Abstract
Following a century of scholarly attention, the migrant letter, whether written by family members, lovers, friends, or others, is a document that continues to attract the attention of scholars and general readers. Over time, the study of migrant letters has developed in myriad directions. It has adopted methodologies ranging from the publication of complete collections and excerpts to the close analytical and computational readings of letters and their authors examined through the lens of gender, identity, family, and emotions. Regardless of the methodology, the history of migrant letters remains tied to the history of the family. This introduction presents an overview of the historiographical evolution of the study of migrant letters from the early twentieth-century onwards. It highlights the ways in which this Special Issue contributes to the discussion by exploring the connection between the practice of letter writing and the emotional, transnational, economic, and familial experiences of individuals separated by migration.
In 1916, American sociologist William I. Thomas and his Polish colleague Florian Znaniecki began a collaboration which resulted in one of the most influential works of the twentieth century on individual and family experiences amid rapid social and cultural changes brought on by the expansion of capitalism, urbanization, and migration (Zaretsky, Citation1984). The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Thomas & Znaniecki, Citation1918, 1919–1920, Citation1927) was also a major methodological turning point in its extensive use of first-person accounts and life documents, most notably a large collection of letters from Polish migrants and their families. A century later, the migrant letter, whether written by family members, lovers, friends, or others is a document that continues to attract the attention of scholars and other readers. With migration occupying a central role in the twenty-first century and digital communication technologies morphing our world as we once knew it, the practice of letter-writing and the letters themselves have become fragments of the past for many. Yet, when we think of the migrant letter today, the image of a mother reading aloud to her family the letter received from her migrant son or daughter continues to resonate among us. What exactly is it about this form of writing that perplexes, fascinates, and continues to elude us? Is it nostalgia thrusting us to a distant, yet desired past? Is it the consequence of the letter’s eclipse resulting from the prevalence of digital communication technologies? Or is it about the centrality of family, mobility, and communication, then and now, in the face of change and continuity?
The work on migrant letters pioneered by Thomas and Znaniecki had initially few followers among migration historians. In the United States, George Stephenson’s and Theodore Blegen’s studies of letters of Scandinavian migrants (for example, Blegen, Citation1931; Stephenson, Citation1929) started a new tradition of inquiry which led the way to social historians’ interest in letters as a way to incorporate migrants’ own perspectives in the study of migration.Footnote1 Since then, letters have been at the center of scholars’ preoccupation with mobility. Over time, scholars’ questions, approaches, and methodologies have varied considerably. Thomas and Znaniecki used migrant letters (which they called ‘peasant letters’) to show the impact of modernization on traditional societies and the resulting breakdown in family solidarity and organization. Early historians interested in the ‘America letter,’ like Theodore Blegen, George Stephenson, and Marcus Hansen saw the immigrant letter as the ideal source for research on migration. They viewed the migrant letter as a catalyst of mass migration (Gerber, Citation2006, p. 41). Scholarly interest shifted to the migrant letter as a privileged source to learn about the experiences of migration, motives of emigration, places of settlement, migrants’ daily lives and socio-economic adaptation. Beginning in the 1950s, edited collections of migrant letters began to appear in their original language and in English translation (Blegen, Citation1955; Conway, Citation1961). These volumes and numerous others that followed provided qualitative first-hand testimonies of migrants’ efforts in adjusting to social and economic shifts in a variety of contexts (for example, Baily & Ramella, Citation1988; Barton, Citation1975; Blasco Martínez & Rubalcaba Pérez, Citation2003; D’Agostin & Grossutti, Citation1997; Erickson, Citation1972; Fitzpatrick, Citation1994; Franzina, Citation1979; Kula, Assorodobraj-Kula, & Kula, Citation1986 [1973]; Miller, Schrier, Boling, & Doyle, Citation2003; Soutelo Vázquez, Citation2001). With the emergence of the New Social History, historians began to see as well ‘the analytical potential of many of the usual deletions [from complete collections]… discussed as trivial, such as, health, family gossip, friendship, personal inquiries, and so on’ (Gerber, Citation2006, p. 55). In most of these cases, if not all, the perspective that was featured belonged to the migrants. All too often, and for practical limitations especially, many of the collections underscored one side of the correspondence, that is the migrants’ (for example, Kamphoefner, Helbich, & Sommer, Citation1991), leaving it to the researcher to provide commentary based on the content in the letters. Since the 1990s, scholars have also begun to pay special attention to the language of the letters as well as their place in the context of broader epistolary practices (for example, Fitzpatrick, Citation1994, Citation2006; Franzina, Citation1981, Citation1987; Gibelli, Citation1989; Lyons, Citation2013; Miller, Citation1985; Moreton, Citation2012; Vargas, Citation2006). Several works also considered the meaning and functionality of migrant letters as vehicles for nurturing and (re)negotiating family relations and personal networks altered by migration, for cultivating new ideas of self and others, and for expressing emotions in contexts of migration (for example, Cancian, Citation2010, Citation2012a, Citation2016; Da Orden, Citation2010; DeHaan, Citation2001, Citation2010; Errington, Citation2008; Gerber, Citation2006; Gibelli, Citation1989, Citation2002; Liu, Citation2005; Murray, Citation2004; Sinke, Citation2002). These approaches were in part influenced by developments in other disciplines and fields like critical theory, literary analysis, social psychology, feminist anthropology, gender studies, literacy studies, linguistics, and more recently, the history of emotions.
