This article is a response to Claudia Castañeda's "Adopting Technologies: Producing Race in Trans-racial Adoption" and Jessaca Leinaweaver's "Adoption and the Politics of Modern Families" in this issue.

I sit on the porch of a rented bungalow in the Catskills, watching my nine-year-old daughter play with a Playmobil camper—little plastic white people, a big camping trailer, the kind I associate with middle America on summer vacation. The camper set was a gift from my sister's mother-in-law; my daughter has been playing with it, by herself, whenever she's not running around like a wild thing with the two other girls she's befriended here. As the plastic white people sit around their tiny picnic table, eating their miniature hot dogs, I remember how, when we looked at the website photos of this somewhat run-down, old-fashioned bungalow community, she asked me, "how come most of them are white people?"

I had asked the owners pretty much the same question. Satisfied that it was multi-cultural "enough" for us and our friends to feel "comfortable"—there were a couple of biracial families, various friends of color visiting, a "progressive" vibe—I asked her, "Do you think we should we go even though it doesn't looked very mixed?" She responded, "Yeah. I guess so. It looks pretty. They have a pool." So here we are, sitting on the porch in a summer community where she is currently the only child of color, and we are the only biracial family, and as I write I find myself wondering: if I were raising a white child, would she have noticed that it didn't look "right," and would I have taken so much care to be sure that she did?

Such questions come into focus reading the very generative papers in this issue by Jessaca Leinaweaver and Claudia Castañeda about the politics and technologies of race, love, and suffering in transnational and transracial families. When I was asked to comment on these papers, I was intrigued, but apprehensive. I am a white, single, American adoptive parent of a nine-year-old Guatemalan daughter. I am a feminist professor and a psychotherapist, and adoption is neither my academic nor clinical specialty—yet I think about it all the time. This seemed like an opportunity to grapple with critical issues at once personal and political (the intrigue), in a very public way (the apprehension). My own daughter is not at all sure she wants me writing about this subject; she alternately believes it is "none of anyone's beeswax," and understands the important, if confusing to her, reasons for sharing our stories.

"Adoption and the Politics of Modern Families," by Leinaweaver, and "Adopting Technologies: Producing Race in Trans-racial Adoption" by Castañeda, call on "us" (read: academics/ feminists/ adoptive parents / white people) to recognize the deep inequalities that penetrate transnational and transracial adoption, to acknowledge that these are built upon what Leinaweaver calls the "unstable foundation of other people's suffering" and Castañeda refers to as the adoptive child's "conditions of birth." These authors challenge the dominant discourse of "saving" needy children through transnational-transracial adoption, and question the ways what David Eng has called "new global families" may do the ideological work of naturalizing racial oppression and global injustices—or un-do it. I'd like to consider their papers in terms of how they can contribute to the radical, political, project of raising consciousness of racism and exploitation among their white, middle-class subjects in support of what Eng terms an "ethical multiculturalism," and whether their insights hold potential for mobilizing adoptive families around global and local movements for social and economic justice—good work for feminists.[1]

Leinaweaver's paper sets out to address the "politics of the modern family"—a big topic. Taking the reader through maids from the Caribbean and surrogates in India, she arrives at transnational adoption, with a focus on pop icon Madonna and her adoption of children from Malawi. It's here that I'll concentrate my comments. Following Shellee Colen's (1995) concept of "stratified reproduction," Leinaweaver brings into view the ways global inequalities of power and wealth serve to break down ("disassemble") families in some nations (primarily the global South), while providing adoptable children to "make" families in others (the global North), and she reiterates some of the unacknowledged ways in which the privileged create and sustain our lives through the labor, including the reproductive labor, of the poor in the intimate, political spaces of the family.[2]

