adoptive migration by jessaca b. leinaweaver

8/22/2019 Adoptive Migration by Jessaca B. Leinaweaver

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Jessaca B. Leinaweaver

Adoptive Migrationraising latinos in spain

Duke University Press Durham and London 2013


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2013 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United

States of America on acid-free paper$

. Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker.Typeset in Whitman by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leinaweaver, Jessaca B.

Adoptive migration : raising Latinos in Spain / Jessaca B. Leinaweaver.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-8223-5492-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-8223-5507-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Intercountry adoptionSpain. 2. Intercountry adoptionPeru.3. SpainEmigration and immigration. 4. PeruEmigration

and immigration. i. Title.

hv875.5.145 2013

362.7340946dc23

2013011689

Permissions/Subventions. Some of the material in this book was previously

published in another form. Portions of chapters 1 and 2 originally appeared in

Kinship Paths to and from the New Europe: A Unified Analysis of PeruvianAdoption and Migration, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthro-

pology 16 (2): 380400, 2011 American Anthropological Association.


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In memory of Jorge A. Hernndez Seminario

q.e.p.d.


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contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction

comparing adoption and migration 1

one Waiting for a Baby

adopting the ideal immigrant 25

two The Best Interests of a Migrants Child

separating families or displacing children? 47

three Mixed Marriages

migrants and adoption 66

four Undomesticated Adoption

adopting the children of immigrants 84

five Solidarity

postadoptive overtures 102

six Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

culture, ethnicity, and race 122

Conclusion

what adoptive migration might mean 148

Notes 155 References 179 Index 193


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acknowledgments

In the six years that I have been planning, working on, and completing thisproject, I have amassed countless debts. To those who supported (intellec-

tually, financially, and emotionally) and participated in this study, I amsincerely grateful. Any strengths of this book can be traced back to those Iname here. Its errors and inadequacies are mine alone.

Research and writing take time and cost money, both of which are hardto come by these days. I am fortunate that my research with Peruviansin Spain was generously supported by the National Science Foundation(nsf) (grant no. 1026143), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropo-logical Research, the Fulbright iie Program, the Social Sciences and Hu-

manities Research Council of Canada(sshrc) Standard Research Grant,and the Howard Foundation. Special thanks to Deb Winslow at nsf, MaryBeth Moss at Wenner-Gren, and Aitor Rubio and Patricia Zahniser at Ful-bright in Spain for outstanding support. My earlier research in Peru,20013, was funded by the National Science Foundation DissertationImprovement Grant, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearch, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, a Jacob K. Javits Fellow-ship, and the University of Michigan.

Brown University has been enormously generous in supporting thisresearch through its Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award; FacultyResearch Fund for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; and theKaren T. Romer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award for Interna-tional Summer Research Collaboration. Browns Population Studies andTraining Center (pstc) provided financial support in the form of MellonAnthropological Demography Funding. I also received support fromBrowns Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (clacs). Acourse release granted by Browns Pembroke Center during the year I was

Edwin and Shirley Seave Faculty Fellow in the seminar Markets andBodies in Transnational Perspective was deeply appreciated. Exchanges


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x acknowledgments

with colleagues in that seminar, led by Kay Warren, were enormouslyproductive. The nsf advance Career Development Award ($15,000 tosupport career development) that I received through Brown in 2010 wasalso invaluable.

I cant imagine a better environment in which to do this research andwriting than Brown University. I am especially grateful to those writing-group friends who read and commented on these chapters and improvedthem measurably: Paja Faudree, Rebecca Carter, Bianca Dahl, BeckySchulthies, and Marcy Brink-Danan. My colleagues in the AnthropologyDepartment deserve so much appreciation for their friendship, support,and collegiality: Adia Benton, Lina Fruzzetti, Matt Gutmann, SherineHamdy, Marida Hollos, Steve Houston, David Kertzer, Cathy Lutz, Pat

Rubertone, Andrew Scherer, Bill Simmons, Dan Smith, and Kay Warren,along with Keith Brown, Keisha-Khan Perry, Nick Townsend, Phil Leis,Dwight Heath, and Doug Anderson. At the pstc, my thanks to MikeWhite, Andy Foster, and Leah VanWey. At clacs, Rich Snyder and JimGreen were very supportive. Im also grateful to Kiri Miller, Vanessa Ryan,Nancy Jacobs, and Carolyn Dean for so many non-book-related conversa-tions that unbeknownst to them, sharpened the book anyway. The sta inAnthropology, pstc, and clacs each made this project less onerous in

small and large ways: Kathy Grimaldi, Margie Sugrue, Matilde Andrade,Priscilla Terry, Tom Alarie, Kelley Smith, Shauna Mecartea, Sue Silveira,Susan Hirsch, and Jos Torrealba. Our librarians also do so much on ashrinking budget, and I am particularly grateful to Patricia Figueroa, Car-ina Cournoyer, Ron Fark, Ned Quist, and the Interlibrary Loan sta.Finally, I learn new things every day from my graduate and undergraduatestudents, and among these I especially want to single out the graduateresearch assistants Kristin Skrabut and Josh McLeod and the undergradu-ate research assistants Alfredo Aguirre and Maia Chao for their trulyimportant contributions to this project.

I am particularly grateful to those who closely read the entire book, andwhose support has been absolutely invaluable: Nicole Berry and JoshuaTucker. Nicole read everything piece by piece in its earliest stages and, notfor the first time, motivated me to write and helped me figure out what Iwas actually saying. Joshua read the full manuscript with a sharp eye forhow things actually work in Peru and in Spain, and a gift for how to write asentence. Two anonymous reviewers improved the text significantly as

well and I thank them for the time and care they took with it. At DukeUniversity Press I would also like to thank Valerie Millholland for her


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ackno wled gm en ts xi

interest in this project early on and Susan Albury, Rebecca Fowler, andKatie Courtland for their careful work on this book. It has been a truepleasure to work with Gisela Fosadomil gracias, chaque. The press islucky to have you.

I thank the audience members and discussants who oered manythoughtful suggestions as I presented this workparticularly those inMadrid at Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas (csic), theUniversidad Nacional de Educacin a Distancia, and the Universidad Pon-tificia Comillas. I spoke about this project at various stages with colleaguesworking on adoption or Latin American studies and would especially liketo acknowledge the scholarly generosity of Erdmute Alber, Florence Babb,Caroline Bledsoe, Caroline Brettell, Laura Briggs, Anne Cadoret, Andrew

Canessa, Jennifer Cole, Megan Crowley-Matoka, Heike Drotbohm, Gil-lian Feeley-Harnik, Claudia Fonseca, Susan Frekko, Britt Halvorson, To-bias Hecht, Marcia Inhorn, Eleana Kim, Esben Liefsen, Bruce Mannheim,Susan McKinnon, Ruben Oliven, Karsten Paerregaard, Jennifer Reynolds,Liz Roberts, Linda Seligmann, Sonja van Wichelen, Ceres Victora, SylviaYanagisako, Kristin Yarris, and Barbara Yngvesson.

Colleagues in Spain were unfailingly welcoming and cordial, and sev-eral took the time to meet with me and give me advice and further con-

tacts. I am particularly grateful to Ana Berstegui, Joaquin Eguren, An-geles Escriv, Blanca Gomez, Isabel Madruga, Diana Marre, Margarita delOlmo, Diego Ramiro, and Beatriz San Romn for discussing this workwith me on multiple occasions. Thanks also to Sileny Cabala, Julio Diaz,Juan Diez Nicols, Adela Franz, Gonzalo Garland, Carlos Gimnez, FlixJimenez, Livia Jimenez, Maribel Jociles, Asuncion Merino, Azucena Pal-acios, Maria Sanchez, and Liliana Suarez.

