Karen Winkler,
"The Distance Traveled: Reading Leinaweaver and Castañeda on Politics,
Privilege, and Race in Transnational Adoption"
(page 4 of 4)
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]
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