Leinaweaver frames her argument about adoption with Colen's study of "Manhattan mothers" and their use of West Indian nannies to care for their homes and children. Drawing a parallel between power relations in adoption and domestic work, she makes a valuable intervention into discourse that often substitutes the good intentions of adoptive parents for attention to the needs, capacities, and human rights of mothers in impoverished "sending" nations. Hers is fundamentally an ethical argument about certain forms of family, reproductive labor, and transnational adoption. I was disappointed, then, to find Leinaweaver undermine the strength of her argument by choosing a rhetorical strategy that relies on the figure of the white, professional, "Manhattan mother," along with that of pop icon Madonna, to critique transnational adoption. This limited sample of adoptive mothers stands in for transnationally adopting parents more broadly, and Leinaweaver's argument directs us toward women as key beneficiaries and perpetrators of other women's exploitation. The well-off "Manhattan moms" make easy marks: she points to them as self-congratulatory women who often desire a child as a fashionable "commodity," and are resistant to seeing their own choices as "made at the expense of another woman's reproductive integrity." This rhetoric extends to feminists who, she contends in a striking generalization, tend to find arguments about the global inequalities that undergird new family configurations "upsetting" because they "are convinced that these 'choices' are the only ones that will allow them to do what they want to do".[3] By targeting self-serving families led by "Manhattan mothers" and celebrities, as well as feminists who turn a blind eye to other women's suffering, Leinaweaver misses the opportunity to call to account the government policies and agency practices around transnational adoption that guide adoptive families toward particular countries, and support deep, structural inequality, injustice, and corruption.

Leinaweaver's language betrays a deep (and understandable) impatience for privileged white parents (read: women) who adopt without regard to ethics, history, or material conditions, and for the entitlement of a (female) celebrity able to bypass law and custom to adopt in Malawi. I am not unsympathetic to this feeling (though I object to what reads as implicit woman-blaming, despite Leinaweaver's attempt to guard against it). Just recently, in the "Lives" column of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, a Brandeis University poetry fellow, Melanie Braverman, wrote a stunningly solipsistic essay about her response to her young adopted son's first questions about his birth mother: "To Molly and me, our children are so completely ours it feels impossible that anyone else had anything to do with them."[4] Though she notes that her son was drawn to the romantic notion that he came from an (unnamed—Caribbean? Asian?) island, and was just beginning to show interest in the fact that another mother gave birth to him, she herself is happy to completely erase the first mother as no more than a vehicle, telling her two adopted sons "the truth as I see it: 'Some babies come out of their mommies, and some come through other bodies to get to their mommies. My body couldn't make babies, so we had to find another way to get you here.'"[5]

Braverman acknowledges that her five-year-old must begin to create his own narrative of origins, but so contented is she with the "relentless perfection" of their summer (and their lives), she seems unable to recognize what he himself names: the terrible distance he traveled (metaphorically and literally) to get from his first to these second mothers: "... they weren't my mommies ... I swam a hundred miles to get home," he tells his friend.[6] In crafting a narrative to shield their children, and apparently especially themselves, from the truly difficult and complicated "truths" at the heart of adoption, Braverman and her partner have done violence to another woman's story—and to their child's story. Theirs is a balder version of the sentimental, "you were meant to be my baby" narrative embraced by many adopters trying to naturalize their non-biological, affective tie to their child (and sometimes to rationalize years of failed infertility treatments); this story implies, of course, that another woman, somewhere, was "meant" to have a baby that she would relinquish to complete the happy adoptive family in the U.S. (Braverman's essay rightly occasioned many angry, online comments from other adoptive parents who have struggled to create narratives that honor the place of another mother in their family's collective psyche.)[7]

