Abstract
Contemporary international migration produces a great deal of bureaucratic writing activity. This article reports on a study of one bureaucratic literacy practice—correspondence—of 25 international migrants in the United States. Contextual and practice-based analysis of data collected through literacy history interviews shows that (a) by virtue of living transnational lives, migrant writers develop correspondence practices that seem vernacular, but in fact take on the hegemonic qualities of modern bureaucracy, and (b) when composing everyday correspondence, migrant writers, rather than being subject to bureaucracy’s whims, take up bureaucratic roles that allow them to manage their own and others’ economic and geographic mobility. These findings complicate claims that migrant correspondence simply maintains relationships or fosters cultural cohesion. Migrant writers, while often corresponding to keep in touch with family and friends elsewhere, also adopt the practices of bureaucracy, becoming participants in the management of people on the move.
International migration has increased in the last two decades, with numbers rising from 154 million in 1990 to 232 million in 2013. A total of 46 million international migrants currently live in the United States, 1 double the 23 million who did in 1990. 2 Contemporary migration—fast, dense, economically polarized—feeds government and organizational bureaucracies that manage people’s movement. In turn, international migrants are involved in a great deal of bureaucratic communicative activity, producing and being subjected to a broad writing landscape of applications, notes, transcribed interviews, personal messages, and papered files.
As a culture constituted in office-based writing practices, modern bureaucracy is understood to be alienating, impersonal, and disorienting. Bureaucracy as such arises not from specific national or cultural locations, but from social organization determined by a “polity of offices” in which authority is located in procedures and forms, processes and documents (Hariman, 1995, p. 148). Thus, bureaucracy is thought to concentrate capital and material means in the hands of an anonymous and powerful management; via the state it determines national identity and supplies naturalized state thought to which one must assimilate (Bourdieu, 1994; Weber, 1968). In these terms, the literate dimensions of bureaucracy are pressing. As migrants are pushed through maddening and often dangerous immigration processes, they encounter writing according to the whims of a government branch, outpost, or office.
Scholars have shown how migrants are often at the mercy of bureaucratic demands on literacy, focusing on educational institutions (Sarroub, 2005; Warriner, 2007) and the nation-state (Kalmar, 2001; Vieira, 2011). Studies of migrant and immigrant literacies in which bureaucracy plays a role have focused on individual writers acting with agency (Guerra, 1998; Meyers, 2014), on communities acting together (Duffy, 2004; Kalman, 1999), and on bureaucracies acting on or against writers (Blommaert, 2008; Hernandez-Zamora, 2010). Many migrant lives depend on dexterity in these writing roles, but in the increasingly dense bureaucracies of contemporary migration, roles shift: Migrant writers act like bureaucratic agents; already mobile migrants manage the mobility of others yet to move. Such complexity necessitates a reconsideration of the purposes, audiences, and agents of migrants’ writing practices, as well as a reexamination of the influence of bureaucracy on everyday writing.
In pursuit of this reconsideration, this article reports on a study of one bureaucratic writing practice—correspondence—of 25 international migrants in the United States. Following Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) call for literacy studies to consider literacy’s ability to travel beyond the local, and to endure after its writers have left, this study treats correspondence as a durable practice that travels, asking what this practice reveals about the significance and status of everyday migrant literacies. While correspondence has been often studied as an epistolary genre—the letter—this study treats correspondence more capaciously as written material made to be sent, including cards, email, postcards, and letters for purposes beyond the personal. Correspondence practices have endured from writers using ostraca, pieces of broken pottery, as the “scrap-paper of the ancient world” (Bagnell & Cribiore, 2006; Muir, 2009, p. 15), to World War I soldiers writing postcards home (Lyons, 2013), to contemporary Nepali teenagers composing love letters (Ahearn, 2001). Correspondence also travels as material made to be on the move: Since writers squeezed script on messengers’ shoe soles or across leather wound around travelers’ staffs, letters, notes, and messages have slipped across borders and among many hands (Muir, 2009).
Scholars have long framed correspondence as a byproduct of bureaucracy, associating the expansion of letter writing with the expansion of nation-states, empires, or opening economies: Increasing prosperity in Song dynasty China created bureaucratic demand for educated letter writers (Kirkpatrick & Xu, 2012); new illiterate monarchs in an expanding Roman Empire demanded a ready supply of Romans educated in ars dictaminis (Perelman, 1991); the growth of a bureaucratic state in 18th-century France converted personal correspondence into business communication (Chartier, 1997). In these correspondence contexts, writers take on roles of management or the managed, while they manipulate or navigate managerial systems. However, even in associating correspondence with bureaucracy, scholars overlook the significance of its mobile and durable qualities, instead arguing that its main function is to foster cultural identity or to maintain diasporic communities (Decker, 1998; DeHaan, 2001; Gerber, 2006; Hall, Robinson, & Crawford, 2000; Martin-Jones & Bhatt, 1998). Such oversight may miss the bureaucratic dimensions of migrant correspondence that have long been an undercurrent in the literature and are an inescapable component of the migrant writing practices explored below.