Professionals working in adoption in Spain were very kind and forth-coming, and I particularly wish to thank Lila Parrondo of Adoptantis,Felipe Marn Navarro of the Reik Centro de Psicologa Dinmica, DavidAzcona and Laura Heckel of La Voz de los Adoptados, Dr. Jess GarciaPrez of the Hospital de Nio Jess, Antonio Ferrandis of the InstitutoMadrileo del Menor y la Familia, and Beln Cabello of Familias para laAcogida. I also want to thank some associations that regularly host openworkshops about adoptions: Adoptantis, Hijos que Esperan, the Adop-ciones, Familias y Infancia (afin) research group in Barcelona, and LaVoz de los Adoptados.

Peruvian migrant professionals involved in various aspects of the life ofthis migrant community were generous with their time as well, and I


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xii acknowledgments

would like to thank Ana Camargo, Sonia Castillo, Fernando Isasi Cayo,Mariella Khn, Manuel Pinto, and Yolanda Vaccaro. The associations Ari-Per and the Federacin de Asociaciones de Peruanos en Espaa (fedap)also oered kind support. Finally, I want to thank those I spoke with who

were not directly associated with either worldBlanca Hernando, JorgeFernandez, and David Planellfor their time and contributions.

Most of all I am grateful to the adoptive and migrant families whoshared their stories with me and introduced me to their friends. Yourgenerosity is remarkable, and tremendously appreciated. There is a specialthank-you owed to my dear friends whom I followed from Peru to Spainand the Spanish friends who brought them therefor putting up with mefor so long. My parents and siblings have been unfailingly supportive and I

am forever grateful. And, always, all my love to Joshua and to Leo.


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Introduction

comparing adoption and migration

Mami, do cars have souls? And what happens if I dont wear a seatbelt inthe planeif I fell, would I fall all the way down to the ground? The year2002 was drawing to a close, and I was sitting in the small airport inAyacucho, Peru, waiting for the arrival of the puddle jumper to Lima. The

source of these questions, and many more, was Rebeca, a second graderwhom I had met in the Ayacucho adoption oce a couple of weeks earlier.The target of the questions was Fernanda, a woman from northern Spain,and Rebecas new mother. In between the questions, Fernandas patientreplies, and the photos that Rebeca directed us to pose for, Fernanda toldme that the pair would spend a few days in the capital city of Lima tocomplete the adoption paperwork and obtain Rebecas Peruvian and Span-ish passports.

Fernandas adoption of Rebeca was the second adoption to Spain Idwitnessed that year. I was living in Ayacucho while doing an ethnographicstudy of traditional child fostering and formal adoptions (Leinaweaver2008b). The Ayacucho branch of the Peruvian governments adoptionoce had only overseen a dozen adoptions that year, and fewer than halfof them were international. Given those small numbers, two childrenheading to Spain from Ayacucho was noteworthy.

Three months earlier, Zaida, a twenty six year old who was one of myclosest friends in Ayacucho, had left her extended family, her husband,

and her hometown behind and immigrated to Spain herself. She hadobtained her work contract, visa, and plane ticket with the support of a


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2 introduction

Spanish woman who had befriended Zaidas family over the course ofseveral years worth of volunteer trips to Ayacucho. Juxtapositions like thenearly contemporaneous departures of Rebeca and Zaida to Spain werewhat first clued me in to the way that adoption and migration form

mutually constitutive parts of one integrated system of global mobility. Ifollow that juxtaposition of adoption and migration from Peru, where Ifirst noticed the significance of their pairing, to Spain, where young Peru-vians like Rebeca and Zaida forge their new lives.

Comparing Adoption and Migration

International adoption is a form of migration. This argument has implica-

tions for how we understand both adoption and migration, although Ifocus largely on the implications for adoption. Adoption and labor migra-tion are rarely, if ever, analyzed in conjunction with one another. In manyrespects they are seen as wholly dierent from one another. They areregulated by dierent laws, overseen by dierent administrative depart-ments, and governed by dierent regimes. Social workers and psycholo-gists make adoptions happen, while consular ocials and border ocersshape labor migrations. Furthermore, not only are labor migrants numer-

ically far superior to adoptees in every receiving nation but they also hailfrom many more countries (Gimnez Romero 2008, 109). Usually, adop-tees enter a higher social class than do labor migrants, and they are alsousually younger upon arrival (although there are exceptions to both ofthese tendencies). Perhaps most importantly, the children of labor mi-grants are more often pitied or discriminated against by a dominant so-ciety for which they can never quite assimilate enough. Meanwhile, youngadoptees are more likely to fascinate those around them due to their dif-ferences. Typically, and ironically, adopted children are welcomed intoreceiving countriestheir immigration facilitatedwhile labor migrantsfrom the same nation are viewed with suspicion or worse.

Yet in other ways the processes are similar and linked. Both Rebeca andZaida would have to obtain passports and visas before they would be per-mitted to enter Spain, for example. The paperwork behind their move-ments reminds us that migration and adoption are transnational phenom-ena where young people cross borders and, through powerful bureaucraticprocesses, come to possess new civil statuses and new identities. More

significantly, the same forces that propel labor migrants to leave certainnations deemed less developed, war torn, or disaster prone for new lands


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Comparing Adoption and Migration 3

of opportunity are also the forces that produce adoptable children. Adopt-able is a euphemism describing children whose parents or extended fam-ily members are unable to assume their care, often due to the same poverty,war, or disaster that motivated the migration of their peers. As a result,

labor migration and adoption can occur simultaneously, often sharing thesame origins and destinations. For this reason, I sometimes refer to inter-national adoption as adoptive migration. Adoptive migration highlightsthe similarities between international adoption and other forms of border-crossing, oering a starting point from which to talk about the similaritiesand dierencesbetween adoptees and immigrants.

As an ethnographer, I am interested in these broader structural ques-tions about the forces that shape and relocate populations, but I am also

interested in the intimate level of everyday experiences. Here too thereare both important dierences and provocative similarities between theexperiences of labor migrants and their children and the experiences ofadoptive migrants. The similarities are apparent despite my best attemptsto follow scholarly convention, tease apart the two phenomena, and puteach tidily in its own chapter to begin my analysis. For example, in chapter1 I describe adoption from Peru to Spain, highlighting the centrality ofwaitingin the experience of adoptive parents like Fernanda, and the way

that parents and professionals articulate and contest a preference forinfants. In chapter 2 I take up migration from Peru to Spain, focusing onthe factors considered in making a decision about whether or not a youngperson should migrate to Spain, and how to make sense of young peopleonce they arrive. Yet both chapters show parents waiting anxiously andwith waning patience for the arrival of their children to Spain. Bothchapters suggest that parents are concerned with what an ideal migrantmight beadoptive parents seek infants who can adapt with ease, whilesome migrant parents decide that only adults can bear the diculties ofmigration and make the painful decision to leave their children in Peru. Itrace these and other unexpected overlaps, identifying certain themes thatfloated to the surface of both immigrant and adoptee stories.