As I was researching my own adoption options a decade ago, I met prospective adopters who said things like: "I plan to adopt from China because I feel a real affinity for Chinese art," or, "I love Chinese food." In Guatemala City, at a big hotel where families waited days (or weeks) with their adopted infants for necessary documents, I breakfasted with many people who fit my idea of typical, white-bread, Christian, Midwestern families. Greeting them each morning in the hotel's restaurant, our brown babies attached to us in baby-slings, I often thought: how in the world are they going to raise that Latina baby? But their parental excitement worked the edges of my stereotypes and took down my (unearned) sense of superiority, and I was struck by the existence of an entire universe of adoptive families (including "Manhattan moms," and dads, and single people, and LGBTQ couples), many of whom had struggled to save the money for an adoption (as I had), and committed to parenting all sorts of children in all sorts of places. (Among the Manhattan moms I know who have adopted transnationally are Iranian, Haitian, and Cuban-Chinese women.) This is not to say that most of the white parents I encountered were conscious of the ideas and feelings about race they may have carried with them into this parenting project. A friend who also adopted a Guatemalan infant recalls numerous admiring comments from other adopting parents about how "pretty and light-skinned" her baby daughter was; they seemed envious that her child would be able to "pass" with no racialized mark of her Guatemalan origin. Examples abound of adoptive white parents, whether well-meaning or not, professional, middle class, or working class, doing and saying stupid, racist things (even if unconsciously)—in Manhattan, in Minnesota, in Texas, everywhere. As Castañeda points out (see later discussion), the traditional adoption narrative of race-blindness ironically may serve to blind parents to racism. White adoptive parents of children of color (whether through domestic or transnational adoption) generally start out with the same relation to white privilege as other white people, and the same ignorance about the rest of the world that so many Americans share. Yet in creating "global families," they open up the possibility of a different relation to whiteness, and to international solidarity.

It seems to me that a crucial part of our job as feminists is to figure out how to move open-minded people to consider just the sort of analysis Leinaweaver offers of the ethical imperative in transnational adoption to value not only "the best interest of the child," but the interests of other mothers, other peoples, other nations. In rejecting the dominant discourse of adoption as all-good and always benevolent (the rhetoric favored by the adoption establishment), we need to avoid the self-righteousness that sometimes sneaks into our academic discussions, and acknowledge the deeply felt, intimately protective love between adoptive parents and their children. Only then will we be able to figure out how to work with them as potential allies in the struggles against racism and inequality on a global scale, and recognize them as important forces to support demands for robust child welfare programs in sending countries, in addition to the ethical regulation of adoption.[8] Many adoptive parent listservs and comment boards are filled with discussions of searching for birth mothers and first families, sending funds to support other children or paying for their educations, contributing money to child welfare organizations, and arguing about ethical responsibilities.[9] To these parents, the suffering of other mothers is a conflictual part of their everyday consciousness, and the sense of loss often haunts their family experience. If this is "a mildly radical idea," as Leinaweaver suggests it may be,[10] then we must see many of these parents as already radicalized in some way by their adoption experiences. These online discussions, as well as conferences and other forums, offer opportunities to learn from transnationally adopting parents, and to share our scholarship with them to engage broader political questions (of immigration reform, or fair trade, for example).

One additional point must be made: Leinaweaver's work in Peru leads her to point to the variety of formal and informal child welfare practices around the world that sustain family structures and affective ties, and she brings this to bear on her discussion of Madonna's foray into Malawi, suggesting that local, temporary "solutions" to problems of child rearing would often be preferable to transnational adoption in terms of protecting the rights and desires of birth parents. Adult adoptees have also questioned (sometimes angrily) adoption practices that rupture families of origin. However, crucial recognition of cultural alternatives to formal adoption (not to mention deep concern over profiteering, corruption, manipulation, fraud, political terror, and child theft in transnational adoption—outside the scope of both Leinaweaver's essay and this response), should not obscure other limits on women's reproductive integrity and choices in the Third World. Limited access to birth control (underwritten by the U.S. global gag rule), the illegality of abortion and/or religious sanctions against it, domestic and political violence, male prerogatives to have multiple children to prove masculinity in many cultures, legal and cultural sanctions that make girl children undesirable, and occupational hazards to reproductive health, for example, have all made adopting children out an important option for many women struggling to survive and to make a better life for their families, and themselves.[11]

