Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain 9780822377511

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Adoptive Migration

Jessaca B. Leinaweaver

Adoptive Migration raising latinos in spain

Duke University Press Durham and London 2013

∫ 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 adoption—Spain. 2. Intercountry adoption—Peru. 3. Spain—Emigration and immigration. 4. Peru—Emigration and immigration. i. Title. hv875.5.145 2013 362.7340946—dc23 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 Peruvian Adoption and Migration,’’ The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 16 (2): 380–400, ∫ 2011 American Anthropological Association.

In memory of Jorge A. Hernández Seminario

q.e.p.d.

contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction

comparing adoption and migration one

Waiting for a Baby

adopting the ideal immigrant two

1

25

The Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child

separating families or displacing children? three

Mixed Marriages

migrants and adoption four

66

Undomesticated Adoption

adopting the children of immigrants five

Solidarity

postadoptive overtures six

84

102

Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

culture, ethnicity, and race

122

Conclusion

what adoptive migration might mean

Notes 155

References 179

Index 193

148

47

acknowledgments

In the six years that I have been planning, working on, and completing this project, I have amassed countless debts. To those who supported (intellectually, financially, and emotionally) and participated in this study, I am sincerely grateful. Any strengths of this book can be traced back to those I name here. Its errors and inadequacies are mine alone. Research and writing take time and cost money, both of which are hard to come by these days. I am fortunate that my research with Peruvians in Spain was generously supported by the National Science Foundation (nsf) (grant no. 1026143), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Fulbright iie Program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc) Standard Research Grant, and the Howard Foundation. Special thanks to Deb Winslow at nsf, Mary Beth Moss at Wenner-Gren, and Aitor Rubio and Patricia Zahniser at Fulbright in Spain for outstanding support. My earlier research in Peru, 2001–3, was funded by the National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and the University of Michigan. Brown University has been enormously generous in supporting this research through its Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award; Faculty Research Fund for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; and the Karen T. Romer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award for International Summer Research Collaboration. Brown’s Population Studies and Training Center (pstc) provided financial support in the form of Mellon Anthropological Demography Funding. I also received support from Brown’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (clacs). A course release granted by Brown’s Pembroke Center during the year I was Edwin and Shirley Seave Faculty Fellow in the seminar ‘‘Markets and Bodies in Transnational Perspective’’ was deeply appreciated. Exchanges

with colleagues in that seminar, led by Kay Warren, were enormously productive. The nsf advance Career Development Award ($15,000 to support career development) that I received through Brown in 2010 was also invaluable. I can’t imagine a better environment in which to do this research and writing than Brown University. I am especially grateful to those writinggroup friends who read and commented on these chapters and improved them measurably: Paja Faudree, Rebecca Carter, Bianca Dahl, Becky Schulthies, and Marcy Brink-Danan. My colleagues in the Anthropology Department deserve so much appreciation for their friendship, support, and collegiality: Adia Benton, Lina Fruzzetti, Matt Gutmann, Sherine Hamdy, 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 Mike White, Andy Foster, and Leah VanWey. At clacs, Rich Snyder and Jim Green were very supportive. I’m also grateful to Kiri Miller, Vanessa Ryan, Nancy Jacobs, and Carolyn Dean for so many non-book-related conversations that unbeknownst to them, sharpened the book anyway. The sta√ in Anthropology, 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 José Torrealba. Our librarians also do so much on a shrinking budget, and I am particularly grateful to Patricia Figueroa, Carina Cournoyer, Ron Fark, Ned Quist, and the Interlibrary Loan sta√. Finally, I learn new things every day from my graduate and undergraduate students, and among these I especially want to single out the graduate research assistants Kristin Skrabut and Josh McLeod and the undergraduate research assistants Alfredo Aguirre and Maia Chao for their truly important contributions to this project. I am particularly grateful to those who closely read the entire book, and whose support has been absolutely invaluable: Nicole Berry and Joshua Tucker. Nicole read everything piece by piece in its earliest stages and, not for the first time, motivated me to write and helped me figure out what I was actually saying. Joshua read the full manuscript with a sharp eye for how things actually work in Peru and in Spain, and a gift for how to write a sentence. Two anonymous reviewers improved the text significantly as well and I thank them for the time and care they took with it. At Duke University Press I would also like to thank Valerie Millholland for her x

acknowledgments

interest in this project early on and Susan Albury, Rebecca Fowler, and Katie Courtland for their careful work on this book. It has been a true pleasure to work with Gisela Fosado—mil gracias, chaque. The press is lucky to have you. I thank the audience members and discussants who o√ered many thoughtful suggestions as I presented this work—particularly those in Madrid at Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (csic), the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, and the Universidad Pontificia Comillas. I spoke about this project at various stages with colleagues working on adoption or Latin American studies and would especially like to 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, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Claudia Fonseca, Susan Frekko, Britt Halvorson, Tobias 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, Sylvia Yanagisako, Kristin Yarris, and Barbara Yngvesson. Colleagues in Spain were unfailingly welcoming and cordial, and several took the time to meet with me and give me advice and further contacts. I am particularly grateful to Ana Berástegui, Joaquin Eguren, Angeles Escrivá, Blanca Gomez, Isabel Madruga, Diana Marre, Margarita del Olmo, Diego Ramiro, and Beatriz San Román for discussing this work with me on multiple occasions. Thanks also to Sileny Cabala, Julio Diaz, Juan Diez Nicolás, Adela Franzé, Gonzalo Garland, Carlos Giménez, Félix Jimenez, Livia Jimenez, Maribel Jociles, Asuncion Merino, Azucena Palacios, Maria Sanchez, and Liliana Suarez. Professionals working in adoption in Spain were very kind and forthcoming, and I particularly wish to thank Lila Parrondo of Adoptantis, Felipe Marín Navarro of the Reik Centro de Psicología Dinámica, David Azcona and Laura Heckel of La Voz de los Adoptados, Dr. Jesús Garcia Pérez of the Hospital de Niño Jesús, Antonio Ferrandis of the Instituto Madrileño del Menor y la Familia, and Belén Cabello of Familias para la Acogida. I also want to thank some associations that regularly host open workshops about adoptions: Adoptantis, Hijos que Esperan, the Adopciones, Familias y Infancia (afin) research group in Barcelona, and La Voz de los Adoptados. Peruvian migrant professionals involved in various aspects of the life of this migrant community were generous with their time as well, and I acknowledgments

xi

would like to thank Ana Camargo, Sonia Castillo, Fernando Isasi Cayo, Mariella Köhn, Manuel Pinto, and Yolanda Vaccaro. The associations AriPerú and the Federación de Asociaciones de Peruanos en España (fedap) also o√ered kind support. Finally, I want to thank those I spoke with who were not directly associated with either world—Blanca Hernando, Jorge Fernandez, and David Planell—for their time and contributions. Most of all I am grateful to the adoptive and migrant families who shared their stories with me and introduced me to their friends. Your generosity is remarkable, and tremendously appreciated. There is a special thank-you owed to my dear friends whom I followed from Peru to Spain— and the Spanish friends who brought them there—for putting up with me for 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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acknowledgments

Introduction comparing adoption and migration

‘‘Mami, do cars have souls? And what happens if I don’t wear a seatbelt in the plane—if I fell, would I fall all the way down to the ground?’’ The year 2002 was drawing to a close, and I was sitting in the small airport in Ayacucho, Peru, waiting for the arrival of the puddle jumper to Lima. The source of these questions, and many more, was Rebeca, a second grader whom I had met in the Ayacucho adoption o≈ce a couple of weeks earlier. The target of the questions was Fernanda, a woman from northern Spain, and Rebeca’s new mother. In between the questions, Fernanda’s patient replies, and the photos that Rebeca directed us to pose for, Fernanda told me that the pair would spend a few days in the capital city of Lima to complete the adoption paperwork and obtain Rebeca’s Peruvian and Spanish passports. Fernanda’s adoption of Rebeca was the second adoption to Spain I’d witnessed that year. I was living in Ayacucho while doing an ethnographic study of traditional child fostering and formal adoptions (Leinaweaver 2008b). The Ayacucho branch of the Peruvian government’s adoption o≈ce had only overseen a dozen adoptions that year, and fewer than half of them were international. Given those small numbers, two children heading to Spain from Ayacucho was noteworthy. Three months earlier, Zaida, a twenty six year old who was one of my closest friends in Ayacucho, had left her extended family, her husband, and her hometown behind and immigrated to Spain herself. She had obtained her work contract, visa, and plane ticket with the support of a

Spanish woman who had befriended Zaida’s family over the course of several years’ worth of volunteer trips to Ayacucho. Juxtapositions like the nearly contemporaneous departures of Rebeca and Zaida to Spain were what first clued me in to the way that adoption and migration form mutually constitutive parts of one integrated system of global mobility. I follow that juxtaposition of adoption and migration from Peru, where I first noticed the significance of their pairing, to Spain, where young Peruvians like Rebeca and Zaida forge their new lives. Comparing Adoption and Migration

International adoption is a form of migration. This argument has implications for how we understand both adoption and migration, although I focus largely on the implications for adoption. Adoption and labor migration are rarely, if ever, analyzed in conjunction with one another. In many respects they are seen as wholly di√erent from one another. They are regulated by di√erent laws, overseen by di√erent administrative departments, and governed by di√erent regimes. Social workers and psychologists make adoptions happen, while consular o≈cials and border o≈cers shape labor migrations. Furthermore, not only are labor migrants numerically far superior to adoptees in every receiving nation but they also hail from many more countries (Giménez Romero 2008, 109). Usually, adoptees enter a higher social class than do labor migrants, and they are also usually younger upon arrival (although there are exceptions to both of these tendencies). Perhaps most importantly, the children of labor migrants are more often pitied or discriminated against by a dominant society for which they can never quite assimilate enough. Meanwhile, young adoptees are more likely to fascinate those around them due to their differences. Typically, and ironically, adopted children are welcomed into receiving countries—their immigration facilitated—while labor migrants from the same nation are viewed with suspicion or worse.∞ Yet in other ways the processes are similar and linked. Both Rebeca and Zaida would have to obtain passports and visas before they would be permitted to enter Spain, for example. The paperwork behind their movements reminds us that migration and adoption are transnational phenomena where young people cross borders and, through powerful bureaucratic processes, come to possess new civil statuses and new identities. More significantly, the same forces that propel labor migrants to leave certain nations deemed less developed, war torn, or disaster prone for new lands 2

introduction

of opportunity are also the forces that produce adoptable children. ‘‘Adoptable’’ is a euphemism describing children whose parents or extended family 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 the same origins and destinations. For this reason, I sometimes refer to international adoption as ‘‘adoptive migration.’’ Adoptive migration highlights the similarities between international adoption and other forms of bordercrossing, o√ering a starting point from which to talk about the similarities —and di√erences—between adoptees and immigrants. As an ethnographer, I am interested in these broader structural questions about the forces that shape and relocate populations, but I am also interested in the intimate level of everyday experiences. Here too there are both important di√erences and provocative similarities between the experiences of labor migrants and their children and the experiences of adoptive migrants. The similarities are apparent despite my best attempts to follow scholarly convention, tease apart the two phenomena, and put each tidily in its own chapter to begin my analysis. For example, in chapter 1 I describe adoption from Peru to Spain, highlighting the centrality of waiting in the experience of adoptive parents like Fernanda, and the way that parents and professionals articulate and contest a preference for infants. In chapter 2 I take up migration from Peru to Spain, focusing on the factors considered in making a decision about whether or not a young person should migrate to Spain, and how to make sense of young people once they arrive. Yet both chapters show parents waiting anxiously and with waning patience for the arrival of their children to Spain. Both chapters suggest that parents are concerned with what an ideal migrant might be—adoptive parents seek infants who can adapt with ease, while some migrant parents decide that only adults can bear the di≈culties of migration and make the painful decision to leave their children in Peru. I trace these and other unexpected overlaps, identifying certain themes that floated to the surface of both immigrant and adoptee stories. One such theme is the contested idea of rebirth. Years ago, before Zaida immigrated to Spain, she told me that she thought going to Spain would be like a rebirth, because everything she had lived through would be left behind in Peru. Adoption too is depicted as a rebirth in the legal sense. Prior kin ties and community memberships are formally erased and substituted with new ones (Berástegui, Gómez, and Adroher 2006, 20). Yet the powerful image of rebirth can sometimes enable a child’s family and Comparing Adoption and Migration

3

community to mute all traces of the preadoptive past, something viewed by 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 Spain’s mistake when it comes to adoption is ‘‘to normalize it and erase pieces of your life. . . . By contrast, in migration, an Ecuadorian comes to Spain, he doesn’t stop talking about Ecuador and become completely Spanish. That’s not normal. He has a life before Spain.’’ Yet Carmela, an adoptive mother to three Peruvian children, told me on more than one occasion that the problematic immigrants in Spain are those who want to keep living as if they are in their birth countries. Describing a neighbor of hers, an Ecuadorian woman who had married a Spanish man, Carmela said that ‘‘it was very clear to [my neighbor] that she couldn’t keep thinking 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 between maintaining their previous lifestyles and becoming ‘‘completely Spanish.’’ This path becomes even more complicated for those adopted as infants and for children born in Spain to labor migrants—there is no previous lifestyle to maintain, and yet both groups of youths are under considerable pressure from parents and professionals to develop an a≈nity for a country they 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 way to integrate (or assimilate) a foreign body? Does it matter how that body got to Spain, or who his or her parents are? To put a finer point on it: Does it matter for a young adoptee that the woman who cleans her father’s o≈ce after hours has come from the same country that she has? This book is about the way that adoptive and other migrants and their families negotiate what matters—the ordinary experiences and the poignant recollections, the exclusions and inclusions, the sense of belonging or not belonging 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 labor migrant told a team of Peruvian social scientists who went on to title their study after his quote (Ansion, Mujica, and Villacorta 2009). The airport has a heightened importance in narratives of transnational mobility: in 4

introduction

Peru it is the site where children and other family members strain to catch their last glimpse of a departing labor migrant, and in Spain it is a point of national 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, these unaccompanied children land at the Madrid-Barajas Airport in their Sunday best and with every hair perfectly in place, greeted e√usively by family whom the confused children may not recognize. As the adoption psychologist Lila Parrondo recounted to me, children who migrate to join their families ‘‘are just as much strangers [to their families] as is the adopted child, and they, too, have to learn to adapt [acomodarse].’’ But the airport holds the same mystery for adoptive families—I would later see Parrondo lecturing an audience of adoptive parents that in adolescence their children would begin to ask, ‘‘Who am I? Who do I belong to? Who are my people?’’ She insisted that they would not always be ‘‘the kid who got o√ the plane at Barajas.’’ Studies of transnational lives must account for the ways and reasons that people move, and also the complex and often poignant methods through which they, along with those they are joining and those they have left behind, make a home for themselves in a new and unfamiliar place. How young people, in particular, accomplish this is a question yet to be answered: the anthropologist Deborah Boehm and her colleagues have argued that young people have been largely overlooked as important players in globalization and transnational processes (Boehm et al. 2011, 5). As I began research in Spain, exploring what life is like for young people like Rebeca and Zaida after arrival at the Madrid-Barajas Airport, I found that one of the ways young adoptive and other migrants create new homes for themselves is by deploying ideologies of national identity. These ideologies are embodied as ‘‘national substance,’’ a notion I develop in chapters 3 and 4. In those two chapters I take up unexpected juxtapositions—atypical sites where I found migration and adoption considered jointly, itself an unusual finding, if one accepts my contention that adoption and migration are typically treated separately both in the literature and in real life. Chapter 3 considers mixed marriages—marriages between a Spaniard and a Peruvian—and the ways in which the di√erent possibilities for children in those unions (including step-children, biological reproduction, and adoption) are inflected with understandings of national substance. Chapter 4 examines an unusual but growing phenomenon, domestic adoptions of the children of immigrants, which I call Comparing Adoption and Migration

5

‘‘undomesticated adoption.’’ I analyze such adoptions as sites where both migrant misbehavior (ostensibly high fertility and irresponsible parenting) and native shirking of responsibility (gendered criticism of abortion rates) are tamed into submission. I argue that such substantialist notions of identity turn out to infiltrate lives and policies even in a thoroughly transnational, supposedly postnational world. As such, thinking about adoption in the context of migration o√ers novel and significant insights into the continuing centrality of the nation. Yet it is also possible that I found national substance to be significant precisely because I was studying adoption and migration with a specific focus on Peruvians in Spain (rather than, for example, adopted children and migrants from anywhere), a criticism I heard from a few astute colleagues in Spain, and one that has been eloquently described as ‘‘methodological nationalism’’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, 302).≤ My challenge in problematizing nationalism has been that the national origin of adopted children clearly matters a great deal to their families. It matters in practical terms: each country has di√erent restrictions and requirements, and adoptive parents must choose only one country from which to adopt before proceeding with their application. Indeed, there is an emotional premium placed on the selection of the country. The social worker Charo González told prospective parents at an information session in Madrid in 2012 that the choice is ‘‘something very personal and intimate between spouses.’’≥ In this sense national di√erences are what anthropologists refer to as an emic distinction, a distinction made by research participants themselves—it would be remiss of me to ignore them. The importance of the nation may even increase after the adoption has been concluded, as I discuss in chapters 5 and 6, because Spanish family members learn to conceptualize themselves as tied in crucial ways to the child’s country of origin. As a Catalan adoptive father put it to the anthropologist Diana Marre, ‘‘When you go to a country . . . you are of the country that your children are from. . . . Your children are from that country, you have ties with . . . you have links to that country, little by little you come to know the people, you get accustomed’’ (2004).∂ It is further significant in the friendships the family develops; in Spain, as elsewhere, adoptive family associations are organized largely by the child’s country of origin (compare Howell 2002 for Norway). Chapter 5 considers these ideas through the framework of solidarity as a window into ethical behavior in the postadoptive day-to-day, looking for moments or places where adoptees and migrants actually meet, from employment to philan6

introduction

thropy to high school. Chapter 6 begins from the observation that both migrant youths and adopted youths are told—on a daily basis, through a dizzying array of actions and behaviors, comments and assumptions— that they are inextricably associated with Peru. I follow this presumption of connection to its logical conclusion, investigating both the ways in which ‘‘Peruvianness’’ is highlighted in adopted and migrant children, and the ways in which (and the reasons why) it is sometimes rejected. The Big Picture

‘‘Nation’’ is a genealogical metaphor: like ‘‘nature,’’ the word comes from the Latin ‘‘natio’’ or ‘‘birth’’ (Herzfeld 1997, 41). Naturalization occurs when a migrant obtains citizenship of a new nation. Metaphorically, sharing a nationality means belonging to the same family. Where dual nationality 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,’’ a legal term meaning that a child who is adopted loses all legal ties to his or her birth family (e.g., cannot inherit), as those ties are replaced by a full set of formal and legal ties to the adoptive family. Adoption in most wealthy countries, following the Hague Adoption Convention of 1993, is plenary. Sara Dorow has referred to plenary adoption as a ‘‘kind of ‘serial monogamy’ of national/familial kinship’’ (2006, 209). As John Terrell and Judith Schachter have argued, ‘‘a study of adoption can shed light on definitions of and criteria for ‘citizenship’: What does it mean to belong to a group or nation, and is this linked with ideas about what it means to be a family?’’ (Terrell and Modell 1994, 159). The idea of belonging is central to our understandings of adoption and migration. Both phenomena ultimately demand an interrogation of what it means to belong to a family, to a community, to one nation or another or more than one, in a context where key symbolic markers such as phenotype or ideologies of blood ties work against e√orts to belong. Because of these and other underlying similarities, the historian Karen Balcom has suggested that it would be fruitful to analyze adoption as a form of migration (2010). But these two processes are largely kept separate within scholarly work. Migration is often reported using a wide-angle lens, by economists or sociologists seeking to understand the causes that drive migration. Adoption is more often analyzed on a microscale, by psychologists or social workers who explore the e√ects of adoption on individual psychological development or family relations.∑ Comparing Adoption and Migration

7

International adoption (also referred to as ‘‘transnational adoption’’ or ‘‘intercountry adoption’’) has become a centerpiece of recent writing, mostly anthropological, that explores belonging through a focus on kinship, 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 reveals persistent ties between nationalism, race, class, gender, kinship, and imperialism. The central comparative frame in most scholarly work on adoption to date has been between adoptive and so-called natural families— that is, families formed through biological reproduction. This framing has led to the important finding that the ways in which internationally adoptive families are constructed can shed light on the ways that other forms of kinship we imagine to be natural are constructed. This valuable contribution, however, precludes a close comparison of ways that internationally adoptive families are like, and unlike, specific other kinds of families, such as the migrant families I knew. We also need to examine similarities and di√erences between adoptive and ‘‘other unnatural’’ families, families that draw negative attention or public anxiety, such as migrants who are separated 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 brought together, this literature reveals key themes in the field of kinship under displacement. On one hand, the literature focuses on how kinship is sustained despite distance, and on the other, it elucidates the obstacles to that kinship, and the ways in which it is reconfigured.π These studies are colored by a particularly poignant irony: the often painful separation that children and parents endure is caused by a migration motivated by the parents’ desire to improve the lives of the children, which rarely unfolds in the way either parent or child had imagined.∫ These studies of transnational families are part of a larger literature on the transnational connections between sending and receiving countries, and between people, ideas, products, and other things that flow between them.Ω The great value of this literature is its emphasis on the ties, rather than the disjunctures, between people in sending countries and receiving countries. Focusing on the ties lets us normalize, rather than pathologize, migration and migrants by showing that labor migration is an understandable response to di≈cult situations. The downside of emphasizing ties to home is that this focus can come at the expense of discovering how labor 8

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migrants may be similar to, and develop a≈nities with, people and ideas in the host nation—such as adoptive families. Both perspectives must be held 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 battleground of immigration struggles’’ (2011b, 175). Their observation reveals how it is paramount to bring together di√erent ways of considering family, migration, and the international order in the same framework. Yet work that places immigration and adoption within the same analytical lens is still rare, with a few notable and insightful exceptions (see Howell and Melhuus 2007; Hübinette and Tigervall 2009, 337; Marre 2009c, 240, Rastas 2009). The comparative literature scholar David L. Eng has labeled transnational adoption ‘‘one of the most privileged forms of diaspora and immigration in the late twentieth century,’’ and in the same breath he questions the adoptee’s immigration status when he suggests that the phenomenon raises ‘‘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 in terms that begs its own deconstruction, a nebulous status that can always be questioned: They are immigrants. Are they immigrants? Origin Stories

While the national origin of adopted children in Spain mattered greatly to many who are involved in adoption, I confess that it mattered to me as well. Many scholars who work on international adoption in a receiving country do so from a perspective of interest in and long experience with that country (see Howell 2006; Marre 2007; Yngvesson 2010). I made my way to Spain on an alternate path—the path more often taken by anthropologists who begin their careers in a sending nation and end up working on communities of migrants from that nation. After many years of anthropological fieldwork in Peru (2000–2007), I had developed a deep knowledge of the way that Peruvian adoptions worked. I had a network of contacts in Peruvian adoption o≈ces, children’s homes, and ngos upon whom I would be able to call as questions arose. I also knew that people in Peru were curious, even anxious, to know what was becoming of the children who left Peru in international adoption. Ruth, the Ayacucho adoption lawyer during my fieldwork there, had complained that one reason adoptions take so long is because some judges and attorneys are against adopComparing Adoption and Migration