One such theme is the contested idea of rebirth. Years ago, before Zaidaimmigrated to Spain, she told me that she thought going to Spain wouldbe like a rebirth, because everything she had lived through would be leftbehind in Peru. Adoption too is depicted as a rebirth in the legal sense.Prior kin ties and community memberships are formally erased and sub-

stituted with new ones (Berstegui, Gmez, and Adroher 2006, 20). Yetthe powerful image of rebirth can sometimes enable a childs family and


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4 introduction

community to mute all traces of the preadoptive past, something viewedby adoptive professionals as psychologically unhealthy and unhelpful.

The idea of rebirth is contested by members of adoptive families as well.David Azcona, an adult adoptee and adoption activist in Spain, insisted to

me that Spains mistake when it comes to adoption is to normalize it anderase pieces of your life. . . . By contrast, in migration, an Ecuadoriancomes to Spain, he doesnt stop talking about Ecuador and become com-pletely Spanish. Thats not normal. He has a life before Spain. Yet Car-mela, an adoptive mother to three Peruvian children, told me on morethan one occasion that the problematic immigrants in Spain are those whowant to keep living as if they are in their birth countries. Describing aneighbor of hers, an Ecuadorian woman who had married a Spanish man,

Carmela said that it was very clear to [my neighbor] that she couldnt keepthinking of her country; she had to take on Spanish norms and customs.You have to want to become part of the country, not stay on the margins.Both labor migrants and adopted youths must tread a careful path betweenmaintaining their previous lifestyles and becoming completely Spanish.This path becomes even more complicated for those adopted as infantsand for children born in Spain to labor migrantsthere is no previouslifestyle to maintain, and yet both groups of youths are under considerable

pressure from parents and professionals to develop an anity for a countrythey may not know or remember.Labor migrants and adoptees each represent foreign bodies in Spain,

and as such they raise a complicated set of questions. What is the best wayto integrate (or assimilate) a foreign body? Does it matter how that bodygot to Spain, or who his or her parents are? To put a finer point on it: Doesit matter for a young adoptee that the woman who cleans her fathersoce after hours has come from the same country that she has? This bookis about the way that adoptive and other migrants and their families nego-tiate what mattersthe ordinary experiences and the poignant recollec-tions, the exclusions and inclusions, the sense of belonging or not belong-ing that permeates their daily lives.

Belonging to Family and Nation

In the airport he told me to look after my mother, the son of a labormigrant told a team of Peruvian social scientists who went on to title their

study after his quote (Ansion, Mujica, and Villacorta 2009). The airporthas a heightened importance in narratives of transnational mobility: in


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Peru it is the site where children and other family members strain to catchtheir last glimpse of a departing labor migrant, and in Spain it is a point ofnational entry that stands for other kinds of entries into a new country,family, and way of life. When labor migrants finally pull together the legal

and financial resources to bring their sons and daughters to Spain, theseunaccompanied children land at the Madrid-Barajas Airport in their Sun-day best and with every hair perfectly in place, greeted eusively by familywhom the confused children may not recognize. As the adoption psychol-ogist Lila Parrondo recounted to me, children who migrate to join theirfamilies are just as much strangers [to their families] as is the adoptedchild, and they, too, have to learn to adapt [acomodarse]. But the airportholds the same mystery for adoptive familiesI would later see Parrondo

lecturing an audience of adoptive parents that in adolescence their chil-dren would begin to ask, Who am I? Who do I belong to? Who are mypeople? She insisted that they would not always be the kid who got othe plane at Barajas.

Studies of transnational lives must account for the ways and reasonsthat people move, and also the complex and often poignant methodsthrough which they, along with those they are joining and those they haveleft behind, make a home for themselves in a new and unfamiliar place.

How young people, in particular, accomplish this is a question yet to beanswered: the anthropologist Deborah Boehm and her colleagues haveargued that young people have been largely overlooked as important play-ers in globalization and transnational processes (Boehm et al. 2011, 5). AsI began research in Spain, exploring what life is like for young people likeRebeca and Zaidaafterarrival at the Madrid-Barajas Airport, I found thatone of the ways young adoptive and other migrants create new homes forthemselves is by deploying ideologies of national identity.

These ideologies are embodied as national substance, a notion I de-velop in chapters 3 and 4. In those two chapters I take up unexpected jux-tapositionsatypical sites where I found migration and adoption consid-ered jointly, itself an unusual finding, if one accepts my contention thatadoption and migration are typically treated separately both in the litera-ture and in real life. Chapter 3 considers mixed marriagesmarriagesbetween a Spaniard and a Peruvianand the ways in which the dierentpossibilities for children in those unions (including step-children, biolog-ical reproduction, and adoption) are inflected with understandings of

national substance. Chapter 4 examines an unusual but growing phenom-enon, domestic adoptions of the children of immigrants, which I call


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6 introduction

undomesticated adoption. I analyze such adoptions as sites where bothmigrant misbehavior (ostensibly high fertility and irresponsible parent-ing) and native shirking of responsibility (gendered criticism of abortionrates) are tamed into submission. I argue that such substantialist notions

of identity turn out to infiltrate lives and policies even in a thoroughlytransnational, supposedly postnational world. As such, thinking aboutadoption in the context of migration oers novel and significant insightsinto the continuing centrality of the nation.

Yet it is also possible that I found national substance to be significantprecisely because I was studying adoption and migration with a specificfocus on Peruvians in Spain (rather than, for example, adopted childrenand migrants from anywhere), a criticism I heard from a few astute col-

leagues in Spain, and one that has been eloquently described as method-ological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, 302). My chal-lenge in problematizing nationalism has been that the national origin ofadopted children clearly matters a great deal to their families. It matters inpractical terms: each country has dierent restrictions and requirements,and adoptive parents must choose only one country from which to adoptbefore proceeding with their application. Indeed, there is an emotionalpremium placed on the selection of the country. The social worker Charo

Gonzlez told prospective parents at an information session in Madrid in2012 that the choice is something very personal and intimate betweenspouses. In this sense national dierences are what anthropologists referto as an emic distinction, a distinction made by research participantsthemselvesit would be remiss of me to ignore them.

The importance of the nation may even increase after the adoption hasbeen concluded, as I discuss in chapters 5 and 6, because Spanish familymembers learn to conceptualize themselves as tied in crucial ways to thechilds country of origin. As a Catalan adoptive father put it to the anthro-pologist Diana Marre, When you go to a country . . . you are of thecountry that your children are from. . . . Your children are from thatcountry, you have ties with . . . you have links to that country, little by littleyou come to know the people, you get accustomed (2004). It is furthersignificant in the friendships the family develops; in Spain, as elsewhere,adoptive family associations are organized largely by the childs country oforigin (compare Howell 2002 for Norway). Chapter 5 considers theseideas through the framework of solidarity as a window into ethical be-

havior in the postadoptive day-to-day, looking for moments or placeswhere adoptees and migrants actually meet, from employment to philan-


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thropy to high school. Chapter 6 begins from the observation that bothmigrant youths and adopted youths are toldon a daily basis, through adizzying array of actions and behaviors, comments and assumptionsthat they are inextricably associated with Peru. I follow this presumption

of connection to its logical conclusion, investigating both the ways inwhich Peruvianness is highlighted in adopted and migrant children, andthe ways in which (and the reasons why) it is sometimes rejected.