Most of the original discussion of migrant letters took place in the context of immigration in North America and the North Atlantic world, but over time a broader community of international scholars began to look at the place of migrant correspondence in other countries of immigration and emigration. Conferences and initiatives of international collaboration have resulted in diversified theoretical and methodological approaches. They have also facilitated a dialogue among different scholarly traditions (for example, Elliot, Gerber, & Sinke, Citation2006).Footnote2 There are, however, still some parallel developments in the study of migrant letters across borders. For example, scholars in Europe have paid more attention to migrant letters in the context of ‘popular’ or ‘working-class’ writings and traditions of ‘popular literacy’ than those in the United States (for example see Barton & Hall, Citation2000; Castillo Gómez, Citation2002; Lyons Citation2012, Citation2013). On the other hand, studies of migration and mobility within European imperial spaces and the writing practices of individuals and families of the middling and upper sectors who moved in these spaces have developed in parallel (but not necessarily in dialogue) with studies of migrant letters (Pearsall, Citation2008; Rothschild, Citation2011).Footnote3 There is, therefore, plenty of room for comparisons and collaborations by scholars at the international level, in a way that is closer to the experience of migrants themselves who traversed national boundaries and were exposed to multiple cultural influences. The study of letter-writing by migrants and their families in different historical, geographic, and cultural contexts, and through multiple disciplinary lenses will result in a fuller understanding of its meaning, purpose, and characteristic features – what is unique, what changes across groups and contexts, what are the differences and commonalities with broader letter-writing practices at home and abroad.
Questions of representativeness have also been raised in the field of migrant letters. The number of letters available for research and the overall number of letters that were written and those that were not exchanged between individuals and families have perplexed researchers (Erickson, Citation1972; Fitzpatrick, Citation1994; Helbich & Kamphoefner, Citation2006; Richards, Citation2006). These questions have compelled historians Helbich and Kamphoefner (Citation2006) to ask ‘how similar or different the socioeconomic and demographic profile of these individuals was, compared to those who did write … what sort of letters survived and surfaced, what may distinguish them from those that did not, and which part of the chain composed by writer, recipient, preservers, and finally donor may have been most essential’ (p. 30). In other words, how representative were the conclusions culled from the available letters if researchers did not have access to all the letters composed, delivered, and preserved over time? As valid as this caveat may be, historical records are always partial and fragmentary, and in this regard letters written by migrants are no different from other sources. Expanding the types of repositories and voices represented by letters is one way to strive for as large and diverse a population as possible. This is particularly important for letters from the barely literate, semi-literate, or even illiterate (who wrote with other people’s assistance), which constituted the majority of migrants during the period of mass transoceanic migrations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As scholars of working-class writings remind us, separation caused by migration was one of the biggest pushes for millions of people to start writing for the first time, whatever their capacity (Gibelli, Citation2002; Lyons, Citation2013). Access to a variety of letters from diverse populations also creates interesting possibilities to shed light on the ways in which cultural practices, worldviews, expectations, and strategies varied according to class and cultural backgrounds, and how these factors may have shaped letter-writing among migrants.
