Vieira WritingRemittancesMigrationDriven 2016

Writing Remittances: Migration-Driven Literacy Learning in a Brazilian Homeland
Author(s): Kate Vieira

Source: Research in the Teaching of English , May 2016, Vol. 50, No. 4 (May 2016), pp.
422-449
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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Writing Remittances: Migration-Driven Literacy Learning in a
Brazilian Homeland
Kate Vieira
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Literacy scholars have long studied migrant literacies in host countries, but have largely overlooked
how emigration shapes literacy learning in migrants' homelands. Yet homelands are crucial sites
of literacy research, as left-behind family members of migrants learn new literacy practices to
communicate with loved ones laboring or studying abroad. This article examines this overlooked
phenomenon by reporting on an ongoing qualitative study of migrants' family members and
return migrants in a midsized town in Brazil. Further developing a sociomaterial framework
for transnational literacy, it demonstrates that emigration promotes literacy learning among
homeland residents via the circulation of "writing remittances"—the hardware, software, and
knowledge about communication media that migrants often remit home. As objects of emotional
and economic value, writing remittances demand literacy learning as one condition of their
exchange. Because such learning, like money, is fungible, homeland residents often circulate and
reinvest it locally, with varying returns. Writing remittances mediate both intimate interpersonal
communication and the larger context of global economic inequity in which migrant families are
implicated, making such remittances rich sites ofprint and digital literacy practice across borders.
"Ai, que saudades!" (How I miss him!), Eliana1 says of her brother, who has lived
in the United States for 12 years. We are sitting in her spotless living room in the
midsized Brazilian town of Jaü, which I have visited at regular intervals since
2001. It is 2011, and for the first time I am there not only to visit family, but also
to conduct research. I sip the cold soda Eliana has offered me and proceed: How
do you overcome these saudades, this intense missing? Do you talk on the phone?
Write letters or emails? Use video chat? How, I want to know, do people remain
close when they are far? With an embarrassed laugh, Eliana gestures to the laptop
her brother sent her from the United States. It sits in a neat cabinet, topped with a
doily, awaiting her children's help to turn it on. Eliana does not know how to use
it. "I am becoming illiterate," she tells me. "But I want to learn." Eliana's brother's
transnational migration, symbolized by the presence and communicative potential
of the remitted laptop, demands what is for Eliana a new kind of literacy learning.
As such, this middle-class homemaker, who has never left Brazil, has found her
422 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50, Number 4, May 2016

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Vieira Writing Remittances 423
self at the forefront of pressing technological and global changes that are shaping
literacy today.
As of 2015, 244 million people live outside the country of their birth, repre
senting a steady growth in international migration over recent decades (United
Nations Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2015). Yet many more
remain in their homelands. Much research has addressed the literacies of the former
group, migrants living abroad. Such research has shown how migrants negotiate
literacy within schools (Purcell-Gates, 2013; Sarroub, 2004; Valdés, 2001), outside of
schools (Duffy, 2007b; Kalmar, 2001; Orellana, 2009), and in digital spaces (Berry,
Hawisher, & Seife, 2012; Burrell & Anderson, 2008; Lam & Rosario-Ramos, 2009).
While scholars continue to grapple with the complexities of migrant literacy in host
countries, we have, with some notable exceptions (Guerra, 1998; Meyers 2014),
largely ignored the other side of the relationship between literacy and migration:
the way migration shapes literacy in the homelands migrants leave behind. Yet, as
many ethnographers and sociologists of transnational migration have argued (e.g.,
Dreby, 2010; Levitt, 2001), homelands are crucial sites of transnational research—
research that often emphasizes familial separation across national boundaries
(Parrenas, 2005). What are the implications of extended familial separation for
literacy, as family members learn (or don't learn) new literacy practices to sustain
intimate relationships across distance?
To offer one answer to this question, this article reports on a small-scale
qualitative study of migration-driven literacy learning among return migrants and
migrants' family members in one community. Using literacy history interviews,
I ask how homeland residents across social classes have experienced migration
driven literacy learning in lives that have seen radical shifts in transnational
communication technologies, from pre-Internet letter writing to a post-Internet
array of choices. I find that communication via print and digital media has been
entangled in global economic networks, as migrants send home what I have come
to call "writing remittances"—hardware (laptops and webcams), software (Skype,
MSN chat, ICQ), communication (letters, emails, video chats), and literacy knowl
edge—which homeland residents often take up, revalue, and invest. The concept
of "writing remittances" illustrates the relationship among economic inequality,
literacy's materiality, and the maintenance of intimacy across borders.
To theorize this relationship, and to argue for its relevance beyond the specific
site of this study, I further develop a sociomaterial framework for transnational
literacy (Vieira, 2016). The sociomaterial perspective forwarded here brings to
gether two fundamental aspects of literacy—its imbrication in economic trends
and its materiality—to examine how they interanimate each other in interpersonal
interactions across borders.
Study Context: Jau, Brazil

Jaü is a medium-sized town in the interior of Sào Paulo, Brazil, with a modest rate
of outmigration.2 While Brazil as a whole has been a notable sending country of
immigrants since the 1980s, and there are just under 2 million Brazilians living

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424 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50 May 2016
abroad (Margolis, 2013), many of Jaü's residents do not migrate. Judging from
the rate of automobile ownership ( 1 for every 2 residents), Jaü is riding the larger
national trend of middle-class growth (Institute Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica,
2013), making migration relatively rare—though economic inequalities still act
on those who do choose to migrate.
What highlights migration-driven literacy practices in Jaû is not that everyone
leaves, but that most tend to stay. Felipe, for example, whose brother migrated to
the United States, grew up in Jaü, where both his parents were born. He married
his high school sweetheart, then moved into a house across the street from her
parents, who had built the house there for that purpose. (His wife's brother lives
next door in an identical house with his family.) Felipe often visits his father at
lunchtime, and weekend activities often include extended family gatherings, where
his brother is missed. Residents think of Jaü, a town securely ensconced in Brazil's
interior heartland, as quiet, friendly, and safe—a collective belief that makes the
absence of one community member noteworthy.
For those who do go abroad, social class largely correlates with types of emigra
tion. For example, some wealthy residents send their children to study abroad in
the United States or Canada; some middle-class residents attempt to graduate from
universities abroad, because they are seen as less expensive, less competitive, and
potentially of higher quality than some Brazilian institutions; and lower-middle
class residents often migrate to work, traveling to Japan, Europe, or the United
States to further their and their families' financial well-being. Even in this largely
middle-class town with only moderate outmigration, migration is wrapped up in
the social inequality that has long stratified Brazilian society.
As readers will see, in this class-stratified community of tight-knit families,
when one family member migrates, homeland residents' use of print and digital
communication technologies intensifies in ways mediated by writing remittances.
Theoretical Framework; Sociomateriality

This section further develops a sociomaterial perspective on literacy to help ac
count for the stories people shared with me, in which technological, economic, and
interpersonal factors animated their transnational literacy experiences.3 In peoples'
accounts, both literacy's technological affordances and its contingency on global
economic forces acted on their familial communication across borders, alternately
lending it qualities of intimacy and closeness or alienation and distance. That is,
macrosocial economic forces and the meaning-making potential of particular print
and digital interfaces animated one another in sites of transnational interaction.
While I found economics and technology to be intertwined, research in transna
tional literacy has often considered them separately. Here I synthesize these two
strands of research to further develop a sociomaterial approach to transnational
literacy. Such an approach allows researchers to examine how the economic and
the material aspects of literacy interact to shape experiences of intimacy in families
separated by distance.

