Marcelo Borges

This project focuses on late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century labor migration from Portugal to the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Through the study of family correspondence, it examines the ways in which migrant husbands and their wives who remained in Portugal evaluated and negotiated their migratory strategies, the opportunities at home and abroad, as well as their hopes, dreams, and the perceptions of their fluid reality. In particular, I will explore the possibilities of a variety of immigrant correspondence commonly known as call letters or cartas de chamada. These letters were used by Portuguese migrants to ask their families to join them abroad. Call letters were part of ongoing epistolary exchanges among members of transnational families.

Call letters offer a rare opportunity to learn about the motives of migration, the lives of migrant families, the process of migration and decision-making, and the ways migrants viewed their places of origin and destination. Call letters are also unique in that the imminent reunification brings to the fore explicit considerations of family strategies, aspirations, and negotiations. Also, the impeding trip results in a wealth of information about the journey and its preparations. Finally, since the majority of these letters were sent to married women by their husbands, they open a unique window into the analysis of family and gender relations in these transnational families.

As means of communication across vast spaces, call letters provided occasions to share achievements and failures, negotiate roles and expectations created by distance and separation, and facilitate the functioning of transnational families and the process of family reunification. They also reflect the existence of conflicts and tensions among family members in general, and migrant husbands and their wives, in particular. In short, they provide an intimate, gendered, migrant-centered record of the experience of turn-of-the-twentieth century migrant families.