Based on analysis of literacy history interview data, I argue that migrant writers, while sending correspondence to keep in touch with family and friends elsewhere, also adopt bureaucratic literacy practices. In the sections below, I first describe my data collection and analysis; then, I report on five participants’ correspondence practices. I show how analysis of these results produces a two-part finding: (a) By virtue of living transnational lives, migrant writers develop correspondence practices that seem vernacular, but in fact take on the hegemonic qualities of modern bureaucracy, and (b) when composing everyday correspondence—NGO thank-you letters, letters to fathers working abroad, visa application letters, pen pal notes—migrant writers, rather than being subject to bureaucracy’s whims, take up bureaucratic roles that allow them to manage their own and others’ mobility.
Method
In this article, I present data from an institutional review board approved study of 25 multilingual migrants’ literacy practices designed to understand how literacy travels—how it moves with writers who themselves move around the world and among languages as a matter of their everyday writing experiences. The study asks how writing is practiced by multilingual migrants in the United States and in their home countries, and how migratory movement among those sites affects or alters migrants’ literacy practices. The larger study grants literacy’s ability to travel with people on the move (Lorimer Leonard, 2013; Richardson Bruna, 2007; Rounsaville, 2014), but asks how that travel affects literacy practices themselves. This article focuses on a subset of the larger study’s data, exploring what one commonly described literacy practice, correspondence, reveals about migrant literacies.
A central tension in researching migrant literacies is the need to fix, or pin down, a mobile phenomenon in order to study it. Researchers in literacy and language studies continue to grapple with this tension, redefining analytic tools and frames such as context, scale, practice, and event (Blommaert, 2010; Collins, Slembrouck, & Baynham, 2009; Kell, 2006; Lillis, 2008). The tension of fixity/fluidity is particularly marked in new literacy studies, which has relied on the notion of socially situated practices to move from notions of autonomous to ideological literacies (Street, 1995). A seeming imperative to investigate the local community or situation from which literacy practices spring can confound observations of literacies that move in, out, and among situations. In this way, overattention to the local can miss global ideological pressures, an impasse variously identified as local/distant (Brandt & Clinton, 2002), universalist/particularist (Collins & Blot, 2003), or vernacular/hegemonic (Kell, 2011).
Scholars have suggested several approaches to move beyond these impasses: focusing on the ideological relationship between the local and the global rather than on one site or the other (Street, 2003), or Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) calls noted above. Kell (2006) has proposed tracing trajectories of meaning-making or undertaking transcontextual analysis of meanings projected across contexts. However, horizontal/context, vertical/scale, and even chronological methods still require a kind of fixing: To trace a unit of analysis across contexts or scales can continue to reify the boundaries of both the unit traveling and the unit being crossed. Therefore this study traces one practice in an attempt to account for vernacular practices that act like hegemonic ones or pressures that are simultaneously local and distant. Such a complex accounting aims to collapse the local/global impasse that new literacy scholars continue to cite.
Data Collection
Participants in the larger study were recruited for interviews using a snowball sampling method that originated with one pilot participant from a community writing center. Multilingualism was the primary criterion that drove sampling, creating a participant pool that was all multilingual and primarily professional (see Table 1). Snowball sampling was carried out with a question at the end of every interview: “Can you think of other friends or acquaintances who also might be reading and writing among multiple languages?” That participants almost always referred me to their colleagues who also happened to be migrants was an unexpected pattern. However, participants varied widely in class, educational, national, and linguistic background. For example, the nurses referred me to other nurses, but this group of seven nurses represented lower- to middle-class family backgrounds, high school to graduate degrees, six countries of origin, and 10 languages. Studying a group of writers who share the daily activities of multilingual writing rather than studying a bounded culture or community helped focus collection of the phenomenon under study—multilingual literacy practices that moved with their writers.
Participants’ Correspondence.
Over the course of two years, I conducted one semistructured literacy history interview (Brandt, 2001; Duffy, 2007) with each participant and one follow-up interview with eight focal participants 14 to 16 months after initial interviews. Interviews lasted from 40 to 90 minutes and were designed to foreground an emic perspective on migrant writing, drawing out participants’ own insights about their movement. As a data collection method, qualitative interviews mitigate the constraints inherent in researching a phenomenon that moves over time and space, and prove productive for accessing events or practices from writers’ pasts (Merriam, 2002). Because participants could not be observed as they migrated, nor asked questions along the way, the research aimed to elicit recollections and interpretations of past literacy experiences in relation to current ones (Fontana & Frey, 2005).
