuits, immigrants, learners in a foreign country, gain emotional and ideological support when they become ‘teachers’ of their home country fellows.
Yet literacy's economic value fluctuates across time and space—a diploma may not offer the same job it used to or in another country. Therefore, Vieira argues that literacy is less of a tool or skill that can be abstracted from people's lives and more of a sociohistoric trend whose potentials people activate via writing in transnational contexts. Vieira shows how transnational families change the way they write as the social and technological context changes over time. She describes the switch from print to digital literacy learning occurring in the context of technological development in three sites. Experience with writing remittance also varies with social class and gender. Vieira concludes that writing remittance tends to benefit those in favorable social positions. Therefore, using literacy successfully in transnational contexts requires social advantage, awareness, judgement, timing, and moxie.
Vieira believes that the book can provide teachers and policy makers with insights on how to build on existing family-based migration-driven literacy learning. She proposes a view of literacy that might help teachers to teach it better and people to practice it better, namely that for everyone, literacy means reading and writing across changing socioeconomic and emotional contexts.