9

tion and think it is a method of organ tra≈cking. But, she hastily explained to me, this is not possible because there are four years of postadoption biannual reports, complete with photos of the children. Beyond these formal reports sent to the government adoption o≈ce, the public knows only a few anecdotal cases of adoptees who have returned to Peru to do philanthropic work or meet members of their birth families (Leinaweaver 2011).∞≠ But I also wanted to find out how transnational migration had transformed the lives of the Peruvians I knew best. Two months after Zaida departed, her younger brother left too, having obtained a work contract and visa with the help of his Spanish girlfriend, who had also spent many summers volunteering in Ayacucho. In March of the next year, Zaida’s husband Jorge left Ayacucho to join her at last, after a long and di≈cult separation. During the following decade, a few more of their friends and relatives followed. By the time I got to Spain I felt right at home there among my Peruvian friends who welcomed me with plates of ceviche and papa a la huancaína. They moved into a neighborhood populated largely by immigrants and Roma, and when I stayed with them we would buy imported Peruvian chilies at small corner shops near their apartment. My friends had su√ered a terrible loss in the summer of 2006 when Zaida’s husband Jorge was killed in Afghanistan; the vehicle he was traveling in was hit by an improvised explosive device. He and Zaida’s brother had both joined the Spanish military when they could not find other work after migrating. As the first of Spain’s soldiers to be killed in Afghanistan, his sacrifice was solemnly honored by Spanish dignitaries. As a Peruvian migrant, his death was analyzed and criticized in both the Spanish and Peruvian media for what it said about who was fighting this war. ‘‘Peruvian, Cannon Fodder,’’ read one memorable headline in a Peruvian newspaper. In the damp Lima night, I went to Peru’s military airport in Callao and waited there to meet the Spanish military plane bearing his co≈n, his widow, and his friends. The next day I followed them northward to his small hometown and accompanied his devastated family members as they laid him to rest. I remember that Zaida couldn’t sleep, so as I lay next to her 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 di√erent context, and where I could begin to compare the experiences of adoptees and migrants. Having observed the near-simultaneous 10

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departures of Rebeca and Zaida for Spain, I had already begun to understand the revelatory possibilities of juxtaposing adoption and migration. I think their pairing promises enormous insight to migration scholars and kinship scholars alike. As an anthropologist of kinship, and as someone with several adopted family members and other more distant relatives who placed children for adoption, I am keenly interested in what this juxtaposition means for adoption. And as a result of my long-standing ties to Peru, my account privileges the perspectives of Peruvians within Spain rather than those of Spaniards. Listening to both Peruvians and Spaniards, from the perspective of a U.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 permanently based in Spain. One consequence of this is that my depiction of Spanish society sometimes di√ers from that which Spanish scholars have produced, particularly in my analysis of racism and xenophobia there. Race is directly relevant to the experiences I record in this book because the implication of transnational adoption between the specific countries of Peru and Spain is that such adoption is also transracial.∞∞ That is, native Spanish 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 argued in the Norwegian context that young persons of color were assumed to be adoptees (and not discriminated against) until immigration began to increase; consequently, adoptees were suddenly treated with racism. The unremarked-upon implication here is that migrants are visibly di√erent and are unsurprisingly treated in racist ways (Howell 2006, 128).∞≤ A Contingent Method

As an ethnographer seeking to compare two communities that, at least in theory, are carefully separated, I contribute to the idea that they share key characteristics through the very act of comparison. I am not and I was not a neutral observer: I actively sought points of contact and felicitous coincidences that, when taken together, show the complexity of both adoption and migration as everyday lived experiences. I followed those chance overlaps when I came across them, a strategy that ultimately produced a book that, in essence, groups people who are not supposed to be seen together. The juxtapositions that I encountered gave me a sense of the big Comparing Adoption and Migration

11

picture: that although children, parents, professionals, and researchers may 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 can only tell me about itself. This is an unusual but not unique position, and I found it notable that the two colleagues in Spain who most explicitly explore the relationship between adoption and migration are both migrants from Argentina.∞≥ One of them, Parrondo, the psychologist, directs a support and counseling service for adoptive families that approaches ‘‘childhood from the point of view of adoption and migration, because they are happening simultaneously in Spain,’’ even in the face of some adoptive parents’ complaints about this juxtaposition. Meanwhile, the anthropologist Diana Marre was told in no uncertain terms by a teacher in Barcelona that ‘‘we do not have immigrant children, we have children adopted internationally’’ (2009c, 228). My comparative stance would occasionally bring forth exhortations from adoption professionals to be cautious in approaching adoptive parents, because these professionals believed that adoptive parents would be likely to resist the idea that migration and adoption 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 considering the comparisons and more than ready to frankly resist anything they did not agree with. To figure out what bearing migration and adoption have on one another, I conducted ethnographic research in Madrid for eight months spread over four years (2009–12). Madrid is a key destination both for Latin American migrants and for international adoptions. The director of adoptions in Madrid told me that about 20 percent of Spain’s total adoptions come to the Community of Madrid. (The Community of Madrid is one of the Spanish political divisions known as Autonomous Communities, and contains the city of Madrid and its environs.) I also draw on research in Peru to complete my analysis, including both the investigation that I conducted between 2000 and 2007 on adoption, and a recent visit in 2012. Over the course of this study, I spoke with a wide range of very disparate sources: Peruvian migrants and their families; Peruvian adoptees and their 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 adop12

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tion. Some of these people I met through my earlier connections, asking migrant friends to introduce me to members of their networks. I met other migrants in the classic settings of migrant research—Peruvian restaurants and bars, national celebrations, and formal settings such as the consulate. I contacted adoptive families with the assistance of adoption professionals, researchers, and listservs. Research participants are referred to by pseudonyms, with the exception of those persons I interviewed in their capacity as experts (for example, lawyers and psychologists). When I first introduce each research participant, I pause to explain how 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 I could, but, understandably, their parents were protective, and several parents preferred to speak to me alone and not involve their children. The result is that while I report young people’s voices here, those voices are sometimes heavily mediated. In addition, while I spoke with mothers and fathers and sons and daughters alike, I should note that family making in contemporary Western countries is gendered feminine (di Leonardo 1987) and adoption is overwhelmingly the work of women (mothers as well as professional social workers, psychologists, and lawyers), and accordingly, I talked to more women than men. Finally, most of the migrants and adoptive 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 semistructured interviews, unlike my previous work, which drew more heavily upon participant observation. This was largely a consideration of the issue I was studying. From conversations with scholars, professionals, and reporters interested in adoption, I quickly learned that many adoptive families in Spain are tired of feeling like guinea pigs and being poked and prodded by yet another questioning outsider. Participant observation involves spending significant amounts of time with research subjects as they carry out their day-to-day activities, and setting up camp in the kitchens of adoptive families or the classrooms of adopted youths would have been both impractical and unwelcome. Contained yet open-ended interviews, where I spent two or three hours chatting with parents or families and followed up in subsequent years for more of the same, were acceptable to family members and yielded a great deal of fascinating material. (All translations from these interviews, as well as from Spanish-language texts, are my own. I follow a loose translation practice, prioritizing the flow and sentiment over literal translations.) A broad cross section of people touched by adopComparing Adoption and Migration

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tion and migration—more than two dozen adoptive parents or families and migrant parents or families—were ultimately willing to speak with me, and from them I discovered that young people are of interest both for what 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 international adoption and educational presentations to adoptive parents. I collected and analyzed other publicly available materials as well: textual and visual materials drawn from news media and advertisements; fictional or pedagogical representations of adoption found in films, television shows, and books; national legal documents and international conventions regulating adoption and migration; and the records of an open online adoption forum, where Spanish prospective adoptive parents and those who have already adopted from Peru exchange information and support.∞∂ My own positionality as an ethnographer in Spain was di√erent than it had been ten years earlier in Peru. This was a consequence both of my shift in field sites and of changes in my own life. In Peru at the start of the twenty-first century, I had been something of a curious anomaly, childless and unmarried in my mid-twenties, an age when more than half of Peruvian women had already had children. Now married and in my thirties, and on my most recent trips to Madrid accompanied by my infant son, I was less likely to cause consternation among those I interviewed, not least because the average age of first-time Spanish mothers is over thirty.∞∑ More interestingly for my research, bringing my son to Spain meant I was promptly exposed to all kinds of madrileño (the name for a Madrid resident) and Peruvian ideas about babies and children with which I had never had an immediate connection before. I heard several aphorisms that were new to me. Numerous madrileños told me that babies are lovely ‘‘when they’re little,’’ implying that in just a few months they turn into handfuls. Only one such commenter was silenced by her companion, who solemnly insisted that ‘‘a house without children is like a garden without flowers.’’ These attitudes about children reflect broader demographic and social trends in the Spanish context.

14

introduction

Adoption and Migration in Spain

This juxtaposition of adoption and migration could be studied in many places where the end points of transnational adoption and transnational migration coincide, like Sweden, Norway, or the United States. Its alter— the juxtaposition of absent children and absent migrants—could be studied in many places where the origin points of transnational adoption and transnational migration coincide, such as Guatemala or Russia.∞∏ In this book I compare adoption and migration through a focus on the relationship of two countries: Spain and Peru.∞π Peru is the sending country in this pairing, an appellation used both in migration research and adoption practice: babies and children are sent from Peru to new families in other countries, and men, women, and families travel from Peru to other countries in search of work, education, personal safety, or to reunite with other family members.∞∫ Spain is the receiving country, where single people or couples are transformed into family members via adoption, and where migrants are incorporated and, in the optimistic discourse of the Spanish state, ‘‘integrated’’ into new jobs and new communities. In the past fifteen years more than forty thousand children from more than thirty-five countries have been adopted by Spanish parents and moved to Spain.∞Ω In the grand scheme of things, these numbers are not vast—the numbers of international adoptions do not even equate to one percent of annual births in Spain. But at the same time, there was a period of great change in these small numbers. I discuss some of the idiosyncrasies of Spanish international adoption practices, and the specifics of adoptions from Peru, in chapter 1. Here I note only the sense of great and rapid change in the international adoption scene. The demographer Peter Selman (2010) documents that between 1998 and 2004 global numbers of international adoptions rose by 42 percent and in Spain they rose by a full 273 percent. And the numbers do not fully account for the image and importance that international adoption has had in Spain. As Laura Briggs writes, ‘‘adoption, while a practice that a√ects a small and shrinking number of people, has been important to national and international politics out of all proportion to its numerical significance’’ (2012, 5). The numerical significance of international migration, on the other hand, is unquestioned. The migrant population was recently estimated at over six million (14.1 percent of Spain’s total population) (oecd 2010). At the close of 2011, almost 20 percent of the Community of Madrid’s population was made up of immigrants. Of those foreigners currently residing Comparing Adoption and Migration

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in Madrid, 40 percent are from the Americas, and the top five nationalities are Romanian, Ecuadorian, Moroccan, Colombian, and Peruvian.≤≠ I will further discuss the specifics of Peruvian migration, and key themes raised by migrant youths and families, in chapter 2. These numbers have begun to decline in the past two years, undoubtedly slowed greatly by the economic crisis but also a√ected by Spanish naturalization policies that ease migrants out of the category of ‘‘foreigner.’’≤∞ Migrants’ presence is also perceived by most as a recent and sudden phenomenon. One adoptive family, Diego and Gabriela and their children, agreed to talk with me after an adoption professional they had worked with contacted them about my study. They were incredibly gracious, receiving me 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 including Spanish tortillas and Peruvian chicha morada. As I leafed through a photo album with them, looking at a picture of the school graduation of one of their children, I remarked, ‘‘Looking at these photos, I don’t see many Peruvians.’’ Diego explained, ‘‘At first there weren’t many. Ten years ago in Spain . . .’’ His son cut in, ‘‘In our school there were almost no immigrants.’’ Diego continued, ‘‘The same is true for our neighborhood. Our kids were the first ones who went to that school. . . . Spain has changed a lot. Four million arrived, out of the blue.’’ The language that scholars use to describe the rise of international adoption in Spain also evokes the surprise and suddenness with which it seemed to appear out of nowhere; for example, irrumpir (bursting onto the scene) is often used (Múgica Flores 2008, 91). Workplaces, schools, streets, public transport, marriages, and families are all more diverse than they were thirty years ago (Giménez Romero 2008, 108). As one social worker told me, Spain was a third-world country sixty years ago—to illustrate this he exclaimed, ‘‘unicef came here!’’ But over the past two decades, Spain went from being a poor country of out-migration to a top European destination for migrants from South America, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. At the turn of the twenty-first century in Spain, immigration was ‘‘on the minds and tongues of scholars, policy makers, politicians, the media, and everyday citizens’’ (Ríos-Rojas 2011, 70). This sudden transformation significantly a√ects the way that labor migrants, and the adopted youths who resemble them, are incorporated and come to belong or to be excluded. Over and over, Spanish people remarked to me some variation of the sentiment ‘‘ten years ago there were 16

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no immigrants in Spain, and look how things have changed.’’ This was said ruefully, as a precursor to critiques of a Spanish racism that only became apparent when immigrants arrived to provoke it. As one woman wrote after 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 are racists. Spaniards have never been racists. It’s just that it is a big change in a short time.’’ Large numbers of international migrants and symbolically meaningful numbers of international adoptees do not arrive to a blank slate. Spain is an aging, low-fertility society, and these demographic features a√ect the way adoptees and migrants are brought into the national body. For example, labor migrants do many kinds of work, but perhaps one of their most appreciated roles is as caregiver for senior citizens and disabled persons. They also care for children, although there are fewer and fewer children for them to care for, given that Spain’s fertility rate is well below replacement level (Population Reference Bureau 2012). I heard many explanations for this low fertility rate. Perhaps it is just too expensive to raise children to fulfill their class position in a Spain that is falling apart economically and politically. Or perhaps children cut too sharply into the famous Spanish nightlife. Or maybe it is that there are not enough extended family members around and available to shoulder some of the caretaking. Violeta, a twenty-one-year-old Peruvian migrant, told me that after four years in Spain she had observed that ‘‘Spanish people have kids after age thirty,’’ which seemed delayed to her and which she ascribed to the weight of their mortgages and their desire to travel and enjoy life. While Spaniards may delay childbearing, there are many cultural pressures to have children, as suggested by a saying I heard that one must do three things in life: write a book, plant a tree, and have a child. And eventually some of those who do want to have children turn to adoption— until very recently, strongly preferring international adoption—to make their desire a reality. While Spanish parents adopt from many di√erent countries, and immigrants bring their children to Spain from many di√erent countries, I found that there is something particularly meaningful about raising Latinos in Spain. (The term Latino refers to people of Latin American origin who reside in the United States, but it is also used widely in Spain by migrant youth and others as well.)≤≥ First, Latin American migrants in Spain are always at least tacitly figured as ‘‘good migrants’’ in comparison Comparing Adoption and Migration

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to Islamic North Africans (Rogozen-Soltar 2012). Despite a long history of relations and mixing, Spain is often defined in the popular imaginary as that which is not Arabic, from the central historical moment of the Reconquista to the resistance to present-day North African migration. So Latin Americans are often contrasted to Arabs when Spaniards are talking about the probability of migrant ‘‘integration.’’ Diego had told me that the best evidence for how well integrated Latinos are is that perhaps one-third of Spain’s forces in Afghanistan are Latino immigrants.≤∂ By contrast, Spain is viewed as the mother country to Latin American nations, and the similarity that springs from that is felt to be important. Latin Americans are generally thought to hold great symbolic and material importance in Spain because of long-standing, deeply rooted ties to the Americas lasting five hundred years or more. Of course, the actual variety of relationships between Spaniards and Latin Americans is much more complicated than such a quickly sketched history might suggest, but the past of conquest and colonialism is nonetheless mentioned with surprising frequency given how long ago it occurred. One young man I knew in Peru, who later migrated to Spain, told me in 2001 that he hated Spaniards because of what they did to his Peru. And Diego recounted for me 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, they had beards. I arrived and she was frightened; she didn’t want to approach me.’’ So he shaved o√ his beard, and as I turned the pages of their photograph album, the final picture showed him smiling and clean-shaven. Other scholars have noted that numerous Peruvians associate Spain with ‘‘the conquistadors, arrogant and racist’’ and believe that ‘‘the Spanish are better o√ than the Peruvians today because they robbed them’’ (Tornos and Aparicio 1997, 14, 72). Together these instances gesture to a shared, violent history. The repercussions of the Spanish invasion of Latin America five hundred years ago continue to echo, if softly, as Peruvians consider migrating to Spain and try to make sense of how they are received there. Spain and Peru have a postcolonial relationship, although not one that is usually described in such terms, as the colonial period is so distant in time. The legacy of colonialism colors Spanish migration policy: legal residents who wish to obtain citizenship may do so more quickly if they come from Latin American countries—in two years rather than five years for refugees or ten years for citizens of other countries. In addition, certain key former colonial subjects—Peruvians and Moroccans among them— 18

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have been privileged in recent years to be able to migrate with a work contract alone, as opposed to first requiring further paperwork that demonstrates that potential Spanish workers were not available. People I spoke with in Spain ascribed these policies to ‘‘colonial guilt,’’ glossed originally in the law as ‘‘cultural a≈nity’’ (Vives-Gonzalez 2011). Indeed, European countries have a very di√erent tradition than does the United States when it comes to incorporating migrants as citizens, due to their ‘‘strong historical links between imagined cultural community and political belonging’’ (Castles and Davidson 2000, 100).≤∑ For Spaniards, Latin Americans can variously represent undeveloped, needy people to whom they send humanitarian aid (Sinervo and Hill 2011); ‘‘good migrants,’’ in contrast with North Africans, courteous and kind and ready to assimilate (RogozenSoltar 2007); migrants who are backward and slow (one friend got called ‘‘Indian’’ by a Spaniard whose meal she was serving); or, worst of all, delinquents, associated with bandas latinas (Latin gangs). ‘‘Latin gangs’’ is the public’s term for gangs made up of youths of Latin American origin, like the Latin Kings and Ñetas. Both groups originated among Latinos in the United States, and their arrival in Spain is a fully transnational a√air: migrant youths from Latin American nations first brought them back to their countries of origin, where they grew and thrived, and some members of those Latin American versions of the gangs then immigrated to Spain (see Aparicio, Tornos, and Cabala 2009, 84; García España 2001; López Corral 2008). One social worker I spoke with made an unconventional suggestion that rang true to me. He felt that the idea of Latin gangs is almost entirely a moral panic, an invented crisis. He saw them as simply a way for young people of migrant origin to hang out— and they are a convenient trope in the conservative media where stories of migration are all too frequently paired with stories of delinquency.≤∏ The gangs are also a figure against which young migrants can narrate broader experiences of marginalization and exclusion.≤π 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 him where he thought racism came from. ‘‘Good question. . . . I think Germany.’’) He recounted an origin story, possibly apocryphal, about how four neo-Nazis went to the Barajas airport in Madrid and beat up a recent arrival from Ecuador, who—angrily and understandably—formed a group to defend himself, which became the Latin Kings. Jaime thought that the Latin Kings ‘‘are made up of kids whose parents brought them here as teens, they came already rebellious, didn’t want to do anything, and joined Comparing Adoption and Migration

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gangs. And they start killing people, which obviously isn’t appreciated and so the Nazi groups come in the nights to beat up dark-skinned people.’’ In other words, for Jaime, Latin gangs were originally formed in response to racism, but anti-Latino racism is also ‘‘motivated by Latin gangs.’’ I discuss the significance of Latin gangs in more detail in chapter 5. Jaime’s words about racism are particularly interesting given another important feature of the Spanish context: despite all the evidence and everyday experience to the contrary (see Barbadillo 1997; Cabral and Faxas 2004; Calavita 2003; Salvatierra 2001; Suárez-Navaz, Maciá, and Moreno 2007), the dominant discourse emphatically states that Spain is not a racist nation. Diego’s words kept echoing in my mind: ‘‘Spaniards have never been racists.’’ I suggest that—as, famously, is the case for Brazil—when Spaniards repeatedly insist that they are not racist, they are actually displaying a hyperconsciousness of race (Costa Vargas 2004). I introduce here my first scholar-as-informant, on the assumption that we must ‘‘observe both the social scientists observing the social world as well as the e√ects that this has on this world’’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, 302). The migration expert Juan Diez Nicolás, cordially receiving me in his shady suburban backyard, expressed the same conclusion Diego had come to in a backhanded fashion and that I would eventually find to be typical of Spanish discourse on the subject. Diez Nicolás remarked that Spain is ‘‘less racist than most European countries.’’ He based this notentirely-ringing endorsement on data collected by the World Values Survey. For a survey question about what kind of person the respondent would least want to have as a neighbor, he explained, Roma are usually highest ranked in Spain, far above immigrants or people of other races.≤∫ Not incidentally, the belief that Spain is not racist fits perfectly with adoptive kinship ideology: that racial di√erences should be meaningless, and that transracial, international adoption is therefore an ‘‘unproblematic child welfare practice’’ (Hübinette and Tigervall 2009, 336). Because of this dominant discourse, the Spanish people I spoke to who said that they had observed racism would always preface it by saying, ‘‘Supposedly Spain isn’t racist, but . . .’’ Esteban Beltrán, the director of Amnesty International in Spain, noted that racism is ‘‘o≈cially invisible’’ because in Spain, unlike in most European countries, racist acts are not formally documented and catalogued.≤Ω But migrants do experience racism: being asked for id by white police o≈cers at metro stations in Latino neighborhoods and being glared at by older white women on subways are the ‘‘everyday social circumstances that the bandas mean to respond to, 20

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fighting the humiliation of being Latino’’ (Aparicio, Tornos, and Cabala et al. 2009, 92). The Spanish pediatrician Jesús Garcia Perez, whose clinic specializes in the care of internationally adopted children (a population more prone to tropical diseases, malnutrition, or interrupted vaccine schedules), provocatively characterized gangs as antibodies when we spoke. He suggested that migrants are not incorporated into a Spanish society that overtly praises diversity but does not successfully promote diverse social interaction. And despite its o≈cial nonexistence, many adoptive parents do see Spain as racist—for instance, when their children are told by classmates to ‘‘go back to your country, negro.’’≥≠ Furthermore, xenophobic political parties have made gains in recent years, as they have elsewhere in Europe. Carlos Giménez Romero (2008, 112) argues that most Spaniards have contradictory views about migration—empathizing and recalling Spain’s history of out-migration (Suarez-Navaz 2005; compare Cole 1997), but resenting cultural relativism or the possibility of Spain being transformed. I met one migrant mother and her Spanish-born son who participated in a commission on migration that formed part of the protests of indignados (indignant ones) that began on May 15, 2011, in Madrid’s heart, the Puerta del Sol. (Several months later the same anger and frustration would 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 manifesto—how we are against human rights abuses, like when they round people up in the metro, and we are against the new immigration law, and we want the immigrant detention centers closed. Social and legal equality for everyone.’’ Transnational adoption from Peru to Spain is usually also transracial adoption. Outsiders and family members alike identified adopted children’s phenotypes as di√erent from their parents’—what one interviewee called ‘‘the elephant in the room.’’ Race in Spain is heavily predicated on visible di√erence and on other cues such as place of origin and language abilities. Adopted children and migrant youths may di√er in their citizenship but they may share a racial ascription, something that causes anxiety among many associated with adoption. Identifying with one’s roots is one thing (as I argue in chapter 6), but identifying with one’s fellow Peruvianorigin migrants may be seen as a step down (as I argue in chapter 5). This has implications both for labor migrants and their families, whose lives are limited by connections between race and class, and for adoptive migrants, whose parents must navigate those connections and attempt to tease them apart on their children’s behalf. For adoptive parents, these Comparing Adoption and Migration