Briefly, the study of migrant letters has developed in myriad directions adopting methodologies ranging from the publication of complete collections to the publication of large excerpts of letters as illustrations of historical events and experiences to close readings of letters, and interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches with a focus on gender, identity, family, and emotions in content analysis, and more recently, computational analysis. Regardless of the methodology, the history of migrant letters remains tied to the history of the family. From Thomas and Znaniecki on, scholars have underscored the value of migrant letters in historical illustrations, descriptions, and the re/telling of migration experiences on behalf of individuals, families, and communities.
Since then, other questions and approaches have been pushing the boundaries of inquiry in the field. One of the questions, ‘Can migrant letters speak for themselves?’ asks to what extent the presentation of a letter collection provides a reading into the experiences of migrants and their significant others? The work of Fitzpatrick (Citation1994), Gerber (Citation1997), and Miller, Schrier, Boiling, and Doyle (Citation2003) ushered in closer readings of migrant letters leading to a more in-depth understanding of migrants ‘constructions of experience’ (Fitzpatrick, Citation1994, p. 5). This line of inquiry has been expanded and enriched during the last two decades with the work of other scholars interested in the possibilities of content analysis (qualitative and quantitative) to explore migrants’ constructions of identity, language, and emotions (for example, Cancian, Citation2010, Citation2012a; Da Orden, Citation2010; DeHaan, Citation2001, Citation2010; Elliot et al., Citation2006; Gerber, Citation2006; Moreton, Citation2012; Sinke, Citation2002).
Similar to other narrative sources, emotions, affect, and intimacy are integral to migrant letters. Within the context of family and migration, Loretta Baldassar and Donna Gabaccia recently noted that ‘families are increasingly understood as sites of disagreement and contest, particularly along gendered and generational lines as well as of bonds of emotion that, along with economic concerns, often provide the affective drivers for migration’ (Baldassar & Gabaccia, Citation2011, p. 3). What kinds of emotions and emotional energies (Altman, Citation1982) can be mined from migrant letters? Recent works (Cancian, Citation2010, Citation2012a, Citation2012b; Errington, Citation2008; Gerber, Citation2006) have contributed to underscoring the importance of emotions, affect, and intimacy in migrant correspondence.Footnote4 In doing so, they have begun to explore more closely the state of mind and state of heart of the letter-writers on both sides of the migration process, making evident the interior complexities of leaving one’s family and being left behind.
Equally important has been an emphasis on transnationality that has emerged among scholars in the late twentieth century. Defined as ‘a way of life that connects family, work, and consciousness in more than one national territory,’ transnationalism, historian Donna Gabaccia notes, was viewed ‘as a normal dimension of life for many, perhaps even most, working-class families in Italy [and other countries of emigration] in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Family discipline, economic security, reproduction, inheritance, romance and dreams transcended national boundaries and bridged continents’ (Gabaccia, Citation2000, p. 11). In this light, the letters of migrants and the letters of their significant others who remained behind are crucial. Increasingly, beginning with the works of Liu (Citation2005), Gerber (Citation2006), and Cancian (Citation2010), for instance, the links, continuities, and negotiating efforts illustrated in letter collections between migrant letter-writers and their family members back home became important sources for analysis. Transnational links between families continue to serve as an important conduit of inquiry for current scholarship.
Building on this rich trajectory, the articles in this Special Issue offer new insights from case studies and methodological and theoretical discussions that reflect the current state of historical analysis of migrant letters and contribute to setting the agenda for further historical inquiry. Contributors use a variety of approaches and engage in multidisciplinary dialogue to illuminate the practice of letter-writing, its multiple meanings and functions, and its connection with the experiences and identities of individuals and families separated by migration.
David Gerber’s article uses letter-writing to identify the process of ‘immigrant self-making’; in particular, the uses of migrants’ memory of their past lives and the relationships they left behind as they built new lives in the places of settlement. Using insights from literary analysis and social psychology, the article explores migrants’ use of nostalgia in migrant letters as a strategy of personal adaptation that bridged the former selves and new selves in-the-making, as a ‘mechanism of reconciliation’ with their new lives. Musing about their previous lives could act as a ‘bridge’ or a ‘barrier.’ Nostalgia could operate as a means to facilitate change or, in less successful or functional cases, it could lead to brooding sentiments of inadequacy. Gerber analyzes these different processes of memory work and identity-making in the letter collections of three individual British migrants to the United States in the nineteenth century.
