Transnational Relationships: The Struggle to Communicate Across Borders

Abstract

In transnational contexts, and particularly in situations where people have physically migrated across international borders and may be separated by other barriers as well, communication cannot be presumed and should be problematized. To date, however, research focusing on transnational migration has emphasized the kinds of ties people maintain despite corporal separation, such as negotiating transnational households and community associations and conducting business ventures and political movements. How people accomplish these tasks across borders has been less developed in the literature, although authors do acknowledge that modern telecommunications technologies have facilitated communication, particularly in comparison to the tools available to earlier generations of migrants. In contrast, this paper focuses on the ways migrants from a very rural area of El Salvador communicate across borders, identifying the roles that gender and power play, with particular attention to the dynamics between spouses.