Laura Briggs, "Adoption, Immigration, and Privatization: Transnational Transformations in Family"
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In some ways, it is not surprising that, during this period of anxiety, there was an explosion of interest from the U.S. in transnational adoption. Middle-class domestic space had grown increasingly important, but more women were starting families late and struggling with fertility. Moral panics about "crack babies" and FAS left many who, in an earlier generation, might have adopted children from U.S. foster care leery of potential disabilities. A vision of unregulated markets was gaining real traction, and, at least ideologically, the state was in decline. Manufacturing plants began to move easily and repeatedly to wherever poverty was the greatest, assuring the lowest wages; Third World workers began to be seen as interchangeable, and babies entered this world as similarly mobile.

Adoption, like jobs, followed gradients of poverty and civil disruption. Wars in Korea and Vietnam produced the first big waves of transnational adoption, and then adoption followed in the wake of advancing neoliberalism and civil war. In the late '70s and the '80s, the most significant sending countries, besides South Korea, were Colombia, Peru, Guatemala, Chile, and Paraguay.[20] This is a striking list, as each was run by a right-wing government with close ties to the U.S., and each was engaged in a dirty war against leftist insurgents that included massive human rights violations against civilian populations and used "disappearances"—clandestine arrests, kidnapping, and murder—as a tactic of terror.[21]

Activism by human rights groups like the Asociación Pro Búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desaparecidos in El Salvador and Todos por el Reencuentro in Guatemala made it increasingly clear that child kidnapping, followed by adoption within the country or by a U.S. or European family, was also a tactic of political terror.[22] Court cases from Argentina to El Salvador used the disappearance and adoption of children as the major—sometimes the only—civil war crime that can be prosecuted.[23] As a result, organizations of parents of disappeared children and the grown children themselves have emerged as some of the most important groups in Latin America's pro-democracy movements that demand legal accountability for war crimes.

In one place—Guatemala—rates of transnational adoption doubled in the year after the Peace Accords were signed and increased almost a hundred-fold within a decade.[24] Guatemala has been called the country where neoliberalism has advanced the farthest, at least in part because anti-Communism was most successful there.[25] For thirty years, the state tried to kill every trade unionist, member of an agrarian cooperative, intellectual, or member of a progressive political party, only to then turn to genocide of indigenous people, whom they suspected of someday possibly having progressive sympathies. When the killing was done, the leaders were pardoned and stayed in power. Those who kidnapped children and sold them through adoptions during the war continued to oppose the implementation of international human rights frameworks for adoption. Despite repeated reforms, each a tacit admission that perhaps all was not well before, many still regard the Guatemalan adoption system, in the words of one human rights lawyer, as "a nest of corruption."[26]

To return, then, to the story with which I began, the conditions under which middle-class U.S. households decide to hire Latin American women to do household labor or adopt Guatemalan babies, or that Guatemalan women decide to migrate or relinquish their children for adoption, have changed dramatically since 1970. I have tried to describe the historical, material contexts in which individuals do or do not make these choices and to characterize some of the things that have made them more likely in this post-Cold War moment in vigorously neoliberal states like the U.S. and Guatemala. Privatization has meant the expansion of "the private" for some and its virtual evisceration for others. We have understood neoliberalism to be about states and economies, but it is at least as true to say that it is a story about families.

Endnotes

1. A long version of this article is forthcoming as "Foreign and Domestic" in Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreñas, Intimate Labors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Care, Domestic, and Sex Work (Rutgers, 2010). [Return to text]

2. The Guatemalan Truth Commission report called it genocide; see Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico. Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio. 12 vols. Guatemala: Oficina de Servicios para Proyectos las Naciones Unidas, 1991. [Return to text]

3. I first came to understand external adoption as a kind of alternative to a welfare system after reading Tobias Hübinette's dissertation. See Tobias Hübinette, "Comforting an Orphaned Nation: Representations of International Adoption and Adopted Koreans in Korean Popular Culture" (Stockholm University, 2005). The ideology battle in Guatemala was particularly stark, and I am not thinking exclusively of the kinds of positions espoused by the guerilleras, although that would be clear enough, but also all the labor unions, agrarian cooperatives, and other grassroots democratic institutions suppressed through murder by the Guatemalan state. See e.g., Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2000). [Return to text]

4. Women's age at first child has been climbing steadily since 1970, actually increasing almost every year, from 20.1 in 1970 to more than 25 in 2002. It has increased more and faster for white women than for black women, with women "of Hispanic origin" in the middle. This would be consistent with it being a strategy for maintaining middle-class status, as more white women than black or "Hispanic" women are middle-class, rather than working class. In 2002, the average age of first birth for all white women was almost 27—getting surprisingly close to ages at which fertility is difficulty. A. Chandra et al., "Fertility, Family Planning, and Reproductive Health of U.S. Women: Data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth," in Vital Health Statistics (Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, 2005). [Return to text]

5. In fact, with respect to the nanny part of the equation, Hochschild, among others, has pointed this out. See her essay "Love and Gold," Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2003). Although I am troubled in this essay by her assignation of the term "pre-modern" to anyone's late 20th century childhood—the whole notion seems preposterous at best, a hallmark of the anthropology of premodern "savages" at worst—I do appreciate the effort to think through care-work in a transnational context. Another work that makes this point eloquently is Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2001). [Return to text]

6. Although not, we should note, the "epidemic" of infertility widely and hysterically reported in the press, that Susan Faludi comments on in Backlash. Rates of actual infertility are declining. Impaired fertility is part of normal aging. A. Chandra et al., p. 2. [Return to text]