The contribution of Emma Moreton also looks at migrants’ memory work as a way to bring together the country they left behind and their new lives as immigrants. Her study adds a different methodological and theoretical approach to the discussion; it uses content analysis techniques from corpus linguistics to examine the letters of Julia Lough, an English migrant woman living in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which are part of a larger collection of family correspondence. While Gerber’s article looks at nostalgia as a state of being ‘temporarily and unexpectedly overcome by memories,’ which in some cases could be a primer for more conscious memory work such as recollection, Moreton’s analysis complements the discussion by concentrating on the ways migrants constructed the language of recollection. Moreton identifies verbal strategies used by Julia Lough in order to emphasize past experiences with family who remained at home, thus strengthening emotional bonds and connections to shared meaningful places. This migrant used the language of recollection to connect with family members back home while positioning herself in her new environment and identity without losing a sense of attachment to home. Letter-writing was equally important for the emotional ties of families separated by migration and for migrants’ identities. Moreton’s analysis shows how it provided Julia Lough with a vehicle to keep emotional ties with the family left behind and facilitated her process of self-fashioning as an immigrant.
The letters analyzed in the first two articles facilitated epistolary conversations between female and male migrants and a variety of interlocutors back home – parents, siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts. In which ways did different recipients contribute to shaping different narrative strategies? Babs Boter and Suzanne Sinke consider this question in their article which analyzes the impact of epistolary audiences and perceptions of expected gender and family roles in migrants’ letter-writing practices. The authors compare the letter-writing of two Dutch men who migrated to Canada and the United States in the early twentieth century; one wrote mostly to his parents, the other to the wife he left behind and with whom he was hoping to reunite abroad. In their letters back home, they presented ‘epistolary personae’ that made use of varied ideas of their roles as men, and of their place within and responsibility toward their family. The comparison of the letters of these two men illustrates a ‘successful’ and a ‘failed’ case in migrants’ use of letter-writing to cultivate emotional and material connections with loved ones left behind, and to fulfill expectations as men and responsible family and community members. This discussion shows, as the authors put it, that ‘audience mattered,’ as did gendered understandings of self and family obligations.
Other contributions in this Special Issue expand the discussion of family expectations and obligations expressed and (re)negotiated through letter-writing to other migrant groups, and add different analytical approaches. The article by Sonia Cancian and Simone Wegge focuses more specifically on material support and economic matters discussed through the language of emotions in letters exchanged by migrants from Europe and their families during the first half of the twentieth century, now digitally available as part of the University of Minnesota’s Digitizing Immigrant Letters Project. The authors explore the many ways in which economic and financial concerns appeared in letters sent both by migrants and by family members in their places of origin. Economic concerns discussed in these letters included the use of migrants’ remittances, details of domestic economics and market prices for essential goods, management of family property, and the hardships of relatives who stayed behind. Money matters were often discussed from the point of view of emotions, using language of affect and emphasizing family ties and expectations. The discussion on migrant letters examined from the viewpoint of socioeconomic conditions brings to light the shifting importance that economic matters occupied in transnational family relations and their letters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, economic matters appeared more frequently in letters whose authors exhibited greater economic need.
For its part Marcelo Borges’ article looks at migration, gender roles, and family expectations through the lens of married couples living apart as a result of labor migration from Portugal in the late nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on personal letters sent from husbands, and sometimes fathers, working abroad which were put to use as ‘call letters’ to facilitate family reunification, the article explores narrative strategies and language usage which contributed to presenting migration as a family strategy. Letters conveyed messages of marital duty and family obligations, as well as ideas of migration as a common life project. Married men built epistolary personae clearly anchored in ideas of responsibility, gender roles, and marital duty, and they expected reciprocity from their wives. These ideas were communicated through a language of affect that contained both emotional and material components. These letters also showed the effect migration could exert on customary gender and marital roles, and were used as a vehicle to maintain emotional bonds and to negotiate the impact of distance and time of separation on marital and family relations.
