Lynnette Arnold, Living Together across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 248

When global capitalism prevents families from covering their basic needs, and neoliberal logics force individuals to sacrifice themselves for their families' survival, migration is a difficult but likely path for many.The cross-border family separation that results is common enough in places like El Salvador that these families become the subject of widespread media and political discourses.On the one hand, migrants are lauded as national heroes for sending remittances, thereby keeping national economies afloat; on the other hand, they are just as likely to be vilified.Considered the destructive agents causing 'ruptured families', politicians selfservingly blame them for all social ills, including poverty and crime.In Living Together across Borders, linguistic anthropologist Lynnette Arnold masterfully talks back, revealing the harms of such pervasive neoliberal discourse while also underscoring the agency, creativity and care families meaningfully maintain across great distance and over many years.Transnational families, in which core members live in different countries, are not new.In the past, however, contact between them was slow and infrequent, making communication and the maintenance of ties difficult.In the era of widespread access to mobile phones, Arnold demonstrates that not only is communication more frequent, but that these regular conversations constitute forms of care and convivenciaa kind of living together made possible through speech acts that perform multiple functions for families.First, she argues, we need to understand phone calls, video messages, even brief greetings as communicative practices of care.Yes, these families show care by sending remittances and using remittance money responsibly, but their love for each other is also present in all their communications, especially in the ways they check in on each other, ask about their ongoing lives, and reminisce together about moments when they still lived together before migration separated them.She also compellingly argues that conversations and language 'reveal both the historical forces and global inequities that these