A semistructured interview protocol was organized into three categories—home, school, and community literacy memories; current literacy practices in English and other languages; and opinions about multilingual communication—with questions aiming to draw out the shape and specificity of everyday writing taking place over the span of a lifetime and across dispersed geographic locations. All participants expressed a desire to conduct the interviews in English, either because they felt fluent enough or because they agreed to be interviewed precisely to practice their English. Therefore, interviews were conducted in English, with occasional code-switching into Spanish from participants who knew I would understand.
In addition to literacy history interviews, I collected other data to support a rich understanding of the participants’ writing lives. I wrote research memos and observation reflections throughout data collection and analysis, and engaged in informal email correspondence with several focal participants. Four focal participants offered me school essays, journal excerpts, and textbooks as textual insight into their writing practices. 3 While these data inform responses to my research questions, analysis in this study focuses on initial and follow-up interview transcripts in which participants discussed the most relevant data to a study of correspondence.
Data Analysis
Data analysis was carried out in four rounds of coding, which I summarize here and elaborate below. Rounds were guided by heuristic analyses from grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998): initial open coding in the larger study, axial coding of practice and then contextualization codes, and finally, focused coding of contextualization codes. Two theoretical frames guided my coding and helped me respond to my research questions. In the second round of coding I used new literacy studies’ understanding of literacy practices to divide correspondence practices into constituent parts, as explained below (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 2000; Scollon, 2001; Street, 1995; Tusting, Ivanic, & Wilson, 2000). In the third round of coding, I used an ecological understanding of the rhetorical situation (Cooper, 1986; Edbauer, 2005) to code contextual elements that shift as correspondence travels. Together, these theories of practice and ecology provided a theoretical framework that helped move analysis beyond static local/global comparisons.
Initial open coding of literacy history interview transcripts yielded 44 literacy practices coded as gerunds from “application writing” to “work reporting” (Charmaz, 2006), with correspondence codes (email writing and letter writing) appearing in all but two participants’ interviews (see Table 1). In fact, correspondence was often mentioned first or as the only writing a participant was doing. Its prevalence led me to ask what this practice was doing there, in both active and material senses (Scribner, 1984), spurring a focused study of migrant correspondence. I carried out a round of axial coding on all correspondence codes, treating each described practice as action mediated by the interconnected values, resources, and materials surrounding and including a text, repeated over time for the sake of routine or tradition. Table 2 shows an example of coding from this round in which I expanded initial correspondence codes into constituent parts of a practice: values, materials, resources, and routines.
Axial Coding Example, Tashi.
Note: Participant interview excerpt. Coded excerpts are in bold, with codes in brackets.
Although Kell’s (2011) important critique of practice as a unit of analysis concludes that the concept’s application lacks precision as it is applied to describe observable detail and to generalize patterns of emic observations to the ideological etic (p. 611), this study uses practice to maintain the tension between emic descriptions and etic ideological inference. A study of correspondence particularly benefits from this tension while connecting repeated individual activity to emergent social structure (Baynham & Prinsloo, 2009; Bourdieu, 1977; Pennycook, 2010). Thus, I use practice as a description of what participants are doing with correspondence (emic), and use participants’ perspectives on those activities together with my own small theories of the activities (etic) in order to refine a theory of the significance and status of migrant correspondence (Lillis, 2013).
Differentiating practice codes also helped distinguish one practice from another—letter writing is not essay writing because it involves different values and requires different materials and resources—and helped add complexity to each practice through comparison across its constituent parts. The comparison of routine to values, for example, pointed especially to this study’s motivating question: what correspondence was doing there, as an activity and an object existing in a situation. Comparing the values and routine shown in Table 3 led me to see that Houa’s letter had contextual purposes beyond those that were stated: While one purpose of Houa’s letter was to help keep her family together, another was also to document for an unknown bureaucratic audience a romantic relationship that already existed.
Axial Coding Example, Houa.
Note: Participant interview excerpt. Coded excerpts are in bold, with codes in brackets.