The Big Picture

Nation is a genealogical metaphor: like nature, the word comes fromthe Latin natio or birth (Herzfeld 1997, 41). Naturalization occurs

when a migrant obtains citizenship of a new nation. Metaphorically, shar-ing a nationality means belonging to the same family. Where dual nation-ality is not permitted, one may only belong to one such family at a time.This exclusivity of family is seen most literally in plenary adoption, alegal term meaning that a child who is adopted loses all legal ties to his orher birth family (e.g., cannot inherit), as those ties are replaced by a fullset of formal and legal ties to the adoptive family. Adoption in mostwealthy countries, following the Hague Adoption Convention of 1993, is

plenary. Sara Dorow has referred to plenary adoption as a kind of serialmonogamy of national/familial kinship (2006, 209). As John Terrell andJudith Schachter have argued, a study of adoption can shed light ondefinitions of and criteria for citizenship: What does it mean to belong toa group or nation, and is this linked with ideas about what it means to be afamily? (Terrell and Modell 1994, 159).

The idea of belonging is central to our understandings of adoption andmigration. Both phenomena ultimately demand an interrogation of whatit means to belong to a family, to a community, to one nation or another ormore than one, in a context where key symbolic markers such as pheno-type or ideologies of blood ties work against eorts to belong. Because ofthese and other underlying similarities, the historian Karen Balcom hassuggested that it would be fruitful to analyze adoption as a form of migra-tion (2010). But these two processes are largely kept separate withinscholarly work. Migration is often reported using a wide-angle lens, byeconomists or sociologists seeking to understand the causes that drivemigration. Adoption is more often analyzed on a microscale, by psycholo-

gists or social workers who explore the eects of adoption on individualpsychological development or family relations.


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8 introduction

International adoption (also referred to as transnational adoption orintercountry adoption) has become a centerpiece of recent writing,mostly anthropological, that explores belonging through a focus on kin-ship, reproduction, and childhood. This work on international adoption

demonstrates how kinship is formed across national borders and between(or excluding) people of widely discrepant means and stations, and revealspersistent ties between nationalism, race, class, gender, kinship, and im-perialism. The central comparative frame in most scholarly work on adop-tion to date has been between adoptive and so-called natural familiesthat is, families formed through biological reproduction. This framing hasled to the important finding that the ways in which internationally adop-tive families are constructed can shed light on the ways that other forms of

kinship we imagine to be natural are constructed. This valuable contribu-tion, however, precludes a close comparison of ways that internationallyadoptive families are like, and unlike, specific other kinds of families, suchas the migrant families I knew. We also need to examine similarities anddierences between adoptive and other unnatural families, families thatdraw negative attention or public anxiety, such as migrants who are sepa-rated from their children.

Books about adoption reside together in the library or bookstore, while

studies of transnational families are scattered across the stacks and shelves,each catalogued according to the country under discussion. When broughttogether, this literature reveals key themes in the field of kinship underdisplacement. On one hand, the literature focuses on how kinship is sus-tained despite distance, and on the other, it elucidates the obstacles to thatkinship, and the ways in which it is reconfigured. These studies are col-ored by a particularly poignant irony: the often painful separation thatchildren and parents endure is caused by a migration motivated by theparents desire to improve the lives of the children, which rarely unfolds inthe way either parent or child had imagined.

These studies of transnational families are part of a larger literature onthe transnational connections between sending and receiving countries,and between people, ideas, products, and other things that flow betweenthem. The great value of this literature is its emphasis on the ties, ratherthan the disjunctures, between people in sending countries and receivingcountries. Focusing on the ties lets us normalize, rather than pathologize,migration and migrants by showing that labor migration is an understand-

able response to dicult situations. The downside of emphasizing ties tohome is that this focus can come at the expense of discovering how labor


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migrants may be similar to, and develop anities with, people and ideasin the host nationsuch as adoptive families. Both perspectives must beheld in play to fully capture the reality of contemporary migration.

Caroline Bledsoe and Papa Sow have noted, In the eu , as in much of

the industrialized world, family life is quietly becoming the battlegroundof immigration struggles (2011b, 175). Their observation reveals how it isparamount to bring together dierent ways of considering family, migra-tion, and the international order in the same framework. Yet work thatplaces immigration and adoption within the same analytical lens is stillrare, with a few notable and insightful exceptions (see Howell and Mel-huus 2007; Hbinette and Tigervall 2009, 337; Marre 2009c, 240, Rastas2009). The comparative literature scholar David L. Eng has labeled trans-

national adoption one of the most privileged forms of diaspora and immi-gration in the late twentieth century, and in the same breath he questionsthe adoptees immigration status when he suggests that the phenomenonraises an interlocking set of gender, racial, national, political, economic,and cultural questions. Is the transnational adoptee an immigrant? (2003,1). Transnational adoptees are privileged immigrants, a contradiction interms that begs its own deconstruction, a nebulous status that can alwaysbe questioned: They are immigrants. Are they immigrants?

Origin Stories

While the national origin of adopted children in Spain mattered greatly tomany who are involved in adoption, I confess that it mattered to me aswell. Many scholars who work on international adoption in a receivingcountry do so from a perspective of interest in and long experience withthat country (see Howell 2006; Marre 2007; Yngvesson 2010). I made myway to Spain on an alternate paththe path more often taken by anthro-pologists who begin their careers in a sending nation and end up workingon communities of migrants from that nation. After many years of anthro-pological fieldwork in Peru (20002007), I had developed a deep knowl-edge of the way that Peruvian adoptions worked. I had a network of con-tacts in Peruvian adoption oces, childrens homes, and ngos upon whomI would be able to call as questions arose. I also knew that people in Peruwere curious, even anxious, to know what was becoming of the childrenwho left Peru in international adoption. Ruth, the Ayacucho adoption

lawyer during my fieldwork there, had complained that one reason adop-tions take so long is because some judges and attorneys are against adop-


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10 introduction

tion and think it is a method of organ tracking. But, she hastily explainedto me, this is not possible because there are four years of postadoption bi-annual reports, complete with photos of the children. Beyond these formalreports sent to the government adoption oce, the public knows only a few

anecdotal cases of adoptees who have returned to Peru to do philanthropicwork or meet members of their birth families (Leinaweaver 2011).

But I also wanted to find out how transnational migration had trans-formed the lives of the Peruvians I knew best. Two months after Zaidadeparted, her younger brother left too, having obtained a work contractand visa with the help of his Spanish girlfriend, who had also spent manysummers volunteering in Ayacucho. In March of the next year, Zaidashusband Jorge left Ayacucho to join her at last, after a long and dicult

separation. During the following decade, a few more of their friends andrelatives followed. By the time I got to Spain I felt right at home thereamong my Peruvian friends who welcomed me with plates of ceviche andpapa a la huancana. They moved into a neighborhood populated largely byimmigrants and Roma, and when I stayed with them we would buy im-ported Peruvian chilies at small corner shops near their apartment.

My friends had suered a terrible loss in the summer of 2006 whenZaidas husband Jorge was killed in Afghanistan; the vehicle he was travel-

ing in was hit by an improvised explosive device. He and Zaidas brotherhad both joined the Spanish military when they could not find other workafter migrating. As the first of Spains soldiers to be killed in Afghanistan,his sacrifice was solemnly honored by Spanish dignitaries. As a Peruvianmigrant, his death was analyzed and criticized in both the Spanish andPeruvian media for what it said about who was fighting this war. Peru-vian, Cannon Fodder, read one memorable headline in a Peruvian news-paper. In the damp Lima night, I went to Perus military airport in Callaoand waited there to meet the Spanish military plane bearing his con, hiswidow, and his friends. The next day I followed them northward to hissmall hometown and accompanied his devastated family members as theylaid him to rest. I remember that Zaida couldnt sleep, so as I lay next toher on a crowded single bed in a crowded room at her in-laws small house,she quietly and urgently recounted stories to me about him, about them,and about migrant life in Spain.

