Letters from Portuguese migrants

What is it about?

This article analyzes the language of call letters, a particular type of family letter written by Portuguese migrant men to call their wives and children to join them abroad. In particular, it examines the ways in which migrant husbands and their wives adapted to living in transnational households and to changing roles at home and abroad. It shows how family strategies of migration were discussed within narrative frameworks of family and marital love and duty, by making use of a variety of arguments that combined discourses of both material and emotional well-being. The discussion is based on the narrative patterns, recurrent themes, and argumentative strategies of a corpus of over 2200 letters, from the 1870s to the 1920s.

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Why is it important?

In Portuguese migrant letters, discussions of marital duty, loyalty, and reciprocity contributed to a language of affect built on narratives of responsibility and dependability that reinforced the idea of migration as a family project.