Abstract
Migrant Longing is an intimate study of Chávez-García’s personal family archive of over 300 letters written and exchanged by her parents, as well as the many family members and friends whose names appear on the letters between the 1960s and early 1970s, across the US-Mexico borderlands. The pieces of correspondence depict how migrants (and those who did not move) negotiated gender, culture, society, law, polity, and the economy under extreme conditions of isolation, separation, and loneliness. The text works to answer five broad questions around international migration: what do the letters reveal about migrants’ dreams, desires, and challenges? How do the letters reveal mechanisms and cultural resources adapted by migrants when confronted by a host of gender, racial, ethnic, class, and cultural constraints in the new environment? How are gender, intimacy, marriage, and identity affected in a cross-border context? How did migration in the 1950s and 1960s shape transnational relations and social cultural networks across the border? Finally, how did Mexico’s plan for industrialization and modernization give rise to urbanization on a massive scale, and to migration on a smaller one to the United States, during the World War II and postwar era? Chávez-García argues that the correspondence demonstrates migrants’ desire not only to improve their personal, family, and economic lives but also to cultivate and nurture cross-border intimate, emotional, and household relations that could sustain them in their new environment.
The letters, written mainly in Spanish with some English words, have been reorganized, transcribed, and translated to dialectically contextualize their complex meaning and relationship to other primary sources used in the study, which include interviews, oral histories, photographs, music, radio programming, film, memorabilia, newspapers, magazines, censuses, and government reports. This amalgamation of sources creates a comprehensive historical framework –– what Chávez-García describes as the “toggle” between the micro (family archives) and macro (national and transnational trends).
Chapter one assesses the personal, emotional, and creative world of José Chávez Esparza (Chávez-García’s father) –– a single male migrant farmworker living in the Imperial Valley during the 1950s and 1960s. His living and working conditions in el valle are portrayed as the source for his loneliness, isolation, and ambivalence as a “border dweller,” despite his status as a green-card holder and his ability to engage in return migration (37). Deterring his state of destitute, through letters, José reinvents his reality and gendered identity as a poor, rural, and solitary migrant male laborer to one of a sensitive, sophisticated, and urbane man to romance María Concepción “Conchita” Alvarado –– an 18-year-old woman that José met following a brief visit to Mexico for the holidays. Utilizing eighty letter exchanges between José and Conchita from 1963 to 1971, the chapter explores José’s living and working conditions, the rituals of courtship as expressed in the letters, and how Conchita –– a young woman with hopes and plans of her own that did not include marriage –– would eventually marry José and relocate with him to the agricultural valley.
Chapter two contextualizes Conchita by referencing her complicated family dynamics in the Zacatecas-Aguascalientes Bajio region in the 1940s and 1950s. It works to explain how Conchita, a vibrant free-spirited young woman, eventually went through with the wedding even though she had little romantic interest in José, let alone in settling down and forming a family with him. Chávez-García factors in the death of Conchita’s father and her family’s economic troubles to argue that she found José’s proposal for marriage and migration to the US-Mexico border region increasingly inviting as it allowed her to alleviate her household’s economic burdens. Nevertheless, her emotional and romantic love for José remained uncertain.
Chapter three examines migration’s personal, emotional, and economic toll on family members who stayed home and how changing circumstances in their family and community in Mexico and the United States affected their social roles and identities. For this assessment, Chávez-García uses 50 letters written between José Chávez Torres to his son, Paco Chávez, who lived and worked in the US-Mexico borderland, as well as another 50 penned among Paco and his mother, sister, and older brothers. Chávez-García argues that the distance between family members, stretched across the US-Mexico border, undermined José’s patriarchal authority over them. It was only when Paco discovered that his father was ill that he provided the filial, moral, and economic support José had demanded for years earlier.
Chapter four examines emotional longing and the disintegration of courtship over time. The subject is historically linked to systems of personal communication available in Mexico and the United States in the early to the mid-twentieth century, including the postal service, telephone, and telegraph. Chávez-García probes these communication connections to underscore the on-again, off-again relationship between Paco (José’s younger brother) and Chifis or Chonita (Conchita’s older sister). Their relationship illustrates how delayed correspondences led to suspicions of fidelity between both parties, which resulted in their use of mutual acquaintances to carry out surveillance on each other’s social relations in and outside their town.
Chapter five traces the experiences of Paco’s friend Rogelio Martínez Serna – and that of his male peers – across the US-Mexico borderlands. Chávez-García argues that these men crossed into the United States not only to deter impoverishment and hardship but, more importantly, to achieve an economically, personally, and emotionally stable family life. This final chapter opposes Chávez-García’s initial assessment that these letters simply provided a window into broader social, political, and economic circumstances beyond their control in shaping their choices. Instead, Chávez-García illustrates how Rogelio and his male acquaintances were neither victims nor passive agents in the process of gaining employment and other opportunities. Their use of humor, creativity, and resilience afforded them opportunities to cope with larger structural systems that they otherwise could not dictate. Moreover, Chávez-García notes that their oppression toward women, women’s bodies, gender, and female sexuality illustrates another dimension of agency that these men possessed when negotiating their lives in the United States.
This study is important because, as Chávez-García notes, few histories on twentieth-century Mexico have examined migrants’ firsthand personal experiences in the United States. More than that, however, it creates new dominions of archival sources. The book demonstrates how new generations of historians, with access to personal family archives, can shed light on matters that dominant and traditional archival sources simply lack. Finally, Chávez-García’s work provides a rudimentary outline for curating family archives within a larger historical framework.