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Recent research on literacy's materiality has shown that how literacy matters
in everyday lives often inheres in the very matter of literacy. For example, out-of
school studies have demonstrated how material incarnations of writing—from
scrapbooking (Pähl, 2014) to instant messaging (Haas & Takayoshi, 2011 ) to word
processing (Haas, 1996) to mid-twentieth-century typing (Reddy,2015)—are "en
tangled" (Reddy, 2015) in sites of everyday literate production. That is, the limita
tions and affordances of particular writing interfaces (such as glue, a computer
screen, or a typewriter in the examples listed above) shape how, what, and often to
what ends people write. Such objects form part of what Prior and Hengst (2010)
call "semiotic remediation," as materials present at the site of one literacy event
take new forms and are repurposed in others, layering meaning-making over time
and space. Education research has built on these descriptive studies of literacy's
materiality to show how expanding semiotic possibilities beyond print (e.g., Kress,
2004; Rowsell, 2013) can lead to learning gains in content areas (Jewitt, 2007),
literacy (Grenfell et al., 2012, Chapter 7), and composing (Shipka, 2011), while
also potentially fostering a sense of critical consciousness (Vasudevan, 2010) and
belonging (Lam & Rosario-Ramos, 2009; Vasudevan, 2014). Literacy's materiality,
attention to which is perhaps heightened at the cusp of a supposedly paperless age
(Micchiche, 2014; Vieira, 2016), informs scenes of contemporary writing, forming
a crucial, if only fairly recently noted, part of learning.
The meaning-making affordances of particular literacy technologies do not
function in isolation; they often act in concert with larger systems of political
control. Lorimer-Leonard (2015), for example, has connected the materiality of
the personal letter to transnational bureaucratic structures; Prendergast and Licko
(2009) have demonstrated how paper use in institutions of higher education hinges
on funding structures; and I (Vieira, 2016) have previously linked immigrants'
literacy practices with immigration papers to the state structures that regulate their
use. Likewise, work on the materiality of semiotic systems—from the Cherokee
syllabary (Cushman, 2011) to khipu (Mignolo, 1995) to the alphabet (Sebba, 2007)
to Mesoamerican codex books (Baca, 2008)—has shown how the intricacies of such
systems respond to the political circumstances, such as colonization, that inform
their invention and use. As the theoretical work of Brandt and Clinton (2002) has
postulated, literacy's materiality allows it to act across time, space, objects, and
people, giving it the meaning-making potential that makes it uniquely sensitive
to larger social and political currents.
The social current that perhaps most powerfully acts on literacy in migrants'
homelands is the experience of global economic inequality that often fuels hopes
for migration. Across such diverse sites as postcommunist Slovakia (Prendergast,
2008), the Mexico/U.S. border (Hernandez-Zamora, 2010), the contested borders
of Central Africa (Blommaert, 2008), and the Philippines (Lagman, 2015), the eco
nomic consequences of colonization and neoliberalism have often driven migration
at the same time as they have curtailed migrants' abilities to reap the benefits of
their literacy training. These same forces have made financial remittances crucially
important to literacy education in impoverished homelands (Abrego, 2014; Mey

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ers, 2014). Across unequally positioned national economies, the value of migrants'
literacy often varies with the comparative worth of migrant labor. That is, how
literacy matters in transnational lives has often depended on the larger economic
waves that promote migration in the first place.
How, then, might the economic realities that shape literacy practices in trans
national contexts inhere in the materials necessary for their use? That is, how
might scholars unite insights from economic analyses with those from materialist
analyses in order to better understand contemporary transnational literacy prac
tices? Brandt's (1998) concept of sponsorship provides one answer, showing how
capitalist production imperatives can result in the unequal distribution of literacy
technologies, with those who are better positioned accessing the technologies that
help pave the way for better-remunerated careers. This concept, however, does not
fully account for the stories people shared with me during my research, in which
people saw both literacy technologies and the macrosocial economic forces shaping
their use as constitutive of some of their most intimate literate social interactions.
As Brandt's model emphasizes, the economic and material aspects of literacy did
act on participants' life prospects, but these aspects of literacy also seeped into
their relational and emotional lives via the literacy-infused practice of crossborder
communication. A sociomaterial perspective on literacy, then, proposes a deeper
investigation of interpersonal literate meaning-making than sponsorship allows; it
helps track how people experience literacy's materiality and its economic purchase
in otherwise intimate sites of literate communication.
This connection between the materiality of literacy, its macrosocial economic
context, and social interaction is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in trans
national families—who are often separated due to labor migration and depend on
literacy's material affordances to remain connected. A sociomaterial perspective
on literacy helps account for how, when people are far, they often use—and learn
to use—literacy to remain close.
Methods: Tracking Writing Remittances

The research questions guiding this study are the following: How do homeland
residents across social classes experience the use of print and digital literacy to com
municate with distant loved ones? How do their experiences shift across their life
spans, as technologies for transnational communication change? And finally, how
do they report using migration-driven literacy practices in their lives? Answering
these questions offers insights into how the economic, material, and interpersonal
aspects of literacy—the components of the sociomaterial perspective described
above—interact across transnational life histories.
Defining Literacy Historically

To best answer these questions, I define literacy historically, as a trend that circulates
across time and space via people, texts, technologies, and larger political and eco
nomic institutions, such as capitalism. I use this sociohistorical definition in part

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because it reflects how participants themselves reported understanding literacy. For

many participants, who were born pre-Internet, literacy was intimately tied to the
reading and writing of print. At the same time, participants extended print-centric
notions of literacy to their engagement with the digital. Eliana, as readers saw in
the opening anecdote, made just such a connection, reporting being rendered "il
literate" by the presence of newer digital technologies, despite her training as an
accountant who could write reports and figures by hand. Such legacies of print
hovered over even seemingly print-absent communication technologies (such
as video chat) in the form of log-ins, messaging (the go-to interface when video
failed), and the interface of the keyboard. Print-based literacy, to use Brandt's (1995)
term, historically "accumulated" in these new sites, even as they also depended
on synchronous visual and aural modalities made possible by the Internet. For
the purposes of this study, then, I see the use of video chat as a literacy practice,
because it is historically linked to instantiations of what participants in my study
considered to be literacy. This historic and emic definition allows me to track how
"older" and"newer" incarnations of literacy interacted in participants' experiences.
Data Collection
Consistent with this historical definition of literacy, I conducted literacy history
interviews (LHIs) to answer the above research questions. To be clear, this article
does not report on observable semiotic meaning-making practices, as do many eth
nographic or phenomenological studies of literacy technologies. Rather, I examine
here how literacy, as a historical trend, courses through peoples' life experiences. A
unique research tool, the LHI elicits memories of how people have used reading
and writing over their life spans. As such, LHIs provide insight into what Brandt
(2015) has called the "macro-force of literacy" that appears in stories of individual
literacy experiences. LHIs do rely on imperfect memories, leading Prior (2014),
for example, to suggest that they address not the "party" of literacy, but recollec
tions "after the party," and thus should be conducted in conjunction with on-the
ground observation to develop a fuller picture. While such multiple methods of
data collection are no doubt valuable, individuals' historical testimonies of literacy
hold value in and of themselves. As Duffy (2007a) points out, the subjectivity of
this method is its strength, not its weakness, as it reveals how people understand
their uses of literacy. If literacy is a sociocultural practice, as New Literacy Studies
scholars have demonstrated since the 1980s, then these subjective experiences of
literacy deserve sustained attention, particularly, as Duffy (2007a) again argues,
when those telling the stories are marginalized subjects, such as migrants or refugees,
whose words may not be documented in archives. LHIs are also uniquely suited
for studies of transnational literacy, as they allow access to a (subjective) picture
of literacy before and after migration. For the purposes of this article, then, LHIs
reveal one aspect of literacy's history, as reported by people who are using it at a
moment of technological and global change.
To this end, I conducted 19 literacy history interviews with 16 individuals
who either had family members who had lived abroad, or had returned from liv