Therefore, I took up another round of axial coding to better understand the proliferating contextual elements of the coded practices. A traditional notion of analyzing context as a boundary around an event could not account for many participants’ correspondence practices, nor illuminate their always-shifting contextual elements. To a certain extent, Gumperz’s (1982) notion of contextualization, a dynamic activity emerging in each social interaction, loosens a static notion of context. But ecology models (Cooper, 1986; Edbauer, 2005) supply more relevant terminology for coding contextual elements of correspondence. Although I needed to identify discrete contextual elements in order to code (sender, receiver, purpose, exigence, constraint), an ecology framework helped me analyze codes as interactive and fluid. This framework is informed both by Cooper’s (1986) ecology of writing as dynamic systems of purposes, cultural norms, and textual forms (p. 368), as well as by Edbauer’s (2005) rhetorical ecology, which moves analysis beyond a focus on individual writers, texts, or acts to a distributed range of emergent and interactive dimensions (p. 13). Thus, an ecological understanding of context moves away from singular, bounded groupings of contextual elements and toward plural, interacting elements. In other words, rather than code a unit of analysis across bounded contexts, I coded shifting roles within one literacy practice that was inextricably and simultaneously local and global.
To understand the nature of these shifting contextual roles and practices, I carried out a final round of focused coding in which I sought to name and understand these shifts. This final round produced proliferations of contextual codes, what I came to think of as codes piling up: For example, one correspondence account might yield multiple sender codes, as well as multiple receivers and purposes, the vertical demonstration of which is shown in Tables 4 through 8. This accumulation of codes revealed fluctuating and expanding bureaucratic roles that had previously remained hidden under the guise of vernacular writing. These shifting roles, when analyzed in relation to correspondence practices, pointed toward the ways migrant writers were managing their own and others’ geographic, economic, and affective mobility.
Dad Letter Writing.
Note: Participant interview excerpt. Coded excerpts in bold, with codes in brackets.
Marriage Letter Writing.
Note: Participant interview excerpt. Coded excerpts in bold, with codes in brackets.
Visa Letter.
Note: Participant interview excerpt. Coded excerpts in bold, with codes in brackets.
Sponsor Letter.
Note: Participant interview excerpt. Coded excerpts in bold, with codes in brackets.
Pen Pal Letter.
Note: Participant interview excerpt. Coded excerpts in bold, with codes in brackets.
Findings: Managed Mobility
Data analysis suggests a two-part finding: (a) in response to the bureaucratic demands that shape migrant life, migrant writers develop everyday correspondence practices that take on the hegemonic qualities of modern bureaucracy; (b) through these practices, migrant writers participate in managing the mobility of themselves or others, with some writers developing practiced bureaucratic capacities later on in life. Below I support these findings with figures and narration of participants’ described experiences. The five examples below show the thickest context codes, those that piled up the most in focused coding. These participant accounts are not meant to represent all migrant writers or even the 25 writers in the study. Rather, they are rich examples that speak most clearly to my research questions and support the study’s findings. Ultimately, these findings complicate claims that migrant correspondence simply maintains relationships or fosters cultural cohesion. As migrants write, they develop practices that bare the traces of contemporary writing conditions. The correspondence accounts below describe the lived experience of these conditions.
From Connecting to Managing
Participants’ accounts do show that migrants write letters and emails to keep in touch, maintain relationships across distance, or foster cultural or community ties. For example, several participants described correspondence as a way they connected with their working and traveling fathers during their childhoods. But these accounts reveal the proliferating purposes of correspondence beyond the maintenance of relationships: Harriet, a Chinese nursing student, described her father writing to her only in Mandarin, even though they were bilingual in English, so she would learn the characters. Raani, a teacher from Pakistan, recalled that her father would send her model essays in his letters that he would expect her to imitate and return to him. So in addition to connecting with daughters from afar, fathers also maintained involvement in their daughters’ literacy learning, a form of educational management in absentia.
For example, Sabohi would “write all the time” to her dad who “would be always on the official tours” for work. She described a correspondence event that has become treasured lore in her family:
Sabohi wrote letters intending to ask for gifts from her traveling father, but received much more. Scholars maintain that the high frequency of letters copied from manuals show textual gestures of goodwill toward absent family members or friends far away (Hall et al., 2000). But Sabohi was not only maintaining a relationship with her father as he moved around for work, but also learning how to use models to write, tapping into the poetic history of a language, learning conventions for correspondence in Urdu, and understanding that writing in Pakistan is “a very formal thing” and “a big deal.” Because Sabohi’s father was called away to work, Sabohi was called to write letters, her learning regulated and funded in part by her father’s employer. Sabohi’s literacy learning shows proliferating purposes and multiple senders and receivers, with a writer composing as herself but also in the name of someone no one knows. In this way, accounting for thick and shifting contextual elements adds the institutional, often bureaucratic, dimension that would be missed in an accounting of correspondence that stops with cultural connections. The following sections offer three examples of how correspondence practices position migrants in bureaucratic roles as they manage the geographic, economic, and affective mobility of themselves or others.
