In Receive Our Memories, José Orozco, associate professor of history at Whittier College, offers a unique set of primary documents accompanied by a family history and local history, insightfully contextualized within the first half of twentieth-century Mexican history. It examines the life of a campesino (and great-grandfather of the author) Luz Moreno (1877–1953) from the town of San Miguel el Alto, Jalisco, through the 170 letters written to his eldest daughter Pancha (1901–2002), who had migrated to Stockton, California. Luz's letters reveal, from the perspective of a poor man in his own words, aspects of his philosophical inner self—one quite different from the taciturn and stoic outward persona. Indeed, Moreno's letters—sent to his eldest daughter from 1950, after she married rather late in life and emigrated, until his death a few years later—are as complex as they were frequent. Reserved and a man of few words in person, the ailing patriarch reveals in his letters to his favorite daughter his intense love for her and an “interior monologue,” while his prose “displays a conscious and persistent literary intent” (p. 10). In the historiography of immigration, Orozco's book is unique in that most letters examined to tell stories of migration are from the migrant's perspective, not from that of a family member left behind to struggle with the physical and emotional separation from a loved one. Orozco explains that Moreno “saw emigration as a threat to his religion, to the coherence of his family, and to the viability of a way of life that he once believed was immutable” (p. 40). In Moreno's own words from 1951, “Many go illegally to that Promised Land in search of the Dollar and they give more importance to it than to tending the corn in their own country. Compared to the Dollar, everything seems to be stacked against corn... What shall we do? Shall we only eat Dollars?” (p. 40). His letters and Orozco's analysis reveal the negative effects of modernity and modernization.Orozco has organized the content thematically and translated 80 of the original letters in these chapters, providing historical and historiographical context for each one. The themes include affective bonds, religion, poverty, letter writing and newspaper reading, and old age and dying. The first chapter tells the history of San Miguel el Alto and weaves the story of the entire Moreno clan into local and national political developments, with a focus on religious resistance. Especially rich in details about Pancha's life in Jalisco, this chapter decenters the somewhat persistent triumphalist narrative of the 1910 revolution through a careful depiction of these fervent Catholics and their participation in both Cristero rebellions (from 1926 and 1929 and from the mid-1930s to early 1940s, respectively) and the Sinarquista movement (from 1937 to 1950). Indeed, Orozco states that some Alteños considered the Cristero rebellions to be the true revolution rather than the 1910 movement against Porfirio Díaz. The story of the Moreno family highlights Catholic resistance to state power and the complexities of traditional, yet at times quite fluid, gender roles and norms. For example, Pancha served as secretary of feminine action for the Sinarquista party in the late 1930s and 1940s, for which she performed work considered acceptable for her gender such as sewing the party's flags, feeding members, and coordinating children's activities. But she also actively recruited new members, traveling with her uncle to neighboring locales. In 1916, the family had refused to let Pancha marry her sweetheart Juan; she defied them when he returned in 1950 to marry her, and the male family members eventually accepted the situation.Receive Our Memories demonstrates the elderly Luz Moreno's self-awareness of his life in poverty and how avid newspaper reading and his Catholic faith made him conscious of the global interconnectedness of “el miserable pueblo.” The letters also speak with sophistication to international political events and ideologies. Of particular concern to Moreno when writing to his daughter were the godlessness, greed, and capitalistic excesses of the United States and the threats that these posed to her Catholic soul. Perhaps less predictably, Moreno weighed in on heavy political and economic issues like the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the bracero program with tremendous detail. The book sheds light on the importance of the family economy (both in Jalisco and transnationally through remittances) and the indissoluble bonds of family in the face of migration. The text is accompanied by sketches by artist José Lozano, meant to harken back to “lexical-visual collaborations undertaken in the 1930s and 1940s” between Mexican artists and American radical intellectuals (p. x). Moreno's ability to connect to global political, economic, and social developments and his self-awareness about poverty and his relation to others in that struggle worldwide in his writings make them a unique source. It will be of interest to historians and anthropologists of Mexico and scholars studying the elderly, migration, and poverty in any geographic region. The letters combined with Orozco's careful contextualization of the economic, political, and religious milieus make the book ideal for undergraduate students and scholars alike.