21

encounters and overlaps may lead to ‘‘an extended conversation about the social meaning of race’’ among racially unmarked, socially powerful people 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 many years and who volunteers in youth prisons with immigrants, remarked that Spain is like a stir-fry (which is referred to as a wok in Spanish). Such a meal is full of so many di√erent things from all over the place, and you begin to eat it, and halfway through your meal it starts to feel heavy in your stomach and you wonder how you will ever digest it. In other words: diversity is a wok that Spain can’t 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 linguistically (Giménez 2008, 108). Language di√erences have long been crucially important in Spain, a fact that my research setting of Madrid, the national capital, may obscure. Adoptive and labor migrants who land in the Basque Country or Catalonia face a very di√erent linguistic and cultural context. Second, the Spanish government and the European Union more generally are strongly committed to ideologies of integration and of interculturalidad (interculturality), despite the apparent di≈culty of digestion. One young migrant I interviewed, Esteban, told me that he had received instruction on how to think of himself from a teacher steeped in the discourse of interculturality: ‘‘Uno no es de donde nace sino de donde pase’’ (You’re not from where you are born, but rather from where you live). But as Susana, a Peruvian migrant and psychologist, told me, many Spaniards are against the ideal of interculturality because of Spain’s ‘‘internal conflict’’: linguistic and cultural tensions, political separation movements, and the attendant challenges of negotiating powerful regional governments and the imperatives of national unity. And to me the emphasis on integration suggested that the burden is on the migrant to acculturate, not on the Spaniard to learn to understand and value di√erence. it is not insignificant that the research for this book was done during a global economic crisis. The good life prior to the global crash led to a construction boom in Spain and a great need for labor. That boom was recent compared to other European locations because of the long dictatorship that Spain endured under Francisco Franco (1936–75), under which urbanization and industrialization both proceeded at a much slower pace than in the remainder of Europe. Migration policy, while controlled as 22

introduction

necessary in the view of fellow European nations, was nonetheless relatively permissive during the 1990s and early 2000s, and periodic amnesties allowed those who were in Spain without documents to begin on a path to citizenship. Because Spain has a social safety net that the United States lacks, even undocumented migrants have access to health care and education. But as the bottom fell out from the global markets and Spain’s construction sector was particularly hard hit, it became more di≈cult—and less desirable—for immigrants to come to Spain. The relatives of migrants already in Spain continue to arrive, but it is now nearly impossible to obtain a work contract and migrate as a laborer. In 2011 migrants’ unemployment rate reached 39.1 percent, more than twice as high as the 18.4 percent rate corresponding to native-born Spaniards (Colectivo Ioé 2012: 8). Meanwhile, as one Limeño taxi driver told me, unprompted, in 2012, he hoped Peru’s economy continues to grow so that Peruvians will no longer have to emigrate to make a living, as he had seen news reports of Latinos being treated poorly in Spain. In fact, the number of migrants leaving Peru began to fall in 2008 after a decade of increase (Cooperación Interinstitucional inei-digemin-oim 2010). Many migrants are also returning to Peru—including three of the friends I first met in Peru and later encountered in Spain.≥∞ During the Peruvian elections in 2011, the candidate Keiko Fujimori’s radio ad played up this possibility while exhorting listeners to ‘‘vote for the country that saw your birth. If I am elected and you decide to return you’ll come back to the Peru that you long for, with more security and more opportunities.’’ Native Spaniards are departing the country as well, in such vast quantities that they now outnumber immigrants to Spain, and some of them are even moving to Peru.≥≤ It is amid this context of growing insecurity and economic anxiety that I conducted the research for this book. It is a context that a√ects international adoption as well. One reason adoptions are stalling in Spain is because of the economic crisis, as Carmela, an adoptive mother, told me during our most recent conversation. People don’t have stable jobs, so they are not approved to adopt. The ngos that assist Spaniards with the process are closing their doors because of financial problems. But she added a few other reasons: the children of the adoption ‘‘boom’’ have begun to grow up and have di√erent kinds of problems, so adoption no longer seems like such a good idea. Another contributor to the decline, she thought, was the decrease in adoptable children without special needs in sending countries (Selman 2009, 589). Every year, from Comparing Adoption and Migration

23

the beginnings of international adoption at midcentury to their 2004 peak, both applicants and actual international adoptions grew steadily.≥≥ Since 2004, adoption numbers have fallen substantially, a decline not matched by numbers of applicants (Selman 2009, 575; see also Selman 2010). So this book depicts a brief moment in time—a moment when both international labor migration and international adoption (to Spain, but also overall), after swelling tremendously, have crested. It is not necessarily the beginning of the end of either phenomenon, but it quite possibly marks a crucial shift in direction for both. The case studies that appear in this book invite reflection on larger demographic processes, such as increasing immigration, low fertility, and aging European societies. They also provide insight into larger political processes, such as the rise of antiimmigrant parties currently transforming even those countries that had historically welcomed foreign workers. Adoption o√ers an intriguing model of how ‘‘foreign bodies’’ may be integrated, yet the process of adoption and growing up racially di√erent from one’s own kin—when one of the many things kinship is thought to mean is the inheritance of racial and ethnic identity—is a complicated path. The following chapters trace my own approach to adoption and migration in the way that I inductively arrived at them: from a consideration of each separately to an exploration of their surprising connections, and finally to how those connections can reveal the ways that adoption and migration are meaningfully contingent, and the ideas and ideologies that a unified analysis of migration and adoption can help to explain.

24

introduction

one

Waiting for a Baby adopting the ideal immigrant

In 2011 the director of adoptions for the Community of Madrid gave me a piece of fieldwork advice: ‘‘Act like you’re an adoption applicant—call our o≈ce and ask for a slot at one of the weekly informational meetings about international adoption.’’ And a few weeks later I entered the front door of Madrid’s Department of Children and Families (Instituto Madrileño del Menor y la Familia, immf) building, Gran Via 14, right in the heart of Madrid, passing images of iconic pacifiers splashed across the front windows, and found myself in a peach-colored seminar room set up with about forty chairs that faced a projection screen. The room rapidly filled with incredibly quiet, attentive people, and I paused for a moment to think about the implications of forty people learning about international adoption each week in Madrid alone.∞ Later, the director of adoptions told me that up through 2010 the o≈ce actually o√ered two sessions a week: ‘‘Almost ninety people each Friday! Perhaps this contributed to the harmful excess of applications in so many countries.’’ Each week one of the sta√ members leads the two-hour session, and the week I attended it was given by Antonio Calles, from the legal department. I appreciated the way Calles presented international adoption to the group. He called it a peculiar and complex project and urged potential parents to reflect long and hard on the probable di≈culties they would face before beginning the process: ‘‘Many prospective parents see speed as a virtue. They want a child and they want him now. So everything that they must do along the way is viewed as a barrier to achieving that child.’’ He suggested

that instead, they might view the home study as a potentially helpful tool to allow them to better prepare to receive a child. Calles went on to list some of the probable di≈culties: the child’s troubled history of abandonment or health problems might have an unexpected impact, and bonding takes place far more slowly than prospective parents anticipate. By the end of his presentation he had painted a stark picture of international adoption. My sense was that he wanted to discourage anyone who wasn’t extremely committed, in part because supply and demand are so out of whack, as the director’s evocation of ‘‘harmful excess’’ had suggested.≤ Perhaps the most striking moment of Calles’s presentation came as he quickly skimmed through an alphabetical list of countries one might adopt from, drawing our attention to a photocopied table in the informational folders we had all been given upon checking in: Bolivia was a pretty good place to adopt from, but they haven’t renewed their accreditation. Kids in Brazil are aged five and up, although they do accept same-sex couples. Bulgaria has kids aged zero to three but there you can be no more than forty-three years older than the child, so if you start at forty-one and the process takes longer than two years, you’re no longer eligible. Chile has too many families waiting already. China’s not worth the hassle any more. Colombia is very strict about age, and for a child aged zero to three there is a fouryear wait. Costa Rica, the children are older. . . . He went on through the alphabet while I thought about this devastating litany. I imagined prospective internationally adoptive parents, many of whom had endured countless uncomfortable infertility treatments, coming to this information session full of hope and being told that programs will shut down unexpectedly, the available children are likely to be older or have special needs, the waits are long, and an immense sense of anxiety accompanies the wait because the parents’ ages are linked to the children’s so one could age out of eligibility to adopt before ever receiving a child. I imagined that this could be a very demoralizing two hours, but that from Calles’s perspective it was an e√ective strategy to eliminate all but the most-dedicated prospective adopters.≥ There are two aspects of Calles’s presentation I want to highlight because they reveal issues that Spanish prospective parents are thinking about when they think about international adoption. First is one of the central points of his talk: the lengthy process, the waits. This is a key feature of international adoption now, although it was not necessarily so 26

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for many of the parents of Peruvians who adopted their children in the late 1990s. Second is an underlying assumption that almost goes unstated in his discourse—the obvious preference he assumes that prospective adopters will have for younger children.∂ Because waits could be significantly shortened if families were willing to adopt older children, the preference for infants must therefore be extraordinarily strong. I suggest that we should consider that preference as an articulation of prospective parents’ search for an ideal migrant.∑ That ideal migrant has no history—not in the painful sense of being institutionalized or su√ering poverty or abuse prior to removal, and also not in the sense of being the kind of migrant who wants to keep living as if in his or her own country, as the adoptive mother Carmela had memorably put it when she described problematic immigrants. Recent discourse and practice in Spanish international adoption convey a belief that an infant ‘‘without history’’ is worth the wait. A Postcolonial History: How Spain and Peru Do International Adoption

The contemporary moment of narrowing possibilities for international adoption contrasts with a period full of promise and excitement in the late 1990s: Spain’s international adoption boom. International adoption was already well established by the 1970s in Scandinavia and the United States. But Spain di√ered from other European countries, as the long years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship had a√ected everything from international exchanges to fertility rates, and international adoption had a later start there than elsewhere in Europe.∏ Adoptive families and association members interviewed by the anthropologist Diana Marre concurred that it was the mid-1990s when international adoption began, inspired in part by the broadcast in Spain of Channel 4’s documentary The Dying Rooms in 1995 (Marre 2004; see also Anagnost 2000, 400). Although Spain now has a robust egg donation and in vitro industry (Bergmann 2011a, 2011b), surrogacy is prohibited, so there were and are fewer legal or local alternatives to adoption than elsewhere. Furthermore, until very recently, domestic adoption has been relatively unusual. In part this is because the Spanish child-welfare system has prioritized citizens’ parental rights (see Marre 2009c, 230).π Consequently, once international adoption began to be taken up in the 1990s, Spain rapidly emerged as an important receiving country.∫ By the time a furniture company published (and quickly retracted) advertisements in 2000 in Madrid and Barcelona with the slogan Waiting for a Baby

27

‘‘Redecorate your life. Adopt a child,’’ international adoption was widely familiar.Ω ‘‘It all started with Peru,’’ one of the first Spaniards to adopt from Peru told me. ‘‘Then everyone went over to China, but at the beginning it was Peru and Colombia.’’ Data from Spain’s Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality (Ministerio de Sanidad, Servicios Sociales e Igualdad) confirm this recollection: in 1998 (the first year that statistics are available) the top three countries from which Spanish families adopted were Colombia with 393 children, China with 196, and Peru with 151 (45 of those Peruvian children, nearly one-third, arrived to the Community of Madrid).∞≠ This would be Peru’s peak year for sending children to Spain, as it turned out. The following year, 126 Peruvian children were adopted by Spanish families (with 35 or just over one-quarter of those going to the Community of Madrid). They were outnumbered by Colombia (361), China (261), India (163), and Russia (141), and closely trailed by the Ukraine (116) and Mexico (107). In 2000 the number of children adopted from Peru to Spain dropped below one hundred and it has not surpassed that figure since. For the four most recent years for which data is available (2008–11 inclusive), an average of twenty-five Peruvian children have been adopted to Spain per year, significantly fewer than to the top destination of Italy and around the same number as to the United States.∞∞ Meanwhile, the figures from other countries were skyrocketing. In 2002 the annual number of children adopted from China topped one thousand, and in 2003 so did the annual number from Russia. One implication of these rapid shifts is that current preferences in adoption applications are not reflected in the makeup of actual adoptive families, meaning that prospective parents have little anecdotal information to be able to judge the outcomes of international adoption from their desired countries. For instance, as a population of youths adopted from China has now coalesced, adoptions from China have already become much more uncommon. The idea that ‘‘it all started with Peru’’ reflects a broader recognition of the importance of Latin America at the beginning of Spanish international adoption. A full two-thirds of the children adopted internationally to Spain in 1997 were Latin American (Selman 2009, 581–82). Latin America was initially said to be important to Spain as an adoption destination because of both linguistic and cultural a≈nity. The adoption psychologist Felipe Marín suggested to me that Spanish people just have ‘‘a particular fondness’’ for Latin Americans, stemming from a long entwined history. (These depictions downplay the violence of the colonial and postcolonial 28

chapter one

relationship.) In practical terms, Latin American countries were also good choices because Spaniards could draw on existing connections with Spanish clergy in Latin America to facilitate adoptions (Marre 2009a). However, Latin American countries typically required adoptive parents to spend between one and three months in the country to finalize the adoption, and when ‘‘express adoption’’ emerged in China, with nine-month wait times and one-week stays overseas, many prospective adopters shifted their interests (Marre 2009a). In the somewhat cynical take of Amparo Marzal Martínez, then-director of Children and Families for Spain’s Ministry of Work and Social Services (Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales), the increase in Spanish adoptive demand during the first part of the twenty-first century led to a ‘‘search for countries where adoption is fast and children are young, not considering Spanish society’s ability to integrate their di√erences’’ (2008, 25). In recent years, however, new restrictions emerged in previously ‘‘express’’ nations and waits were drawn out everywhere. Many Spanish adoptive parents are reconsidering Latin America as a destination for what they call ‘‘sweeter adoptions,’’ with the sweetness arising from an enforced lengthy stay that allows a greater degree of intimacy to develop before returning to Spain and everyday work and life (Marre 2009a).∞≤ I heard a similar observation from Cora, a Peruvian representative for a Spanish adoption agency. I had sought Cora out in Lima in 2012 on the glowing recommendation of Diego and Gabriela, the Spanish couple whose children were the first foreigners in their school. Diego and Gabriela had worked with Cora on multiple occasions and she had helped them with a particularly complicated adoption. Cora told me that Spanish parents find the process in Peru to be transparent, and find a kind of value in the lengthy process, as it permits the child to begin adapting to his or her parents prior to departing Peru. Cora had heard that in China parents are given the child ‘‘as if he’s a package,’’ abruptly and with no ceremony, while in Peru, adoption o≈ce sta√ and the representative of the Spanish adoption agency accompany the parents throughout the process. She reiterated, ‘‘It seems like they [adoptive parents] appreciate this part of it, even though the waits are long.’’ Because of the length of the adoption process, families often have time to travel and be tourists. In 2011, when I met Sergio and his twelve-year-old son, Nelson, at their nicely appointed apartment in Madrid, I heard a similar story. Sergio— light complected but tanned with the summer sun and bearing a wide grin and thin wire glasses, which he took o√ to give me the obligatory hello and Waiting for a Baby

29

goodbye kiss on the cheek—was unfailingly cheerful and kind. He flipped through a photo album open on the glass-topped table before us, showing me pictures of baby Nelson on the new family’s travels through Peru’s Sacred Valley of the Incas. He recalled warmly that ‘‘it was like vacation, although the adoption was still in process. . . . It’s a country you want to spend time in, a place you always want to return to.’’ The enforced lengthy stay freed parents like Sergio and his wife from the constant demands of work that they experienced in Spain, and allowed them to feel something like vacation, entwined with the joy of finally becoming parents. International adoption was rare from Peru before the war in the 1980s between the Peruvian government and the Shining Path, which led to the orphaning of countless children and the emergence of an adoption system. During the decade of the 1980s, an average of 220 children per year left Peru in international adoption (Kane 1993, table 3). Some of the adoptions from this period would later be revealed as illegal or ‘‘irregular’’ (that is, technically legal but problematic for various reasons). Adoptions at this time were classified as judicial, as they were carried out by lawyers and judges. The involvement of individuals who might be corruptible made irregular and illegal activity possible. The process was changed from judicial to administrative—flowing through a government ministry rather than the courts—in 1993 with the passage of Peru’s new Children’s and Adolescents’ Code, Ley 26102.∞≥ The Peruvian legal scholar Gerardo Ludeña Gonzalez has argued that this shift created a serious conflict of interest by putting the investigation of children’s abandonment in the same hands that governed the adoption process itself (2000). Irregularities were not entirely banished by this law. Perhaps the most famous international adoption from Peru was done in 1996 by the Spanish performing artist Isabel Pantoja, and Pantoja was later investigated on the suspicion that she had paid bribes to accelerate the process.∞∂ It is noteworthy that her ostensible goal was to speed things up. By following the principles of the un Convention on the Rights of the Child, Peru’s new Code had also introduced more rigorous practices meant to ensure that children were indeed truly ‘‘abandoned,’’ with no hope of being returned to their families of origin. The predictable e√ect was a significant decrease in the ‘‘supply’’ of adoptable children, which in places like Spain felt like a slowing down of the process. For the four most recent years for which data is available (2008–11 inclusive), an average of 145 children per year have left Peru via international adoption (compared to around ninety annual domestic adoptions, that is, adoptions within Peru).∞∑ Simi30

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lar changes occurred in several other Latin American countries around the same time as their legislative bodies incorporated the principles of the un Convention into their own legal frameworks (for Brazil, see Fonseca 2002; for Ecuador, see Leifsen 2012). These changes contextualize how the desires of those who wanted to adopt internationally were ultimately displaced from Latin America to Eastern Europe, then China, and now Africa. The gray areas of Peruvian adoptions were the subject of my first book (Leinaweaver 2008b), where I studied how local, traditional forms of child fostering intersect with formal, legal adoption practices. By traditional child fostering I mean sending a child to temporarily live with a neighbor or godparent, something parents did in part to give the child the opportunity to attend a better school or learn to speak Spanish, and in part to strengthen a relationship with a better-o√ patron. What concerned me was the possibility that this common practice could be depicted as an illegal child transfer and used as evidence for a claim that a child was truly abandoned by irresponsible birth-family members. The cases I encountered in Ayacucho were complicated, and the appearance of traditional fostering in a child’s record was never the only piece of evidence used to justify his or her redefinition as adoptable. It was always coupled with a parent’s or relative’s poverty, old age, or distant kinship. Nonetheless, that it was used at all had serious implications for poor and indigenous people. It meant that a strategy that poor parents used in part to help their children was being reconfigured as pathological and harmful. But this was work done behind the scenes. What was visible to adoptive parents in Spain and elsewhere was a sense that careful and legal steps had been taken to ensure that a child was truly available for adoption. By 1998 when Sergio and his wife adopted their first child, it was precisely this regularized, bureaucratic administrative process that appealed to them (and to many others, in Sergio’s rendering) about Peru. As he put it, ‘‘You have an idea. You fly there with the protocol under your arm and it says, ‘on the first day this happens, the fourth day that happens, the eighth day something else.’ And then it lists the cost of each step. So you have an idea.’’ These regulations, for Sergio, equated to a ‘‘guarantee, for parents, and above all for the child. So when you come back to Spain you don’t have the unpleasant surprise of the police coming after you to say that the child has been reported missing and hadn’t been legally adopted. No—I have my papers. . . . By guarantee I mean above all that the papers are real. You know, o≈cial, legal, and you can bring the child home with all the proper permissions and with his passport.’’∞∏ Waiting for a Baby

31

The ‘‘guarantees’’ Sergio was grateful for resembled in my mind ‘‘the certainties of the contract’’ given by a state to an investor (Tsing 2005, 69). The idea of guarantees gestures toward the formal regulation of adoption, both in Spain and in Peru, by national laws and regulations that incorporate the principles of the Hague Adoption Convention of 1993, which both countries have signed. One mother, Beatriz, told me about the choice of country for international adoption: ‘‘We liked South America; it had always appealed to us. Then the language, that helped too, and Peru has a very solid agreement with Spain that is signed and clear.’’ The appeal of an international agreement cannot be overstated. Social workers in Peru, too, repeatedly praised the process for its transparency and regularity (Leinaweaver 2008b, 51–52). The reality of Spain’s compliance with the Hague Adoption Convention is slightly more idiosyncratic than the solid image of guarantee suggests, however. The Hague requires that all countries establish a central authority for the purposes of regulating adoption (which does not obviate the presence of adoption agencies, several of which operate in Spain).∞π In Peru, the National Secretariat of Adoptions is the central authority.∞∫ Spain, by contrast, reacting against decades of centralism under Franco, has a political context of extreme regional autonomy. Regions like the Community of Madrid hold a significant amount of economic authority. As a result there are nearly two dozen ‘‘central authorities’’ handling international adoptions in Spain, and each has its own guidelines and requirements for international adoption.∞Ω In the Community of Madrid, the central authority is the immf. In this way, adoptions, like so much else in contemporary Spain, are decentralized at a time when international pressure urges centralization, standardization, and transparent regulation. Decentralization by itself does not automatically lead to irregularities, but it does suggest potential confusion among prospective parents about what the requirements might be. One reason why it matters what country a prospective parent selects (Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, and so on) is that each country has its own adoption requirements. Prospective parents in Spain must meet both the requirements of the Spanish central authority corresponding to their place of residence and the requirements of the sending country they select. (For example, while Spain permits adoptions by same-sex couples, many countries, including Peru, do not.) In order to adopt from Peru, prospective parents must fit Peru’s requirements. Their average age must fall between twenty-five and fifty-five, and they must be able to document their emo32