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ing abroad themselves—including labor migrants, those who traveled for higher
education, and high school study abroad participants—from a variety of social
classes (see Table 1 below). I did not seek out key or focal participants, as might
have been appropriate in other forms of qualitative work, but instead gathered life
histories that were consistently nuanced and detailed across participants. Because
it is not readily apparent who in Jaü is a return migrant and who has family abroad
(i.e., there are no local community organizations or networks of these groups), I
recruited participants through a snowball sample, starting with a family member
and extending to a local English language school, the proprietor of which knew
many family members of migrants and return migrants. Participants' ages ranged
from 18 to 65 and educational levels from second grade to a master's degree. Immi
gration destinations included: Paraguay, Japan, the United States, France, Canada,
and Germany. I did not ask directly about income, and instead ascertained how
participants experienced their social class through their discussions of education
and explanations of their or their family member's migration, and by observing
living and communication environments in homes.4 Conducted by the author
in Brazilian Portuguese, these interviews: ( 1 ) addressed how family members
had communicated across national borders across their life spans; (2) elicited
memories about how they learned to write via particular technologies (including
letters and computers); and (3) asked for descriptions of how they used writing
and associated technologies in their work and personal lives, and what benefits
they had experienced from such uses (see Appendix A). Interviews lasted between
30 minutes and 2 hours, and I interviewed three participants a second time, six
months later, to ask follow-up questions. Additionally, I took notes on informal talk
about transnational communication, reflecting the intertextual nature of interviews
(Koven, 2014), which often spill over into other communicative events. While my
position as a foreigner made me an outsider to the community, my regular visits
to and communication with local residents for over a decade and the transnational
nature of my own family provided a basis of identification. In many cases, I found
common ground with participants by discussing my then-3-year-old daughter,
who accompanied me to Brazil on the research trip to visit her grandfather, tios
(uncles and aunts), and cousins, whom she had previously only "seen" across a
computer screen in video chats.
Data Analysis
To analyze both interviews and field notes, I used a constructivist approach to
grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) that takes into account researchers' active roles
in interpreting data. This approach allowed a rigorous examination of the data at
the same time as it acknowledged the active nature of my interpretation in light of
my long-standing community relationships. Analysis included four rounds of cod
ing. First, I coded for motivations (psychological need, missing a family member),
types (letters, email, video chat, telephone), and frequency (daily, weekly, monthly)
of transnational communication. I noted that all participants reported that migra
tion led to an uptick in the frequency of their use of literacy technologies, due to
what Brazilians call saudade—missing or nostalgia. In a second round of coding,

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Table 1. Migrants' Family Members an

Reason for Relationship
Pseudonym; Primary Mode(s) Writing Invested
Migration Length of and of Transnational Remittance Writing
Transcript; Destination Communication Remittance
Number of
Interviews
Felipe; Brother ICQ, Skype Hardware: Traded

Traded migra
migra
33 pages; migrated to Laptop tion-driven
tion-driven ICQ
ICQ
2 interviews Europe and Practice: knowledge for
U.S. Learned ICQ help in English
from brother classes; uses lap
top for research
Joao; Son mi Phone Hardware:
25 pages; grated to Laptop
1 interview Europe, then
U.S.
Maya; Aunt Phone, Skype

5 pages; migrated to
1 interview U.S.
Eduardo; Migrated Phone, Skype, Hardware: Uses laptop
19 pages; for work email Laptop from Japan to
1 interview in Japan as improve his
soccer coach analysis of goal
(return ies in his local
migrant) work as a coach
Carla; Migrated to Cards on special Hardware: Uses U.S.
27 pages; work in U.S. occasions, Skype, Laptop bought laptop
1 interview as nanny phone for lesson plan
(return ning in work as
migrant) a teacher
Eliana; Brother Phone, Skype Hardware:
22 pages; migrated to when children Laptop
1 interview U.S. are present
Maria; Son mi Letters dictated Hardware:
Hardware: Provides access
27 pages; grated to to husband, Laptop to computer and
1 interview Japan Skype Practice: Internet for local
Learned to grandchildren
Skype
Hugo; Migrated to Letters,
Letters,Skype,
Skype, Hardware:
Hardware: Uses technol
22 pages; France, sister digital telephone Webcam
digitaltelephone Webcamfromfrom ogy knowledge
1 interview still lives in sister, suitcase for social status
sister,suitcase
France (re of letters and in work as
turn migrant Practice: proprietor of
and relative Learned help desk
of migrant) about In
ternet from
Minitel in
France
Gilberto; Migrated to Letters,
Letters, email
email Hardware:
Hardware: Used
Usedbooks
books
to to
28 pages; Italy, then to Computer,
Computer, further
further career
career
29 interviews
intprvipwc TTQ (rpturn books ic
as rYiof
chef
U.S. (return
migrant)
continued on next page

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Table 1. Continued
Pseudonym; Relationship Primary Mode(s)Writing Invested

Length of and of Transnational Remittance Writing
Transcript; Destination Communication Remittance
Number of
Interviews
Leonido; Son studies Email, chat, Practice: Used Uses knowledge
27 pages; in Europe Skype email and gleaned from
2 interviews MSN like emails about
"never before" Germany to
improve orga
nization in the
school he directs
Loirinho; Brother Skype Practice: Used migration
9 pages; studies in Learned driven Skype
1 interview Paraguay Skype to knowledge to
communicate take a distance
with brother
Antonio; Studied Email, chat, Practice.
27 pages; in Europe Skype Increased use
1 interview (return of Skype and
migrant) MSN
Sylvia; Son studied Letters, email, Practice: Uses Skype and

29 pages; in Canada Skype Learned to email to com
1 interview "mess with municate with
the com family
puter" to use
Skype and
send emails to
communicate
with son
Isabella; Studied in Skype
24 pages; U.S.
1 interview
Emerson; Studied in Skype

24 pages; U.S.
1 interview
Katia; Son studied Nextel telephone, Practice: Son
24 pages; in U.S. Skype left computer
1 interview loaded with
Skype for
communica
tion, but she
already knew
how to use it
I identified how saudades were resolved (or not) in relation to how participants
spoke of valuing particular media (whether they promoted closeness, seemed to
require labor, made the participant feel alienated, etc.).
Third, to account for how the technological and economic aspects of literacy
coalesced, I coded for how those differently positioned with regard to social class
came to own or use particular communication technologies. Migrants who emi
grated to work often sent the technology back home as a gift to their family mem

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bers. Moreover, the labor or effort involved in buying the technology, learning to
use it, and using it helped establish an intimate connection via that medium. The
very valuation of labor, the reason economic migrants left their homelands in the
first place, underwrote communication across distance. This correlation existed
consistently among the 9 participants connected to labor migration, but not among
the wealthier families who sent their children to study abroad in high school.5
To describe the relationship among saudades, materiality of communication,
and labor, I turned to migration studies' theories about remittances and my own
remittance experiences. Such theories address the educational impact of financial
remittances that are invested in infrastructure and tuition for families back home
(e.g. deHaas, 2007; Nobles, 2011), as well as social remittances (e.g., Levitt, 1998;
Levitt, 2001; Levitt & Lamba-Nieves, 2011), such as cultural practices, that circulate
between host country and homeland. Using a "constant comparative" method of
theory building (Glazer, 1965), I posited that literacy, as a sociomaterial resource
tied to wider economic realities, could work similarly across transnational networks.
Having previously traveled to Brazil with laptops for family members to sustain
our transnational communication, I had also participated in just such a circuit. I
coded this remittance circuit as writing remittances.6
Much like economic remittances, writing remittances appeared to function as
circuits involving what economic sociologist Zelizer (2006) has called "interchange,
intercourse, and mutual shaping" (p. 32). Such a description jibed with what par
ticipants told me, of receiving literacy-based remittances that then demanded an
exchange of labor—in their case, the labor of using the remittance or learning to
use it to emotionally support migrants abroad. In other words, writing remittances
not only flowed from global north to global south, but also formed a bidirectional
transactional circuit. To track the implications of such remittances for homeland
residents, in a final fourth round of coding, I examined ( 1 ) how the remittances
functioned pre- and post-Internet access, and (2) how participants invested (or
did not invest) such remittances both locally and transnationally.
In sum, this analysis revealed that participants experienced writing remittances
as mediating both intimate interpersonal communication and the larger context
of global economic inequity in which they were implicated, making such remit
tances rich sites of print and digital literacy experiences across borders and lives.
Findings and Discussion