Managing Geographic Mobility
Several participants sent correspondence around the world to satisfy the needs of nation-states and to move themselves and others through the bureaucracy of borders. For example, Houa, a Hmong nursing student in her twenties, helped manage a family member’s geographic mobility to the United States by engaging in correspondence practices. Although she rarely communicated with relatives in Laos because of what she called a frustrating lack of Hmong vocabulary, she did participate in correspondence in Hmong for her aunt and uncle.
The contextual elements of this letter-writing scene are complex. In order to bring his future wife over from Laos to get married in the United States, her uncle composed a letter as proof of an already-existing relationship. Houa was a literacy broker for her uncle, translating a letter from English to Hmong, even though she didn’t consider herself to be fluent in Hmong. In this way, the letter was composed by two senders pooling their language and literacy resources, and sent to two receivers: a nonwriter whose immigration possibilities depended on the letter and a receiving immigration office looking to paper its files.
Letter writing by literacy brokers has been said to show how whole communities, rather than individual members, engage in letter reading and writing together, distributing literacy resources and maintaining cultural norms (Besnier, 1995; Kalman, 1999; Mihut, 2014). But this letter writing account reveals more than the distribution of literacy resources across or within a community. Houa’s translation (although she uses “wrote” to describe its production) was not written entirely for the purpose of maintaining Hmong culture in the United States. When asked if she saw a reply to the letter, Houa said, “maybe she wrote back but I’ve never read it.” Nor did Houa’s uncle and aunt normally correspond with letters: “They talked but it isn’t like, they just didn’t really communicate with writing.” Houa’s translated letter was a written piece of correspondence that did not expect a reply—they just “had to have something there.” It was written as “proof” that her uncle intended to marry a woman in Laos who was trying to immigrate to the United States. This letter, written in Hmong, served simply as a textual object for the English-dominant U.S. immigration services. One might conjecture that its appearance in Hmong, rather than English, made it more authentic, and thus more credible, to U.S. bureaucrats even though the writer(s) were not fluent in Hmong and neither, most likely, were the bureaucratic readers.
Houa’s uncle, through the literacy brokerage of his niece, did not want a letter written for reasons cited in the literature above—to create or maintain a relationship with his future wife living in another country, nor to convey any emotional or informative output her way. In fact, he didn’t really want or need to hear back from her at all; he just needed to send it. The act of sending the letter away, putting it in motion toward another country, was enough to create a textual object that convinced immigration officials of the relationship’s authenticity. This symbolic text, simply “part of the paperwork,” was the green light to “get that whole process going” and successfully manage the geographic mobility of a family member. Said Houa, “It worked out, yeah. She’s been here for about five years now.”
Similarly, Alandra, a Brazilian high school bilingual resource teacher, created correspondence for the sake of her family’s geographic mobility. While helping her father complete his application for a travel visa to the United States from Brazil, she wrote a personal letter to the consulate explaining why he needed to visit.
Alandra “didn’t necessarily expect” an answer from the consulate. Instead she wrote to present documentary proof of her own ethos as a U.S.-based immigrant with a family who knew how to navigate its bureaucratic systems. She chose the written letter as a most convincing display of this knowledge. Alandra set out to create “a connection” through the letter, although one that is much less about establishing a relationship—she didn’t write to receive a reply—and more about presenting a savvy bureaucratic self to smooth the path of her father’s mobility.
The written bureaucratic practices of immigration processes are notoriously mind-numbing, and both Houa and Alandra are subject to these. But with differing amounts of awareness—Alandra’s activity was intentional while Houa was fulfilling a family request—they wrote through bureaucracy; bureaucracy did not write them in or out of the process. The success of their correspondence was measured not by the content of the letters or its response from readers, which neither Houa nor Alandra seemed to care much about, but rather by the texts’ ability to make family members mobile.
Managing Economic Mobility
In her memories of childhood schooling, correspondence practices are bound up in the circulation of money and especially the economics of global giving. Tashi attended her boarding school in northern India from third to tenth grade. Having essentially been raised in this school, she was immersed in its routine, being able to detail with great specificity the school’s budgetary operations. She said, 40% of the finance comes from the international SOS. . . . I think it’s um, international red cross. And then basically it’s run on sponsors’ scholarships. Like almost every children there have sponsor from, majority from Europe and some from America, and every building is built from sponsor’s money.
When asked how she could have known so much about how the school was run as a young student, she explained that “all the teachers, they keep telling us, this much amount comes from that, this much amount from this,” and said teachers would reiterate this financial context at annual school gatherings:
They would just declare to us, you know, like “if you don’t study hard it’s not good for you because such people over there abroad they’re working so hard to make you study, putting in money. Look, all the sponsors are not rich sponsors. Whoever is sponsoring you they are usually commoners and poor people. How did they make adjustment? They don’t go out on the weekend, then money they save and they send it. And sometimes they don’t have three times meals and they will go for two meals and then save one meal’s money and send it. So you guys should really work hard. You should not kind of waste these money.” And you know. We believe in karma and they will say “in your next generation you will not be happy by taking money from someone and wasting it.”