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tional stability and maturity, as well as their intellectual and economic capacities. But they must also be found eligible to adopt in the estimation of the central authority in their country of origin. Whether this experience feels more like a maze or an insurmountable peak is debatable, and the Spanish graphic artists Cristina Durán and Miguel A. Giner Bou, who adopted a daughter from Ethiopia, depicted their own process as both (see fig. 1.1). The process of being found eligible to adopt is a lengthy one that is specific to each central authority (so in the case of the Community of Madrid, the immf), involving medical checks, police records, social worker and psychologist interviews, and a home study. I had been surprised both in Peru and in Spain to see how explicit and rigid the requirements for the family’s home were. Peruvian literature suggested the home should be ‘‘in good condition (basic services, spacious, adequate light, and ventilation) and comfortable, . . . located in an area with numerous resources.’’≤≠ Ten years ago in Lima, an employee in a government adoption o≈ce told me that one of the home’s most crucial features was a private room for the child (Leinaweaver 2008b, 191 n. 2). Recent contributors to a Spanish online forum about Peruvian adoption concurred, noting that the requirement is a separate room, rather than a quantitative measurement of area.≤∞ One woman I interviewed was considering renting out her own apartment and moving elsewhere so that she would have enough bedrooms to be approved to adopt a second child. At the same time, she recognized the absurdity of this move, telling me that she had shared a room with her two sisters when she was growing up. If prospective parents complete all these steps and are declared suitable to adopt (idóneos in Spain, aptos in Peru), they are then placed on a waiting list. A council in Lima, made up of distinguished figures in the judicial, psychological, religious, and child-protective spheres (see Leinaweaver 2008b, 39–41), does the privileged work of assigning adoptable children to waiting families. When a couple has been assigned a child, they are given formal notice of the designation and have seven days to o≈cially accept or reject it. They make arrangements to travel to Peru, where a formal twenty-one-day process begins. The child and prospective parents (or parent) meet and begin to spend time together over the course of up to a week’s time. Then there is a one- to two-week fostering period when the child physically resides in the couple’s hotel room or rented apartment. During this time sta√ visit to evaluate whether empatía (literally empathy, but perhaps better translated as rapport) is developing beWaiting for a Baby

33

figure 1.1. A couple begins the process of being declared eligible to adopt in Spain. Image from the book La máquina de Efrén (Efrain’s machine) by Cristina Durán and Miguel A. Giner Bou (Madrid: Sinsentido, 2012). ∫ Cristina Durán y Miguel A. Giner Bou. Used by kind permission of the authors.

tween the child and the prospective parents. If so, the couple may sign adoption papers and wait an additional day for the adoption to be formally recognized. Once it is formalized and prior to travel, they must obtain the child’s new birth certificate and passport. A postadoptive follow-up is required twice a year for four years, which is conducted by adoption personnel (public or through an agency) in the receiving country. La Dulce Espera: Sweetness and Waiting

The time on the waiting list—between being approved to adopt and receiving notice that one has been assigned a child—can span several long years. Recent reports from members of the online forum indicated that the formal wait for a healthy, nondisabled child aged three or younger is approximately two to three years after being declared suitable to adopt. This figure was identical to the one that I heard in Peru in 2002 from the Spanish adoption agency representative who assisted Fernanda with her adoption of Rebeca. In Peru’s adoption system, two or three potential families for the child must be weighed against each other before each assignment is made (Leinaweaver 2008b, 51).≤≤ Because the assignments are made based on ‘‘the best interests of the child,’’ prospective parents who are deemed in some way lacking (for example, single parents or older parents) might wait much longer for a healthy, nondisabled child. Recent reports suggest that more than twenty thousand Spanish families have already been declared suitable to adopt and are currently in this position of formally waiting to be assigned a child through international adoption.≤≥ To this multiyear estimate must be added the twelve- to eighteenmonth period that the adoption agency representative told me was necessary to prepare the dossier in order to be declared suitable to adopt (see Harris, Sandelowski, and Holditch-Davis 1991, 152). Many prospective parents incorporated still another stretch of time into their own private counts: the period between realizing that they want to become parents and making the decision to achieve that goal through adoption. In some cases several years’ worth of attempted fertility treatments would fall between those two moments. Most of the parents I spoke with had not experienced particularly long waits because they adopted early on. My study focused on adoptive families rather than prospective adoptive parents though, so I was unable to interview anyone currently on the waiting list. My reviews of postings by current waiters on the online forum and from newspaper reports suggest Waiting for a Baby

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that waiting has taken up a central position in current discourse around adoption.≤∂ Spanish journalists don’t have to dig very deep these days to find an internationally adoptive parent who can o√er an unhappy remark about the long wait for a child.≤∑ One newspaper article from 2010 about plummeting international adoption rates in Spain quotes José, father to two Ethiopian siblings, who lamented, ‘‘All the paperwork at the beginning is a hassle, but the worst is how long it takes before they assign you a child.’’≤∏ In another article about the stress to prospective parents caused by long wait times, Inma, mother to a child from Peru, a biological child, and a third child from China, said that her latest adoption ‘‘was like a pregnancy, though eight years long instead of nine months.’’≤π The wait is depicted in these media sources as an experience that is primarily onerous: what the sociologist Betty Harris and colleagues call ‘‘an eventless interval without a script’’ (Harris, Sandelowski, and HolditchDavis 1991, 151).≤∫ Yolanda Vaccaro, a Peruvian migrant and journalist, wrote in the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio in 2003 that the Spanish adoption agency Meniños had written to the Peruvian authorities to complain about how stressed the families were. She quoted from that letter: ‘‘Two, three, four years pass, and nothing. Anxiety and frustration grow, depression threatens, self-esteem wavers, and when the family is finally assigned a child, they have su√ered so much. It’s true that the excitement of having their child at last is a miracle cure, but we wonder: Is it just to require these families to undergo the torture of such waiting for years? Our children deserve parents who haven’t had to su√er so long, especially if that su√ering could have been avoided or diminished.’’≤Ω This is a neat trick: to suggest that it is not in the best interests of Peru’s children to make their future parents su√er through long waits. Yet there is something positive about the wait as well. Those parents who don’t sink into the depression sketched by Vaccaro in her article can develop patience and strength. The director of adoptions in Madrid suggested with a rueful smile that parents of Peruvian children might be better interview subjects than parents of Chinese children. Having been subjected to such long and uncertain wait times, they might be more patient with my questions. A poster on the online forum echoed this sentiment when congratulating a fellow participant on her long-awaited assignment: ‘‘How lucky your child is to have a mother like you! So strong, so able to bear the hard times.’’ The wait can also be an opportunity for prospective parents to articulate faith, ideologies of kinship and destiny, and love for their future 36

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children (see also Gay y Blasco 2012, 330–31). These notions are directly and explicitly linked to waiting in prospective parents’ discourse. For example, they suggest that the wait is long and arduous, but ultimately worth it because you are waiting for the ‘‘right’’ child, the one that was meant for you and who is also waiting for you. One poster on the online forum reported using precisely this approach to convince her husband not to give up: ‘‘There’s a child in Peru anxiously waiting for us who wants to have a new family, a sister, and so many aunts and uncles and cousins to grow up with.’’ The idea of waiting for the right child draws from an ideology that child and parent are perfectly matched, an ideology that in nonadoptive families is expressed through the idiom of biology. For adoptive families this ideology of matching is articulated in a more spiritual but equally powerful dimension, and the wait is an important tool for constructing that sense of matching. For instance, one wish for good luck on the forum read in part, ‘‘You can never know when your child will appear—open your arms and your child will call you.’’ Another stated, ‘‘I understand the disappointment of those who have been waiting for years, but don’t be afraid and don’t be impatient: your turn will come, and that will be your child, that one and no other.’’ Another poster wrote, ‘‘When you have your child in your arms you’ll realize this was the only child for you—so many families describe it this way that it can’t be a coincidence. So think of the day that your child’s face appears at the adoption o≈ce in Peru, . . . that will be your treasure, the one you’ve dreamed of so long who has always been waiting for you in Peru.’’ Analyzing similar narratives in Catalonia, the anthropologists Diana Marre and Joan Bestard argue that through such discussions ‘‘adoptive parents reveal one of the main assumptions of kinship, namely that relatedness is something previously given, and it needs to be activated in order to create a concrete relationship between individuals’’ (2009, 67). One result of elongated waits is that adoptive parents of Peruvian children expend a lot of time and energy in parenting before the children are even assigned to them. The e√orts they go to in making the wait bearable and in contemplating parenthood during that time resemble the talk, shopping, planning, and overall consideration that occurs during the pregnancies of the middle-class U.S. women whom the anthropologist Sallie Han has described (2013). The extension of parenting work to the prenatal period in Han’s work and to the even longer waiting period that the prospective adoptive parents endured constitutes a further expansion of Waiting for a Baby

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what Sharon Hays has called ‘‘intensive mothering,’’ a model ‘‘that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children’’ (1996, x). The ‘‘early adopters’’ of the early 1990s expended such energy by writing to consulates and forming their own networks. The ‘‘late adopters’’ of the present day wait, not simply whiling away the time but experiencing the waiting as deeply meaningful and even as a contribution to becoming more patient parents of the children who are meant for them. Neither those prospective parents writing to consulates nor those who make sense of their waiting in online discussions are socially identifiable as parents yet but they are all nonetheless engaged in something that looks like intensive parenting.≥≠ ‘‘La dulce espera’’ is a phrase I used to hear in Peru that refers euphemistically to pregnancy. It would translate to something like ‘‘expecting,’’ but with an added adjectival sweetener. In 2011, a poster on the online forum used the term to designate those prospective parents who had been assigned a child but had not yet traveled: ‘‘ahora [now] la dulce espera.’’≥∞ That reappropriation suggests that the sweetest part of the wait consists of its last moments when one knows it is coming to a close. One poster wrote upon being assigned a child at last: ‘‘I think our profound happiness right now is proportional to how long we have waited!’’ Another congratulated the new parents: ‘‘All the time you’ve waited was so worth it.’’ The ‘‘sweetness of waiting’’ linguistically associated with pregnancy can also be coopted to perform important work in preadoptive intensive parenting. It is clear from journalistic coverage and forum posts that adoptive parents are frustrated by the long wait times in the contemporary adoption field and the uncertainty about when parenthood will finally be achieved. But it is equally apparent that adoptive parents often use or interpret the long period of waiting to further bolster their own sense of destiny and kinship with the waiting child. Infants without History

What kind of child are these parents waiting for? As Calles indicated in his presentation and as various countries’ laws determine, the age of the child is deemed crucially important. Younger children are viewed almost without question as more desirable adoptees. Yet both in Calles’s presentation and in other literature and presentations by, and discussions with, adoption professionals, I discerned a slightly more subtle take on this: first, a sense that prospective parents believe younger children to be desirable, 38

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and second, a desire by professionals, bolstered by the experience of some parents, to challenge this stance. Both of these findings are interesting when viewed from the perspective that adoption is a form of migration: the assumption that younger migrants are more easily integrated may be flawed, opening new possibilities for thinking about how foreigners can come to belong. The age of the child to be adopted is contingent upon the parents’ ages, so that a couple whose average age falls into a particular range will be assigned a child of a particular age. Currently in Peru, couples whose average age falls between twenty-five and forty-three are assigned children aged zero to three.≥≤ However, as Calles pointed out in his presentation, zero to three is a very broad range—one might imagine receiving a six-month-old baby only to be greeted by a walking, talking toddler. Beatriz and her husband, both aged thirty-one, were assigned this zero-to-three range for their adoption in 1998, and she told me that ‘‘in the interviews we said we wanted her to be very little, but they said ‘that’s the age range, that’s how it is,’ and so when they said she was seventeen months we were delighted.’’ Beatriz—now divorced from her daughter’s father and since remarried —lived in an apartment block in a small suburb on the distant outskirts of Madrid. I had met her through a friend of hers, a professor named Marcia, who had also adopted a Peruvian child. And I had first gotten Marcia’s contact information from a Spanish colleague who had done a study on single-parent adoptions (in which Marcia had participated) and freely passed on to me the names of those who had adopted Peruvians. By this roundabout fashion I had invited myself over to Beatriz’s apartment, where I interviewed her together with her daughter, Tina. In that setting Beatriz did not elaborate on why she and her husband had wanted their child to be ‘‘very little.’’ It is a position that appears to be so widely accepted that it goes without saying. The idea seems to be that younger children are more pliable—that they haven’t really been formed yet— leaving open the possibility that they can be formed by their new parents in the ways that matter most. They also have spent less time in an institution, which is presumed to be harmful. Perhaps another part of it, rarely mentioned, is that history might also involve birth parents and other kin, aspects of an adopted child’s past that many parents find frightening.≥≥ Legally, adoption is a ‘‘clean break’’ with a family of origin, creating exclusive kin ties between a child and his or her new parent(s) (Yngvesson 2000, 171; Modell 1994). For older children, then, their histories, memories, experiences, and legal statuses may not align. Waiting for a Baby

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In Calles’s presentation to the roomful of prospective parents, he lingered on the kinds of problems one might be able to anticipate with adoption, and the problems he listed were nearly all examples of what a migrant child might experience when undergoing the jarring shift of culture shock on an intimate level. He proposed, ‘‘Imagine the challenge that this is for a child. A new culture, integration, having to bond with all these people. . . . For a child, adoption is a break with everything he or she has known, and it can be a negative experience—not just for the child but for the biological parents, for the country, they’ve lost a child. Think of the challenges—let’s put ourselves in the child’s shoes. Strangers arrive, you don’t understand them, and you must go [with them] to a new country with new foods.’’ Calles switched to the third person as he continued: ‘‘In many cases the child doesn’t have a good grasp yet of the language. He or she is in the process of creating a new link with new parents. The child is experiencing transculturation, having gone from one culture to another.’’ Calles encouraged parents to treat adoption as a mutual thing rather than a one-way process, and urged them to take it slowly, ensuring that the child has bonded with the parents before beginning school or day care.≥∂ But the unmarked assumption in his words is that a child who must learn a new language, new foods, and a new culture is therefore an older child who already knows a first language, foods, and culture—and by extension that an older child is more of a challenge to adopt. And a younger child, who is more open, unformed, and pliable, can soak up the new culture, new people, language, and food with greater ease. An older child, perhaps, is more like our image of a migrant. While many professionals reproduce a discourse that younger children adapt better than older ones upon adoption, they also work to intercede in it. For example, they argue that even infants have history. The guide to international adoptions published by the Community of Madrid states that ‘‘no matter how small children are, even when newborn, they always bring a piece of history from before they came to live with us. In their ‘backpacks’ children might bring developmental delays, memories, a history, behaviors, a biological origin, cultural belonging, the physical features of those who saw their birth’’ (Berástegui, Gómez, and Adroher 2006, 20).≥∑ Juan Alonso Casalilla, an immf sta√ psychologist who addressed a gathering of adoptive parents that I attended in 2010, noted that sometimes parents say, ‘‘I want a little kid because he doesn’t have much of a history.’’ But Casalilla argued against that position, positing that even

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small children have histories: histories of inadequate care, institutionalization, and abrupt changes in the central people in their lives. I also had some poignant conversations with parents about when and how they planned to share with their children particularly painful details about their preadoption histories, which in a sense were acknowledgments that these histories—which the children did not remember and would never know otherwise—mattered and were important to someday share. Still, the fact that professionals must emphasize that infants have histories indicates the strength of the tendency against which they are working: parents seek infants because they wish, ‘‘albeit implicitly, . . . to minimize the e√ects of early environment on the child’’ (Gailey 2010, 106). In other words, the younger the children, the blanker their slates, making them more suitable for adoption, particularly for international adoption where they must adapt not only to new families but to new countries, cultures, languages, food, and more. There is some truth to this, of course. More than one parent told me that their children, adopted at older ages, are behind in school, something that seems to expose them to other kinds of risks that derive from socializing with other school-challenged youths. Diego said of his daughter Isabel that she was essentially illiterate when she came to Spain at the age of eleven, but she was placed in sixth grade because of her age, and she was incredibly bored because she understood nothing. Diego—who came across as extremely sympathetic and kind—invited me to understand how Isabel’s life had been upended: ‘‘Just imagine, her whole life she thought that what was in store for her was getting married and scraping by, and then one day we came and brought her to Spain and told her to go to school.’’ It is not surprising that school would be accompanied by challenges for many older adopted children. But you can also see potential di≈culties in the everyday pain of having to change things that are so deeply anchored. For example, I asked Isabel whether she felt Peruvian, and she said that she did—very Peruvian: ‘‘I still have the habits I had in Peru.’’ She then went into a detailed description of the way that her body had been trained by the nuns at the home she lived in: ‘‘There, when we ate our meals, we normally had to eat with one hand and keep the other hand in our laps, because it was impolite to be like this,’’ she glanced meaningfully downward, ‘‘with our hands on the table.’’ Her father, Diego, sketched the context for me, explaining, ‘‘we insist that when we are eating, they keep their hands on the table.’’ Isabel went on: ‘‘Every time I

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begin to eat, I forget and my mother says, ‘Hello.’ ’’ ‘‘It’s like a code word,’’ her mother, Gabriela, explained. Isabel finished, ‘‘which means ‘Isabel, get your hands up on the table.’ ’’ The implicit assumption here is that adopted children must adapt to the ways of their Spanish parents. Unlike other migrants who can and do retain many of their habits and practices that they came to Spain with, adopted children are expected to transform. This expectation is one reason why infant children are preferable, why they are the ideal migrants: there is little to be transformed. Gabriela concluded the discussion of Isabel’s wayward hands by observing that migrant children raised in Spain by their migrant parents live a di√erent situation than adopted children raised by Spanish parents, ‘‘because those who live here with their South American parents, I think they keep the same customs they did there.’’ While Gabriela did not o√er a comparison of the e√ects of transformation on adoptees and the e√ects of ‘‘keeping customs’’ on the children of migrants, others were ready to do so. On one side were the psychologists Lila Parrondo and Javier Múgica, who felt that things were harder for adoptees. Parrondo indicated to me that ‘‘migrants with family here do things one way at home and another way out in public, so their children have a chance to experience their double reality. The adopted child has it harder.’’ Múgica writes that adoptees ‘‘actually have a harder time of it than immigrant students, who go home to a space within which they can identify. When adoptees go home they are still di√erent and these di√erences from their parents hurt’’ (2008, 99–100). The opposing view was expressed by a cultural mediator speaking to adoptive families, who told the audience that adopted children ‘‘may be better o√ than the children of migrants. Why? Because they don’t live with two cultures on a daily basis. Their second culture isn’t imposed on them as it is in foreign families. . . . In your children, the second [culture] is latent, and not imposed by you’’ (quoted in Jociles and Charro 2008, 117). These models of culture as contained within mobile children—adoptees and other migrants—are more static than today’s anthropologists would like. The models do not take into account the di√erences between concepts of culture, phenotype, and national origin. Nor do they consider the possibility that the children of migrants may feel themselves to be more ‘‘culturally Spanish’’ than ‘‘culturally Peruvian.’’ As Unni Wikan asks about a controversial case in Norway where Aisha, the Norwegian-born adolescent daughter of migrants, was returned by authorities from a foster placement to her abusive father against her stated wishes but in accor42

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dance with a policy of respect for cultural integrity, ‘‘what is in e√ect the culture of a girl born and raised in Norway’’ (2002, 20)? The psychologists and cultural mediators working with adoptive families in Spain further surmise that possessing two cultures is not unlike a disability that must be managed in some way, either by suppressing one or by giving both equal time. Ann Anagnost, analyzing how culture is constructed for adopted children, argues that anthropologists must be attentive to the ways that a concept of ‘‘culture’’ circulates and is deployed, reminding us to attend to ‘‘what is at stake and who is empowered when culture is invoked’’ (2000, 413). The Spanish parents of adopted Peruvian children and Peruvian labor migrant parents alike invoke culture as desirable for their children, although their understandings of what culture is di√er considerably from one another and from the psychologist’s and the cultural mediator’s approaches. If history matters more for infants than the prevalent discourse allows, the counter may also be true: the history of older children may not be the obstacle it is imagined to be. Carmela, a teacher to whom I was referred by her friends Diego and Gabriela, adopted three children from Peru with her husband. Carmela was initially very cautious about sharing information about her children, and even after we became friendly she never invited me to meet them, so I o√er only her perspective on what her children are doing. But I still found it instructive when she told me that her youngest daughter, who was almost ten when she was adopted, had adapted more successfully than her other children, who were younger at the time of their adoption. In Carmela’s interpretation, her daughter had known her birth family, had lived life as a Peruvian, and knew all too well the reality of Peru. For all these reasons she had no desire or yearnings to return, unlike Carmela’s other children. As Carmela said rather ironically, ‘‘She knows she is better o√ here . . . she has more things!’’ Carmela’s interpretation acknowledges the privilege that adopted parents hold and pass on to their children. I got a similar sense from Marcia, a single mother whose daughter Karla was four at the time of adoption. While Karla may not remember much about life in Peru, Marcia has told her that the reasons for her abandonment were ‘‘poverty and culture’’—in other words, Karla’s birth mother presumably had a low level of education and could not support her. Marcia explained that in Spain, Karla has lived like ‘‘the daughter of a queen,’’ precisely the opposite of her previous life. As a result, Karla associated Peru with poverty and wanted nothing to do with it. Marcia analyzed Waiting for a Baby

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Karla’s a√ection for the fancy Spanish department store El Corte Inglés for me, noting that because Karla associates Peru with poverty, one of the ways she articulates her non-Peruvianness is by purchasing brand items. It is striking that both Carmela and Marcia treat their daughters’ relative disinterest in Peru as a positive signal of adaptation to life in Spain. This suggests that older children’s negative memories of an impoverished life in Peru can be harnessed and turned toward their adaptation to life in Spain, while those who were adopted as infants may be left with questions and mysteries that become more pressing as they get older. Finally, Calles also told his audience that younger children were not good candidates for adoption for two reasons completely unrelated to the children’s psychological states. The first reason was that such children are in extremely high demand, so setting your sights on one could entail a lengthy wait or disappointment. As he cautioned, ‘‘every day it’s harder to find children aged three and under,’’ and added that if you are single, cohabiting, gay, or lesbian, you’re even less likely to be assigned such a child. So rather than fully challenging the notion that younger children are developmentally the ideal adoptee (or migrant), he suggested that they are so idealized that they will be di≈cult to find. Perhaps more alarmingly, Calles also warned: ‘‘Don’t trust countries where kids come young.’’ In other words, he implied that young children are an index of a corrupt process: babies being stolen or taken illegally from their birth parents, with an improperly quick investigation (for Ethiopia, see Joyce 2011; for Guatemala, see Briggs 2012; Leinaweaver and Seligmann 2009, 4–5; and Posocco 2011). An infant is thought to be preferable to an older child from a psychological and developmental perspective, but the same infant raises a parade ground full of red flags from a legal and global political perspective. this widely circulated and powerful trope of ‘‘waiting for a baby’’ is also a contested representation. The elongated wait turns out to be a crucial and meaningful time during which prospective parents carry out considerable parenting work through ascribing elaborate import to waiting, work whose ultimate end is to more fully anchor the child within his or her new family. Parents who make it through the wait are patient, a skill required of contemporary parents. They are also deserving. The intensiveness of such parenting work is striking because it is carried out long before a child arrives to transform the adult into a parent in the eyes of the larger community. Indeed, supply and demand are so mismatched in Spain to44

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day that many people currently approved and waiting to adopt may never actually be assigned a child (Selman 2009, 591). The desire for an infant without history is similarly contested. From a developmental perspective, adoption professionals argue, even infants bear traces of personal history that cannot and should not be papered over. And in an appeal to the prospective parents’ own resistance to waiting, these professionals add that the very desirability of such children leads to their rarity and a longer wait time. Meanwhile, some parents find that children adopted at an older age could adjust more easily because they are able to identify their new lives as an improvement over what they had in Peru. Infants and the very idea of waiting are linked because they raise broader sociopolitical concerns tied to international adoption. As adoption professionals note, countries o√ering infants are probably not following international protocols for adoption. The specter of the wait has its own ties to irregularity—one mother who adopted in 2000 after a six-year wait told me that the singer Isabel Pantoja had done the right thing. As she said, if she had had some way to shorten her wait, she too would have done so, and she didn’t begrudge Pantoja’s actions. Another mother, who adopted in 1996 after a two-year wait, similarly glossed over any irregularities in Pantoja’s adoption of her daughter, remarking that ‘‘the girl is here; we hope things are going well for her and that’s what matters.’’ Some have observed that the desire for a baby, as soon as possible, has the potential to lead to pressure on administrators in sending countries. The idea of ‘‘harmful excess’’ flagged by the Madrid director of adoptions was repeated in a recent statement from the federation of adoptive family associations in Spain (Coordinadora de Asociaciones en Defensa de la Adopción y el Acogimiento, or cora), which called for a moratorium on new adoption applications for countries where the wait is longer than four years, ‘‘in order to stop pressuring [those countries] to ‘obtain’ adoptable children.’’≥∏ The larger concerns raised by the combination of waiting and infants are clear. To probe the contours of this relationship between ahistorical infants and protracted waits is to very quickly veer into dangerous territory. First, waiting is also part of the discourse about children (Briggs 2012, 117; Cartwright 2003). For instance, in Peru older (five and up) or disabled children or sibling groups are placed on a list called ‘‘Waiting Angels’’ (Ángeles que Aguardan), a phrase that emphasizes that children are the ones whose wait for a family matters. The historian Laura Briggs observes that the use of the term ‘‘waiting’’ to describe children discursively deWaiting for a Baby

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taches them from their families of origin: ‘‘another name for this ‘waiting’ might be the period in which birth parents, usually mothers, are scrambling to get their children back. Once the conversation is defined in terms of waiting or delay, the illegitimacy of the claims of birth parents on their own children has already been presumed’’ (2012, 199n94). These forms of waiting are linked, so that the children on Peru’s list of ‘‘Waiting Angels’’ are more likely to be long-separated from birth relatives than those in the canonical three-and-under range. Furthermore, if applicants elect to adopt from this list they can shorten their own wait times considerably and can choose a specific child, allowing them the flexibility around gender or racial and ethnic preferences that they would not have in an unmarked international adoption. That prospective parents overwhelmingly do not take up this possibility is evidenced by the fact that four hundred ‘‘angels’’ are currently waiting on that list.≥π This suggests that despite the developmental, sociohistorical, and personal arguments against adopting an infant, it still remains the ideal to which many prospective parents aspire. Perhaps this ideal has purchase because of the hope that younger children can more easily fit into new families and nations, a hope that speaks to ideas about migrant and second-generation youths more generally. For this reason, prospective parents reimagine waiting as something beneficial, creating (or confirming) patience and permitting valuable kin work to be done. But perhaps it also speaks to a prospective parent’s sense that it will be easier for him or her to incorporate an infant without history into an already existing household that has lived its own history. That is, the value of the ahistorical infant lies not in the way that such a child can adapt to the parent but in the way that the parent can adapt to such a child. This is a conclusion with implications for how labor migration is managed in Spain: ideal migrants are not necessarily those who will adapt easily to a new context, but rather those to whom citizens of the receiving country can most easily adapt.

