Living Together Across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families

In Living Together Across Borders, author Lynnette Arnold tells the stories of extended families living stretched between a rural Salvadoran village and the urban locations in the United States where their migrant relatives live. In this multi-sited ethnography, Arnold examines seemingly mundane conversational practices-such as sending greetings, negotiating remittances, and reminiscing together-that are central to family life across borders. Arnold underscores the consequentiality of these linguistic practices by tracing how they are shaped by and re-shape gendered and generational norms of family care, as well as how they are tied to Salvadoran histories of migration, violence, and poverty, which are powerfully influenced by U.S. economic and foreign policy.

This book demonstrates that these communicative practices bring inequities between the global North and South into family life by continually reproducing distinctions between relatives in El Salvador and those living in the United States. Conversely, she examines seemingly mundane interactions including greetings, remittance negotiations, and reminiscing together. Although these relational moments of cross-border connection are fleeting, their impacts endure, laying the foundation for the ongoing material and economic provisioning necessary to family survival. Through cross-border conversations, families nurture intergenerational relations that sustain the family and convivencia (living-together) over the years despite ongoing separation.

Dr. Lynnette Arnold is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research examines the power of language in contexts of mobility and migration in the Americas.