Adoption, Immigration, and Privatization: Transnational Transformations in Family
Article notes[1]
In this article, I explore neoliberal globalization and its paradoxical
effects on the "private" space of the family through a story about three
imagined but common sorts of people. The first is a Guatemalan infant,
adopted by a U.S. family. The second is a Guatemalan woman who
is, let's say, the child's mother—and someone who left behind other
children and family members to migrate to the U.S., where she works as
an undocumented nanny. Consider how these two people are valued—and how
borders produce that value. The cost of the infant's adoption, for her
U.S. parents, was about $30,000. The child's mother, on the other hand,
is valued at very little, if we think about the wages she can probably earn,
or what her life was worth, crossing Mexico and then the Arizona
desert, where she was twice as likely as a man to die. While we dwell on
how unfair that is, we could recross the border and notice that their
relative "value" is the opposite in Guatemala. The child is most likely
Mayan, one of more than a dozen distinct indigenous groups. One could
say that her existence is the result of the failure of the genocidal
campaigns of the state in the 1980s and '90s.[2]
If, for some reason, this child's family couldn't raise her, she might be lucky enough to go
to school or even to find an NGO-based orphanage, or she might live on
the streets in communities with children as young as two or three. She
might well be working for wages or panhandling by the time she was six
or seven.
Adoption to the U.S. is serving as a privatized welfare system for
the ferociously neoliberal Guatemalan state. This is bitterly fitting,
given the U.S. role in defeating other visions of the state in
Guatemala.[3]
The child's mother, we might say, has a higher "value," as
measured by her wages or the likelihood of dying of treatable disease or
malnutrition.
In figuring out how borders reverse the relative value of these
lives, we need to consider them in relation to another problem of
domestic labor and value—that of a middle or upper-class woman in the
U.S., usually but not always white, who might adopt this
Guatemalan baby and employ the mother. Like the women whose story Arlene Hochschild
told in her 1989 book The Second Shift, this woman, well-educated
and potentially well paid, probably entered the labor force in her
twenties, unlike many women in previous generations, to offset the
historic decline in real wages that affected households beginning in the
1970s, creating a crisis at home. Women were still doing most of the
housework—and fighting with their husbands about it, as Hochschild tells
it. At the time, with women's wages becoming critical to more and more
household budgets, it seemed like men would eventually have to do more
childcare and housework. It turned out, though, that there was another
way of negotiating this problem for middle-class families: delaying
childbearing until a later time, when a mother might be further along in
her career (and receiving higher wages),[4]
and then hiring a nanny from
outside of the U.S. for relatively low wages.[5]
But delayed childbearing
is a risky reproductive strategy, as both partners' fertility declines
as they age, conspicuously with women beyond the age of 35, which is
more or less the moment when she might be established professionally.
Rising ages of reproduction for women have led to increased rates of
impaired fertility,[6]
and this has been met, in part, through
transnational adoption. This narrative is also relevant for queer
families, who might not have a specifically gendered labor crisis at
home but are nevertheless caught up in the same problem of managing
domestic and waged labor in the context of child-rearing and a
structural "infertility."
This article explores a genealogy of how these bodies, families, and
their labor came to be valued differently, looking at some of the many
factors that might account for it. First, I examine how transnational
adoption from Latin America emerged in the 1970s and '80s in
conjunction with civil and dirty wars. Second, I explore how moral
panics around race and parenting rendered some children less desirable
than others. Finally, I look at how related (and sometimes similar)
hysterics around parenting turned middle-class parents into guardians of
these children and rendered "security" a keyword of the family as much as
the state. Taken together, these three
developments account for the peculiar and contradictory story of the
relative values of these three figures.
Page: 1 | 2 | 3
Next page
|