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two

The Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child separating families or displacing children?

An important motivation behind the desire to adopt an infant is to bring to Spain an ‘‘ideal migrant,’’ someone who can adapt easily to a new context and someone to whom parents and other Spaniards can adapt relatively easily. An analysis of the desirability of infant adoptees suggests a new set of questions for thinking about the children of labor migrants, questions about the possible consequences of bringing them to Spain. Labor migrants often know more intimately than do prospective adoptive parents in Spain what it means to migrate and what an ideal migrant may look like. As a result, the questions they ask as they contemplate bringing their children to join them in Spain look somewhat di√erent than the questions prospective adoptive parents ask as they contemplate the same move. As I found over the course of conversations with migrant parents who made opposite decisions about where to raise their children, the parents already accept as a given that migration will be transformative for children in both positive and negative ways. This leads them to ask a question prior to the ones adoptive parents ask: whether or not to bring their children from Peru to Spain. Adoptive parents, of course, must bring their children from Peru to Spain. After all, that is the nature of international adoption: prospective parents and adoption authorities have all concluded that it is in the best interests of that particular child to come to Spain. Many potential adoptive parents may be personally uncomfortable with the broader implications of international adoption, sometimes framed as the globalized inequity of

being a privileged ‘‘importer’’ of someone else’s kin. Those who cannot overcome this discomfort do not adopt. Those who do form adoptive families will first raise the kinds of questions described in chapter 1, about age and adaptability, and other questions that I will discuss in later chapters. Migrant parents, however, first face a prior, or at least less tacit, set of choices. Should they leave Peru, and leave their children with kin? Once they are eligible to do so, should they bring their children to Spain through the legal process of family reunification? And if they have brought children to Spain, might there come a time when they should send those migrant children back to Peru? The di√erent decisions migrant parents make in response to these questions speak volumes about the parents’ relative valuing of opportunities available in Peru and Spain, their concerns about raising children either in Peru or in Spain, and their opinions about the importance of being with family versus the importance of being in one’s community. As labor-migrant parents weigh the di√erent options, they are conceptualizing, in a way, what the best interests of their own children might be. Comparing the explanations of migrant parents who have come to opposite conclusions about where to raise their children reveals some shared concerns. As the parents explain their decisions, they reveal a set of preoccupations about what life for a young person of Peruvian origin in Spain might be like—some of which has direct relevance for parents of adoptive migrants. Where to Raise a Child?

On my most recent trip to Peru in 2012, I noticed a new kind of handicraft for sale that I had never seen before. It was a typical piece of folk art in most ways: a doll, with the female version clad in Andean skirt, adorned with braids, and holding a baby in her arms (the male version wore rough woven pants and a knitted cap with earflaps). What made this doll unusual was the passport attached to her skirt—a faithful replica of the rust-colored Peruvian passport, with the national shield on the front cover and the formal typeface inside listing the doll’s passport number, full name, place of birth, and passport-issuance date. The market woman in Lima whom I quizzed about the doll told me the passports were ‘‘so no one makes trouble for her’’ when the doll departs Peru with her tourist owner. Even as the Peruvian economy churns along while most European and North American countries’ are sputtering, the dolls and their passports imply that emigration still has a powerful grasp on the Peruvian imagination.∞ 48

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Of course people have always been moving throughout, to, and from Peru, since before there was a Peru. There were forced resettlements of whole populations in Inca and Spanish-colonial times alike, as well as Spaniards relocating to Peru during the colonial period and again during the Franco era. Seasonal or circular migration has also been an important part of agricultural lifeways for hundreds of years, as Andeans moved and still move between di√erent altitudes to take advantage of microenvironments (Brush 1977) and between di√erent crop zones to take advantage of seasonal shifts in market demand (Collins 1988). But it was not until the latter part of the twentieth century that migration scholars began to take notice of significant numbers of Peruvians migrating internally from the impoverished Andean highlands to coastal Lima, for reasons both of economic advancement and—in the 1980s—personal security during the civil war. Transnational migration from Peru, which had begun among the middle classes for educational and professional reasons (Paerregaard 2008, 128), boomed in the 1980s and early 1990s, especially due to high unemployment and political crises in Peru under the governments of Alan García and Alberto Fujimori (Takenaka, Paerregaard, and Berg 2010, 5).≤ In the 1990s, Peruvians left their country at a rate of around fifty thousand per year. In the 2000s this figure shot up dramatically. Between 2000 and 2004 it almost doubled to nearly one hundred thousand per year, and between 2005 and 2009 it doubled again, with more than two hundred thousand departing annually.≥ As a destination of long standing, the United States still holds the most Peruvian migrants, with nearly a third of those Peruvians abroad residing there, geographically dispersed throughout the nation. But as U.S. immigration policy tightened in the 2000s, Spain, Italy, and Japan encouraged labor migration and received the bulk of migrants from Peru (Takenaka, Paerregaard, and Berg 2010, 6; see also Escrivá 2005). Nearly one-third of Peruvian migrants now reside in Europe, and Spain is the nation with the third-largest number of Peruvian migrants overall, 13 percent of the total. The city of Madrid is home to a full 8.6 percent of all Peruvian migrants globally.∂ Finally, the gendered dynamics of Peruvian migration bear examination.∑ Approximately 53 percent of Peruvian migrants living in Spain are women, many of them mothers, which shapes parental debates over whether, and when, migrants should bring their children to Spain (see fig. 2.1). In 2010 I heard the key themes of these debates unfolding within the context of a fascinating discussion set up by Graciela, an adoptive mother The Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child

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figure 2.1. An ad in a metro station for a phone card to call Peru reads ‘‘Hello, Mom,’’ implying a customer who is a migrant mother separated from her child. Photo by author, 2009.

of two Peruvian daughters, now in their early twenties. Graciela and her daughter Sandra brought me to the small rented o≈ces of the adoptivefamily association Voyager, which Graciela had founded years ago. There we were met by Clara, the social worker from a city in the Peruvian Amazon who assisted with Graciela’s adoptions. Graciela had helped Clara get a work visa so she could migrate to Spain, where she met and married a Spaniard. Two of Graciela’s other migrant friends joined us too: Soledad, a working-class Peruvian with one child in Spain and two older ones back in Peru, and Cindy, a marriage migrant who came to Spain with the support of her Spanish husband. As the six of us sat around a conference table in the association’s meeting room, the question of whether it was better to raise a child in Spain or in Peru arose almost immediately. Cindy, the marriage migrant, fell into the pro-Spain camp. As she introduced her story and described her contentment with Spain and her six-year-old Spanish-born son, she mentioned that some of her fellow marriage migrants have talked about returning to Peru, but she has no plans to do so. She tied this directly to her own motherhood, telling us, 50

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Spain is another world: it’s the kind of place to raise a child. In Peru there is a lot of delinquency, economic instability, the culture is different. There is political, social, cultural disorder in comparison with here. For myself I’d go back to my country tomorrow, but as for raising my son, I would prefer to do it here. . . . The education kids get here is excellent and it’s free. In Peru you have to put your kid in private school if he’s going to learn anything. . . . I don’t have the money to go into debt for my child to study.∏ Cindy argued that the educational opportunities in Spain and a broader sense of it being a safe and ‘‘orderly’’ place were compelling reasons to raise a child in Spain. Clara, who had come to Spain as a labor migrant before marrying her Spanish husband, and who also had a Spanish-born child who was eight years old, had a somewhat more ambivalent position. She said that many immigrant mothers came to Spain alone, leaving their children with their grandparents. When the children are adolescents and are brought to Spain, ‘‘they have been completely unmothered [desmamado]. They don’t want to study or take advantage of the help that is o√ered. They drink or, statistics show, Latina girls get pregnant at thirteen and fourteen. When you leave them with their grandparents it’s not the same as being with your own child—the education, the constant ‘What are you doing? Where are you going? Time to do your homework.’ You leave them with the grandparents, send money, the grandparents feed them and the kid is free to do what he wants.’’ When the child finally comes to Spain, the result of this displaced childrearing is a lack of respect of parental authority, potentially including violence toward parents and truancy. As Clara said, ‘‘They say ‘my child will be with me,’ but he’s with you only in words; in reality you are working all day. So the teenager asks ‘what did you bring me for?’ ’’π Clara’s ambivalent evaluation raised a few interlinked issues. First, she felt that only a parent could provide the close attention that a child needs. Here she draws on Peruvian kinship ideologies that I encountered in earlier research in Ayacucho—in precisely the same terms, the idea that it just ‘‘isn’t the same’’ for someone who is not the parent to be caring for the child (Leinaweaver 2008b, 86, 151). These kinship ideologies also closely resemble the ones articulated in European family-reunification migration policy. Anxieties about the fate of the children of migrants have been expressed elsewhere in Europe, for example in recent sensationalist discussions of ‘‘Euro-orphans’’ (eurosieroty), those Polish youths whose parThe Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child

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ents moved to Western Europe (upon Polish accession to the eu) to find work (White 2011, 118). Separating from a child due to migration is reluctantly understood but is nonetheless criticized both by resentful relatives and by scholars (Ansion, Mujica, and Villacorta 2009, 37, 83). Clara’s words indicate that migrants know they ought to be with their children. Clara’s second point was that separation from parents can lead to a lack of parental authority. She added a few moments later that the Spanish judicial context further weakens this authority, because migrants’ children learn to say to their parents, ‘‘If you lay a hand on me I’m turning you in.’’ For Clara and other migrants, Spain overemphasizes children’s rights, which they interpret as leading to a culture of permissiveness that in its own way points to delinquency. The anthropologist Caroline Bledsoe and geographer Papa Sow have traced some West African migrants’ decisions to send their children back home to precisely this point. As they note, many West African migrant parents think Western society coddles children, which prevents them from developing the drive to succeed, without which they may at best simply coast and at worst be enticed to involvement in gangs. But parents also observe that Western society prevents them from disciplining their children in the way they believe necessary to instill that drive (Bledsoe and Sow 2011a, 748). As a result, some decide to send their children back home for the duration of their adolescence, a period of heightened risk. A third criticism that Clara o√ered was that migrant parents in Spain have no time to take proper care of their children. I heard the same concern over and over from Peruvian migrants in Spain. One delegate at the Congress of Peruvians in Europe, held in Madrid in 2010, complained that migrant parents leave the house at six in the morning and return at nine at night, and don’t see their children all day, with the result being that the young people hang out in the street in groups and give Peruvians a bad reputation.∫ Esteban, the twenty-one-year-old nephew of one of the delegates, agreed: ‘‘My mother works from six in the morning until ten at night in order to be able to feed me. I would say to all the mothers: save a little time for your children, that’s the most important thing.’’ This criticism of migrant parents is one form of a broader critique of working mothers that one adoptive mother reiterated for me. Carmela, herself a teacher, mentioned that the adopted Peruvians she knows in Andalusía have all had relatively positive outcomes, and one key reason that she identified for this is that their mothers don’t work outside the home, so the children are constantly tended to. 52

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Imagine the challenge here: no matter what you do, someone casts doubt on your parenting choices. The migrant parents of both children they leave in Peru and children they bring to Spain are tarred by criticism. If they bring a child to Spain, the child is said to grow up almost completely unattended. If they leave that child in Peru, it is said to mean depriving the child of close and loving parenting. Those who have begun their migration journey by leaving a child in Peru, only to later bring the child to Spain through family-reunification migration, haven’t made things better for the child, but rather twice as bad, or so Clara’s remarks suggest. The damnedif-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t assessment of family reunification suggests that underlying these criticisms may be anxieties surrounding the migrant project more generally. That is, such criticisms do not fall upon parents who remain in place. The subtext of statements portraying parental migration as bad for children no matter where the children end up is that parents simply should not migrate, and this message is couched in pro-child terms that are di≈cult to argue against. Yet not migrating was not seriously considered by these parents, who—ironically—often embarked upon their travels with the stated goal of providing support for their children (Ansión, Mujica, and Villacorta 2009, 75; on Ecuadorian migrants, see Pribilsky 2001). Adoptive parents also face judgments of their parenting abilities. Indeed, both Spanish international-adoption applicants and migrant parents who consider whether to bring their children to Spain weigh these excruciatingly complicated questions and ultimately determine that the factors in favor of bringing a child outweigh those against. Holding adoptive parents and migrant parents together in this sustained comparison shows the complexity of some of the reasons for their actions. Parents’ abstract belief that children should be raised by their mothers and fathers bleeds into the parents’ own aching desire to be together with their children. Their belief that it is in the children’s best interests to grow up in developed, privileged Spain and ultimately as Spanish citizens may outweigh the nagging sense that they do not have enough time to devote to their children. Again, adoptive parents get such criticisms too, from professionals and other parents alike: Carmela told me that she went to work part-time after adopting her first child and quit entirely after the second, because it is essential to take time o√ and work very closely with one’s kids, to give them extra support in school and to establish the all-important bond. Given the complexities of this decision, it is not surprising that some migrant parents decide not to bring their children to Spain.Ω The Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child

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Staying in Place

Because of legal restrictions on temporary workers, Peruvian parents who come to Spain as labor migrants cannot bring their children initially. They must leave their children in the care of family members in Peru. Sometimes migrants intend to bring their children to Spain eventually, once they have obtained legal residency and are eligible to do so. In the meantime, these children are characterized by migration scholars as ‘‘children left behind.’’∞≠ It is a phrase with negative overtones, connotations of abandonment. In an ideal world, it suggests, children would not be left behind. They should be brought to Spain—or perhaps, better yet, the whole family should stay in Peru where they ‘‘belong.’’ But some migrants, like my mechanic friend César, are confident that they do not want their children to move to Spain. Under these circumstances, the children are deliberately left behind with no intention to ever bring them, and indeed they might more accurately be described as ‘‘staying in place.’’ Listening to the accounts of migrants who do not intend to bring their children to Spain shows the diversity among children whom migration scholarship defines as left behind. In the spring of 2011 I met César, a quiet and kind man who grew up in Lima with his three sisters and his parents, themselves internal migrants to Lima. César had migrated to Madrid five years earlier, while his daughter, Zoraida, remained in Peru (see Leinaweaver, forthcoming). Zoraida, now six years old, lives with her mother, from whom César is separated. César speaks to his daughter weekly from an Internet café and visits annually. He praised Zoraida’s intelligence and acknowledged that much of her character is due to her mother: ‘‘Her mom is bringing her along the right path so that she’s obedient, does her chores, her things. Of course, it really has nothing to do with me because I’m far away and the little time that I do speak with her is not the same as being there in person.’’ He acknowledged the attenuation of his own parental ties to his daughter, something that may be easier to accept for migrant fathers than for migrant mothers, but argued that it was the right decision for Zoraida. This was because for César, raising a child in Spain is almost a form of cruelty. As he explained, Here the kids don’t have the freedoms that we do in our country, to go outside, to hang out at their cousins’ house. They don’t do that here. To have children here means they are closed up in the apart54

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ment all day, as if they’re in jail. Or you take them to daycare with the other kids and they learn bad habits. Spanish kids are already cussing when they’re five or six years old, which isn’t right. Here you would be giving them another upbringing [educación], one that’s not—we Peruvians aren’t like that. When she’s older, maybe, but while she is still in school I don’t think this is the place for her. I heard criticisms of Spanish children from many other migrants. Peruvian women who drew on their experiences as caregivers told me that Spanish children are spoiled; don’t respect their elders, using the informal tú form of address; and are ungrateful to parents who provide them with so much. César and his fellow migrants made it very clear that a young Peruvian growing up in Spain would be exposed to the negative influences of his or her Spanish peers, with decidedly unwelcome consequences. César was not blind to the benefits Spain might o√er nor to the possibility that Zoraida might disagree with his evaluation. He added, ‘‘When she’s an adult she can decide if she stays or goes. That’s di√erent, we’re talking about an adult then, but while she is still a girl, while I’m responsible for her [a mi cargo], I can’t allow her to stay here.’’ To give her that freedom to decide as an adult if she wishes to live in Spain, César listed Zoraida as a minor under his authority when he made his application for Spanish citizenship, which is still o≈cially pending as of 2012: ‘‘For me citizenship is important because it opens many doors for me and for my daughter. I can give my daughter the opportunity to come and stay here if she wants.’’∞∞ César’s case shows how he has weighed the options and concluded that he can give Zoraida the benefits of Spain—primarily citizenship, should she choose to use it as an adult—without the drawbacks of a negative influence on an impressionable youth. He accepts that the personal costs to his relationship with his daughter are high, but he holds fast to the idea that through telephone conversations and annual visits he retains a place in her life despite their physical distance (see Leifsen and Tymczuk 2012). Although Zoraida isn’t in Spain, Spain can still represent opportunity for her, and César takes comfort in the fact that for now she is safely in Peru and being brought up correctly. Scholars of transnational parenthood have worked to humanize decisions like César’s separation from his child. For example, Joanna Dreby has argued that Mexican migrant parents living in the United States ‘‘have made a remarkable but common parenting decision: they have chosen to The Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child

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move to places in the United States where they can earn more money for their labor while their children have remained behind in Mexico, where the cost of living is low. . . . Their migration and hard work represent a sacrifice of everyday comforts for the sake of their children and their children’s future’’ (2010, 2; see also Yarris 2011). Under certain circumstances parents can come to the reasonable conclusion that it can be best for their child not to reside with them. Adoptive parents may be more ready than most to respect and try to understand this choice, because part of the narrative some of them must tell their children is that somewhere, birth mothers were thinking of their best interests and placed them for adoption out of kindness, not heartlessness. César’s criticisms of children’s experience in Spain—that they are harmfully enclosed and exposed to bad influences—are ones that adoptive parents simply cannot consider. They are, though, criticisms that migrants who do bring their children weigh seriously. But most of the women migrants I spoke to were eager to bring their children more permanently. I have no doubt that there is a gender di√erence here: as Rhacel Parreñas has shown for the Philippines, children of migrant mothers feel abandoned because mothering is thought to be performed through presence, while those of migrant fathers do not have that sense, because fathers can perform fathering through financial support, that is, sending remittances (2005, 127; see also Cienfuegos 2010; Coe 2008; Dreby and Adkins 2012, 171; Pedone 2006, 213). This gender di√erence does not, however, mean these choices are obvious, easily taken, or transparent. César was able to make the decision he did because Zoraida is being well cared for by her mother, but his articulations of why he did so are worth considering. It is equally important to hear from the migrant mothers of those children who truly were left behind, in the sense that the mothers want to bring their children to Spain as soon as possible. To do so they must follow specific procedural steps glossed in migration law as ‘‘family reunification.’’ Family Reunification and European Kinship

Until the economic crisis that began in 2008, temporary, renewable work visas were the main way that Peruvian migrants came to Spain.∞≤ To obtain a work visa, a Spanish company or individual first must formally o√er the prospective migrant a contract to perform a specific job. Migrants coming to Spain on work visas are not eligible to bring family members. The ideology behind this is that you cannot bring a child right away because you are 56