Castañeda's essay offers a different take on transnational adoption, urging us to deconstruct the ways transnationally adopting families employ "technologies of race" to "re-racialize" their adopted children. She suggests that "transracial adoption in the U.S. has become almost coterminous with transnational adoption since the 1990s,"[12] because white parents adopting domestically have tended to favor adopting white babies. (This may change now that transnational adoption has been shut down in several countries, due to changes in sending nations' regulations and concerns over ethical practices.) In her analysis of the approaches to race taken up in transracial, transnational adoption in the U.S., she proposes the idea of re-racialization to account for the family's interpretation of their child's difference—the meanings "color" (or "phenotype") and "culture" take on within the white adoptive family. Analyzing several different models employed by adoptive families to structure their relationship, and their child's relationship, to race, she comes to the powerful conclusion that the problem of race in transracial adoption is fundamentally a question of the parents' approach to racism.

Before turning to Castañeda's review of the "technologies of race," I want to take a moment to puzzle over the concept of "re-racializing" adopted children. It seems to rest on the slippery foundation that the child is already racialized through some logic of biological inheritance ("a notion of race as a natural substance that is passed from the birth mother and father to the child") that is disrupted in adoption; the child's race is then re-produced by her adoptive family, according to different "technologies." She states compellingly that, "To think of adoption as a technology of race is to identify the process of racialization that takes place through adoption, understood as a specific—and often material or materializing—set of practices. It is to understand adoption not simply as 'reflecting' existing forms of racial categorization and attribution, but as one among many other sites in the U.S. nation that 'makes' race in particular ways. This approach does not address the biological truth of race—it has none—but the ways in which race and its categories are given semiotic and material existence in adoption discourse."[13] It is not clear, then, what is at stake for Castañeda in insisting on the "re" of re-racialization in the models she describes; she seems ambivalent about just what sort of "racialization" happens prior to the child's adoption and positioning in the social (and psychic) space of race in America, and slips back and forth between the terms "racialization" and "re-racialization" throughout the paper.

According to Castañeda, in the old-fashioned assimilation model dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, the adoptee's "race" was denaturalized, and the child thus made available to be absorbed into the whiteness of the adoptive family. She proposes that an adopted Korean student who exclaimed, "I'm white ... I'm white!" in her Women's Studies class quite "naturally" sees herself as white, given the material and affective practices employed by her parents.[14] Castañeda suggests that "feeling white" follows from the parental practice of ignoring the child's racial origins (her embodied difference from them), and raising her to "be" white (through social learning)—like them. In her view, this is a problem for her student mainly insofar as she must "invoke her whiteness,"[15] unlike her white peers who assume it automatically. But what does it mean to "feel white"? How can we understand this identification with whiteness, or with the white adoptive parents? What psychic processes does re-racialization entail? What becomes of the adoptee's material and psychic loss of their first parents in the process? Eng and Han (2006) describe a psychotherapy patient who similarly "feels" white, but they posit the concept of "racial melancholia" to account for the transnational, transracial child's unconscious identification with her first mother, and motherland, and the devalued, disavowed racial identifications that may haunt her idealization of whiteness. Castañeda's analysis of racialization would benefit from reference to Eng's and Han's elegant psychoanalytic work on the intrapsychic dimensions of racialization in transnational adoption—especially the unconscious experience of the adoptee whose adoptive parents do not reciprocally identify with their child's losses, but instead maintain a version of "color-blindness" that fails to recognize her experience and "threatens to redouble racial melancholia's effects."[16]

In considering other modes of (re)racialization, including what she terms "immersion" and various culturally-based models (that she describes in the context of Korean, Chinese, and Latin American adoption), Castañeda makes the important argument that adoptive parents see their adoptive children as "being" of a different racio-cultural heritage, and at the same time "make" or "sustain" their racio-cultural difference through particular practices. Such practices range from enactments of selective elements of birth-culture, to exoticizing their child's difference, to making trips to the country of origin to enable the child to develop an authentic relationship to her "conditions of birth."[17] Castañeda is suspicious of the "racio-cultural" technological processes that imbue the adopted child with a cultural identity presumed to be derived from her "homeland" while displacing racial identifications: the over-riding question she poses is whether racism will be explicitly articulated and addressed by adoptive parents in the midst of the celebration of multi-culturalism.