In this context of responsibility, guilt, and motivation, Tashi and her fellow classmates carried out correspondence with the individuals who sponsored 60% of their education. The quote above shows that these students would have been writing with a very specific sense of audience: They were writing to people far away, “over there abroad,” not necessarily well-off, who were making sacrifices to support them. Whether or not it is believable that these sponsors were “commoners and poor people” who would skip a meal in order to donate to an NGO, this was the audience constructed for these young student writers. The school created a specific connection for these students between their individual educations and a larger international web of money and charitable organizations.
Tashi began writing letters to her sponsors in Norway when she was in fourth grade. She explained that at first she “would just draw hands, birds, or whatever” but eventually, Tashi explained, “I was writing ‘How are you? I am fine. Thank you for the gift. I miss you.’” This would happen three to four times a year.
Tashi said she would get called into the school office to respond to a letter that had arrived from her sponsors, sometimes accompanied with cards and gifts. She described a writing scene in which she would read the letter with the office secretary nearby, who would then ask if Tashi understood and if not explain it to her. The sponsors wrote in English, as did Tashi in her response. This correspondence practice, carried out in English, perhaps not the dominant language of senders or receivers but likely a lingua franca they shared, created a transnational relationship that wasn’t necessarily about cultural maintenance or the development of an interpersonal connection. One could charitably analyze Tashi’s correspondence with her sponsors as creating exposure to new cultures or building appreciation of her funded education. A more critical reading might conclude that the letters were not an authentic communicative exchange at all, but were instead the creation of a material object symbolizing connection, a receipt of sorts, to justify a global flow of money. In other words, the correspondence followed the flow of money, not the other way around.
This latter reading is particularly compelling in light of the content of the letters described by Tashi above: “How are you? I am fine. Thank you for the gift. I miss you.” Tashi explained that sponsors would occasionally visit the school and take students shopping, although her sponsors never did. In other words, Tashi knew about her sponsors’ lives, but never met them in person: “After that I kind of like lost contact with them. They no longer called me for writing.” Given the fact that Tashi had not met her sponsors in person and that her relationship with them was eventually broken off because they had their own children, one wonders at the use of “I miss you” in her letters. Perhaps this phrase was simply a convention, or perhaps it was suggested to Tashi by the hovering school secretary, but it rings slightly false in the context of a physical connection that was never formed. Either way, instead of an authentic communicative exchange, the letters seem to be, for Tashi, simply part of a very structured boarding school routine. She was called for writing, so she wrote. For the sponsors, the letters might serve as an object of affirmation, material proof that their money benefited a human being far away. But they did not know each other—Tashi and the other students were not allowed to have the addresses of their sponsors because, as Tashi said, students might continue to write their sponsors and ask for more, which Tashi called a “minor privacy issue.”
Luckily for Tashi, the school found ways to continue to fund students whose sponsors had disappeared, so she wasn’t made to leave the school. She explains that the school puts sponsor money “in the pool and circulates it.” The school, in fact, takes “that pool money and invests it and takes the interest and runs the school.” Importantly, this addendum to Tashi’s explanation of the correspondence relationship shows that the sponsorship model was not a one-to-one exchange of money for letters. The donors’ money was funding everyone; the letters were an exercise in personalizing those donations for sponsors. Just as the Nukulaelae workers in Besnier’s (1995) study wrote letters to “monitor, record, stimulate, and control economic transactions associated with the exchange of gifts,” so did Tashi’s letter writing become less personal and more economically symbolic, laden with the influence of modern bureaucratic practices (p. 93). Tashi wrote to her Norwegian sponsors letters that serve more as receipts of an international donation than communication that expects a reply. She takes up these practices as she writes to an audience she does not know, managing her own economic mobility and, to a certain extent, that of the school as well.
Managing Affective Mobility
Haneen, a Palestinian who immigrated to the United States from Jordan, experienced multifaceted mobilities in her early correspondence practices. Her physical mobility was managed by others—by her family, by warring nations and their bureaucratic functionaries at the border—but her affective mobility, her ability to be emotionally moved, was under her own management. This kind of mobility is clearly distinct from those above in that it is a product of or reaction to limited geographic and economic mobility. Haneen did not necessarily manage the mobility of others, but she did manage this particular kind of mobility for herself when her other mobilities were constrained.
Haneen sent letters across borders as a small act of literate resistance in a politically fraught region, sending out of the country what she couldn’t write within it. With much emotion, Haneen described the context that regulated her early writing practices: We lived in an area which had a lot of actions, as we say. They were always near. If you’re familiar with people moving from Palestine, this was a kind of life I was raised in. I was raised in a wealthy family, but we still were in this society that’s closed. That has a lot of demonstrations. Lot of shooting and guns; lot of stuff happening at the school.