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in Spain to work, not to settle and raise a family. Only when the migrant has obtained permanent residency in Spain, based on residing and working there for a specific period of time, may he or she begin the reunification process and bring family members to live in Spain. For those faraway kin, the family-reunification visa is a privileged form of entry into ‘‘Fortress Europe’’ (Rytter 2010, 301). As legal scholars of immigration (e.g., Bosniak 1991) and adoption (e.g., Yngvesson 2010) have argued, the law is a crucially important mode of kinship production. The family-reunification process is a legal-cultural text that reveals key formalized features of Spanish attitudes toward migrant families and children. Yet as Bledsoe and Sow point out, migration policies like Spain’s are extraordinarily contradictory and may convey opposed messages (2011b; see also Somerville 2005, 661–62). Bledsoe and Sow note that such ambivalent policies and practices toward the families of migrants are the result of two opposed tendencies within Europe: an exclusionary pressure toward more-rigid immigration practices, for example by limiting the kinds of family members a migrant is authorized to bring, and a humanitarian pressure to treat people with compassion, for example by allowing separated families to reunite (2011b, 175).∞≥ The assumptions contained within this family-reunification process, contradictory as they are, are worth briefly examining.∞∂ First, the term that I am translating as ‘‘reunification’’—reagrupar in Spanish—literally implies the joining together of things that were previously joined.∞∑ There is an ethical stance behind this term: that something that was once united and was later rent asunder should, if possible, be made whole again. When European migration policy applies this term to families separated by migration, it clearly transmits the position that family members should physically reside together. (When migration scholars use the negative phrase ‘‘children left behind’’ to describe all children who do not reside with their migrant parents, they also communicate similar expectations.) Consequently, migrants like César who choose not to bring children to Spain are doing so in the face of a strong and implicit message that parents and children belong together. Second, the combination of ideologies about family with migration policy demonstrates that for European nations, kinship is a valid reason to permit migration. This is the humanitarian tendency that Bledsoe and Sow describe: allowing family members to reunite aligns with an ethical stance. But to make full sense of this we need to closely examine what kind of kinship is valid. A certain model of approved kinship is implicit within The Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child

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European immigration policy, revealed by the precise norms governing kinship relations that must be met or adhered to for family-based immigration. Here is where the pressure to limit migration, identified by Bledsoe and Sow, is most clearly expressed. Under Spanish immigration law, family reunification is treated as a right: ‘‘foreign residents have a right to a family life.’’∞∏ However, only certain kinds of family life are included in this right: migrants are only entitled to the presence of certain relatives. These reagrupables (regroupable or reunifiable family members) are defined in Article 17 of the Ley de Extranjería (Law of Foreigners). The first eligible category is spouses. Not all spouses are eligible, however: excluded are those separated from, polygamously married to, or fraudulently married to the Spanish resident.∞π A further point of interest is that, legally, reunified family members may not work for a defined period. This wrinkle clearly identifies them as solely occupying the role of family member, not laborer. The second eligible category is made up of children and legal dependents. Once again, not all dependents are eligible: the dependent must be under eighteen or disabled, unmarried, and under the sole authority of the Spanish resident in case of a custody dispute.∞∫ The final eligible category is parents. Here too, not all parents are eligible: they must be over sixty-five and document ‘‘reasons that justify the need to authorize their residence in Spain.’’∞Ω A particular model of the nuclear family—more accurately depicted as the lineal and consanguineal family—is prioritized in this legislation. Through this policy, Peruvians and other migrants learn that Spain’s ideal migrant family includes spouses and minor children, with the occasional elderly parent who manages to successfully demonstrate the need to reside in Spain. The model excludes adult siblings (for my exploration of the consequences of this exclusion, see Leinaweaver 2011; see also Herrera 2010; Leifsen and Tymczuk 2012). Along with delineating who counts as legitimate family for the purposes of reunification migration, Spanish policy also spells out what family sponsors are expected to do for their prospective migrant relative. Anita, a young Peruvian migrant woman, explained to me that if you wish to bring a family member to Spain, the government requires proof that you are financially able to support him or her. Anita added that government employees even come to your house to make sure a spare room is available. This sounded so much like adoption home studies that I almost doubted it could be true. But indeed, when I began to pore over the new immigration regulations of 2011, I discovered that they spelled out pre58

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cisely Anita’s observation.≤≠ First, the application must include proof that the immigrant requesting reunification has employment income or other su≈cient economic resources to meet the needs of reunified family members. Second, migrants must also include ‘‘proof of an adequate home to meet the needs of the petitioner and the reunified family member(s).’’ A local government representative must document the resident’s right to occupy the home (a title or a rental contract), the number of rooms, what each room is used for, how many people reside there, and the home’s conditions of ‘‘habitability’’ and its furnishings.≤∞ The attorney Sonia Castillo, a Peruvian migrant herself, remarked to me that the regulations require just one ‘‘family unit’’ per household for the purposes of family reunification. She criticized the policy as ethnocentric and discriminatory against struggling migrants, arguing, ‘‘two families can live in a house.’’≤≤ These regulations resembled, to me, nothing so much as the requirements for adoption. In adoption, too, one must demonstrate economic solvency, so there is a financial component to family support. And in adoption one’s household is closely inspected to ensure that there is a separate room for the child. It was striking to compare the requirements for adoptive and family-reunification migration and see that both an ideal family and an ideal home are encoded within them. But perhaps the similarity is not surprising, given that the legal framework of family reunification is also the one used to bring adopted children into Spain (Berástegui 2006, 55). The family-reunification process is a key piece of evidence that international adoption and other forms of migration resemble one another. It is a legal framework that shapes and constrains the experiences of migrant families, including those formed through international adoption. The process constrains the form of those families, insisting that they conform to a particular nucleated model housed within a certain kind of middle-class lodging. It also conveys the idea that families should be together—a message that is more than amenable to adoptive parents who have overcome many obstacles to do so, but one that migrant parents treat with more circumspection. It is worth noting that nowhere in adoptive parents’ narratives about adoption do the legal intricacies involved in obtaining a child’s visa appear. In Spanish adoptive parents’ stories about time spent in Peru that are posted in the online forum, the focus is entirely on meeting the child, spending time with him or her, and secondarily on enjoying Peru and the experience of being there. There is very little discussion of the immigration process, the trip to the consulate, the acquisition of the passport, and The Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child

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so on. I saw this in interviews as well, such as one with Graciela where she remembered what it was like to go to the Spanish embassy and get her daughter’s passport, lingering on her daughter’s actions and what they portended rather than the bureaucratic side of things: ‘‘She walked in like she was entering a wondrous place, in slow motion, step by step. I’ll never forget it, because she wanted to come to Spain.’’ This emphasis is not at all surprising, but it does mean that a potential opportunity for adoptive parents to consider how their children may be similar to other migrant children is lost. On the other hand, the migrant parents I interviewed in Madrid didn’t spend much time talking about the paperwork involved in bringing their children either. They instead emphasized the reasons why they ultimately went through all of these steps and brought their children to live in Spain. Child Migrants

The director of Madrid’s Fulbright o≈ce told me that several of my fellow grantees, those with English-teaching fellowships, had been placed at public schools with large numbers of immigrants and might be able to put me in touch with Peruvian youths. It was through the kind reply of one of these teachers that I met Iris and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Ashley, who came to my rented apartment one afternoon in 2011 for an interview. Iris, who grew up in Lima, had the modest, sweet bearing of a woman raised by rural Peruvian migrants. Ashley was slim and pretty, and was wearing a summery ensemble all in bright white—jeans and spaghetti straps. She wore big gold hoops in her ears, which she later twirled idly as she observed that kids in Spain get their ears pierced at a terribly young age, even little boys. Iris told me that she had come to Spain legally, with a work contract in hand, to serve as a domestic worker. Her sister had emigrated first, and used her contacts to get this contract for Iris. When Iris migrated she left Ashley, then eight years old, in Peru with her father. She planned to return to Peru after a short stay in Spain, justifying her willingness to leave Ashley because she was able to frame it as temporary. During their separation, Iris and Ashley spoke regularly, if haltingly, in that way children of a certain age will do with their parents. In Iris’s recollection, the conversations proceeded along the lines of ‘‘ ‘Ashley, are you doing okay?’ ‘Yes, um, yes.’ That was it! She was very shy and quiet.’’ Up to this point Iris’s story resembles César’s—migrating to Spain to work and leaving a daughter in 60

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Peru with the other parent, and regular telephone calls to nourish the relationship. But in Ashley’s recollection, ‘‘[my father] didn’t look after me very well [andaba muy descuidada]. So my mom sent me to my godmother’s, and then I lived with a cousin, and then I came here’’ (for the use of these intrafamilial ‘‘child circulations’’ to facilitate migration, see Leinaweaver 2010). Ashley’s multiple relocations hint at the challenges and perhaps the anxiety that Iris faced as she mobilized di√erent relatives from afar to responsibly care for Ashley. After almost two years Iris returned to Peru to make the arrangements to bring Ashley to Spain. She had been critical of the way Ashley’s father was managing the money she sent—a complaint that must have stood in for other unhappiness as well, because she went on to evict him from her house in Peru. Iris told me why she decided to bring Ashley to join her: ‘‘I couldn’t divide myself between two places [repartirme en dos lados].’’ Ashley, for her part, wasn’t eager to come to Spain. She had grown so attached to her father that she missed her flight because she was crying and clinging to him at the airport. But by the time I met Ashley she had no interest in moving back to Peru: ‘‘I think it’s easier to be here than there.’’ In contrast to César’s plans for Zoraida, Iris thought that Spain was a good place—the right place—for Ashley to be in school. She told me that, although she had initially planned to return to Peru after a short stint in Spain, ‘‘Right now I stay for Ashley because she’s in school, and all I want now is for her to finish her studies and know how to do things for herself, and then I can rest’’ (compare Pedone 2006, 195, for Ecuadorian migrants; and Parreñas 2005, 7, for Philippine migrants). The importance of education among the Peruvian working and middle classes has been well documented (see, for example, de la Cadena 1998; Degregori 1997; García 2005). But it is not simply a question of putting a child in good schools. As Clara told me, it takes a parent’s single-mindedness to keep a child focused on school, so if the parent who will do that is in Spain, then that is where the child should be. Iris echoed this, noting, ‘‘Sometimes children need their parents to be there—pestering them. Later they’ll say ‘thank you.’ ’’ She explained with a giggle that since Ashley is with her, ‘‘she has to study. She can’t escape! She can’t get away!’’ Iris acknowledged that she worked long hours, perhaps aware of the widely circulating criticisms of migrant parents, but insisted, ‘‘I like to try to do it all, and even though I work I am always attentive to her. I come home after a long day of work and I sit down and say ‘Let me see your schoolwork, Ashley, what have you done, what haven’t you done.’ ’’ It was important for Iris to be physically conThe Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child

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tiguous to Ashley so that she could implement the learning and education that she wanted to share. The Spanish word for ‘‘education’’ (educación) refers not only to formal education but to upbringing: the instilling of manners and respect in young people. This too was central to Iris’s assessment of the situation. Like César, Clara, and others, she complained that in Spain, young people disrespect adults. For example, youths use the informal second person (tú) instead of the formal and respectful second person (usted), ‘‘as if they were equals.’’ When Ashley began to use the informal tense in everyday conversation, Iris shut her down: ‘‘Don’t talk to me like that, I can’t understand a word.’’ Ashley also told me that her teacher asks his students to call him by his first name, because he says being called ‘‘Mister’’ ‘‘makes him feel old.’’ But her mother insisted, ‘‘You will say ‘Mr. Marcos,’ . . . otherwise I won’t understand you. ‘Marcos’ could be your friend. . . . Sorry, Ashley, but you’re going to say ‘usted’ to your elders, with respect. Even if the teacher tells you to call him ‘tú’ or by his name, you tell him, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t because it’s not my custom,’ and they will get accustomed to you.’’ . . . The teachers tell me ‘‘She’s a very polite girl, she always says ‘usted’ ’’—but I tell her she shouldn’t lose that way of speaking. Iris fully acknowledged the interpersonal risks of bringing her daughter to Spain but asserted that with strict childrearing and careful attention she would be able to shield her daughter. Iris went on, connecting Ashley’s potential linguistic transformation to other manifestations of a lack of respect: And here it is hard because they want to imitate the youths here, talking back to their parents, going to parties, going out without asking permission, making plans without consulting. No. She has to consult with me first. She can’t go out with someone without me knowing, because she’s not in charge, she’s a minor, who has her mother here. I’m not sure that I’m doing this right, but it’s what I think is right. And thank God, while I’ve been here I’ve tried to do things as I did in Peru. And sometimes she says, ‘‘but her mom lets her,’’ and I say, ‘‘that’s her mom; I’m not her mom, I’m your mom, my customs and my ways are di√erent.’’ I’m not going to change because I am here in Spain; I think that the upbringing and education that I bring from there is better than what’s here. 62

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Iris made a two-pronged argument here: first that Ashley ‘‘has her mother here’’ and is under her mother’s watchful eye, and second that reproducing Iris’s Peruvian model of parenting, rather than adapting to Spanish practices, was necessary for her daughter’s proper upbringing. The deliberately Peruvian-style upbringing that Ashley was receiving was reinforced by her own associations. As she told me, her friends are mostly Ecuadorians and Colombians. Ashley said bluntly, ‘‘I get along better with Latinos.’’ And, like her mother, she began with an explanation that combined language use and a cultural attitude of respect. Her a≈nity with other young Latinos and Latinas had to do with, she said, ‘‘the way we are—the way we are raised. Ecuadorians are also respectful; they call people ‘usted.’ And they use the same words: like here they call goma [eraser] borrador, not goma. Things like that. If I ask a Spanish person for the goma they don’t understand me, so I feel more comfortable with Ecuadorians.’’ For Ashley, a way of speaking Spanish and—in stark contrast to the rude youths who harassed her—a cordial and even respectful attitude were important things that made her similar to other Latin Americans in Spain, a similarity that grounded their a≈nity or likeliness to get along. Being surrounded with others who were like her in important ways seemed to further strengthen the values her mother was trying to instill every night over the pages of Ashley’s homework assignments. Iris, like César, weighed the risks and benefits of bringing her daughter to Spain. Undoubtedly, part of what led her to ‘‘reunify’’ Ashley was that Iris’s circumstances were di√erent, and leaving Ashley to be raised in Peru was less tenable. But Iris also considered how a Spanish education and professional training would give Ashley innumerable advantages as she grew up. Iris recognized the many risks of bringing a child, especially a daughter, to Spain. Indeed, Iris posited that Ashley sees her own friends ‘‘being held back a year in school, dyeing their hair, going to parties, going out with boys.’’ She mentioned this as she described her own strict parenting style, suggesting that being demanding and interceding where necessary have allowed her to mitigate the negative influences in the Spanish environment. the term ‘‘1.5-generation immigrant’’ was popularized in the 1990s by North American sociologists studying migration as a way to describe those who migrated as children—not the so-called true second generation who are born to migrants in a new country, but those who nonetheless ‘‘straddle the old and the new worlds but are fully part of neither’’ (Zhou The Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child

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1997, 65). The term is useful in migration literature to emphasize the similarities between child migrants and children who are born in a receiving country to migrant parents. The implicit comparison and equation between these two sorts of children highlights their malleability, the way that the children can adjust to the receiving country and it to them. Linked to psychological concepts of developmental stages and the ostensible blank-slate quality of childhood, the term hints at something similar to what adoptive parents are getting at when they undergo lengthy waits for the ideal, because young, migrant. I have o√ered a di√erent sort of comparison here. Rather than comparing children who migrate at a young age with children who are born to migrants in the receiving country, I place parents who cause the migration of their children through reunification side by side with those who arrange for their children to remain in Peru. Doing so reveals several interesting similarities. Obviously the di√erences are important ones—it is not for nothing that César makes the wrenching choice to leave Zoraida in Peru, loyally visiting her every year, nor is it a casual decision for Iris to have invested the time and money in bringing Ashley to join her in Spain. But what Zoraida and Ashley have in common is not their malleability but rather what they can teach us about migrant parents’ evaluations of Spain as ‘‘the kind of place to raise a child,’’ in the words of the marriage migrant Cindy. Although they resolved their worries in opposed ways, Iris and César share a concern for what the Spanish environment can do to an impressionable child, and perhaps particularly a daughter. In César’s interpretation, children are closed up indoors or exposed to bad habits in day care. In Iris’s thinking, teens can fall behind in school, go to parties, maybe even get pregnant. Yet the two parents also appreciate certain benefits that Spain can o√er their children. Iris thinks that Spanish public schools are superior. César thinks that the benefits of citizenship primarily redound upon adults like him, and he is working to create the possibility for Zoraida to come to Spain when she’s older. Both César and Iris emphasized the importance of formal education in school and more informal aspects of upbringing. They both felt that one of the most crucial questions is whether the child can be with a parent who can bring the child along the right path, as César put it when he described the parenting work that his daughter’s mother was performing in Peru. They want the best for their children, and they truly believe that even if it involves the fraught and sometimes painful situation of separation from a parent or a child’s abrupt displacement to a 64

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new country, being together with a parent who will bring the child along the right path is nonetheless worth the struggle. This underlying similarity between the two parents equates to a very pointed statement about what a parent must do with and for a child, particularly in an environment like Spain, where the risks to that child are—they would argue—immeasurably heightened.

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Mixed Marriages migrants and adoption

Most children born in the twenty-first century have the same citizenship that their parents do, the citizenship of the nation the children (and their parents before them) were born in. Another way of saying this is that at the birth and formal registration of a new child, kinship and nation are typically aligned. So, according to the unmarked norms of parenthood and citizenship, a child born in Peru to a Peruvian parent will be Peruvian; a child born in Spain to a Spanish parent will be Spanish. But when children are born to immigrants in a receiving country, most nations use a combination of ius soli (ascribing citizenship based on one’s birthplace) and ius sanguinis (ascribing citizenship based on the citizenship of one’s parents) to confer citizenship on those children (Castles and Davidson 2000, 91). At such moments the alignment between kinship and nation begins to blur. I raise this point because it reminds us that Spanish and Peruvian ideologies of family and belonging are grounded in more than just upbringing. The migrant parents in chapter 2 emphasized ideas of nurture over nature, arguing for the importance of a parent’s close influence and dedicated attention. The adoptive parents quoted in chapter 1 made remarkably related points, identifying their patience during long waits as a piece of this dedicated attention, and suggesting that it was young children who had the most potential to be positively shaped by the close influence of the parent. These arguments suggest the importance of how one raises one’s children. In this chapter, I begin to trace the ideologies of birth, substance, and nation that pair with and sometimes contradict ideas

about parenting practices. These ideologies were surprisingly persistent, in the legal sphere but also in the sensibilities of adoptive parents and migrant parents, both of whom have compelling reasons to argue for the significance of context and upbringing as central to shaping a child’s identity. To make sense of the relationship between birth, substance, and nation, I develop a notion of ‘‘national substance,’’ following the anthropologist Janet Carsten’s groundbreaking study of kinship ideologies on Langkawi Island in Malaysia. For people on Langkawi, children are initially formed by the substances flowing from the gestating mother to the child in utero, then further shaped by consuming breast milk and rice meals, neither of which are necessarily or specifically provided by the birth mother (Carsten 1997, 248). This Langkawi ideology of shared substance is also deployed to facilitate the incorporation of migrants who consume rice meals along with other community members (14–16, 127–28). The multiple substances that children, parents, and others can share give rise to a collective sense that children resemble members of the community in embodied ways. In Spain there is a similar sense, but the substance takes a more ephemeral form than rice meals: it seems to adhere around ideas of national identity, origins, and citizenship. I encountered an emphasis, although far from a universal one, on children’s Peruvianness—something that they share with migrant parents, and that distinguishes them from adoptive parents. That national label serves as a gloss for a broader ensemble of important identity markers: kinship, religion, ethnicity, culture, and belonging. It is this broad ensemble, when glossed as Peruvianness, that I identify as national substance. I first began to think about this complex in terms of national substance as I examined a rather esoteric thing: the special privileges that exist for couples in ‘‘mixed marriages,’’ termed pareja mixtas, in international adoptions from Peru to Spain. In mixed marriages, one partner is a Peruvian migrant and the other is a native Spaniard. Adoptions to such couples are relatively rare, but the way they are spoken about is quite telling.∞ On one hand, adoptions of Peruvians by mixed marriages residing abroad are treated as international because of the couple’s place of residence.≤ On the other hand, Peruvian adoption policy favors mixed marriages over all other international adopters, suggesting that the Peruvian spouse dilutes the otherwise unmitigated foreignness of the couple’s place of residence.≥ The uneven treatment of mixed marriages within adoption policy raises questions about the commonly accepted division of adoption into ‘‘domesMixed Marriages

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tic’’ and ‘‘international.’’ Breaking down the neat domestic-international division shows how national substance is both persistent and significant. Adoptions by mixed marriages are not fully international, something signaled by the unique privileges that accrue to them and the hopes that are invested in them. Mixed marriages are privileged in the key areas addressed by adoptive families in chapter 1: they are likely to wait far less time than other couples abroad would for a young, nondisabled infant. Other exceptions are made for them as well. They are exempt from the limit on the number of applicants waiting to adopt from Peru.∂ They may choose to adopt directly from Peru rather than via the adoption agencies that some countries require to mediate.∑ And those residing in countries that have not signed a requisite formal adoption agreement with Peru may still adopt from Peru.∏ A child’s national identity is ostensibly erased or superseded through adoption when he or she becomes a citizen of his or her new parents’ country. But the privileging of mixed marriages as parents for such a child, by Peruvian and international socio-legal practice, suggests some underlying ideas about the persistence of national substance. Specifically, the privileging assumes that migrants bring and retain some intangible package of Peruvianness, and that this national substance translates into a better home for a child originally from Peru.π National origins serve in international adoption practices as a proxy for other less clear-cut identity markers such as race, ethnicity, language, and culture. I take my cue from adoption legislation, which pays special attention to mixed marriages and the specific benefits they are believed to o√er to children of Peruvian origin growing up in receiving countries like Spain. But I broaden my consideration of those marriages and what they imply for notions of national substance through a comparison of three di√erent cases of Peruvian migrant parents who were married to Spaniards. These were an exceedingly small subset of the parents I interviewed for this study, but they do have some demographic weight in Spain, where there are more mixed marriages than in any other European nation (Roca 2011, 491; see also Sánchez-Domínguez, Valk, and Reher, 2011).∫ I distinguish between marriage migration and labor migration. Mixed marriages can arise from either form of migration, but the di√erence is significant because it likely also indexes a class di√erence. Marriage migrants come to Spain through the family-reunification migration process, so they come to be with someone who had the economic resources to bring them. Upon migration, marriage migrants may be partially incorpo68

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rated into their spouses’ social networks, meeting more Spaniards through the course of daily interactions than many labor migrants do. This is not to say that they do not face discrimination. As Ji-Yeon Yuh has argued in a detailed historical study of Korean military brides in the United States, foreign wives may be subjected to particularly intimate forms of racialized oppression precisely in the intimate spaces of in-laws’ homes (2004). Labor migrants, for their part, are more likely to meet and marry the working-class Spaniards they encounter at work or through socializing with other migrants. Here too, the Spanish in-laws may be resistant to incorporating a foreign wife, but the discrimination can take di√erent forms. My interest in mixed marriages is less in the experience of the men and women who take part in them, though, than it is in the consequences and expectations for their children. Adoptive Refusal: Migrant Marriages and Peruvian-Born Children