Here, I organize my findings and discussion in the following manner: First, I of
fer a detailed narrative of Hugo, a musician in his 40s. I choose to focus on Hugo
because he was both a return higher-education migrant and a family member of
a current labor migrant, making his experiences with migration-driven literacy
practices especially telling of shifts in transnational communication over the last
two decades, and of the way such shifts are economically and materially inflected.
Second, I elaborate on the concepts Hugo's narrative illustrates by comparing his
narrative with those of others to show how migration-driven literacy learning
operates differently across social class categories as literacy technologies shift. I

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hope that this detailed narrative, set alongside a comparison across participants,
allows readers an understanding of for whom, how, and under what conditions
writing remittances can operate, revealing both the explanatory power and the
limitations of this concept.
Hugo: "It Was Worth More Than Any Card I'd Ever Gotten"
Hugo made the decision to move to France in the 1990s for higher education,
putting him in a social class category between the upper middle class, who often
sent high school students to study abroad, and the lower middle class, who often
migrated to work. He decided on France because his sister, a labor migrant, was
already living there.
Not a prolific writer before migration, Hugo nonetheless described an uptick
in literacy use when he arrived in France. "When you are there, you get very emo
tional. Far from everything, far from your father, far from your mother." He first
relied on phone cards to make international calls, but recalled hearing the "tic tic
tic" as they emptied of credit in the middle of conversations. Both resourceful and
lonely, he responded to his dissatisfaction with the telephone by writing 10 to 12
letters a day to his friends and receiving 10 to 12 letters a day in return. "When I
was there," he said, "I liked to write." He wrote of the chocolates and yogurts he
ate ("Their yogurt was so good!") and French cultural practices ("You can't just
bring an extra friend to their parties!").
For Hugo, this increase in written communication highlighted writing's ma
teriality—letters' physical heft, the work required to pen them, and the intimate
meanings that their materiality conveyed. For example, he described keeping all the
letters he received from friends and returning home to Brazil "with an enormous
suitcase of letters." The work of writing and of carrying so much paper seemed to
unite literacy's materiality with the labor of its production and circulation.
This association resonated in another account he shared with me, of a moving
letter he received from his grandfather:
Hugo: There was a card from my grandfather that he sent. He didn't know
how to write correctly. And... it's that... when I received this card, I cried
so much.
Kate: Really?
Hugo: Nossa! [Emphatic yes, literally "Our Lady!"] And he wrote on a dirty
paper, you know?
Kate: Yeah.
Hugo: It was on such a totally dirty paper. He wrote with that kind of trembling
handwriting, and nossa [wow]. His letter was the most beautiful that I've
ever received. It had like three lines, you know? But it was worth more than
any card I've gotten.
The materiality of trembling hands and dirty paper, suggestive of the rich, red
farmland of Brazil's interior, emphasized for Hugo the work of writing. Hugo's

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grandfather was working his otherwise limited literacy skills to send word via post
in an effort to communicate with his grandson. In turn, his grandfather's cogni
tive and physical labor of literate production heightened the letter's emotional
resonance. In fact, Hugo remembered the evidence of work etched onto the letter's
surface—the dirty paper, the handwriting—more than its content, which I had to
prompt him to describe. Such letter writing appeared to operate according to an
economic logic. Not only were phone calls expensive, leading to increased writing,
but the effort writing demanded served to deepen its emotional value—value made
material in "dirty paper" and in an "enormous suitcase of letters."
This history with migration-driven print literacy inflected how Hugo spoke
of and valued migration-driven digital literacy. Hugo, at home in Brazil at the
time of our interview, communicated with his sister, still living in France, via
video chat. Similar to the way he described his grandfather's letter, he spoke of his
communication with her in relation to labor. He pointed out to me that they did
not communicate via letter, because: "My sister, she likes to talk. She can talk for
an hour and a half. Can you imagine if I had to read all that?" For Hugo, reading,
like writing, required a kind of work that his sister's voluminous communication
did not merit. His tone in relation to his sister and grandfather differed perhaps in
part due to age and gender, but his connection of labor to print was consistent in
these exchanges. Words on paper appeared to him rare, precious, whereas digital
talk seemed cheap. An economic logic undergirded these shifts in his experiences
with migration-driven print and digital literacy; by this logic, particular literacies
were worth more than others, in relation to cost and work.
The economic value of migration-driven literacy was more than a metaphor
or an emotional state for Hugo. He also invested his migration-driven literacy
knowledge, gleaned across his transnational experiences, for social and financial
gain. During Hugo's stay in France, he became familiar with the Minitel shopping
system, which he described as laying the groundwork for his ease with Internet
mediated technology. When he returned to Brazil, he became one of the first in his
neighborhood to buy a computer. Shortly thereafter, his sister, who had remained
in France, remitted him a laptop and the first webcam he had seen, leading him to
adopt video chat. He reported that neighbors and friends soon visited, asking him
for technological advice and logging on. He circulated his technology knowledge
locally, teaching, as he put it, "all [his] friends and family.... I don't like to keep
all the knowledge to myself." He described his house as a local center of commu
nication technology, resonating with descriptions of the early post office, whose
outward-directed networks could foster intensely social local interactions.
Hugo invested this migration-driven literacy knowledge not only locally, for
social status, but also internationally. An American woman studying abroad in Jaü
learned that he knew how to access an Internet-connected phone line, and would
come "hang" on the phone in his office, speaking with family and friends stateside
for "hours." To his irritation, she broke the phone three times. Still, he took pride
in his ability to circulate writing remittances internationally: "I said, 'Whoa, you
live there [the United States] and I'm the one giving you technology lessons?'

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She even worked in telecommunications!" Similarly, to supplement his income

from his career as a musician, he began working independently at a help desk call
center he set up from home, often offering technological advice to Americans.
He found it ironic that he assisted those living and working in Los Angeles, for
him the supposed hub of technological advancement. So, to trace the influence
of migration on Hugo's experiences of literacy's sociomateriality is not to suggest
that all advanced literacy knowledge stems from the global north. For Hugo, such
flows were bidirectional, and resonated with both local and international social
and professional pressures.
During the technologically and economically tumultuous period of the 1990s
to 2011, Hugo's commitment to "killing" transnational saudades fostered an eco
nomically buttressed, materially resonant, and financially auspicious relationship
with print and digital literacy technologies. Literacy's material face changed across
Hugo's transnational experiences, as his grandfather, a farmer, reached across the
Atlantic in a trembling hand, and as Hugo reached back across the Atlantic with
his experience of the pre-Internet Minitel system, and as his sister later sent hard
ware, knowledge of which he circulated locally and internationally. Hugo valued
letter writing for the labor it entailed, used video chat to avoid what he saw as the
drudgery of print literacy, and internationally and locally invested his knowledge
of and work with digital communication technologies—and saw a return on this
investment. In Hugo's migration-driven experiences of literacy, its materiality and
its association with the economics of transnational movement were simultane
ously at play.
Writing Remittances
To best capture this migration-driven, sociomaterial relationship with literacy, this
section develops the concept of writing remittances. Writing remittances are the
migration-driven literacy practices, technologies, and products—such as laptops,
webcams, letters, texts, and knowledge about such tools and practices—that mi
grants often send or bring home and that often promote increased use of literacy
and/or literacy learning. Writing remittances are sociomaterial practices and artifacts
in that they carry both financial and interpersonal capital, which is exchanged in
the giving of the technology or knowledge, the learning of it, and the investing of
it. In this sense, writing remittances function as part of what economic sociologist
Vivian Zelizer (2006) calls a "circuit." For Zelizer (2006), remittance circuits "convey
powerful shared meanings" (p. 32), through which "participants are constantly
negotiating, contesting, and reshaping their relationship to each other" (p. 33).
Like the financial remittance circuits that Zelizer studies, writing remittances are
both financially transactional and intimately relational. In fact, this interaction of
the social and the material fuels remittance circuits. Writing remittances, because
they involve exchanging the media and knowledge about media that undergird
the continued inclusion of migrants in homeland social life, may even be seen as
a special, privileged kind of remittance. Enmeshed in economic and emotional
exchange, writing remittances mediate migration-driven communication practices

