Writing for Love and Money: How Migration Drives Literacy Learning in Transnational Families

This book tells the story of how families separated across borders write--and learn new ways of writing--in pursuit of love and money. According to the UN, 244 million people currently live outside their countries of birth. The human drama behind these numbers is that parents are often separated from children, brothers from sisters, lovers from each other. Migration, undertaken in response to problems of the wallet, also poses problems for the heart.

Writing for Love and Money shows how families separated across borders turn to writing to address these problems. Based on research with transnational families in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and North America, it describes how people write to sustain meaningful relationships across distance and to better their often impoverished circumstances. Despite policy makers' concerns about "brain drain," the book reveals that immigrants' departures do not leave homelands wholly educationally hobbled. Instead, migration promotes experiences of literacy learning in transnational families as they write to reach the two life goals that globalization consistently threatens: economic solvency and familial intimacy.

Kate Vieira is Associate Professor and the Susan J. Cellmer Distinguished Chair in Literacy in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A former elementary and high school teacher, she is the author of American by Paper: How Documents Matter in Immigrant Literacy (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and numerous essays and articles on writing. Her work has been recognized by a Spencer/National Academy of Education postdoctoral fellowship, a CCCC Chair's Research Initiative Grant, and a Fulbright Scholar fellowship.