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.

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).[↑]
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.[↑]
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).[↑]
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).[↑]
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).[↑]
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.[↑]