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across borders marked by global inequality, offering some, such as Hugo, a leg up
in social and professional realms.
To analyze this concept as fully as possible, this discussion examines how writ
ing remittances work differently across participants, how they function pre-Internet
versus post-Internet, and how they act as objects of local investment.
Pre-Internet: Letters
Letters loom in accounts of transnational literacy. In late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Europe, for example, soldiers on the front and migrants learned
to write letters to ensure cultural continuity and basic psychological stability in
traumatic circumstances, contributing to the rise of mass literacy among the
peasantry (Lyons, 2013).7 Stateside, immigrants to the United States in the early
days of the transnational postal system taught left-behind family members to ad
dress envelopes (Gerber, 2006).8 Personal letters move across borders and/or with
people (Guerra, 1998), reveal cultural traits (Thomas & Znaniecki, 1927/1996),
connect writers to larger bureaucracies (Lorimer-Leonard, 2015), and otherwise
act as the material enclosure of what some immigrants describe as "souls" (Vieira,
2016). Letters, in other words, travel when people cannot, often promoting literacy
use and learning.
For those participants who migrated or whose family members migrated before
use of the Internet became prevalent in the early 2000s, the material affordances
of textual communication were crucial for upholding family relationships and
"killing" saudades. As one mother put it, "You think you can stay far away from
your family and not feel one saudade? You will! In one way or another, you will!"
Distance gave rise to saudades, and participants accessed what technology was
within their means to resolve them. For most, phone calls were too expensive to
rely on as a primary means of communication, though some exceptions did exist.
One upper-middle-class participant described buying a Nextel radio-connected
telephone from a client of her husband's, with which she could make phone calls
to her son studying abroad in Canada at no cost each morning to wake him up.
And another middle-class participant described weekly phone calls to her brother,
an expensive—though emotionally essential—ritual that allowed her to imagine
he was back in Jau, close by, where they used to regularly speak on the phone. For
most, however, international phone calls before the availability of the Internet were
prohibitively expensive. Like Hugo, many relied on the postal system to supplement
the phone. This cost-driven negotiation of communication hardware emphasizes
both literacy's materiality and its relation to money in the lives of homeland
residents and return migrants, in ways that, as readers will see, shape how these
individuals interact with digital technologies for transnational communication.
Like Hugo, many return migrants described depending on this communication
while they were abroad, comparing transnational communication to sustenance.
In his 40s, Gilberto ran a successful Italian restaurant in Jau, where I interviewed
him for this study. lust before the busy evening shift, he sat smoking in his chef's
apron and spoke to me of his experiences abroad. He lived in Italy from 1992
to 1994, returned to Brazil for two years (where he described himself as being

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"without money and without possibilities"), and then left again for the United
States, where he lived in New York for six months, frying chicken in a fast-food
restaurant, and then in Florida for four years, where he worked in Italian restau
rants and sold cigars. In the United States, he communicated occasionally with
his family by phone, despite the crushing expense. While the phone allowed for
nearly synchronous interaction, Gilberto longed for the letters that he complained
were few and far between. "When you are alone," he told me, "you hope for letters
much more, understand?" "Morria de saudades," he said. "I was dying of missing
them." His invocation of death in relation to saudade is an idiom in Portuguese,
but it nonetheless speaks to the physical necessity of communication.
Those who remained home also appreciated that transnational communica
tion could be a matter of migrants' survival. In his 30s, Felipe taught engineering
courses at a private technical institute. His brother migrated to Europe in 1999,
returned briefly in 2000, and then left for the United States in 2002. After hearing
from his brother in a letter that he didn't have enough to eat, Felipe and his family
started sending a letter every 10 days.
There were material reasons to send the letter: "We put money in an enve
lope, such that the money wouldn't be seen, because it could get 'lost' [i.e., stolen]
along the way." And there were psychological reasons. Felipe was concerned that,
in his words, his brother would "go out of his mind, because no one understood
his language." From the perspective of those who stayed home, the letters acted as
material and psychological support, the only kind they could muster, as Felipe's
family attempted to care for his brother from a distance, through a textually me
diated proxy.
When one family member's literacy was insufficient for solo letter writing, the
labor of such textual care was shared among family members. Consider Maria, who
had a second-grade education and described her literacy in this way: "I know how
to read and write, but not to 'write,' you know?" Her son had worked as a soccer
coach in Japan since 1997, having migrated due to a lack of work opportunities in
Brazil. He eventually married a Japanese woman and had a child, Maria's distant
grandson. During our interview in Maria's cozy living room, her granddaughter
(her daughter's daughter, who lived locally) napped in an adjoining room. She
woke mid-interview with a cough and a cry, offering a warm bodily example of
the difference between local and transnational family. Local family members could
be held. The transnational family, on the other hand, was represented by Japanese
remittance objects in the room—a painting, a clock, a laptop, and an album of
Maria's son's life in Japan that displayed photos, cards, and the inky baby foot
prints of her newborn grandson. To overcome saudades pre-Internet, given her
self-reported limited literacy, Maria engaged in labor-intensive collaborative letter
writing in order to communicate with her son. She described dictating personal
letters to her literate husband, who would transcribe her words, resulting in an
uptick in Maria's literacy use—whether or not she could "write."
As families attempted to include absent loved ones in daily life, and as those
abroad worked to maintain what Gerber (2006) has theorized as a stable narrative

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identity across borders, they communicated through print in ways that offered
sustenance, familiarity, and regular participation. Because the telephone was ex
pensive for most, they described relying on letters, whose cost of circulation was
underwritten by the government-funded transnational literacy institution of the
postal system. Such reliance emphasized literacy's materiality. Letters' technical
affordances meant they could be carried (Hugo), kept (Gilberto), supplemented
with cash (Felipe), and returned to in moments of longing (Maria).
In addition to these technical attributes, letters also operated socioeconomi
cally. That is, the work they were perceived to require underlay their value as a
medium of intimate communication: For Hugo, his grandfather's card was of worth
partly because his grandfather struggled to write it. For Gilberto, the fact that his
family only rarely made the effort to write a letter left him feeling unmoored, alone,
and resentful. For Maria, the labor of writing was so difficult and yet so necessary
that it had to be shared. And Felipe concretized the relationship between literacy's
materiality and its economic purchase by enclosing money along with words in his
brother's own language. Letters, as bidirectional writing remittances, circulated in
a financially and emotionally stratified transnational realm.
Post-Internet: Video Chat and Print across Social Class

