Diego Arispe-Bazán: The argument of the book hinges on the concepts of communicative care and convivencia (living together). How did you identify these phenomena ethnographically, and how have they helped you conceptualize your research?
Lynette Arnold: Living Together Across Borders explores how members of transnational families find ways to convivir (live together) despite sustained cross-border separation. Convivencia is central to how people in rural El Salvador understand relationships. Families, co-workers, classmates, and even entire villages, dedicate significant effort to set aside times and spaces for convivencia. Sometimes these are large convivios (gatherings) or other events to mark specific holidays (Mother’s Day, Easter Week, the annual community anniversary, and so on), but they can also take the form of more everyday rituals such as visiting together and sharing meals. When I interviewed members of transnational families, both in El Salvador and the United States, many mentioned that they missed the ways they used to convivir with loved ones. But at the same time, from participating in these transnational networks, I knew that families were still finding ways to convivir despite borders and that language was central to these efforts. In talking on the phone to relatives in both countries, I noticed regular moments of convivencia as we reminisced about the past, laughed at jokes or the antics of our children, congratulated or comforted one another, and imagined the future.
My research aimed to trace this cross-border convivencia more closely. I collaborated with two extended families to gather recordings of their transnational phone calls. When I started to analyze the recordings, it became clear to me that their communicative labor was most accurately characterized in terms of care. I understand care as a practice for sustaining life and wellbeing. The book argues that language is crucial to care, not only because it facilitates practical and material care (like sending gifts or remittances), but also because it can itself enact care, forging and maintaining the relational bedrock that is the foundation of all care. At the same time, people use language to make sense of care, specifying which actions, enacted by whom, in which contexts, count as care. With the term communicative care, I bring together these different relationships into a single framework which suggests that language facilitates, enacts, and signifies care. The book demonstrates that this approach sheds light on how transnational families live together across borders through language.
Diego Arispe-Bazán: Against the adage of “actions speak louder than words” your book demonstrates that talk is social action. This is most clear in your analysis of family as a process, (re)created through interactions of care. How would you say your work extends linguistic anthropology and anthropology writ large’s theorizations of kinship?
Lynette Arnold: As your question suggests, my approach to kinship in this book is deeply informed by scholarship that understands family as something that is actively produced, rather than as a pre-given biological structure. I am thinking here of feminist work on reproductive labor that highlights the work of family life and also queer scholarship on chosen family, which has challenged a presumptive biological basis for kinship. In addition, anthropological work on practices of kinwork and relatedness have also deeply informed my thinking.
My contribution to this scholarship is to show that language, in the form of everyday conversations within the family, is absolutely crucial to the way that family is done. For those who face seemingly permanent separation from their loved ones, often without the possibility of visits, language is a central resource through which they continually work to constitute themselves as family.
My long-term research over several years allowed me to see how families used language to sustain themselves over time. In-the-moment uses of language became ways of maintaining family through individual life-course transitions and across generations. The book includes the story of two brothers, who lived in El Salvador when I began my research but who later migrated. Learning how to use language in new ways—for instance, responding to remittance requests—was part of how they began to live into being migrant members of the family. In another example, young children were taught to send greetings to migrant kin they had never met, socializing them into cross-border family life and their place in it. Interestingly, the children of migrants didn’t receive this same socialization, with profound implications for how transnational families will be maintained across generations.
As it makes family, language thus shapes the individual life-course while also producing particular family configurations that include some and exclude others. This is particularly clear when families are not together in the same place, but I would argue that language is relevant for the production of kinship no matter the context.
Diego Arispe-Bazán: I am very interested in your explanation of how nationalism, as moral impetus, gets laminated onto relationships of care within interactions between transnational family members. Have you ever noticed a breakdown or a rejection of nationalism’s assumptions during your research?
Lynette Arnold: The first chapter of the book looks at 30 years of state-endorsed discourses about migration in El Salvador. I show that in the face of shifting geopolitical conditions, these discourses consistently mobilize heteropatriarchal ideas of family care to call migrants to different nation building projects—whether rebuilding the nation after the civil war, sustaining the national economy through remittances, or becoming “working ambassadors” who represent the upstanding Salvadoran national character in the face of racist discourses in the US that target Central Americans. Regardless of the project, the call to migrants is to embody being good citizens by caring for their nation as they would for their family.