As the last articles illustrate, both economic and emotional matters figured prominently in the letters of many migrants, and they were closely connected with migrants’ self-making through family correspondence. The project of migration was usually associated with perceived opportunities for well-being and security based on economic betterment. It was common for migrants to continue playing a significant economic role for their families in their places of origin, even when projects of temporary migration turned into long-term or permanent resettlement. As the article by Liz Stanley argues, however, the interplay of emotional and material considerations in migrant letter-writing and their connection with identity have not been fully examined in migrant letters scholarship. Stanley brings to the discussion of migrant letters a different type of migrant experience and analytical approach. Part of what Stanley calls the ‘middling sort,’ the Forbes family was active in a number of economic activities in both Scotland and South Africa’s settler society during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. The Forbes’ transnational lives produced voluminous writing in the form of letters and other personal and business documents. Using Michel de Certeau’s concept of ‘scriptural economy’ Stanley analyzes the letter-writing practices of this family within the framework of migrant letters historiography, emphasizing shared characteristics with epistolary practices in general and, at the same time, identifying some distinctive features in the context of migrant correspondence – namely, a preoccupation with ‘exteriority’ and shared economic interests over personal matters or affect, and a focus on the present more than on the past.
Stanley’s study of the Forbes’ case contributes to the general discussion of the characteristics and function of letter-writing among families separated by migration and living in transnational situations by considering other contexts and cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Could some of these differences be attributed to the social dynamics created by settler migration (as opposed to labor migration which characterized most moves from Europe to the Americas)? Looking at the full range of cases included in this Special Issue allows us to consider some commonalities between settler migrants and labor migrants, which open new avenues for exploration of the multiple ways in which economic interests, family obligations, and considerations about the present and the future influenced epistolary narratives and identity-making among migrant letter-writers and their families together with memories of experiences and relations located in the past.
Laura Martínez’s analysis of the letter-writing (and reading) among Spanish migrants from the region of Asturias who settled in the Americas from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s and their families provides a revealing complement to the discussion of migrant epistolarity. Like Stanley in the previous article, Martínez places migrant letters within larger epistolary practices, but the lens here is set on the writing practices of the popular classes, to which the majority of transatlantic labor migrants belonged. Martínez’s analysis considers letter-writing in contexts of migration as an activity that transcended the individual to involve the family in letter production, circulation, and reception. To illustrate this dynamic, the author focuses on examples of delegated and multiple writing, and also on practices of collective reading and circulation beyond the original recipient, common in this corpus of migrant letters. The author identifies these practices through analysis of letter content as well as through traces that ‘writing with other hands’ left on the letters themselves. These practices of collective writing and reading were not necessarily the result of low levels of literacy, but more importantly they were the product of the ‘familiar and cooperative’ nature of migration itself among Asturian migrants.
Finally, the article by Romeo Guzmán examines many of the topics outlined above but it zeroes in on the epistolary exchanges of one family of Mexican migrants in the United States, providing a rare opportunity of analyzing the perspective and voices of multiple individuals on both sides of the migratory experience. In doing so, it captures the multiple uses of letter-writing as family members adapted to living transnational lives amid rapidly changing political and economic circumstances – the Mexican Revolution, the Great Depression and its anti-Mexican backlash in the United States, and World War II. The family also experienced several lengths of absence and separation, including multiple migrations and returns. The correspondence exchanged by the Venegas family between Jalisco and California involved many family members who participated in the process of writing and reception. Letter-writing replicated gender and family roles, and it provided a space to reinforce emotional bonds and nurture processes of identity-making. At the same time, it provided opportunities to discuss common interests and to weigh options for the future. Guzmán conceptualizes correspondence as a vehicle for sustaining a transnational experience and a form of ‘cultural citizenship’ that bridged the places of origin and settlement.
The preceding notes identify some of the key contributions of the articles included in this Special Issue and suggest a number of ways in which they dialogue with each other, contribute to current debates, and indicate emerging questions and perspectives for future inquiry. There are, of course, other possible readings and connections. We invite the readers to explore and discover them.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. References to scholarship about migrant letters in this Introduction are not exhaustive but illustrative of some key works, approaches, and trends. For a recent, comprehensive list of works on migrant letters, see chapter two in Sanfilippo (Citation2015).
2. Noteworthy and promising are also several initiatives and platforms for international collaboration, such as Digitising Experiences of Migration: The development of interconnected letters collection, organized by Emma Moreton and Hilary Nesi, at Coventry University, UK (http://lettersofmigration.blogspot.com), and the Digitizing Immigrant Letters Project at the University of Minnesota (https://www.lib.umn.edu/ihrca/dil).
3. See also the Whites Writing Whiteness project, co-directed by Liz Stanley and Sue Wise (http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk).
4. See also the Digitizing Immigrant Letters Project (https://www.lib.umn.edu/ihrca/dil).
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