Over the next year I began making plans to start a new project in Spain,where I could learn what things were like for my friends as migrants in a

wholly dierent context, and where I could begin to compare the experi-ences of adoptees and migrants. Having observed the near-simultaneous


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departures of Rebeca and Zaida for Spain, I had already begun to under-stand the revelatory possibilities of juxtaposing adoption and migration. Ithink their pairing promises enormous insight to migration scholars andkinship scholars alike. As an anthropologist of kinship, and as someone

with several adopted family members and other more distant relativeswho placed children for adoption, I am keenly interested in what thisjuxtaposition means for adoption. And as a result of my long-standing tiesto Peru, my account privileges the perspectives of Peruvians within Spainrather than those of Spaniards.

Listening to both Peruvians and Spaniards, from the perspective of aU.S. scholar who knows adoption most intimately in its Peruvian form,meant that I could potentially hear features of Spanish adoption discourse

that might not have been as apparent to observers more permanentlybased in Spain. One consequence of this is that my depiction of Spanishsociety sometimes diers from that which Spanish scholars have pro-duced, particularly in my analysis of racism and xenophobia there. Race isdirectly relevant to the experiences I record in this book because theimplication of transnational adoption between the specific countries ofPeru and Spain is that such adoption is also transracial. That is, nativeSpanish citizens tend to view themselves as white and European (Marre

2009c, 233). Their children from Peru bear brown skin, dark hair and eyes,and indigenous Andean or Amazonian features. Signe Howell has arguedin the Norwegian context that young persons of color were assumed to beadoptees (and not discriminated against) until immigration began to in-crease; consequently, adoptees were suddenly treated with racism. Theunremarked-upon implication here is that migrants are visibly dierentand are unsurprisingly treated in racist ways (Howell 2006, 128).

A Contingent Method

As an ethnographer seeking to compare two communities that, at least intheory, are carefully separated, I contribute to the idea that they share keycharacteristics through the very act of comparison. I am not and I was nota neutral observer: I actively sought points of contact and felicitous coinci-dences that, when taken together, show the complexity of both adoptionand migration as everyday lived experiences. I followed those chanceoverlaps when I came across them, a strategy that ultimately produced a

book that, in essence, groups people who are not supposed to be seentogether. The juxtapositions that I encountered gave me a sense of the big


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12 introduction

picture: that although children, parents, professionals, and researchersmay consider adoption and migration to be two very separate phenomena,there are many similarities at the level of everyday life.

It is, then, a contingent method: I am interested in how migration and

adoption have bearing on one another, rather than in what each one canonly tell me about itself. This is an unusual but not unique position, and Ifound it notable that the two colleagues in Spain who most explicitlyexplore the relationship between adoption and migration are both mi-grants from Argentina. One of them, Parrondo, the psychologist, directsa support and counseling service for adoptive families that approacheschildhood from the point of view of adoption and migration, because theyare happening simultaneously in Spain, even in the face of some adoptive

parents complaints about this juxtaposition. Meanwhile, the anthropolo-gist Diana Marre was told in no uncertain terms by a teacher in Barcelonathat we do not have immigrant children, we have children adopted inter-nationally (2009c, 228). My comparative stance would occasionallybring forth exhortations from adoption professionals to be cautious inapproaching adoptive parents, because these professionals believed thatadoptive parents would be likely to resist the idea that migration andadoption were similar (compare Dorow 2006, 210). In the end I found that

those people who were willing to speak to me were also open to consider-ing the comparisons and more than ready to frankly resist anything theydid not agree with.

To figure out what bearing migration and adoption have on one an-other, I conducted ethnographic research in Madrid for eight monthsspread over four years (200912). Madrid is a key destination both forLatin American migrants and for international adoptions. The director ofadoptions in Madrid told me that about 20 percent of Spains total adop-tions come to the Community of Madrid. (The Community of Madrid isone of the Spanish political divisions known as Autonomous Commu-nities, and contains the city of Madrid and its environs.) I also draw onresearch in Peru to complete my analysis, including both the investigationthat I conducted between 2000 and 2007 on adoption, and a recent visitin 2012.

Over the course of this study, I spoke with a wide range of very dispa-rate sources: Peruvian migrants and their families; Peruvian adoptees andtheir families; Spanish and Peruvian professionals (such as psychologists,

pediatricians, and consular employees) who work with either community;and Spanish researchers and professors investigating migration and adop-


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tion. Some of these people I met through my earlier connections, askingmigrant friends to introduce me to members of their networks. I metother migrants in the classic settings of migrant researchPeruvian res-taurants and bars, national celebrations, and formal settings such as the

consulate. I contacted adoptive families with the assistance of adoptionprofessionals, researchers, and listservs. Research participants are re-ferred to by pseudonyms, with the exception of those persons I inter-viewed in their capacity as experts (for example, lawyers and psycholo-gists). When I first introduce each research participant, I pause to explainhow I met him or her and to give some contextual background.

Given my focus on young people, I spoke with as many of them as Icould, but, understandably, their parents were protective, and several par-

ents preferred to speak to me alone and not involve their children. Theresult is that while I report young peoples voices here, those voices aresometimes heavily mediated. In addition, while I spoke with mothers andfathers and sons and daughters alike, I should note that family making incontemporary Western countries is gendered feminine (di Leonardo 1987)and adoption is overwhelmingly the work of women (mothers as well asprofessional social workers, psychologists, and lawyers), and accordingly, Italked to more women than men. Finally, most of the migrants and adop-

tive families I spoke to were middle class, although, as might be expected,they did tend to cluster at opposite ends of that category.The anthropological tool kit I used for this study emphasized semistruc-

tured interviews, unlike my previous work, which drew more heavily uponparticipant observation. This was largely a consideration of the issue I wasstudying. From conversations with scholars, professionals, and reportersinterested in adoption, I quickly learned that many adoptive families inSpain are tired of feeling like guinea pigs and being poked and prodded byyet another questioning outsider. Participant observation involves spend-ing significant amounts of time with research subjects as they carry outtheir day-to-day activities, and setting up camp in the kitchens of adoptivefamilies or the classrooms of adopted youths would have been both im-practical and unwelcome. Contained yet open-ended interviews, where Ispent two or three hours chatting with parents or families and followed upin subsequent years for more of the same, were acceptable to family mem-bers and yielded a great deal of fascinating material. (All translations fromthese interviews, as well as from Spanish-language texts, are my own. I

follow a loose translation practice, prioritizing the flow and sentimentover literal translations.) A broad cross section of people touched by adop-


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14 introduction

tion and migrationmore than two dozen adoptive parents or familiesand migrant parents or familieswere ultimately willing to speak withme, and from them I discovered that young people are of interest both forwhat they tell us directly and for what others believe about them and do on

their behalf.I supplemented the insights gained from interviews with sustained

observation of public events, such as informational meetings about inter-national adoption and educational presentations to adoptive parents. Icollected and analyzed other publicly available materials as well: textualand visual materials drawn from news media and advertisements; fic-tional or pedagogical representations of adoption found in films, televi-sion shows, and books; national legal documents and international con-

ventions regulating adoption and migration; and the records of an openonline adoption forum, where Spanish prospective adoptive parents andthose who have already adopted from Peru exchange information andsupport.