These discourses profoundly shape how transnational family members interact with one another. For instance, the expectation that migrants must be economic providers for the family was deeply embedded in normative ideas about how certain forms of communication should unfold: who should say what, to whom, and when. Nevertheless, families did not interpret family providing as a nationalist project. In fact, migrants instead often signified their care as motivated by intergenerational reciprocity, as a way of ‘paying back’ the care their parents had provided to them. So at the level of signification there was some resistance to the state-endorsed merging of family provision with participation in the nation. But this was also enacted in practice through the many ways that migrant relatives engaged in non-economic forms of care. Looking closely at these phone calls revealed so much emotional and relational care, and I was particularly struck by the ways that male migrants communicatively cared for their male relatives. I suggest in the book that these everyday practices of communicative care are a form of subtle contestation of nationalist projects that would co-opt family care to its own ends.
Diego Arispe-Bazán: In chapters 4 and 5 you describe practices of dialogism between transnational family members in building proximity. Can you say more about how gender roles affected this linguistic/discursive phenomenon?
Lynette Arnold: In both of these chapters, I present a close analysis of communicative practices that happen regularly in transnational conversations.Chapter 4 shows how family members develop new genres for managing remittance requests, in which non-migrant relatives used complaints to elicit particular kinds of responses from their migrant kin. In remittance negotiations, family members generally adhere to genre conventions regardless of their gender or that of their interlocutor: what shapes how people engage in these interactions more strongly is whether they are migrants or non-migrants.
The relevance of migration also manifests in the collaborative reminiscing I analyze in Chapter 5, though here the focus is on dialogism in the form of syntax, where interlocutors take up and recycle one another’s phrasing in order to build interactional alignments. While I cannot make conclusive statements about gender given the general underrepresentation of women migrants among my participants, gender did seem to matter for this collaborative remembering practice. People seemed more likely to engage in these joint reminiscences with same-gender interlocutors. Remembering together enacts affective and relational carework, so this may perhaps explain the same-gender preference.
Ultimately, these chapters show that men do engage in relational and emotional care, contra to discourses that cast them only as economic providers. This disjuncture between gender ideologies and practices is perhaps not surprising, but reveals the importance of looking closely at how gender is enacted through language, not just how gender roles are described. Of course, gender ideologies do continue to matter. My book shows that care within transnational families is inequitably distributed. Chapter 2 describes how intergenerational care—including communicative labor—is organized in ways that often assign the most thankless and onerous care work to women. But women sometimes used this communicative care work to claim greater space in family decision-making processes. Thus, specific practices of communicative care can be analyzed to gain greater insight into how gendered ideologies and practices coincide and also where there are disjunctures that might provide leverage for change.
Diego Arispe-Bazán: Ethnographic intimacy as both concept and experience comes through in your project. How would you say you feature this in the book, both as ethnographer and writer? Would you say there is something particular about intimacy in the ethnographic context for linguistic anthropologists, given that our focus is specifically upon language and communication?
Lynette Arnold: I love this question so much! Thank you for asking it!
The research on which this book is based was quite intimate, most obviously because of its focus on everyday family conversations. But it is also deeply personal to me because it was to some extent motivated by my struggles to navigate my own very different experience of family separation. I write about this in the preface, and doing so was certainly an exercise in vulnerability, which I think is a crucial for building intimacy. The research was also based on close relationships with many of the participants whom I have known for over two decades now. We have supported each other through many life challenges, and within these ongoing relationships, my research was incorporated as part of families’ cross-border care endeavors.
All of these experiences and relationships are part of the voice of this book, of why I wrote it as I did and why I am present in the book in the ways that I am. The book aims to be deeply humanizing: not eliding the immense challenges that transnational families face but also honoring the creative ways that they navigate seemingly insurmountable obstacles. In an era of intense anti-immigrant sentiment that often targets Central Americans and criminalizes family ties, the close relationships I had with participants motivated a certain kind of focus and storytelling. I worked hard to make the book accessible to readers outside of linguistic anthropology, and also created a teaching guide which includes key terms and discussion questions for each chapter.
As to the question about disciplinary intimacies in ethnographic work within the field, I hesitate to make any blanket statements, because linguistic anthropologists approach their work in different ways, with a range of motivations and relationships. But I do think that the methods used in ethnographic studies of language and communication can open the door to intimacy. Recording interactions in whatever setting brings us into people’s lives in profound ways. So I’d say our disciplinary orientation can be an invitation to intimacy. Whether we choose to accept this invitation is up to us, but from this research, I can’t imagine any other way to do this work!
CaMP Anthropology 