It occurred to me that if Peruvian labor-migrant couples engaged in adoptions of Peruvian-origin children, it would be another ‘‘data point’’ that I could use to think through the intersections of adoption and migration, the di√ering weights that migrants and adoption agencies give to issues of nationality versus issues of residence, and the attitudes of migrants toward adoption. But perhaps not surprisingly, hardly any of the labor migrants I spoke to had anything to say about adoption. The adoption of strangers is far from the minds of most working-class Peruvians I know. Migrant Peruvians would be more likely to—if anything—informally foster, formally adopt, or sponsor in migration a young person who was already related to them. The closest I got to the tantalizing possibility of linking labor migrants and adoption in this way—and as will become clear, it wasn’t very close—was the ‘‘adoptive refusal’’ that my friend Sileny made in passing. Sileny is a labor migrant in her early forties who came to Madrid ‘‘to make money’’ with the assistance of a distant cousin who secured a work contract for her, for a price. When I first met her she was waiting tables at Los Andes, a small Peruvian restaurant in central Madrid. She didn’t serve the elegant fusion cuisine I would later encounter at the Peruvian culinary superstar Gastón Acurio’s international restaurants, however. Los Andes was run by working-class migrants from Ayacucho and served eight-euro, fixed-price lunches to Peruvians in the neighborhood. I wandered into Los Andes precisely one week after beginning fieldwork, in the summer of Mixed Marriages

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2009. It was around one in the afternoon, which I would eventually figure out was a bit too early for lunch in Madrid. This meant that Sileny was sitting by herself at the bar, behind which were typical Spanish bar staples (a beer tap and a bowl of olives), along with the expected array of Peruvian products: Cuzqueña and Cristal beer, two-liter plastic bottles of Inca Kola and chicha morada, a soft drink made from purple corn. I asked Sileny about the lunch o√erings and about the restaurant itself, and even before she brought me my first course she had persuaded me to describe my research study and immediately o√ered to introduce me to all the Peruvians who came to eat at the restaurant. By the end of my meal, she had covered all the high points of her life story, peppered with hilarious and expansive asides about the trials and tribulations of migrant life in Madrid. That first day we met, Sileny told me about her three children, who reside with her mother and sisters in Peru. At first, she said, her children told her to ‘‘just go already.’’ They wanted a computer, she said wryly. So, with their permission, she left for Spain, and the first thing she did with her wages was buy them a computer. As the years passed she continued to buy them what they asked for, and to send hundreds of euros every month to pay for their private schooling and the expenses of raising them. But now, she said, they say they don’t want anything else, and they only want her to come back. She said she misses them so much that she can’t stand to sign in to her video chat, so she talks to them on the phone instead. She also told me about her boyfriend, Alonso, a working-class Spanish bartender she met on the job, who wanted to marry her. She wasn’t convinced. One mark against Alonso was that his prickly mother was often rude to her, resentful that Sileny, an Afro-Peruvian migrant waitress, can read and write better than Alonso’s siblings. Sileny would later draw upon these literacy skills to save the money that a lawyer would cost, pushing ahead with a do-it-yourself version of family-reunification migration to bring her children to join her. On a more recent visit to Madrid, I was surprised to find that Sileny and Alonso were engaged to be married. She told me that she was ultimately able to tolerate his mother’s rudeness by ‘‘looking at a picture of [her] children.’’ As we sat down to eat at a Peruvian restaurant we hadn’t tried before, she launched into her story, which she interrupted a few minutes later to admonish me, ‘‘You should be taking notes!’’ She had brought to our lunch a large leather binder filled with precious legal and work-related documents, each in its own plastic page protector, which she used to illustrate her story (see fig. 3.1). So, as she recounted that on her last vacation 70

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figure 3.1. Sileny’s file folder with all her naturalization documents, including a map to the migration o≈ce. Photo by author, 2011.

to Peru she obtained legal custody of her children, an achievement that also represented their father’s acceptance that she would ultimately bring the children to Spain, she showed me the material document, tugging it out of its thin plastic sleeve for a closer read. ‘‘Under the law of child protection Sileny Santa Cruz has sole custody of her three children,’’ I read aloud. To Sileny I said that this was a really big deal, and she said Alonso had referred to it as winning the jackpot. By this point Sileny had quit her job at Los Andes and started ‘‘working under the table,’’ caring for senior citizens, while formally drawing unemployment payments. With this document, and the birth certificate of each child, she was able to apply for the ‘‘head of household’’ supplement to her unemployment payment, an additional 426 euros per month. I was surprised she could receive the supplement for her children, given that they are not physically in Spain but rather live with her mother, in Lima. But Sileny explained to me that she has sole responsibility for them: ‘‘without me they would be lost.’’ She took advantage of Spanish regulations that acknowledged her as the primary caregiver even of children that were an ocean away.Ω As Sileny showed me a photograph of her burnished-gold lace wedding Mixed Marriages

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dress on her cell phone, she reiterated that everything she was doing, she was doing for her children. She felt that her future in-laws were convinced she was marrying Alonso in order to get her hands on his mother’s house, but as she said to me, ‘‘I didn’t come to Spain for a house or for food. I could have had that in Peru. I came so that my daughters could become professionals. It’s a window onto modernity, a window to the world. I don’t want them to live in Peru under our regime of ignorance. In Spain there are more opportunities, more things they can achieve. Peru is a beggar sitting on a golden bench. . . . I think it was Arguedas who said that.’’∞≠ The implication was that marriage to Alonso was not about his mother’s house —if anything, it was about the way he could help her to bring her daughters to Spain. After getting to know Sileny I decided to track down her family in Peru on a recent visit there, calling the number Sileny had given me and hiring a taxi to take me into the southern cone of Lima. Her sisters received me with great suspicion—Sileny later explained that her former partner had once attempted to kidnap their children, so her sisters are right to protect the children zealously. After a few minutes’ conversation standing outside on the corner, they must have judged me to pose no threat, as they relented and brought me to the bar that occupied the ground floor of Sileny’s mother’s home. One opened soft drinks and bags of chips and the other commanded Sileny’s children, three polite and bright-eyed youths, to come out and greet me. As the kids disappeared back into the depths of the large and imposing cement-block house, Sileny’s sisters explained to me that in Peru, you want your children to be better o√ than you are: the child of working-class parents should enter the middle class. They told me Sileny was going to bring her children to Spain to be educated—that way, they would later be able to return to Peru if they want to and succeed with a Spanish education, whereas being educated in Peru and then looking for work in Spain would not be nearly as profitable. Left unstated was something her sisters would only say directly to Sileny: the burden of caring for her children is growing heavy on all of them. As may already be clear from her remarks about her mother-in-law, Sileny had displayed considerable ambivalence about her marriage. Marriage to a Spanish citizen would mean that Sileny would immediately become an eu resident, and could apply for Spanish citizenship. With her new status she would be able to apply to bring her children from Peru at last via family-reunification migration, something she said she would do the day after her wedding. But she also told me that she thought her status 72

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was somehow contingent and would expire in a few years if she were to divorce Alonso. So she was contemplating making a second and separate application for citizenship based on years of legal residency. (From its plastic protector she pulled a spare application and o√ered it to me for my records.) But marry him she did: in the summer of 2011 I attended Sileny’s and Alonso’s wedding in city hall. Afterward Sileny took me aside and told me quietly, ‘‘Now that I have you alone, I want you to know that I have done it. It was a hard road, no one liked me—they still don’t. You saw me, I did this by myself, without my parents or my siblings here, I was alone and I did it for my children. On Monday I will go file the papers to bring my children from Peru. You can write up to this point. Later, with any luck, I can visit you in the United States and tell you the rest.’’ The luck has not yet arrived. Spanish bureaucracy moves slowly, and its pace is surely not hastened by Sileny’s do-it-yourself approach. When I spoke with Sileny after she returned from her honeymoon in 2011, she told me that her appointment to bring in the paperwork for her children’s reunification was scheduled for seven months in the future because demand was so high. She said that was far too slow and applied for an emergency appointment. As of the summer of 2012, she was still waiting for her Spanish citizenship to come through. That year I visited the rentcontrolled apartment in south Madrid that she and Alonso moved into. While Alonso entertained my toddler by showing him how he appeared in Alonso and Sileny’s wedding video from the previous year, Sileny brought out her leather folder and extracted from it a tan sheet of paper listing a dozen items she needed to get family reunification for her children: a photocopy of her passport, a copy of the couple’s Libro de Familia, a notarized statement from Alonso, and more. Sileny’s framing of marriage as something she had done by herself indicates that she sees herself and her kin as meaningfully distinct from her husband. National substance is a piece of this, as is kinship and the forms of care attendant upon it. This, coupled with Sileny’s marital ambivalence, may explain her reply, a month or so before the wedding, to my question about whether Alonso would adopt her children when they get here. Upon marriage Alonso became the children’s stepfather, and in the United States, stepparent adoption is not unusual in cases where the noncustodial parent has signed over rights and responsibilities to a child, as Sileny’s ex-partner had done. In Peru stepparent adoption would not entail terminating the children’s ties to their birth father.∞∞ Things are somewhat more complicated in Spain, where stepparent adoption forMixed Marriages

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mally breaks ties with the noncustodial parent (Garriga 2004, 8). But the complexities of the law were not what preoccupied Sileny. When I asked whether Alonso would adopt her children, she said, ‘‘I don’t understand, do you mean in the legal sense, or the emotional sense?’’ I shrugged, and she explained, ‘‘Yes, he’s going to love them, he loves them, he buys them their things. But on their birth certificate they have a father. I don’t want them to have a new birth certificate. Good or bad, that is who their father is. I am not marrying him so they can have a father.’’∞≤ Sileny’s ‘‘adoptive refusal’’—her unwillingness to consider adoption— spoke to the unstated reasons why she did marry Alonso. If it was not so that her children could have a father, then perhaps it was so that they could have a mother, one who lives with them in Spain. But her refusal also speaks to what Peruvian adoption workers have identified as a general resistance among Peruvians to adopting. As Flora, the secretary in the Ayacucho branch of Peru’s adoption o≈ce, remarked to me years ago in Peru, ‘‘The customs here are very strong; if he’s not my child, he doesn’t deserve the same treatment as my child—it’s very clear’’ (Leinaweaver 2009, 54–55). Flora meant that Peruvian adoptive parents will not treat their adoptive children as the international ideology of adoption demands (i.e., that adoption creates a relationship equivalent to that created by birth). Peruvian adoptive parents may resist the idea of adoption as articulated in the international discourse. Finally, Sileny’s refusal also underscores an ideology that documents should reflect reality: the father on Sileny’s children’s birth certificates is their father, and whatever else Alonso will be to them, he can never be their father, as that role is already taken. The Peruvian expression ‘‘madre sólo hay una’’ (you’ve only got one mother) has purchase for fathers too. Sileny’s children will obtain Spanish citizenship, but they will continue to have an embodied tie to a man in Peru. In short, when Sileny entered into a mixed marriage, it had implications for her children’s citizenship, educational possibilities, and future residence, but not for their substance. ‘‘He’s Half-and-Half’’: Marriage Migrants and Spanish-Born Children

Things look somewhat di√erent when children are born in the context of a mixed marriage. To illustrate this, I return again to the group interview where I sat with the Spanish adoptive mother Graciela, her daughter, and three Peruvian migrants, Cindy, Clara, and Soledad. As our conversation 74

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progressed, Cindy’s narrative moved quickly over the way she came to Spain. She said simply, ‘‘I got married. I came to Spain for a three-week vacation, met my husband, and that was it. We met and we got married six months later.’’ In between the couple communicated via video chat, and ultimately, around 2003, he came to Peru and married her, and Cindy moved with him to a small city outside of Madrid, where she has had trouble finding work. So, as she put it, ‘‘When they talk about immigrants, I just don’t think of myself as an immigrant because I didn’t come here to seek a better future, I had my future there already. . . . I left everything to come be with him, out of love.’’ Her words echoed Sileny’s remarks about not having come to Spain in search of things she already had, but for a higher purpose—in Sileny’s case, to set her children on a path to achievement, and in Cindy’s case, ‘‘out of love.’’ So Cindy, unlike Sileny, is a marriage migrant: she married Felipe, who brought her to Spain through family reunification. They had a child the following year. The speed of their courtship might cause some to wonder about the authenticity of their love, in this era of transnational, Internetmediated, mail-order marriages. Scholarship on transnational marriages suggests that many women view them as opportunities for love and respect in a moment when they feel that their local marriage prospects are undesirable.∞≥ Other scholars have argued that transnational marriages are strategies to get ahead in a political-economic context where sex and a ‘‘performance of love’’ are women’s primary routes to migration (Brennan 2004, 21).∞∂ Cindy’s story does not fall tidily into either column, as she reports that she had her ‘‘future there [in Peru] already.’’ My focus here is not on her marital provenance, however, but rather on the consequences of mixed marriage for the couple’s son. Javier, six at the time of our group interview, was born in Spain, and Cindy returned to this point when she described him as Spanish. Yet, to Javier, she reported regularly saying, ‘‘You’re half-and-half [mitad–mitad].’’ Cindy explained that she hasn’t yet registered her son at the Peruvian consulate, ‘‘but he is half-and-half, but yes, he is Spanish. . . . He’s from here, of course—one day I’d like him to have dual citizenship, for him to be Peruvian and Spanish, although he was born here and is Spanish, and he says ‘I’m from Spain’—yes, yes, but he’s half from there, too. Or maybe 20 percent, but he is.’’ Here Clara interjected, ‘‘If he knows the Peruvian national anthem, you can die happy!’’ I persisted: ‘‘It’s very interesting that he says he is Spanish.’’ Cindy reiterated, ‘‘It’s that he is Spanish, his father is Spanish, his family on his father’s side is Spanish, but he says, ‘My Mixed Marriages

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mother, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles who are here are Peruvian,’ so he realizes, they’re Peruvian and Spanish. He’s six years old and completely clear about this.’’ Cindy’s statement that Javier is ‘‘half-and-half’’ may have a genealogical referent, and her remark that ‘‘yes, he is Spanish,’’ may refer to his nationality: his mixed identity is a result of the mixed marriage into which he was born. Javier’s story becomes also, inescapably, a story about his two parents and the two countries they are a≈liated with. As Cindy described Javier, it seemed as if she was also negotiating the mixedness of her marriage. Javier’s genealogical connection to both Cindy and Felipe—in contrast with the example of Sileny, where the children are connected genealogically to only one parent, a mother who wants to reunify her children— powerfully works to fuse their mixed marriage. A good deal of midcentury anthropological literature on kinship and descent has argued something similar: the birth of a child can complete or concretize a marriage in a way that the ceremony itself only gestures to (for instance, as in the example of the Nuer, described in Evans-Pritchard 1940). Another feature that Cindy could have mentioned, but didn’t, was Javier’s phenotype, that is, whether he ‘‘looked Peruvian’’ or not. I had described Cindy in my fieldnotes as ‘‘very white’’ and noted that her spoken Spanish ‘‘sounds like an uncomplicated middle- to upper-class Peruvian with a bit of Spain mixed in.’’ I mention her silence on this matter because her Peruvian friend sitting across the table, Clara, had also married a Spaniard and given birth to a half-and-half child. But Clara, like Sileny, came to Spain as a labor migrant. Clara was a beautiful brownskinned woman with Andean features, the unremarked-on background to her statement that her daughter, now eight, ‘‘has Peruvian blood, but doesn’t look like [Clara].’’ Her Spanish friend Graciela put it a bit more bluntly: ‘‘When they’re out in the park together, people think she’s an immigrant Latina looking after a little blond girl.’’ Finally, although admitting that, ‘‘yes, he is Spanish,’’ Cindy had also referred to one day registering Javier at the Peruvian consulate. The legislation behind this possibility reflects the further presence of national substance. Spain grants citizenship to those children who are born in Spain to immigrant parents, but only if the parents’ country does not automatically grant citizenship to children of its citizens born abroad.∞∑ So, the Spanish-born children of Peruvians automatically become Spanish citizens at birth precisely because Peru requires parents to register their children at the Peruvian consulate before those children can be treated as 76

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Peruvian.∞∏ (By contrast, Bolivia automatically grants citizenship to the foreign-born children of Bolivians, meaning that they are not entitled to Spanish citizenship, because they are Bolivian citizens when they are born.)∞π Children like Javier are eligible for Peruvian citizenship because of the national substance inherited from parents like Cindy, but Cindy must formally register Javier at the consulate in order for that second citizenship that she passed on to him to be triggered.∞∫ Javier can activate in this way the national substance he received from his mother, reminiscent too of the policy where César’s minor daughter, Zoraida, may obtain Spanish citizenship when César is granted it. Acquiring one’s citizenship through a relationship to a parent draws on a kinship ideology of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. National substance is articulated in intergenerational negotiations, and the implications of a previous generation’s actions determine what ‘‘percent’’ of a child born in Spain is Peruvian. Siobhan Somerville provocatively refers to birthright citizenship as ‘‘a nonconsensual means of granting citizenship, linked to feudal, hierarchical modes of allegiance[,] . . . [that] confers status upon a child based on factors that are not under her/his control, such as place of birth or biological parentage’’ (2005, 662). Certainly Javier’s Spanish citizenship is not a thing of his own doing. He is Spanish ‘‘by origin’’ because his father is Spanish.∞Ω But this legal fact—the acquisition of Spanish citizenship thanks to his father—was not the first thing Cindy emphasized when she called Javier Spanish. Rather, it was that he was born in Spain. Javier’s birthplace and mixed origins, I think, made it di≈cult for Cindy to articulate what she felt Javier was, in terms of nationality. In the interview excerpt I quoted, she variously called him ‘‘Spanish,’’ ‘‘half-and-half,’’ ‘‘from here,’’ ‘‘born here,’’ and ‘‘half from there, too, or maybe 20 percent,’’ and she hoped that one day he would ‘‘be Peruvian and Spanish,’’ suggesting finally that he is not—or not yet—both. National substance flows in complicated ways through a child like Javier, born in Spain to a Spanish father and a Peruvian ‘‘marriage migrant’’ mother, and this results in the potential for a complex identity. The complexities may be contingent on life phases: at six Javier isn’t preoccupied with his complexity, but in later years he might come to articulate his national substance in new ways.

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‘‘A Child to Share His Roots’’: Mixed Adoptions

In the two preceding examples, we see the complexity of parents’ thinking about how to place their children when the children are associated with parents’ mixed marriages. For Cindy, six-year-old Javier was composed of indeterminate parts Spanish and Peruvian, relating to his formal citizenship, potential citizenship, place of birth, and kin ties. For Sileny, her three children were Peruvian and would acquire Spanish nationality along with her, by virtue of her marriage to Alonso. They will live with Alonso and he will love them, but they will not acquire a form of kinship with him, limiting the quality and perhaps the duration of their ties to Spain. To further fill out this picture, I introduce a third and final case study: another mixed marriage made up of Spanish citizen and marriage migrant. After I posted a call for research participants to take part in the online adoption forum in 2011, I received only a few replies. One of those was Paulina, a Madrileña in her early thirties, but as she wrote, ‘‘I can’t help you with your study because I’m still on the waiting list,’’ and I was only looking for parents of Peruvian children. She graciously met with me anyway, though, and over sodas and chips in the Santa Ana plaza, she told me how she went to Peru at nineteen, working for an international company. While there she fell in love with Gustavo, and a few years later she married him and brought him to Spain. She showed me a photo of Gustavo on her cell phone. I thought that he didn’t look especially Andean, and indeed she told me that his great-grandfather was from Italy. She added that after ten years of living in Spain, Gustavo also doesn’t speak with a notably Peruvian accent. Paulina told me that all of Gustavo’s friends here are Spanish, and that on the rare occasions when he ventures out to a Peruvian event, he is mortified (he gets ‘‘verguenza ajena,’’ shame by proxy, she said) because Peruvians drink so much. She also said that they have made it clear to Gustavo’s family that he isn’t in Spain to bring his family members— Gustavo (like Cindy) migrated to get married, not in search of work. This position follows logically from the self-definition of a marriage migrant as opposed to a labor migrant—the latter is involved in a family project to get ahead, and often commences migration chains to bring many relatives, while the former is said to be here for one reason only.≤≠ Paulina and Gustavo wanted to have children, and after an unsuccessful course of fertility treatments, she began investigating adoption from Peru. She found out that adoption from Peru was free of charge, which appealed to her because of their modest means.≤∞ Paulina told Gustavo that they 78

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could have a child from Peru who would ‘‘share his roots [raices],’’ and he accepted her proposal. She threw herself into the project—obtaining the required documents on her own steam, as Gustavo’s hatred of paperwork is so strong that he has not yet taken the steps to become a Spanish citizen. Paulina joined the online forum where I encountered her, came to know some of the forum members in real life, and with great trepidation and excitement, even met some of their children: ‘‘It was like seeing my future.’’ As Paulina explained to me, because Gustavo is Peruvian, the couple would have priority over other international applicants. While Paulina and Gustavo waited, more patiently than I would have, for their child to be assigned to them, I spent some time trying to figure out how this priority was justified. What was it about mixed marriages like theirs that gave them this unique status in international adoption? My next step was to mine the applicable legislation to discover what was being conveyed by the allusion to national substance: Was it nationality, ethnicity, culture, language, or something else that made members of mixed marriages preferable to other international adopters? It was here that I encountered a contradiction that made me wonder if the domesticinternational division of adoptions is truly as black and white as it sounds. The division between domestic and international adoptions is given ethical motivation and force by the Hague Adoption Convention of 1993, which regulates adoptions between those nations that have signed and ratified it. According to the Hague Adoption Convention, international adoption should only occur if ‘‘possibilities for placement of the child within the State of origin have been given due consideration’’ (emphasis mine).≤≤ As Antonio Calles, the adoption lawyer in Madrid, put it when presiding over the informational session I attended, the preference to keep the child within his or her state of origin demonstrates the value placed internationally on educational continuity, linguistic continuity, and continuity of customs. The convention does not provide a justification for this preference of domestic over international adoption, so we are left to extrapolate. Because the convention prioritizes a child’s ‘‘best interests’’ (see Leinaweaver 2008b, 52–55, and Briggs 2012, 87, on what this phrase masks), then living in Peru must give a child who was born in Peru the best shot at maintaining his or her national identity, something presented as valuable in humanitarian discourse.≤≥ This preference also, of course, serves the reproductive needs of the states that sign onto the convention, states that need citizens no matter who raises them. But Peruvian law, which actually regulates such matters, puts things Mixed Marriages

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ever so slightly di√erently. Peru’s Code of Children and Adolescents states, ‘‘Adoption by foreigners is subsidiary to adoption by Peruvian nationals[,] . . . the application of the nationals has precedence’’ (emphasis mine).≤∂ The contrast with the Hague Adoption Convention is subtle but notable, a tension between status and state: Peru’s law prioritizes placement with Peruvian nationals, where The Hague prioritizes placement within the Peruvian nation. The existence of this dual legal regimen, and the infrequency with which the two systems collide, implies the wide acceptance of an assumption that would make the two statements congruent: that citizens reside in the state to which they belong (see Malkki 1992 for a clear articulation of this ideology). It is the same assumption that lets ius soli and ius sanguinis work together in many countries. If and when citizenship status and state of residence do not align—for example, when a Peruvian has moved abroad and wishes to adopt—there is uncertainty over whether, and why, that potential adoptive parent should get a leg up in the process. In the international conventions, the nationality of the adopting parent is not mentioned. Both the un Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989 and the Hague Adoption Convention of 1993 prioritize only ‘‘continuity in a child’s upbringing’’ and ‘‘the child’s ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic background’’ in adoption.≤∑ Yet in Peru’s privileging of mixed marriages over unrelentingly foreign international adopters, nationality comes to stand in for the ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic intangibles. Mixed marriages like Paulina and Gustavo’s are preferred by Peruvian law because Gustavo bears a national substance that makes such a couple an intermediary option. They are not so Peruvian that they reside in Peru and will raise a child ‘‘within the State of origin,’’ as the Hague Adoption Convention prefers, but they are Peruvian enough that the child’s national identity has a chance of being maintained through the everyday practices (culinary, musical, folkloric, linguistic, or otherwise) of a Peruvian migrant.≤∏ Because of Gustavo’s own Peruvian origins—his proximity to the potential child’s national substance—the couple is evaluated as more worthy to adopt. Perhaps there is a sense in which Gustavo and his potential child are already a sort of kin because they share national substance. Importantly, the notion of national substance overlooks diversity within Peru, implying that a Peruvian migrant will automatically share an ethnic, religious, and cultural background with his or her new Peruvian adopted child. About a year after Paulina and Gustavo completed their adoption, I met 80