Multimodal and digital literacy works similarly to letters, often offering vicarious
involvement in lives stretched across borders (e.g., Kang, 2011). In fact, many
transnational families currently have such an array of media choices for remaining
connected that ethnographers have labeled the abundance "polymedia" (Madianou
& Miller, 2012). The following analysis of writing remittances post-Internet sug
gests that such choices are mediated not only by interpersonal demands, but also
by the economics of access, social class, and literacy labor. Brazilians' access to
information and communication technology correlates with social class standing:
in the highest social classes, 98% of individuals have a computer in their homes
and 97% have accessed the Internet, compared with 9% and 6%, respectively, of
individuals in the lowest social classes (Centro de Estudos sobre as Tecnologias da
Informaçào e da Comunicaçâo, 2013). What, then, does the class-based nature of
access to computer technology mean for how participants experience migration
driven literacy use in an Internet age?
This section answers this question in the following way: In Brazil, taxes on
digital technologies are high, putting them out of the reach of many, and making
them much cheaper to purchase abroad. So labor migrants (lower-middle-class or
middle-class) often remitted hardware to family members back home, a financial
investment that, in exchange, demanded the labor of learning to use the hardware.
Such negotiations textured how participants valued the labor involved in transna
tional print and digital communication. They experienced digital literacy in light of
their previous and ongoing experiences with print. That is, print literacy—experi
ences with it, knowledge of how to use it, and its very materiality—"accumulated"
at otherwise digital sites (Brandt, 1995), and was activated for participants at
moments of transnational separation (and connection). In sum, for those who
shared their experiences with me, the print and the digital interanimated each other

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through their ongoing historical imbrication in macrosocial economic trends and

transnational relationships.
Among the families of labor migrants, all but one homeland resident de
scribed receiving a writing remittance in the form of hardware (see Table 1 ). Such
remittances were often gifted to family members, entailing an expectation that the
receiver would learn to use them, forming a bidirectional circuit of economic and
emotional exchange.
Such exchange of labor—the work of the migrant to buy the hardware and
the work of the homeland family member to learn to use it—operated even when
the receiver had little educational background to do so. Recall Maria, described
in the previous section, whose son lived in Japan. Pre-Internet, she had shared the
literacy labor of writing letters with her husband. Later, when her son remitted
a new laptop to them from Japan—where, in Maria s words, technology is more
"advanced"—Maria was obligated in an economic and interpersonal exchange to
use it. With the help of her local children, she learned how to log on, sign in, and
use Skype to communicate. Maria interfaced with print-mediated log-ins and
cutting-edge software via a computer keyboard, at the same time as she made use
of the visual and aural modalities of video chat to listen to her son's troubles at
work, offer advice, and see her grandson. Learning this particular literacy practice
was Maria's role in her family's transnational remittance circuit. Her son's role in
the exchange was to buy the computer, a Japanese laptop beyond Maria's means,
which cost him both in money and in time—an outlay that Maria emphasized in
our interview. She said her son worked 12 hours a day and had paltry (according
to Brazilian standards) vacations. She wished she could see him more often. Seen
this way, the price of the laptop was quite high. It was evidence of her son's greater
earning power, the reason he migrated in the first place, and thus symbolized a kind
of payoff for his absence from his family. Hence its value. This valuable remittance
heightened Maria's obligation to communicate through the technology. Bolstered
by this delicate and mutual exchange of materials, communication, and learning,
they maintained an intimate mother-son relationship across time (14 years) and
distance ( 11,400 miles). Migration-driven digital literacy learning, for Maria, was
profoundly sociomaterial.
To offer a contrasting example of how the economic, material, and inter
personal can animate the transnational literacy lives of labor migrants families,
consider now a failed writing remittance circuit, that of Eliana, whose anecdote
opened this article. Eliana was a middle-class accountant turned homemaker,
whose brother worked in the United States. He remitted a laptop to the family to
communicate, which was especially important since his visits home had been few,
due to his undocumented legal status. Yet Eliana was not able to fulfill her part of
the exchange by learning how to use the computer, compromising both the way
she perceived her social class and her ability to "kill" the saudades she felt for her
brother. Eliana repeated to me that her inability to use the computer meant that
she was becoming "illiterate." Instead of analfabeto, the standard way to say illit
erate in Portuguese, she laughed that she was becoming anarfa, a slang word she

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pronounced with an exaggerated twang mocking an uneducated, country Brazilian

accent. Unable to participate in the remittance exchange, she said she touched the
computer "only to clean it," metaphorically demoting herself to a common oc
cupation for uneducated Brazilian women, that of a domestic. On one hand, her
joke emphasized her own middle-class status, as someone who could make fun of
others in less privileged positions. On the other hand, it also called her class status
into question. She could not bring her history of privileged print literacy to bear
on new literacy technologies. Instead of learning to use the expensive remittance
object, Eliana resorted to cleaning it, labor that did not fully pay the interpersonal
debt incurred with the expensive gift.9
As a result, the interpersonal bond with her brother suffered. Of the occasions
when her children helped her turn on the computer, she said: "I find that when
we see each other [over video chat], girl, I get so upset. I end up with increased
saudades. . . . The sadness of seeing each other, but not being able to be close."
Such mediated communication, while perhaps better than nothing and certainly
better than the post ("No letters; not one ... just writing on the back of photos,"
she told me of the written dimension of their postal correspondence), nonetheless
emphasized the bodily absence of a close relative, the absence that is the defining
feature of transnational migration, and that Eliana felt powerless to ameliorate.
By highlighting this absence, video chat seemed to strip her of the cultural capital
she had acquired as an educated, middle-class homemaker, who might otherwise
be enjoying a place physically in the middle of an extended family. Of her inability
to use the computer, she told me, "I feel ashamed." In Eliana's case, the remittance
circuit did not take, compromising her perceived social class standing and her
ability to maintain a relationship with her brother—failure symbolized by the
frequently dusted laptop remitted by her brother with money he earned working
in a bakery in Boston.
Such migration-driven print and digital literacy operated within an unequal
market of both literacy and financial resources: what was distant and unattainable
for some was close and easily attainable for others; what was difficult for some was
effortless for others. Eliana found the computer difficult. But readers will recall that
Hugo believed reading his sister's letter would take much more work than listening
to her speak on Skype. Likewise, return migrant Carla, who worked as a nanny in
the United States for two years and primarily used video chat to communicate with
family at home, perceived personal letters as more valuable and more "intimate."
Like Hugo, she believed they required more effort to write, "like the person is re
ally thinking of you." This is not to say that letters in fact require more effort to
read and write than other forms of communication, but rather that in a context
of "polymedia," participants described intimacy in relation to the perceived labor
and/or expense of using particular communication media. Literacy's materiality,
the economic circumstances of its circulation, and interpersonal demands flooded
moments of migration-driven literacy learning, sometimes keeping writing remit
tance circuits coursing across borders, and other times shorting them out.
While writing remittance circuits for labor migrants' families involved the
remittance of hardware as a crucial element in maintaining transnational relation

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ships, none of the wealthier, study-abroad families received hardware (see Table
1), though nearly all described receiving technological knowledge and support.
In response to their family members' migration, participants reported learning to
"mess" with computers and generally increasing their use of email, chat, and Skype,
in the words of one participant, like "never before." So while migration did appear
to drive some literacy learning for members of wealthier classes, their experiences
were not as apparently enmeshed in global economic inequality as were those of
labor migrants' family members.
This difference does not mean that economic forces were absent from the
migration-driven literacy practices of the wealthy. Rather, the social class privilege
of not having to rely on remittances rendered economic inequality—so apparent
in the lives of labor migrants—invisible in the lives of the more comfortable. Many
could and did simply buy laptops themselves. Some also had the means to visit
their study-abroad family members in the United States or Canada, alleviating
some of the saudades that writing remittances worked to resolve. Unlike labor
migrants, who were attempting to earn more money to make their Brazilian lives
better, study-abroad participants knew they could return to materially comfortable
environments in Brazil. For example, one return study-abroad student described
the difficulty of doing without her domestic maid (who washed, ironed, and cooked
for her in Brazil) during her year abroad. Her goal was not to help support her
family, but to have an educational life experience. Earning money to buy a laptop
to send home was out of the question. Put simply, economic privilege minimized
the necessity of remitting literacy hardware. For the wealthy, this kind of remit
tance circuit was not as heavily trafficked.
In sum, if migration drove increased digital literacy use and learning across
classes post-Internet, economic inequality shaped the terms of such learning and
how participants valued particular kinds of literacies in relation to each other, for
the purposes of maintaining transnational relationships.
Writing Remittances: The Investment