My own positionality as an ethnographer in Spain was dierent than ithad been ten years earlier in Peru. This was a consequence both of my shiftin field sites and of changes in my own life. In Peru at the start of thetwenty-first century, I had been something of a curious anomaly, childless

and unmarried in my mid-twenties, an age when more than half of Peru-vian women had already had children. Now married and in my thirties,and on my most recent trips to Madrid accompanied by my infant son, Iwas less likely to cause consternation among those I interviewed, not leastbecause the average age of first-time Spanish mothers is over thirty.

More interestingly for my research, bringing my son to Spain meant I waspromptly exposed to all kinds ofmadrileo (the name for a Madrid resi-dent) and Peruvian ideas about babies and children with which I hadnever had an immediate connection before. I heard several aphorisms thatwere new to me. Numerous madrileos told me that babies are lovelywhen theyre little, implying that in just a few months they turn intohandfuls. Only one such commenter was silenced by her companion, whosolemnly insisted that a house without children is like a garden withoutflowers. These attitudes about children reflect broader demographic andsocial trends in the Spanish context.


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Adoption and Migration in Spain

This juxtaposition of adoption and migration could be studied in manyplaces where the end points of transnational adoption and transnational

migration coincide, like Sweden, Norway, or the United States. Its alterthe juxtaposition of absent children and absent migrantscould be stud-ied in many places where the origin points of transnational adoption andtransnational migration coincide, such as Guatemala or Russia. In thisbook I compare adoption and migration through a focus on the relation-ship of two countries: Spain and Peru. Peru is the sending country in thispairing, an appellation used both in migration research and adoptionpractice: babies and children are sent from Peru to new families in other

countries, and men, women, and families travel from Peru to other coun-tries in search of work, education, personal safety, or to reunite with otherfamily members. Spain is the receiving country, where single people orcouples are transformed into family members via adoption, and wheremigrants are incorporated and, in the optimistic discourse of the Spanishstate, integrated into new jobs and new communities.

In the past fifteen years more than forty thousand children from morethan thirty-five countries have been adopted by Spanish parents and moved

to Spain.

In the grand scheme of things, these numbers are not vastthenumbers of international adoptions do not even equate to one percent ofannual births in Spain. But at the same time, there was a period of greatchange in these small numbers. I discuss some of the idiosyncrasies ofSpanish international adoption practices, and the specifics of adoptionsfrom Peru, in chapter 1. Here I note only the sense of great and rapidchange in the international adoption scene. The demographer Peter Sel-man (2010) documents that between 1998 and 2004 global numbers ofinternational adoptions rose by 42 percent and in Spain they rose by a full273 percent. And the numbers do not fully account for the image andimportance that international adoption has had in Spain. As Laura Briggswrites, adoption, while a practice that aects a small and shrinking num-ber of people, has been important to national and international politics outof all proportion to its numerical significance (2012, 5).

The numerical significance of international migration, on the otherhand, is unquestioned. The migrant population was recently estimated atover six million (14.1 percent of Spains total population) (oecd 2010). At

the close of 2011, almost 20 percent of the Community of Madrids popu-lation was made up of immigrants. Of those foreigners currently residing


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16 introduction

in Madrid, 40 percent are from the Americas, and the top five nationali-ties are Romanian, Ecuadorian, Moroccan, Colombian, and Peruvian. Iwill further discuss the specifics of Peruvian migration, and key themesraised by migrant youths and families, in chapter 2. These numbers have

begun to decline in the past two years, undoubtedly slowed greatly by theeconomic crisis but also aected by Spanish naturalization policies thatease migrants out of the category of foreigner.

Migrants presence is also perceived by most as a recent and suddenphenomenon. One adoptive family, Diego and Gabriela and their children,agreed to talk with me after an adoption professional they had worked withcontacted them about my study. They were incredibly gracious, receivingme cordially in their inviting garden, which was lined with fruit trees and

situated in front of their small white bungalow on the outskirts of Madrid.Gabriela brought out a generous and multicultural homemade feast in-cluding Spanish tortillas and Peruvian chicha morada. As I leafed through aphoto album with them, looking at a picture of the school graduation ofone of their children, I remarked, Looking at these photos, I dont seemany Peruvians. Diego explained, At first there werent many. Ten yearsago in Spain . . . His son cut in, In our school there were almost noimmigrants. Diego continued, The same is true for our neighborhood.

Our kids were the first ones who went to that school. . . . Spain has changeda lot. Four million arrived, out of the blue. The language that scholars useto describe the rise of international adoption in Spain also evokes thesurprise and suddenness with which it seemed to appear out of nowhere;for example, irrumpir (bursting onto the scene) is often used (MgicaFlores 2008, 91). Workplaces, schools, streets, public transport, marriages,and families are all more diverse than they were thirty years ago (GimnezRomero 2008, 108).

As one social worker told me, Spain was a third-world country sixtyyears agoto illustrate this he exclaimed, unicef came here! But overthe past two decades, Spain went from being a poor country of out-migrationto a top European destination for migrants from South America, NorthAfrica, and Eastern Europe. At the turn of the twenty-first century inSpain, immigration was on the minds and tongues of scholars, policymakers, politicians, the media, and everyday citizens (Ros-Rojas 2011,70). This sudden transformation significantly aects the way that labormigrants, and the adopted youths who resemble them, are incorporated

and come to belong or to be excluded. Over and over, Spanish peopleremarked to me some variation of the sentiment ten years ago there were


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no immigrants in Spain, and look how things have changed. This was saidruefully, as a precursor to critiques of a Spanish racism that only becameapparent when immigrants arrived to provoke it. As one woman wroteafter being robbed by the so-called banda de los peruanos (Peruvian gang),

Are we racist or are they making us racist? Diego, the adoptive father,qualified this generalized sentiment: There are people who say we areracists. Spaniards have never been racists. Its just that it is a big change in ashort time.

Large numbers of international migrants and symbolically meaningfulnumbers of international adoptees do not arrive to a blank slate. Spain isan aging, low-fertility society, and these demographic features aect theway adoptees and migrants are brought into the national body. For exam-

ple, labor migrants do many kinds of work, but perhaps one of their mostappreciated roles is as caregiver for senior citizens and disabled persons.They also care for children, although there are fewer and fewer childrenfor them to care for, given that Spains fertility rate is well below replace-ment level (Population Reference Bureau 2012). I heard many explana-tions for this low fertility rate. Perhaps it is just too expensive to raisechildren to fulfill their class position in a Spain that is falling apart eco-nomically and politically. Or perhaps children cut too sharply into the

famous Spanish nightlife. Or maybe it is that there are not enough ex-tended family members around and available to shoulder some of thecaretaking. Violeta, a twenty-one-year-old Peruvian migrant, told me thatafter four years in Spain she had observed that Spanish people have kidsafter age thirty, which seemed delayed to her and which she ascribed tothe weight of their mortgages and their desire to travel and enjoy life.While Spaniards may delay childbearing, there are many cultural pres-sures to have children, as suggested by a saying I heard that one must dothree things in life: write a book, plant a tree, and have a child. Andeventually some of those who do want to have children turn to adoptionuntil very recently, strongly preferring international adoptionto maketheir desire a reality.

While Spanish parents adopt from many dierent countries, and immi-grants bring their children to Spain from many dierent countries, Ifound that there is something particularly meaningful about raising Lati-nos in Spain. (The term Latino refers to people of Latin American originwho reside in the United States, but it is also used widely in Spain by

migrant youth and others as well.) First, Latin American migrants inSpain are always at least tacitly figured as good migrants in comparison


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18 introduction

to Islamic North Africans (Rogozen-Soltar 2012). Despite a long history ofrelations and mixing, Spain is often defined in the popular imaginary asthat which is not Arabic, from the central historical moment of the Recon-quista to the resistance to present-day North African migration. So Latin

Americans are often contrasted to Arabs when Spaniards are talking aboutthe probability of migrant integration. Diego had told me that the bestevidence for how well integrated Latinos are is that perhaps one-third ofSpains forces in Afghanistan are Latino immigrants. By contrast, Spainis viewed as the mother country to Latin American nations, and the sim-ilarity that springs from that is felt to be important.