7. A number of people have made this point; see e.g. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, "I'm Here, but I'm There: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood," Gender and Society 11, no. 5 (1997); Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica : Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2006 counted 37.2% Latino or Hispanic "maids or housekeeping workers," and 19.9% African-American. It recorded no nannies, but "childcare workers" were 17.3% Latina and 17% Black. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, Sex, Race and Hispanic Origin," (Washington, DC: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007). (It also found this to be the segment of the employed population most likely to be poor). Bureau of Labor Statistics, "A Profile of the Working Poor," (Washington, D.C.: Department of Labor, 2000). [Return to text]

8. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). [Return to text]

9. My favorite invocation of these politics is Barbara Ehrenreich's outraged questions about what happened to them as she encountered resistance from feminists to her discussion in her New Yorker article about the humiliating sexual politics of "maid" work. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, 1st ed. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001). There is a fabulous new literature on welfare rights; see Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Felicia Ann Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New York; London: New York University Press, 2003); Patricia Hill Collins, "Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood," in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994); Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Our Mothers' Grief: Racial-Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families," Journal of Family History 13 (1988); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic Overview," in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994). [Return to text]

10. Laura Briggs, "Orphaning the Children of Welfare: 'Crack Babies,' Race, and Adoption Reform," in Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, ed. Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2006), 2. [Return to text]

11. Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). [Return to text]

12. Jane Erikson, "Doctors Mislabel Defects: Fetal Alcohol Misdiagnosed," Arizona Daily Star, November 27, 1995; HE Hoyme, L Hauck, and DJ Meyer, "Accuracy of Diagnosis of Alcohol Related Birth Defects by Non-Medical Professionals in a Native American Population" (paper presented at the David W. Smith Morphogenesis and Malformations Workshop, Mont Tremblant, Québec, CANADA, 1994). In a personal communication, Hoyme sent me the paper but told me he never published the research. [Return to text]

13. Janet Golden, "An Argument That Goes Back to the Womb": The Demedicalization of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, 1973-1992," Journal of Social History 33, no. 2 (1999). [Return to text]

14. Charles Trueheart, "Marriage for Better or Words: The Dorris-and-Erdrich Team, Creating Fiction Without Friction," Washington Post, 19 October 1988. [Return to text]

15. Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006). Argues that Spock is contradictory and that, on the one hand, he tells mothers to trust themselves, while on the other, he continues to inculcate the reign of the expert doctor, the one who really knows. Fair enough. But as she also notes, he is at a minimum a lot more friendly than the earlier advice books, precisely because he tells mothers to trust themselves. For the post-Spock period, Apple says there is a vastly expanded number of experts offering incredibly heterogeneous advice. Perhaps. But I disagree that there is no orthodoxy; in my experience, even casual conversations with people over 30 reveals a remarkable unanimity in opinion that those who became parents in the decades after 1990 are far more anxious than the generation before. [Return to text]

16. Stearns, Anxious Parents. [Return to text]

17. James D. Sargent, Magda G. Peck, and Michael Weitzman, "Bicycle-Mounted Child Seats and Injury Risk and Prevention," American Journal of Disease of the Child 142 (1986). And www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/injury/New-fact-sheet03/BicycleHelmetUse.pdf. [Return to text]

18. Leavitt, Freakonomics. [Return to text]

19. Stearns, Anxious Parents; Steven Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989). [Return to text]

20. Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Insititute: International Adoption Facts (Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Insititute, 2003 [cited August 30 2007]); available from http://www.adoptioninstitute.org/FactOverview/international.html. [Return to text]

21. See e.g., Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre : Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Steve Stern, Remembering Pinochet's Chile: On the Eve of London 1998, The Memory Box of Pinochet's Chile (Durham: Duke, 2004); Winifred Tate, "Paramilitaries in Colombia," Brown Journal of World Affairs 8, no. 1 (2001); Angela Cornell and Kenneth Roberts, "Democracy, Counter-Insurgency, and Human Rights: The Case of Peru," Human Rights Quarterly 12 (1990); Alma Guillermoprieto, "Letter from Lima," New Yorker, October 29 1990; Amnesty International, "Amnesty International Report 2003: Paraguay," (New York: Amnesty International, 2003). [Return to text]

22. Personal communication. Jon Cortina, Pro-Busqueda, July 2005; Pedro Gregoria Santiago, Liga Guatemalteca para Higiene Mental, August 2007; see also Discovering Dominga, articles from Proceso, above, unsigned, "Aún En Busca De Los Niños Que La Guerra Se Llevó," SwissInfo, October 6, 2006. [Return to text]

23. The lawyers at la Asociacion Pro Búsqueda los Niños y Niñas Desaparecidos helped me understand why this was so critical. Laura Briggs, "Interview with Zaira Navas, Attorney for Pro Búsqueda," (San Salvador, El Salvador: 2005).The Mexican magazine Proceso has also been covering this unfolding story. Juan José Dalton, "Ante La Corte Interamericana," Proceso, 22 marzo 2005; Juan José Dalton, "Cicatrices No Cerradas De La Guerra," Proceso, 25 October 2003; Juan José Dalton, "El Salvador: La Deuda Con Los Niños Deaparecidos," Proceso, 8 March 2003; Marcelo Izquierdo, "Abuelas De La Plaza De Mayo: 25 Años De Búsqueda," Proceso, 25 October 2002. [Return to text]

24. See http://travel.state.gov/family/adoption/stats/stats_451.html (accessed January 19, 2006). [Return to text]

25. John T. Way, "The Mayan in the Mall: Development, Culture and Globalization in Guatemala, 1920-2003" (Yale University, 2006). [Return to text]

26. Inés Benítez, "Guatemala: Whitewash for 'Adoption Paradise'," Inter Press Service, June 5, 2007. [Return to text]

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