In citing Falvey (2008), Louie (2009), Anagnost (2000) and Yngversson (2003), Castañeda searches for models of re-racialization through which adoptive parents can self-consciously resist hegemonic whiteness, re-racializing themselves by de-centering whiteness in the family, and helping their children negotiate the problem of racism by recognizing white supremacy's reach.[18] My description of my family as "biracial" in the opening paragraphs of this paper follows, I believe, Castañeda's idea of ways whiteness may be de-centered. Castañeda argues that Falvey's model of "integration" offers an improvement over the immersion model, but this move overlooks the freighted history of integration in the U.S., and the critique of integrationist approaches from nationalist perspectives. Her suggestion, following Yngversson, that families make visible the "conditions of birth" and the inequalities at work in transnational adoption, and struggle against racism both locally and globally, resonates with Leinaweaver's argument. Yet the figure of the birth mother (first mother) is absent from Castañeda's thinking about the meanings of the child's racial difference from her adoptive family, and the process of re-racialization. Castañeda concludes that trans-racial, transnational adoption does not guarantee that white parents will re-racialize themselves in what she calls a "resistant mode," nor does she believe they are any more responsible than other white people for resisting racism; but she is optimistic that these families hold possibilities of transformation that will help their children and "the worlds they all inhabit."[19]

In his analysis of Deanne Borshay Liem's personal documentary, First Person Plural (2000), David Eng points to "the dearth of vocabularies to investigate this critical juncture of private and public," and asks us to sustain a discussion of "the ethics of multiculturalism in relation to the current emergence of what [I] call the 'new global family.'"[20] Eng's elaboration of the figures of two mothers considers what psychic and political space must be opened up to take in the presence of both adoptive mother (or parent—though his psychoanalytic argument rests on the position of the mother) and birth mother (and more figuratively, homeland).[21] His question brings to mind three oft-cited feature films that address the contradictory (and political) ways love and inequality circulate between the "two mothers" in adoption: The Official Story (1985), Casa de los Babys (2003), and Losing Isaiah (1995).[22] These films viscerally demonstrate what I would suggest is at stake in Leinaweaver's and Castañeda's papers: the urgent possibilities of recognition of the transnationally and/or transracially adopted child's independent origins and subjectivity outside of the (usually) white nuclear family, and of the Third World mother's own subjectivity, recuperation of what Castañeda calls a "relation to her conditions of birth," restoration of collective history, and reparation—both psychic and material (i.e. transfer of capital to support robust programs to support women, children, and families, promotion of ethical adoption practices, and support for global movements for economic and social justice [e.g. fair trade, women's rights]).[23]

In the exquisitely powerful Argentinian film, The Official Story, an adoptive mother, Alicia, married to a military official slowly realizes that her beloved young daughter is the child of a "disappeared" mother, whose grandmother has searched for her since her own pregnant daughter's abduction and "disappearance" by the murderous military junta. The elderly woman is part of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the group that has marched against the abuses of the dictatorship, demanding to know the fates of their disappeared children. She tells her own daughter's story to the adoptive mother, after they've met as each searches for the truth about their child. The horror of Alicia's realization that her husband knew, was complicit, and may have been directly involved in torture, and the ethical, intimate implications of her child's originary theft, are devastating—to the characters, and to viewers. A previously apolitical high school history teacher, Alicia's consciousness changes irrevocably through her search, with her recognition of the suffering of her child's other mother. "What will we do if it's true?" she asks the child's likely biological grandmother.

