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Amherst I n writing Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, Tomás Mario Kalmar has composed a parable about literacy. A simple story used to demonstrate a lesson with "serious political implications" (xv), Kalmar's parable tells the tale of a group of "illegal" migrants in Southern Illinois in the eighties, working together to create an "illegal" alphabet to get by in their labor camp. After a series of violent events between the migrant and anglo populations in town, the migrants leverage their history of biliteracy-primarily among indigenous languages and Spanishto write English como de veras se oye, the way it really sounds. To do this, they break linguistic laws, creating bilingual glossaries that are governed by hybrid English/ Spanish sounds. The question of legality gives the parable its deep resonance: In order for their labor to have value, migrants must cross borders and challenge the laws that police national/linguistic geographies. In the book's terms of literacy learning, "the law itself poses a major part of the problem to be solved" (77). In other words, Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy is a story about migrants working at the borders of literacy in order to survive. That this story is true, and stems from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, makes it a book with lasting relevance for any literacy teacher or researcher working with communities whose creative, strategic, and serious writing work is marginalized or deemed somehow illegal. This review covers the second edition of Illegal Alphabets, published in 2015 by Routledge. Beyond a new set of scholarly commentaries at the end of the book, the argument, organization, and contribution of the book remain the same as the 2001 first edition. In what follows, I review the book's argument and the shape of its chapters. In Illegal Alphabets Kalmar argues that alphabets have always been social constructions and that such literate productions are deemed illegitimate, suspect, or illegal when their writers are. As James Paul Gee notes in his commentary, even the

Contemporary international migration produces a great deal of bureaucratic writing activity. This article reports on a study of one bureaucratic literacy practice-correspondence-of 25 international migrants in the United States. Contextual and practice-based analysis of data collected through literacy history interviews shows that (a) by virtue of living transnational lives, migrant writers develop correspondence practices that seem vernacular, but in fact take on the hegemonic qualities of modern bureaucracy, and (b) when composing everyday correspondence, migrant writers, rather than being subject to bureaucracy's whims, take up bureaucratic roles that allow them to manage their own and others' economic and geographic mobility. These findings complicate claims that migrant correspondence simply maintains relationships or fosters cultural cohesion. Migrant writers, while often corresponding to keep in touch with family and friends elsewhere, also adopt the practices of bureaucracy, becoming participants in the management of people on the move.International migration has increased in the last two decades, with numbers rising from 154 million in 1990 to 232 million in 2013. A total of 46 million

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