Latin Americans are generally thought to hold great symbolic and ma-terial importance in Spain because of long-standing, deeply rooted ties to

the Americas lasting five hundred years or more. Of course, the actualvariety of relationships between Spaniards and Latin Americans is muchmore complicated than such a quickly sketched history might suggest, butthe past of conquest and colonialism is nonetheless mentioned with sur-prising frequency given how long ago it occurred. One young man I knewin Peru, who later migrated to Spain, told me in 2001 that he hatedSpaniards because of what they did to his Peru. And Diego recounted forme the moment he met Consuelo, one of his daughters, in Peru: I think

the kids in the institution had actually never seen anyone with a beard. . . .It was like the Indians, when the Spaniards came to the Americas, theyhad beards. I arrived and she was frightened; she didnt want to approachme. So he shaved o his beard, and as I turned the pages of their photo-graph album, the final picture showed him smiling and clean-shaven.Other scholars have noted that numerous Peruvians associate Spain withthe conquistadors, arrogant and racist and believe that the Spanish arebetter o than the Peruvians today because they robbed them (Tornosand Aparicio 1997, 14, 72). Together these instances gesture to a shared,violent history. The repercussions of the Spanish invasion of Latin Amer-ica five hundred years ago continue to echo, if softly, as Peruvians considermigrating to Spain and try to make sense of how they are received there.

Spain and Peru have a postcolonial relationship, although not one thatis usually described in such terms, as the colonial period is so distant intime. The legacy of colonialism colors Spanish migration policy: legalresidents who wish to obtain citizenship may do so more quickly if theycome from Latin American countriesin two years rather than five years

for refugees or ten years for citizens of other countries. In addition, certainkey former colonial subjectsPeruvians and Moroccans among them


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have been privileged in recent years to be able to migrate with a work con-tract alone, as opposed to first requiring further paperwork that demon-strates that potential Spanish workers were not available. People I spokewith in Spain ascribed these policies to colonial guilt, glossed originally

in the law as cultural anity (Vives-Gonzalez 2011). Indeed, Europeancountries have a very dierent tradition than does the United States whenit comes to incorporating migrants as citizens, due to their strong histor-ical links between imagined cultural community and political belonging(Castles and Davidson 2000, 100). For Spaniards, Latin Americans canvariously represent undeveloped, needy people to whom they send hu-manitarian aid (Sinervo and Hill 2011); good migrants, in contrast withNorth Africans, courteous and kind and ready to assimilate (Rogozen-

Soltar 2007); migrants who are backward and slow (one friend got calledIndian by a Spaniard whose meal she was serving); or, worst of all,delinquents, associated with bandas latinas (Latin gangs).

Latin gangs is the publics term for gangs made up of youths of LatinAmerican origin, like the Latin Kings and etas. Both groups originatedamong Latinos in the United States, and their arrival in Spain is a fullytransnational aair: migrant youths from Latin American nations firstbrought them back to their countries of origin, where they grew and

thrived, and some members of those Latin American versions of the gangsthen immigrated to Spain (see Aparicio, Tornos, and Cabala 2009, 84;Garca Espaa 2001; Lpez Corral 2008). One social worker I spoke withmade an unconventional suggestion that rang true to me. He felt that theidea of Latin gangs is almost entirely a moral panic, an invented crisis. Hesaw them as simply a way for young people of migrant origin to hang outand they are a convenient trope in the conservative media where stories ofmigration are all too frequently paired with stories of delinquency.

The gangs are also a figure against which young migrants can narratebroader experiences of marginalization and exclusion. For example,Jaime, a young Peruvian migrant I spoke to alongside his mother and aunt,argued that Latin gangs formed in response to racism. (I later asked himwhere he thought racism came from. Good question. . . . I think Ger-many.) He recounted an origin story, possibly apocryphal, about how fourneo-Nazis went to the Barajas airport in Madrid and beat up a recentarrival from Ecuador, whoangrily and understandablyformed a groupto defend himself, which became the Latin Kings. Jaime thought that the

Latin Kings are made up of kids whose parents brought them here asteens, they came already rebellious, didnt want to do anything, and joined


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20 introduction

gangs. And they start killing people, which obviously isnt appreciated andso the Nazi groups come in the nights to beat up dark-skinned people. Inother words, for Jaime, Latin gangs were originally formed in response toracism, but anti-Latino racism is also motivated by Latin gangs. I discuss

the significance of Latin gangs in more detail in chapter 5.Jaimes words about racism are particularly interesting given another

important feature of the Spanish context: despite all the evidence andeveryday experience to the contrary (see Barbadillo 1997; Cabral andFaxas 2004; Calavita 2003; Salvatierra 2001; Surez-Navaz, Maci, andMoreno 2007), the dominant discourse emphatically states that Spain isnot a racist nation. Diegos words kept echoing in my mind: Spaniardshave never been racists. I suggest thatas, famously, is the case for

Brazilwhen Spaniards repeatedly insist that they are not racist, they areactually displaying a hyperconsciousness of race (Costa Vargas 2004).

I introduce here my first scholar-as-informant, on the assumption thatwe must observe both the social scientists observing the social world aswell as the eects that this has on this world (Wimmer and Glick Schiller2002, 302). The migration expert Juan Diez Nicols, cordially receivingme in his shady suburban backyard, expressed the same conclusion Diegohad come to in a backhanded fashion and that I would eventually find to

be typical of Spanish discourse on the subject. Diez Nicols remarked thatSpain is less racist than most European countries. He based this not-entirely-ringing endorsement on data collected by the World Values Sur-vey. For a survey question about what kind of person the respondentwould least want to have as a neighbor, he explained, Roma are usuallyhighest ranked in Spain, far above immigrants or people of other races.

Not incidentally, the belief that Spain is not racist fits perfectly withadoptive kinship ideology: that racial dierences should be meaningless,and that transracial, international adoption is therefore an unproblem-atic child welfare practice (Hbinette and Tigervall 2009, 336).

Because of this dominant discourse, the Spanish people I spoke to whosaid that they had observed racism would always preface it by saying,Supposedly Spain isnt racist, but . . . Esteban Beltrn, the director ofAmnesty International in Spain, noted that racism is ocially invisiblebecause in Spain, unlike in most European countries, racist acts are notformally documented and catalogued. But migrants do experience rac-ism: being asked for id by white police ocers at metro stations in Latino

neighborhoods and being glared at by older white women on subways arethe everyday social circumstances that the bandas mean to respond to,


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fighting the humiliation of being Latino (Aparicio, Tornos, and Cabala etal. 2009, 92). The Spanish pediatrician Jess Garcia Perez, whose clinicspecializes in the care of internationally adopted children (a populationmore prone to tropical diseases, malnutrition, or interrupted vaccine sched-

ules), provocatively characterized gangs as antibodies when we spoke. Hesuggested that migrants are not incorporated into a Spanish society thatovertly praises diversity but does not successfully promote diverse socialinteraction. And despite its ocial nonexistence, many adoptive parentsdo see Spain as racistfor instance, when their children are told by class-mates to go back to your country, negro. Furthermore, xenophobicpolitical parties have made gains in recent years, as they have elsewhere inEurope. Carlos Gimnez Romero (2008, 112) argues that most Spaniards

have contradictory views about migrationempathizing and recallingSpains history of out-migration (Suarez-Navaz 2005; compare Cole 1997),but resenting cultural relativism or the possibility of Spain being trans-formed. I met one migrant mother and her Spanish-born son who partici-pated in a commission on migration that formed part of the protests ofindignados (indignant ones) that began on May 15, 2011, in Madrids heart,the Puerta del Sol. (Several months later the same anger and frustrationwould erupt on U.S. soil as Occupy Wall Street.) The son described their

actions as part of a migrant civil rights movement: We wrote a mani-festohow we are against human rights abuses, like when they roundpeople up in the metro, and we are against the new immigration law, andwe want the immigrant detention centers closed. Social and legal equalityfor everyone.