John Sayles' film, Casa de los Babys brings us to an unnamed Latin American country, where a group of women from the U.S. are waiting in a small hotel (known by locals as Casa de los Babys) for children to be referred (assigned) to them for adoption. For all the differences of place and personality among them, they are a group bathed in white privilege, in contrast to the poor maids and laborers that stream into town in the pre-dawn hours to work. Sayles gives voice to a direct critique of transnational adoption through the rather comical, no-goodnik figure of the hotel owner's son, who rails against the imperialists who demand native babies like so many natural resources, as his sharp-tongued mother reminds him that their livelihood is dependent upon the gringas' money. However, it is the private exchange between two mothers that brings home the unbearable, complicated sadness of this unequal distribution of political, economic, and affective capital.

In an achingly painful scene, an Irish woman from Boston (Eileen), and a young Latin American maid in her room to clean (Asuncion), listen uncomprehendingly to each other describe (one in English, the other, Spanish) her hopes for her child. Eileen dreams out loud of the snow day she will spend with her daughter, full of the pleasures of making snow angels and drinking cocoa together. Asuncion responds with her own dreams that the baby daughter she relinquished has found a happy life in America with a mother like this one. Later, Eileen decides to name her adopted daughter "Esmeralda"—the name Asuncion had given her own daughter at birth. The sharing of these two mothers' fantasies of their daughters forges a delicate emotional link between them: each mother's private dream depends symbolically, politically, and unequally, upon the other.

I would argue that even Losing Isaiah, a notoriously problematic film about the politics of transracial adoption, contributes productively to our conversation about "ethical multiculturalism." The film's weaknesses are tremendous (and all the more galling because it works as a tear-jerker): among other things, it exploits the fears of white parents that if they adopt domestically, their children might be taken back by birth mothers who've had a change of heart, or gone through "recovery." The narrative raises the sensational specter to white audiences of Black people with nationalistic agendas hijacking domestic adoption to prevent well-meaning, financially well-off white parents (like the couple played by Jessica Lange and David Strathairn) from providing families for needy Black children relinquished by their crack-addicted, neglectful mothers. But it also raises questions about the white family's exclusively (and typically) white social networks, and their complete lack of familiarity with important aspects of African American culture (e.g. the long list of African American children's literature intoned in court). And it demands that its liberal, white social worker-mother remake her material and psychic bonds with her adopted son's "conditions of birth," acknowledging his "blackness" through acceding to his African American mother's claims. The traumatic rupture of his addicted birth mother's inability to care for him, and the failed recuperation of their bond through his court-ordered return to her, are uneasily resolved when she decides to hand him back. The film leaves us wondering not only whether Isaiah's African American mother (Halle Berry) will recover an authentic place in his life, but what sort of space will open for Isaiah to recognize himself in the history of two mothers.

Back from the Catskills, I've enrolled my daughter in a week-long music camp so I'll have time to prep my courses and write. She comes home the first day and tells me, "This 8-year-old girl is adopted from Guatemala, too. We started talking, and I could tell she looked like me, her color was the same but her hair is wavy. She comes from the jungle area." Later in the week, I overhear these two in conversation: "Have you ever been there?" the other girl asks, then proudly declares, "I've been to visit five times!" "I have pictures from when me and my mom were there when I was a baby, but I decided I want to wait to go back until I'm around 11, when I'm old enough to understand everything," my daughter informs her. What my child did not explain is that she has sometimes felt overwhelmed and confused by our conversations about the history of war and suffering in Guatemala, our reading of a biography for children about Rigoberta Menchú,[24] and other kids books about Guatemala, and especially my showing her the (inspiring, I'd naively thought) website for Safe Passage,[25] a child welfare organization that works with children and families living in the garbage dump of Guatemala City.

As Eng notes in the context of First Person Plural, "[t]he contemporary formation of interracial First and Third World families represents a tremendous opportunity ... the disjunctive experiences of the transnational adoptee open upon a painful though potentially productive social and psychic terrain exceeding the privatized boundaries of the family unit."[26] There is no GPS in this place. My daughter is learning Spanish in the dual-language program of our neighborhood public elementary school, where she is in the majority as a child of color, and many of the families are Central American. Do I think this helps her find her way? I hope so. Yet I also worry that my own confusing, painful awareness that my joy as a mother depends on her first mother's loss (she always watched with curious anticipation as my eyes filled each time I got to the part about the birth mother in the requisite adoption storybooks I used to read her), and my efforts to explain Injustice! Racism! Exploitation! Global Capitalism!, have been too much for her tender heart to absorb.