How do homeland residents invest writing remittances, and with what returns?
Studies of transnational literacy have shown that financial remittances can promote
literacy education for migrants' homeland family members, by covering tuition
costs (Abrego, 2014) and by increasing the cultural capital associated with literacy
education (Meyers, 2014). Might there also be benefits to writing remittances?
For some, the answer to this question was yes, as they invested writing remit
tances for local social status and professional gain. Such was the case, readers will
recall, with Hugo, as it was with others who were able to use hardware and knowl
edge gleaned abroad in local work as varied as coaching and teaching (see Table
1 ). To understand in more detail how the local investment of writing remittances
can work, consider Felipe's experiences: Coming from a lower-middle-class family,
he had aspirations to become an engineer but faced some significant challenges.
In Brazil, public universities are free, but admission is class-biased. The difficult
entrance exams favor the well-off, who often pay for private preparation. Felipe

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knew early on the he would need to have, in his words, "um outro caminhoan
other path. Neither well-off nor poor, he saved money to buy a computer in order
to stay ahead of the technology curve.
While a combination of his own ambitions and socioeconomic conditions
fostered his digital access, his brother's migration to Europe and then the United
States augmented his technological know-how, which he then leveraged for gain. In
the late '90s, his brother introduced him to ICQ chat; then, in the early 2000s, his
brother remitted him a laptop. His dial-up Internet connection was expensive, so
he chatted only with his brother, and generally only for urgent matters. At that time,
Felipe enrolled in an English language school, in part to more fully understand the
cultural context in which his brother was enmeshed in the United States. Though
he continued to speak to his brother in Portuguese, he wanted to read greeting
cards sent from the United States and understand song lyrics his brother shared
with him. More pressing, English was also productive for him professionally, as the
scientific reports he read for his engineering degree were published in English. At
the English school in Jaü, he noticed that the secretary was having trouble using
ICQ, a new technology at the time. He helped her with ICQ, and she helped him
with English. As he put it, "It was a way of us helping each other." ICQ, as a writing
remittance, helped open wider a door that he had already cracked. He reported that
his growing familiarity with English, in turn, facilitated his engineering-oriented
computer research, an activity that he reported engaging in daily throughout his
later years as a college student and, at the time of the interview, as a teacher re
sponsible for staying up-to-date with innovations in his field. The remitted laptop
now sat on his desk, webcam perched atop, used for both work-related research
and transnational communication with his brother and niece.
In a local professional context, in which understanding English and conducting
Internet-based research were increasingly important skills, Felipe took up writing
remittances as part of a larger field of literacy resources to shape his future. As it was
for Hugo, for Felipe investing writing remittances advantaged him in competitive
professional realms that, more and more, demanded digital fluency.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that technology from supposedly more devel
oped destination countries "saved" Hugo, Felipe, or others from poverty or stalled
mobility. For Hugo, readers will recall, while technological knowledge flowed from
global north to global south (from France to Brazil, via his own experiences and
his sister's remittances), it also flowed from global south to global north (from
Brazil to the United States, via his help desk call center), likely attendant with
more complex circuits of exchange than a literacy history interview could capture.
And for Felipe, writing remittances were part of the larger wave of technological
and scientific advances experienced by many professional Brazilians, and that he
actively pursued as part of his project of social class mobility. Writing remittances,
as one literacy resource in a larger field of sometimes abundant and sometimes
scarce local literacy resources, acted on homeland residents' local professional
lives, but they did not autonomously transform them. Still, writing remittances
could provide an important leg up to homeland residents in their professional

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trajectories. Writing remittances could supplement the time, money, and energy
participants had already invested in their literacy educations, offering an outside
advantage that allowed them to reap some of the benefits of the educated, often
technologically savvy Brazilian middle and upper-middle classes.
Like other kinds of investments, however, writing remittances perhaps most
benefited those in favorable social positions. It was no accident that Hugo and
Felipe, both young middle-class men, were able to profitably invest them. For
some women, remittances worked differently. Several women pointed out that the
writing remittance of video chat highlighted their inability to speak with younger
relatives born abroad, further eating away at their literacy-infused status as com
petent ( female) members of their extended families. They could see the youngsters
via video chat, but did not share a language. Eliana, for example, could not speak
with her U.S.-born niece, except in broken Spanish. And a young college student,
Maya, spoke of not understanding her cousin, who was born in the United States
and had little facility with Portuguese. If these women believed their role was to
be linchpins of familial communication—both spoke of being "unable" to leave
their parents and families—then being incapable of communicating with younger
relatives could undermine their familial positions, regardless of the wider cultural
capital that having family abroad could help them accrue.10
In this sense, writing remittances could reinforce beliefs about the supposed
inferiority of education and technology in the global south, eroding the status of
local literacy resources. Maya, for one, felt that education and technology were
more "advanced" in the United States, but because she never wanted to leave her
family, she resigned herself to what she considered worse education and job pros
pects in Brazil. And Eliana saw herself as becoming illiterate and wanted to take a
"course," not only so she could communicate independently with her brother, but
also so she could exchange recipes and jokes with her friends via email without
relying on her children as intermediaries. These women felt left behind, not only
by their family members, but also by global technological, linguistic, and economic
currents. Writing remittances from abroad interacted with local professional and
social pressures to learn new and sometimes foreign literacies, bringing into relief
what they perceived as their own literacy shortcomings.
In the stories people shared with me, writing remittances coincided with pres
sures to accumulate new literacy skills. When invested well, by people in favorable
social positions, writing remittances provided advantages in local and international
economies. At the same time, their very presence in the lives and living rooms of
those in less favorable social positions could work to devalue existing literacy skills.
Writing remittances could highlight how far behind one had fallen, how fixed one
was, in the midst of the rapid global movement of other people and their literacies.
Conclusion: Material, Local, Transnational

In sum, this study has attempted to address the question of how people remain
close when they are distant. Participants in this study did so via writing remit

193.60.238.240 on Mon, 22 Apr 2024 09:13:17 +00:00
tances: the communication hardware, software, and practices that they sent across
borders. As objects of emotional and economic lineage and use, these writing re
mittances demanded literacy learning as one condition of their exchange. Because
such learning, like money, is fungible, it was often reinvested locally, with varying
returns. In the experiences of return migrants and homeland family members,
the process of migration linked three components of literacy—its connection to
larger economic trends, its materiality, and its use as a medium of interpersonal
intimacy—promoting literacy learning and use. As such, literacy acted socioma
terially in these transnational lives.
The concept of writing remittances accounts for the experiences of migration
driven literacy learning among these 16 participants in one homeland community.
This scope is small, and further work remains in four key areas: First, this study
highlighted the experiences of parents and siblings, but how might writing remit
tances function for children, who may have little memory of "paper" transnational
communication on which to draw? It is perhaps significant that the youngest in
this study, Maya (age 20), was the only participant whose migrant relative was a
generation older, and also the only person not to have reported learning a new
communication practice from this migration. Second, this study examined a
largely middle-class community with only moderate emigration and with mostly
male migrants, but how might writing remittances circulate in impoverished
communities ravaged by brain drain, in which both women and men migrate?
Third, as research on the role of emotion in literacy learning grows, how might
the relationship between familial intimacy and literacy's materiality that this study
documented extend or be challenged by work in other emotionally charged sites of
literate practice? And finally, this study examined writing remittances at a moment
of rapid technological innovation. As Internet-mediated communication technolo
gies become more commonplace, how might their economic value change? And
what of the technologies that have become more widespread in Brazil since data
collection in 2011, such as smart phones and apps that facilitate chatting across
borders and require less of an investment than computers?
There are three central implications of this study that I propose can guide
further investigations:
First, this study further develops a sociomaterial perspective on literacy. That
is, it shows how economic interests and interpersonal connections are often aligned
for people in literate acts, and moreover, how such alignments are embedded in
the material technologies that facilitate the production of such acts. Literacy ap
pears here as a phenomenon whose ability to foster intimacy rests on its status as a
material object of exchange dependent on global markets. The experiences of this
study's participants emphasize the interconnected nature of literacy's materiality,
its economic promise, and its emotional purchase. Such connections are intensi
fied in the contexts of families separated by labor migration, and thus sensitized
to the emotional difficulties of distance, to the interpersonal cost of financial gain
abroad. Perhaps it is precisely the ways that writing remittances reach into the
interpersonal, the economic, and the material that make them particularly rich

