Migrant Letters

Marcelo J. Borges is Professor of History at Dickinson College, PA, USA, where he teaches Latin American history and migration history. He has published on migration, labor, and migrant letters. He is the author of Chains of Gold: Portuguese migration to Argentina in transatlantic perspective.Sonia Cancian is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at University College, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE. She is the author of numerous publications on migration, gender, emotions, and migrant correspondence, including Families, lovers and their letters: Italian postwar migration to Canada (2010).

• Introduction. Reconsidering the migrant letter: from the experience of migrants to the language of migrants 1. Moving backward and moving on: nostalgia, significant others, and social reintegration in nineteenth-century British immigrant personal correspondence 2 ‘I never could forget my darling mother’: the language of recollection in a corpus of female Irish emigrant correspondence 3. Adjusting and fulfilling masculine roles: the epistolary persona in Dutch transatlantic letters 4. ‘If it is not too expensive, then you can send me sugar’: money matters among migrants and their families 5. For the good of the family: migratory strategies and affective language in Portuguese migrant letters, 1870s–1920s 6. Settler colonialism and migrant letters: the Forbes family and letter-writing in South Africa 1850–1922 7. Shared letters: writing and reading practices in the correspondence of migrant families in northern Spain 8. The transnational life and letters of the Venegas family, 1920s to 1950s