Transnational adoption from Peru to Spain is usually also transracialadoption. Outsiders and family members alike identified adopted chil-drens phenotypes as dierent from their parentswhat one intervieweecalled the elephant in the room. Race in Spain is heavily predicated onvisible dierence and on other cues such as place of origin and languageabilities. Adopted children and migrant youths may dier in their citizen-ship but they may share a racial ascription, something that causes anxietyamong many associated with adoption. Identifying with ones roots is onething (as I argue in chapter 6), but identifying with ones fellow Peruvian-origin migrants may be seen as a step down (as I argue in chapter 5). Thishas implications both for labor migrants and their families, whose livesare limited by connections between race and class, and for adoptive mi-

grants, whose parents must navigate those connections and attempt totease them apart on their childrens behalf. For adoptive parents, these


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22 introduction

encounters and overlaps may lead to an extended conversation about thesocial meaning of race among racially unmarked, socially powerful peo-ple who do not normally engage in the specifics of disenfranchisement(Dubinsky 2010, 63).

One friend, an Afro-Peruvian musician who has lived in Spain for manyyears and who volunteers in youth prisons with immigrants, remarkedthat Spain is like a stir-fry (which is referred to as awok in Spanish). Such ameal is full of so many dierent things from all over the place, and youbegin to eat it, and halfway through your meal it starts to feel heavy in yourstomach and you wonder how you will ever digest it. In other words:diversity is a wok that Spain cant digest. This characterization, while apt,downplays two important points. First, Spain is and was already (before

the immigrants arrived) a diverse nation culturally, racially, and linguisti-cally (Gimnez 2008, 108). Language dierences have long been cruciallyimportant in Spain, a fact that my research setting of Madrid, the nationalcapital, may obscure. Adoptive and labor migrants who land in the BasqueCountry or Catalonia face a very dierent linguistic and cultural context.Second, the Spanish government and the European Union more generallyare strongly committed to ideologies of integration and ofinterculturalidad(interculturality), despite the apparent diculty of digestion. One young

migrant I interviewed, Esteban, told me that he had received instructionon how to think of himself from a teacher steeped in the discourse ofinterculturality: Uno no es de donde nace sino de donde pase (Yourenot from where you are born, but rather from where you live). But asSusana, a Peruvian migrant and psychologist, told me, many Spaniards areagainst the ideal of interculturality because of Spains internal conflict:linguistic and cultural tensions, political separation movements, and theattendant challenges of negotiating powerful regional governments andthe imperatives of national unity. And to me the emphasis on integrationsuggested that the burden is on the migrant to acculturate, not on theSpaniard to learn to understand and value dierence.

it is not insignificant that the research for this book was doneduring a global economic crisis. The good life prior to the global crash ledto a construction boom in Spain and a great need for labor. That boom wasrecent compared to other European locations because of the long dictator-ship that Spain endured under Francisco Franco (193675), under which

urbanization and industrialization both proceeded at a much slower pacethan in the remainder of Europe. Migration policy, while controlled as


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necessary in the view of fellow European nations, was nonetheless rela-tively permissive during the 1990s and early 2000s, and periodic amnes-ties allowed those who were in Spain without documents to begin on apath to citizenship. Because Spain has a social safety net that the United

States lacks, even undocumented migrants have access to health care andeducation.

But as the bottom fell out from the global markets and Spains con-struction sector was particularly hard hit, it became more dicultandless desirablefor immigrants to come to Spain. The relatives of migrantsalready in Spain continue to arrive, but it is now nearly impossible toobtain a work contract and migrate as a laborer. In 2011 migrants unem-ployment rate reached 39.1 percent, more than twice as high as the 18.4

percent rate corresponding to native-born Spaniards (Colectivo Io 2012:8). Meanwhile, as one Limeo taxi driver told me, unprompted, in 2012,he hoped Perus economy continues to grow so that Peruvians will nolonger have to emigrate to make a living, as he had seen news reports ofLatinos being treated poorly in Spain. In fact, the number of migrantsleaving Peru began to fall in 2008 after a decade of increase (CooperacinInterinstitucional inei-digemin-oim 2010). Many migrants are also re-turning to Peruincluding three of the friends I first met in Peru and later

encountered in Spain.

During the Peruvian elections in 2011, the candi-date Keiko Fujimoris radio ad played up this possibility while exhortinglisteners to vote for the country that saw your birth. If I am elected andyou decide to return youll come back to the Peru that you long for, withmore security and more opportunities. Native Spaniards are departingthe country as well, in such vast quantities that they now outnumberimmigrants to Spain, and some of them are even moving to Peru. It isamid this context of growing insecurity and economic anxiety that I con-ducted the research for this book.

It is a context that aects international adoption as well. One reasonadoptions are stalling in Spain is because of the economic crisis, as Car-mela, an adoptive mother, told me during our most recent conversation.People dont have stable jobs, so they are not approved to adopt. The ngosthat assist Spaniards with the process are closing their doors because of fi-nancial problems. But she added a few other reasons: the children of theadoption boom have begun to grow up and have dierent kinds of prob-lems, so adoption no longer seems like such a good idea. Another contribu-

tor to the decline, she thought, was the decrease in adoptable children with-out special needs in sending countries (Selman 2009, 589). Every year, from


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24 introduction

the beginnings of international adoption at midcentury to their 2004 peak,both applicants and actual international adoptions grew steadily. Since2004, adoption numbers have fallen substantially, a decline not matched bynumbers of applicants (Selman 2009, 575; see also Selman 2010).

So this book depicts a brief moment in timea moment when both in-ternational labor migration and international adoption (to Spain, but alsooverall), after swelling tremendously, have crested. It is not necessarilythe beginning of the end of either phenomenon, but it quite possiblymarks a crucial shift in direction for both. The case studies that appear inthis book invite reflection on larger demographic processes, such as in-creasing immigration, low fertility, and aging European societies. Theyalso provide insight into larger political processes, such as the rise of anti-

immigrant parties currently transforming even those countries that hadhistorically welcomed foreign workers. Adoption oers an intriguingmodel of how foreign bodies may be integrated, yet the process of adop-tion and growing up racially dierent from ones own kinwhen one ofthe many things kinship is thought to mean is the inheritance of racial andethnic identityis a complicated path. The following chapters trace myown approach to adoption and migration in the way that I inductively ar-rived at them: from a consideration of each separately to an exploration of

their surprising connections, and finally to how those connections canreveal the ways that adoption and migration are meaningfully contingent,and the ideas and ideologies that a unified analysis of migration andadoption can help to explain.

adoptive migration by jessaca b. leinaweaver

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