Haneen explained that this level of violence together with the tight control of movement managed her daily life—who could leave the house or neighborhood when and for what purposes—as well as her literate practices. When asked to describe any writing practices at school or at home, Haneen couldn’t think of any. She remembered only reading and oral activities: reading children’s books in a public library or discussing certain topics at school. These were topics about being “raised in an area with big dispute and struggles,” with acceptable discussion points such as “girls and boys being equal.” In further explanation, Haneen described instead topics that were not allowed in discussion or writing: “freedom” and “democracy.” She says such ideas were “more controversial” and “there were a lot of topics that we were not allowed to talk about, politics.” She sighed audibly when she explained, My parents would always say don’t talk about occupation or anything in your writing even at school because this might bring something. It’s not safe. It’s a little bit complicated, a little bit complicated. Like I remember when my brother was almost shot in front of me and I really wanted to write about this. Even though I never wrote it, but like I really wanted to write this and say it to the world.
In this political context, writing was deemed dangerous. Haneen had limited literate options when she wanted to “say it to the world,” to write about politics or violence to an audience that was anything but local. Haneen was taught that writing would “bring something” troubling, although she didn’t speculate whether this was because of writing’s permanent quality or its ability to circulate. Either way, the gravity of written language was not lost on her: “it’s just the whole society living in fear that soldiers will come and harm your family for a word.”
When asked to consider any kind of writing activity around her neighborhood or at school, Haneen recalled protest signs, but she could not remember any writing of her own. In the course of her interview, she sat for long spells of silence, seemingly racking her brain for memories of writing. But 40 minutes into the interview, quite suddenly and in the middle of an explanation of her children’s current schooling, she said, “Oh you know! I had penpals, oh yeah! I had like, when I was in 7th and 8th grade, I had around like 17 pen friends.”
Correspondence with 17 reader/writers in multiple countries around the world suggests that Haneen was engaged very actively in letter writing throughout her 7th and 8th grade years—the last two years before her family left Palestine. Haneen’s sudden recollection of her participation in broad international correspondence could seem straightforward: a teen writing for novelty, writing to learn about music, movies, and families in foreign places. However, given the context in which Haneen was writing and the forces against which she wrote, she seems to have engaged in a distinct correspondence practice for distinct purposes of mobility.
When asked if she felt she could write whatever she wanted in her letters, she said, “Yes, yes,” but if she could write similar things at school, she said, “No, no. No, no, you don’t.” This juxtaposition suggests that her letters addressed topics that would have brought her trouble at school. She said she wasn’t “scared of the letters” even though their content described political topics forbidden in school and at home. Haneen created a distinction between writing which caused fear—anything political inside a border—and that which did not—political letters composed to be sent outside. In fact, as she says she was unsure whether she received all her letters or whether they reached their destination, writing the letters seems more important than whether or not they were responded to. Although her ambivalence toward government censors is surprising, Haneen was almost dismissive of the potential of letters not making it, knowing the bureaucratic “authorities” regulated everything moving across a border. Haneen explained that whether letters made it to their destinations or back to her was out of her control and rather beside the point. Perhaps this is because Haneen wrote letters simply to send them, to make mobile the affective output that could not be expressed locally.
In her analysis of letter-writing relationships between prisoners and their pen pals, Maybin (2000) found that incarcerated pen pals “managed” their relationships through correspondence, opening up channels to the outside world through letter writing. Haneen’s “channel” presented itself when it arrived in her mailbox: “There was some INS, INSY? It’s a group of pen pals. I’m not sure if it’s still running. INSApal? They used to send you brochure with addresses and pictures.” As Haneen’s physical mobility was managed locally, a definitively not-local organization offered a channel through which Haneen could manage her affective mobility. Although Haneen ostensibly wrote pen pals to learn about the world through cultural exchange, she also created correspondence that provided an emotive exit, sending letters to multiple receivers on and across a border, away from a local audience that demanded she be silent.
Discussion
The experiences of the migrant writers above show the bureaucratic qualities of their practices. In their accounts they do write to maintain a cultural community or develop relationships but also to accomplish bureaucratic tasks: Houa re-creates a romantic relationship via letter to satisfy the requests of both her family and a government office; Tashi writes thank-you letters not only to exchange cultural information between Norway and India but to follow appropriate NGO giving protocol. These writers managed mobility—Angela includes a letter in her father’s visa application although none was requested; Houa brokers Hmong-English biliteracy through an immigration system—and are managed by others granting or withholding their mobility: Haneen’s mobility is withheld by the very real danger of mobilizing oneself or others for political protest.