193.60.238.240 on Mon, 22 Apr 2024 09:13:17 +00:00
sites of literacy learning. There are deeply affective and instrumental reasons to
learn to log in or to write a letter. And there are costs of not doing so.
Second, this study offers an example of the migration-driven way in which
print literacy and digital communication are being revalued—by ordinary read
ers, writers, and digital technology users—in relation to each other. Many par
ticipants told me that they never wrote or received letters. But such statements do
not mean that participants do not value print literacy. As digital communication
means proliferate, and as more Brazilians have access to them, many continue to
cherish, or perhaps newly appreciate, print texts. Likewise, digital technologies of
communication, such as video chat, are also being revalued in relation to print
literacy, depending on the labor required to learn to use certain interfaces or buy
expensive hardware, such as laptop computers. Print and digital means of com
munication may not exist relationally forever, but they did for these participants,
whose transnational experiences coincided with a moment of rapid technological
change. All could recall a pre-computer age and all saw new computer technologies
through their pasts and presents with paper.
Finally, this article has examined the understudied phenomenon of homeland
literacies. Even in middle-class, middle-of-the-road areas in the middle of Brazil,
transnational emigration has touched local lives and literacies. We have seen that
writing travels even when people stay put, with implications for homeland residents'
abilities to leverage literacy for professional and social gain. A homeland-based
study thus allows researchers an opportunity to integrate local and global theories
of literacy in ways that do not overly determine writing's autonomy or insist on
an exclusively local context. Instead, homeland studies can reveal how, why, and
at what cost and what benefit writing travels, as everyday readers and writers and
video chatters reach across the otherwise mute expanse of physical distance to
sustain relationships with others.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank the U.S. Department of Education/University of Illinois Latin A
and Caribbean Studies Program for funding data collection, the University of Wiscon
son graduate school research competition for funding data analysis, and the Spencer Fo
for funding revisions. For feedback that greatly improved this article, the author is grat
colleagues at the summer seminar in transnational literacies at the University of Massa
Amherst; to Ellen Cushman, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, and Catherine Prendergast; to the E
Department junior faculty lunch group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and
anonymous reviewers.
Appendix A
Interview Protocol
What is the highest level of education you have completed?

What is the highest level your parents and grandparents completed?

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Tell me about how you learned to write and read. Who was there, what materials were
present, how did you feel about it, what provoked it?
Tell me about your writing in school.
Tell me about your writing in your workplace.
Tell me about your writing in your place of worship.
Tell me about your writing at home.
Tell me about any personal writing you may do.
Tell me about how you learned to use a computer. Who was there, what materials were
present, how did you feel about it, what provoked it?
Tell me about any plans you may have to migrate.
Tell me how you/your family member decided to migrate.
Tell me about your communication with your family abroad (frequency, via what media,
what motivates the communication).
Tell me about how you have learned to communicate with them. Tell me what it is like
to communicate via the different media you have described.
Tell me what you send and/or receive from distant family by post and by Internet. Tell
me what about these objects is valuable to you.
If you use the computer for communication with family, to what other uses do you put
it? Have you taught anyone anything with this technology?
Tell me how you think your migration/your family member's migration has affected
your life.
NOTES
1. All participants' names are pseudonyms.

2. The larger study of which this article is a part is comparative, detailing the transnational literacy
practices of migrants' family members and return migrants both in Jaü and in a similarly sized
town in Eastern Europe that has been ravaged by brain drain.
3.1 develop a variation of this framework in American by Paper (Vieira, 2016), in which the concept
of sociomateriality functions as a way to understand how immigration papers, as literacy artifacts,
infuse migrants'writing practices stateside in ways regulated by bureaucratic institutions—namely,
the state. The instantiations of sociomateriality presented in these two works are united by at
tention to macrosocial structures (economic neoliberalism or the state), literacy's materiality
(technologies of communication or immigration papers), and deeply felt experiences of literacy
(communicating across borders with family or writing to achieve the "American Dream"). While
the conceptual similarities remain constant across these field sites, the specific incarnations differ,
reflecting the contextual contingency of literacy practices.
4. For example, in the home of one mother of a study-abroad student, a maid in uniform brought
us coffee, indicating the mother's upper-middle-class status.
5. Those who traveled for higher education followed a similar pattern as those who studied abroad.
6.1 used wifzngrather than the broader term literacy because writing describes the part of literacy
that is particularly active across economically tumultuous fields (see, for example, Brandt, 2015).
7. Also, more soldiers may have learned to read during this period so they could read instructions
on their weapons (Vincent, 2000).

193.60.238.240 on Mon, 22 Apr 2024 09:13:17 +00:00
8. Besnier (1991) also suggests that letter writing on the Tuvalu Islands was motivated by labor
migration—even though literacy had been brought there by Samoan missionaries for the very
different purpose of missionary work. He calls this a "'spontaneous' transfer of consumption
oriented literacy skills in religious contexts to letter writing," an activity documented elsewhere
(Besnier, 1991, p. 572).
9. Age may have been a factor in her decision not to learn: the other participant who did not learn
to use a laptop that had been remitted by his son from the United States, loäo, was also over 60
and retired. Assessing the impact of age on the circulation of writing remittances would require
further study.
10. Martes (2011) shows that for many Brazilians, it is seen as chic to have lived abroad.
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Writing Remittances: Migration-Driven Literacy Learning in a Brazilian Homeland

Author(s): Kate Vieira

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24889943

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Study Context: Jau, Brazil

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Theoretical Framework; Sociomateriality

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Methods: Tracking Writing Remittances

Defining Literacy Historically

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because it reflects how participants themselves reported understanding literacy. For

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Table 1. Migrants' Family Members an

Felipe; Brother ICQ, Skype Hardware: Traded

Maya; Aunt Phone, Skype

continued on next page

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Pseudonym; Relationship Primary Mode(s)Writing Invested

Sylvia; Son studied Letters, email, Practice: Uses Skype and

Emerson; Studied in Skype

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Findings and Discussion

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She even worked in telecommunications!" Similarly, to supplement his income

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Post-Internet: Video Chat and Print across Social Class

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through their ongoing historical imbrication in macrosocial economic trends and

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pronounced with an exaggerated twang mocking an uneducated, country Brazilian

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Writing Remittances: The Investment

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Conclusion: Material, Local, Transnational

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What is the highest level of education you have completed?

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1. All participants' names are pseudonyms.

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Trajectories of information and communica

Baca, D. (2008). New Concepts in Latino Centro de Estudos sobre as Tecnologias da

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Duffy, J. (2007b). Koven, M. (2014). from

Gerber, D. (2006). Authors of intheir

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Prior, P. (2014). Combining phenomenolog from http://www.un.org/en/development/

ical and sociohistoric frameworks for study desa/population/migration/publications/

ing literate practices: Some implications of migrationreport/docs/MigrationReport