These are deeply personal, challenging issues. Leinaweaver's and Castañeda's papers remind us that these intimate spaces of the family are opportunities for political conversation, where feminists can and should engage with transnational and transracial adoptive families around domestic and global issues of economic justice and human rights. In challenging popular discourses of saving abandoned children and complicating ideas of racial difference, Leinaweaver and Castañeda make visible what I would suggest is the ideological (as well as affective) work done by many adoptive parents to make their "global families" feel "normal." Inasmuch as their work to construct an optimistic, coherent personal adoption narrative may also defend against the anxiety that acknowledging trauma (historical, economic, social, psychic) in transnational adoption might destabilize their family's joy and sense of wholeness, some adoptive parents may resist critiques of transnational and transracial adoption. Yet our relation to the suffering of other mothers—our children's first mothers—and our relation to racism and inequality through our children's lives, can also open onto the possibility of an "ethical multiculturalism" that recognizes in the personal struggle to sustain our own families the need for political struggle to support the rights of women, families, and children around the world.

Endnotes

1. David Eng, "Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas," Social Text 21.3 (2003): 1-37. [Return to text]

2. See Leinaweaver. [Return to text]

3. See Leinaweaver. [Return to text]

4. Melanie Braverman, "An Adopted Boy Considers His Origins," New York Times Magazine 3 September 2010. [Return to text]

5. Ibid. [Return to text]

6. Ibid. [Return to text]

7. Reader comments to Melanie Braverman's "An Adopted Boy Considers His Origins." [Return to text]

8. See Laura Briggs, "Adoption, Immigration, and Privatization: Transnational Transformations in Family," S&F Online 7.3 (2009). Briggs asserts that "[A]doption 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." [Return to text]

9. See for example: Guatemala Birthfamilies. [Return to text]

10. See Leinaweaver. [Return to text]

11. See, for example, Pat Goudvis' documentary video on Guatemalan adoption, Goodbye Baby (New Day Films, 2005) for discussion by Guatemalan interviewees of some of the conflicts pregnant and childrearing women confront, and intra-country arguments about adoption. See also Henry Frundt, Fair Bananas (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2009) for a discussion of toxic environmental exposures, unfair labor practices, and sexual harassment faced by women banana workers, and union responses to these. [Return to text]

12. See Castañeda. [Return to text]

13. See Castañeda. [Return to text]

14. See Castañeda. [Return to text]

15. See Castañeda. [Return to text]

16. Eng and Han, "Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption, Racial Reparation, and Racial Transitional Objects," Studies in Gender and Sexuality 7.2: (2006): 147-172, 156. [Return to text]

17. See Castañeda. [Return to text]

18. See Castañeda's endnotes for full references. [Return to text]

19. See Castañeda. [Return to text]

20. Eng, 3. [Return to text]

21. Eng, 1-37. [Return to text]

22. The Official Story, Luis Puenzo, dir. (Historias Cinematograficas, 1985); Casa de los Babys, John Sayles, dir. (IFC Films, 2003); Losing Isaiah, Stephen Gyllenhaal, dir. (Paramount Pictures, 1995). David Eng has also commented on Casa de los Babys in "Political Economics of Passion: Transnational Adoption and Global Woman," Studies in Gender and Sexuality 7.1 (2006): 49-59, 56. [Return to text]

23. See: Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988) for a psychoanalytic discussion of recognition and maternal subjectivity; Eng, 1-37, on the importance to the transnational adoptee of restoring a sense of collective history; and Eng and Han, 157-163, on racial reparation and mourning. [Return to text]

24. Michael Silverstone, Rigoberta Mench—: Defending Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: The Feminist Press, 1999). [Return to text]

25. Safe Passage website. [Return to text]

26. Eng, 32. [Return to text]