Thus, when Tashi, Haneen, Houa, Sabohi, and Angela compose correspondence, they inhabit multiple roles at once within a transnational bureaucracy. The findings above show that the roles of bureaucratic management, the powerful positions that deem documents and procedures more or less successful, are not fixed. This is significant not only to the extent that vernacular practices become hegemonic, but also to the extent that management might be considered a vernacular function of writing. Perhaps writing in modern bureaucracies is less about “the concentration of the material means of management in the hands of the master” and more about the mutual constitution of means among writers complicit in this process (Weber, 1968, p. 980). The migrant writing accounts above show that modern bureaucracy has become routine enough that writers subject to its whims also quietly take up its methods. But importantly, while the accounts show that bureaucracy does not dominate migrants’ writing practices, migrants do not always write with complete or certain agency. Instead writers take a pragmatic stance, adopting the bureaucratic practices that serve them best. Indeed, for the specific group of writers in this study, ambivalence is a more accurate reaction to the power of governments and organizations to manage their writing, perhaps because they have taken on managerial roles themselves. So in contrast to migrants who, for example, write around bureaucratic post offices by sending letters through a network of neighbors (Kell, 2006), the migrants above write through bureaucracy, sending correspondence straight into the immigration, NGO, or border office.
In some cases, bureaucratic correspondence practices appear in participants’ experiences later on in life. This echo of practice suggests that migrant writers may develop correspondence-specific “navigational capacities” from these bureaucratic adaptations (Stein & Slominsky, 2006, p. 143). This preliminary implication of the findings above shows the potential for migrant writers to leverage existing practices to get what they need with writing. A handful of participants hint at their development of such navigational capacities: Haneen refers to the political affordances of pen-pal expression when describing the Facebook communities she used to stay engaged with the Arab Spring from the United States. Tashi uses early correspondence practices to later apply for university funding and for resident status in the United States, realizing in the process that demands to write or rewrite her requests in letters shows why, as Tashi says, “writing matters.”
This is not to overstate the influence of early correspondence on writers’ later practices; surely other practices supported the navigational capacities developed throughout their lives and no direct line can be drawn from one practice to another. Rather, correspondence plays a role in this later repertoire and, specifically, a role pertaining to government and institutional organizations, a bureaucratic affiliation that migrant writers may remember later in life when navigating the bureaucracies ever present in their transnational lives.
Furthermore, to claim that bureaucratic writing offers occasion to develop navigational capacities is not only to grant agency to the migrant writers in this study, but also to note that navigational capacity is not always the province of the privileged. Following Appadurai, Stein and Slominsky (2006) claim that “the better off are more ‘supple’ at navigational capacities through constant practice and concrete experiences” while the poor “have fewer opportunities for practice” (p. 145). The accounts above show this to not always be the case as participants from less privileged backgrounds—Tashi, Houa, and Alandra—encounter as many opportunities for bureaucratic practice as those from more privileged families—Sabohi and Haneen. In fact, each of these migrant writers experiences different kinds of opportunities for practice, ones that involve both forced and chosen navigation of bureaucratic structures.
Conclusion
In this article, I have illustrated how migrant writers enact bureaucratic roles as participants in managed mobility. I have argued that these bureaucratic functions are not always inevitable adoptions of state-organized thinking, but also sometimes practiced responses to bureaucratic procedures. This argument illuminates the dual powerful forces—of writers and organizational entities—that move writing around the world. The bureaucracy of modern migration certainly has a fixing effect on migrants’ abilities to leverage their literacy practices to make change in their lives, but it also lays down a path, however obscured, that some migrants can follow.
I also hope to have contributed to the conversation on a contextual impasse in literacy studies, the worry that a focus on the local can miss literacy that moves among situations and scales, by showing how contextual elements emerge through and shift in one migrant literacy practice. Analysis of correspondence practices shows that literacy doesn’t need to be situated in geographic place to reveal the ideological interplay of the local and global.
In this study, I set out to understand what correspondence reveals about the significance and status of everyday migrant literacies. Correspondence, as a practice made to move across multiple hands, through a polity of offices, over real or imagined borders, illuminates the proliferating roles of individual writing agents and anonymous writing managers. Thus, correspondence proves to be an epitomic example of the relay nature of literacy. Furthermore, the accounts above show that the meaning of correspondence does not always reside in a personal reply but often elsewhere—in funds donated, visa granted, and politics exported. In this case, correspondence becomes meaningful not when a reader opens an envelope, but simply when it is sent. Likewise for migrant literacy, meaning often is made in its movement.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the participants of the UMass Amherst Summer Symposium on Transnational Literacies for early feedback on drafts of this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.