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Paulina and her daughter, Lorena, at an air-conditioned mall where we could escape the blazing summer heat and where Lorena could enjoy a grand tour of the strategically placed little electronic rides. I had already seen Lorena on Facebook, but it didn’t compare to meeting her in person —a long, tall two-year-old with a tiny little ponytail perched atop her head. When I paused to admire the ponytail, Paulina told me that Gustavo sometimes says, ‘‘My daughter has the hair of a chola!’’ The term he chose to describe Lorena’s straight and thin hair was a striking one, usually viewed as a racialized insult within Peru. I asked Paulina if she thought that Lorena and Gustavo resembled one another. She said, ‘‘I think so! Although he doesn’t think so.’’ She went on to list ways in which their features were dissimilar: their eyes were di√erent shapes, their hair has di√erent textures, their skin tones are di√erent. But, she said, they have the same color eyes. And she added that when the three of them go out together no one ever asks if she is their daughter the way that people ask Paulina when Gustavo isn’t with them.≤π While Lorena and Gustavo may not share an ethnic, religious, and cultural background quite as closely as the legal formulations presume, being adopted into a mixed marriage still has important consequences for Lorena. I asked Paulina something, awkwardly phrased, about what Peru will mean to Lorena, and Paulina replied that Lorena ‘‘hears about Peru all the time, so it will be normal for her to think about it.’’ Like labor migrants but unlike most other adoptive migrants, Lorena regularly hears from her relatives in Peru via video chat. Paulina also is connected to people in Peru—her husband, his parents—and is not threatened by the idea of Lorena developing important ties to Peru and Peruvians. In a way, adoption to a mixed marriage takes what, for adoptive parents, is the safest and most secure form of all: children like Lorena can develop and explore meaningful connections to Peru and Peruvians without seeking out birth relatives, because they already have relatives in Peru. mixed marriages with children contest an underlying desire in both Spain and Peru to keep a child’s and parent’s national origin aligned. Perhaps Sileny’s children have it easiest, born in Peru to two Peruvian parents. Even when they migrate to Spain and hold Spanish citizenship, they can simply be Peruvian and their closest ties can be to their Peruvian mother. Cindy’s son falls somewhere between 20 and 50 percent Peruvian, according to her careful and shifting calculation that drew upon genealogy, ancestry, place of birth, and citizenship. Gustavo contests just Mixed Marriages

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how much he looks like his new daughter, but acknowledges that she shares his Peruvian ‘‘roots.’’ Each parent assesses and helps to produce a child’s identity along imagined lines of genealogy, culture, and place. By holding the three cases together we can see how Peruvian national substance, coupled with Spanish credentials, reveals competing claims to similarity, di√erence, and belonging. Mixed marriages show how national substance evokes the value of cultural inheritance. For example, six-year-old Javier has the potential to be half-and-half and can legally be a dual citizen. His mother, Cindy, pointed to his birth in Spain, his Spanish father and paternal kin, and his Peruvian mother and maternal kin as she went about situating his identity. So family intersects with national origin and citizenship: the fact that Javier’s mother’s family is Peruvian has bearing on the way he is ultimately defined. But Sileny rested her entire narrative on paperwork—from the document that gave her custody of her children and set into motion her project to bring them to Spain to their birth certificates upon which she rejected the possibility of putting Alonso’s name. She had no interest in changing her children’s national substance or rewriting their genealogical ties: her purpose in bringing her children to Spain was in opening for them that ‘‘window onto modernity, window to the world’’ that she saw Spain to be. The case of Paulina and Gustavo gives particular insight into what exactly it is that Peruvian and Spanish parents are respectively ‘‘transmitting’’ to their o√spring when everyone resides abroad. The idea that a child adopted from Peru would share Gustavo’s roots bears an uncanny resemblance to the new reproductive technologies that Gay Becker has written about (2000). Biologically fertile but socially infertile men—like single men, men in same-sex partnerships, or men partnered with infertile women—can become fathers (both paters and genitors) through a technology where their sperm is paired with a donor egg, a surrogate, or both. The resulting child shares the man’s roots (and not, in the case of same-sex relationships or infertile wives, those of his partner). Similarly, Lorena shares something essential with Gustavo, whereas had the couple adopted domestically the child’s national substance might have been Paulina’s, and therefore—importantly—unmarked. What Paulina glossed as her husband’s ‘‘roots’’ is what I am calling national substance. The substance of kinship that Janet Carsten observed on Langkawi Island was transmitted through blood, breast milk, and rice. The national substance that I identify here is transmitted through other kinds of markers: place of birth, the citizenship and phenotype of one’s 82

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biological kin, and cultural practices such as consuming ‘‘ethnic’’ foods and speaking Spanish with a Peruvian accent. National substance is the value that motivates the international and Peruvian regulations that prioritize adoptions by mixed marriages. Cindy shares with Javier a Peruvianness conferred through contiguity and connection with her kin, and through eligibility for Peruvian citizenship that is not automatically granted but requires some interaction with state authorities. This national substance is analogous to what Gustavo shares with his daughter. In Gustavo’s case the biogenetic connection present in my reproductive-technology analogy is replaced by something di√erent: roots, or what the Hague Adoption Convention glosses as ‘‘background.’’ National substance represents the assumption that a parent who shares a child’s national origin will enculturate that child, training him or her in what it means to be a Peruvian, and, specifically, a Peruvian abroad. David Schneider has argued that nationality and religion, like kinship, are defined in the United States in terms of what he called ‘‘substance’’ and ‘‘code.’’ For example, one can be born American or Jewish and gain those qualities as substances, but one can also be naturalized American or convert to Judaism, gaining those qualities via code or law (1977, 67–69). It is striking that in the Spanish, Peruvian, and international adoptive contexts, nationality comes to take precedence as a way to convey the remaining identity markers that are defined as crucial. That is, when a child is born to a parent, nationality and religion align with kinship until something takes place (adoption, naturalization, conversion) to disrupt the alignment. But in the cases of children born to couples in mixed marriages, the uneven alignment of nationality between the child and one parent or another permits the evaluation of other forms of identity or belonging that go unstated when the focus is on citizenship. And in adoptions by mixed marriages, the figure of nationality is remobilized to serve as an entry point, a charged overlap between parent and child from which culture, ethnicity, identity, and kinship are believed to emerge. Mixed adoptions mobilize the genealogical metaphor of nature and nation (Herzfeld 1997, 41), letting national substance produce relatedness between a parent and a child.

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four

Undomesticated Adoption adopting the children of immigrants

Birth is a demographic event that sometimes intersects in surprising ways with geography and political economy (Shachar and Hirschl 2007). As my analysis of national substance in mixed marriages has shown, place of birth is a crucially important part of the evaluation of what kinds of parents most deserve to adopt Peruvian children. The fertility of migrants is another rich arena for study. Anthropologists working on migrant fertility have discovered tensions in host countries regarding the degree to which parents and children belong there, and conversely, the ways in which they are excluded.∞ One way of politically ‘‘redeeming’’ the children of migrants is said to be via domestic adoption. But the categorization of such children as domestic adoptees is a complicated matter given the ideology of national substance that underlies adoption thinking. Adoption officials and adoptive parents alike have trouble fitting such children neatly into the domestic-international adoption binary. Chapter 3 took the unusual case of mixed marriages as a window onto what one Peruvian parent can o√er a Peruvian child abroad. This chapter takes an equally unusual case study, the domestic adoption of the child of an immigrant, as a site where ideas about migration, adoption, and nation come into unexpected focus. Here national substance persists as a key frame even for adoptions that, because they are designated as domestic, would not be expected to involve discussion of nationality. I juxtapose a Madrid government campaign against child abandonment with a case study of the domestic adoption of an immigrant’s child in order to demon-

strate that in Spain, while anxieties around migrant fertility are less acute than they are in places like the United States (Chavez 2008), they can emerge and coalesce disguised as discussions of adoption. The domestic adoption of the children of migrants, because of its very category-crossing nature, has great potential for underpinning a rethinking of adoption and migration in Spain. At the very least, such ‘‘undomesticated adoptions’’ can ground a more empathetic attempt to grapple with the circumstances that migrant women in Spain face regarding child rearing and family politics. The Imaginary Abandoned Infant

In the very first days of my first stretch of fieldwork in Madrid in 2009, I saw a billboard in the metro station that immediately caught my attention (see fig. 4.1). Vivid and shocking, it showed a photograph of a clean white pacifier lying in a dark cobblestone street. The text of the billboard read, presumably in the voice of the infant whose pacifier had caught our attention, ‘‘Before you leave me in the street, make a call [to] 012. Many families want to adopt me.’’≤ The billboard is identified as being a campaign of the regional government of the Community of Madrid. Esperanza Aguirre, the popular right-wing president of the Community of Madrid from 2003–2012, reiterated the message in a press conference held in front of one such metro billboard. The concern, Aguirre explained, is that women know that if—‘‘for whatever reason—they cannot be responsible for their children, we want to help them place their children for adoption, freely and safely for them and for the babies, without committing the crime of abandonment.’’ Aguirre continued, ‘‘Never, ever again, under any circumstances, will a child be abandoned in the street or the parks.’’≥ On the face of it, the campaign is what it says it is—a regional government displaying concern for child protection and taking steps to prevent infant abandonment by providing, and publicizing, a safe way for women to place their children into state care and eventually for adoption. Nowhere in the noticeably depopulated image nor in the central points of the material publicizing the campaign do migrants appear. But everyone I spoke to about the campaign linked it to migrant fertility. Aguirre herself remarked that information about the mother is recorded, but protected, so that she is guaranteed privacy, and in particular so that ‘‘those women who might be illegally in Spain’’ would not be reported.∂ There were further clues toward that interpretation in the campaign’s self-presentation as well. Undomesticated Adoption

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figure 4.1. A billboard in a metro station promotes the Madrid government’s campaign against child abandonment and in favor of domestic adoption: ‘‘Before you leave me in the street, make a call to 012. Many families want to adopt me.’’ Photo by author, 2009.

To begin with, although Aguirre and the billboard both mention the street as the central place of abandonment, the image was actually placed on sixty billboards and 120 posters inside metro stations. The choice of the metro as the primary site to plaster this image is not accidental. Thousands of commuters use the metro every day, including large numbers of migrants, who often must travel long distances between economical housing and job (or jobs). Many foreigners were enchanted with the convenience of the metro—and I could hardly disagree with them—but I also heard many stories of mistreatment that unfolded there. In particular, in the despised actions known as redadas (roundups), police wait outside metro stations in migrant neighborhoods at the end of the workday to demand documents of those who emerge and to detain those who are without. Interestingly, I also heard uncomfortable metro stories from adoptive families and professionals that referenced the metro’s association with migrants. The psychologists Lila Parrondo and Ana Berástegui separately recounted to me an anecdote about one indigenous Andean girl who closely shadowed her Spanish mother every time they would descend into 86

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the metro, so that people wouldn’t think that she wasn’t her mother’s daughter. An adoptive father also sketched the scene for me: ‘‘Now that there are so many immigrants, on the metro you see some parents with their kid who comes from Peru, and you see that the parents are Peruvians, and the child is their child. It’s not the same to see us with our children. People are still surprised by it and you can see that.’’ That summer, I went on to ask many people that I spoke with about the campaign and was greeted with generalized skepticism about the campaign’s true motivations. For instance, one adoption o≈cial paused for several moments before answering me, then said carefully that in Madrid, it is only every two or three years that a child is found dead in a garbage bag or bin. Perhaps once a year a child is left on the doorstep of a church, taken in, and placed for adoption: ‘‘These are the best statistics in the world. We do a terrible job of some things but others we do very well, and this is one of them: an illegal migrant, sin papeles [undocumented], can give birth at the hospital at no cost.’’∑ For the o≈cial, child abandonment was not a real problem in Madrid, and the presence of this campaign therefore demanded further analysis. The o≈cial accepted that the message of the campaign is directly aimed at the ‘‘one woman each year’’ who decides to abandon her baby. But the primary subtext, in his view, was a message aimed at middle-class families to incite them to adopt. At a more cynical level, he suggested that the introduction of infantile imagery and concepts into the public discourse might also be an attempt to reduce high rates of abortion in Madrid. (Only Catalonia, where Barcelona is located, had higher abortion rates nationwide in 2010.)∏ At the time, the Community of Madrid was one of the few Spanish regions with a conservative government, and the o≈cial traced the antiabortion subtext to the government’s stance.π He wasn’t alone in this guess; an adoption psychologist I spoke to also theorized that the ‘‘dreadful pacifier’’ was meant to suggest placing a child for adoption rather than aborting. The psychologist, if anything, took an even more skeptical view, suggesting that the campaign was intended to produce a new population of adoptable babies so that Spanish prospective parents wouldn’t have to bear the expense and inconvenience of traveling internationally in order to adopt. Riding the Madrid metro one day a year later, I was idly watching the news that’s piped in to small televisions a≈xed to the car ceilings for commuters’ edification. To my surprise, a news story about the pacifier campaign came on. The report claimed that the campaign would now be Undomesticated Adoption

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extended in order to explicitly encourage migrants not to abandon their children. It was notable that the report suggested that this was a new focus. The novel strategy explained on the news story was to place posters and flyers translated into Arabic and Roma in immigrant aid centers and locutorios. Locutorios are small businesses devoted to foreign telecommunications, with blocks of computers topped with webcams for video chats, and a wall full of flimsy booths formed by plywood partitions, each holding a folding chair and a telephone to call family and friends back home at a low cost. Like the metro, locutorios are almost indelibly associated with migrants, and an interviewee on the news clip I watched remarked that placing the flyers there would allow migrants to feel that the campaign is directed at them. The news clip then went on to confirm the adoption o≈cial’s cynicism about the campaign. It announced with great fanfare that during the one and a half years of the program’s existence, six babies had been ‘‘collected’’ and placed for adoption, and that forty women had been assisted. One and a half years’ worth of resources had been invested to ‘‘save’’ six babies from an unknown and possibly quite benign fate. That is, there is no counterfactual in such natural experiments: had the program not existed, it does not mean that the babies would have gone untended. Maria Herczog, a child psychologist on the un Committee on the Rights of the Child, contends that ‘‘there is no evidence’’ for claims that programs like this actually prevent infanticide.∫ Of course, I do not mean to dismiss the saving of babies. Policies like these are challenging to analyze because they achieve so many di√erent things simultaneously. But to say that six babies were saved is a framing that prevents certain criticisms while permitting other kinds of political claims. If the claim is linked to adoptions, as the billboard works to do, one of its potential implications is that immigrant mothers irresponsibly abandon their children and that those children can and should be adopted by responsible native Spaniards. The following month, I saw the strategy of targeting the campaign toward immigrants put into play. One Saturday night my husband and I went to a Peruvian bar on the outskirts of the city and enjoyed the food and music so much that we invited our migrant friends to join us there the next day. The long wooden bar was empty of propaganda that Saturday night, but by the time our group arrived the next day for a Father’s Day lunch of pachamanca (steamed meat and vegetables), a large stack of pacifier fliers had appeared next to a metal rack that held issues of the free magazine Raíz, targeted to Latin American migrants.Ω By now utterly 88

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fascinated with the pacifier, I tried to get one of my Peruvian friends to comment on the pamphlet. Why did they think it would show up at this bar? One answered with a guess that since ‘‘Latinos have lots of children,’’ maybe they wanted to put it in places where Latinos went. This pacifier campaign is overtly directed at immigrants, as well as to the general public, perhaps as a method to shore up antiabortion sentiment. One more piece of this broader context is Spain’s low fertility. Spain has a much lower birthrate and consequently more demographic ambivalence than does the United States, meaning there are di√erent possibilities in each country for how the children of migrants are conceptualized.∞≠ Furthermore, immigration is recognized at the policy level, by demographers, as a solution to the ‘‘depopulation problem.’’ Spain’s issues with regard to immigration are not nearly as vexed as those in neighboring France. This comes out clearly in a recent positive assessment of demographic data published in a mainstream national newspaper: ‘‘In the past decade, foreign residents of Spain have gone from 2 percent to 12 percent of the population. In the same time period, births to a foreign mother or father increased from 6 percent to 24 percent. . . . Immigrants’ contribution to the birth rate has been crucial.’’∞∞ Numbers and statistics have special power within the sphere of cultural politics (Urla 1993), and the demographic discourse gives a positive spin to immigrant births. But the pacifier campaign suggests largely negative things about the immigrant women it implicitly targets. Most directly, the campaign suggests that such women may be bad mothers who abandon their babies. If critics are right that the campaign has an implicit antiabortion message, that this too would be targeted at Latinas conveys a further critique of their moral fiber. Most Spanish interlocutors I spoke to assumed that Latinas were less likely to abort than native Spanish women because of a more conservative cultural background. However, media reports indicated high rates of abortion among migrant Latinas in Spain, despite their strong resistance to abortion, and the reports tied this contradiction directly to migrant women’s sometimes precarious employment, housing, or legal status in Spain. Abortion providers in Spain also signaled that Latinas came to Spain from a cultural context of machismo and might be more likely to have unequal relationships with male partners and be uncomfortable using birth control, factors traceable to higher abortion rates.∞≤ All these signs point to a portrayal of incapable immigrant mothers, and to the possibility that children can be removed or even ‘‘rescued’’ from Undomesticated Adoption

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their irresponsible parents, much like the children of illegal migrants in the United States whose parents’ rights were terminated.∞≥ The similarity between the U.S. and Spanish context ends there, however. That such children would be treated as desirable adoptees is quite di√erent from the U.S. context. As Laura Briggs reports, the United States does ‘‘not yet have a discourse that would signal that the U.S. citizen children of immigrants are adoptable children’’ (2012, 279). But as one adoption psychologist told me in 2012, children of immigrants are actually desirable as adoptees in the Spanish context. Referring to some of the issues considered in chapter 1 about the ‘‘ideal migrant’’ and the importance of an adoptee’s relative youth, the psychologist suggested that children of immigrants are often adopted as babies and consequently do not have language di≈culties or the emotional or cultural challenges that custodial transfer at an older age might bring. Even those who are adopted at older ages were institutionalized in Spain, she continued, so their quality of care was better than that in other countries. The Madrid government’s pacifier campaign combined the image of irresponsible immigrant mothers with this incipient sense that the children of immigrants are prime targets for domestic adoption by Spanish parents, and for redemption. As in the United States, however, suspicion of the children’s origins is present despite their appeal, and that suspicion takes a moralistic shape. Christine Ward Gailey has noted for the United States that ‘‘the poor you think you know (from the media) are worse than the abstract poor who are considered simply unfortunate victims of circumstances beyond their control’’ (2010, 101). Her finding is echoed in the words of Raquel, a Spanish woman who, with her husband, adopted the child of an undocumented migrant: ‘‘Domestic adoptions are understood to be marginalized kids, not poor kids, and so those kids who come in international adoption are poor but good, and those from here—we Spaniards aren’t so sure that they are good.’’∞∂ Undomesticated Adoption

Against a context where the Madrid government deploys alarming illustrations of pacifiers to convey a vision of abandoned migrant babies and a consequent antiabortion message, how might the children of migrants be configured as adoptable by Spanish families? Unwanted births to native Spanish women have dropped sharply since the Franco era when birth control and abortion were not permitted, and domestic adoption in Spain 90

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now largely consists of the adoption of migrants’ children (Marre 2009b).∞∑ The children of migrants make up about three-quarters of domestic adoptions, or about seventy adoptions per year, in the autonomous community of Madrid alone. Just in the past few years, prospective parents have begun to turn to domestic adoption with more frequency than in the very recent past, in part because the domestic waiting list is shorter than it once was and in part because it has become more di≈cult to adopt internationally, for broader global political reasons largely unrelated to the Spanish socioeconomic context.∞∏ When I asked the Madrid government’s director of adoptions to tell me about the domestic adoption of the children of immigrants, he began to describe ‘‘lo que mal llamamos adopcion nacional’’ (what we mistakenly refer to as domestic adoption). His words suggested that ‘‘domestic adoption’’ is a misnomer that does not adequately capture this particular adoptive phenomenon, this unexpected point of intersection between migration and adoption. Raquel, the adoptive mother to the child of a migrant in Madrid, would also describe the phenomenon as not quite fitting in either of the familiar categories, domestic and international. She called it the ‘‘tercera pata de la adopción’’—literally, adoption’s third foot, a way of implying both that such adoptions don’t quite fit, like a third wheel, and that they are less understood. This metaphor suggests that the domestic adoption of the children of migrants is a category in its own right and simultaneously disrupts the dynamic between the other two categories. The category is both novel and disruptive: a third foot in a bipedal world. That is, the domestic adoption of migrant children doesn’t quite fit within a socio-legal system that divides the world into migration, which potentially disrupts the Spanish nation, and adoption, which promotes family values that are integral to Spanish national identity while also reproducing the Spanish nation.∞π There are several possible reasons that both the adoption o≈cial and Raquel, separately, identified the phenomenon as a misfit. One way in which these adoptions are not quite fully domestic is that they seem to fall uncomfortably between current legal definitions of domestic and international adoption, an opposition that is also complicated by international adoptions to mixed marriages. International adoptions are defined in the Hague Adoption Convention of 1993 (Chapter 1, Article 2) as those ‘‘where a child habitually resident in one Contracting State (‘the State of origin’) has been, is being, or is to be moved to another Contracting State (‘the receiving State’).’’∞∫ This wording implies that what makes adoption interUndomesticated Adoption

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national is the international displacement of a child, rather than the di√erence between the child’s and the parents’ nationality. By this definition, mixed marriages are international adopters, as they relocate their new children from Peru to Spain. Similarly, the adoption within Spain of the children of migrants is clearly a domestic matter, since it does not relocate a minor between states. But international adoption is defined in Spanish law as adoption ‘‘which involves a foreign element, whether the citizenship or the place of residence of either the adopters or the adoptee’’ (Ley 54/2007, Chapter I, Article 1.2).∞Ω Some children born to migrants in Spain (such as children born to Bolivian migrant parents) acquire the citizenship of their parents, rather than Spanish citizenship, upon birth. Under Spanish law, then, adoptions of such children should technically be interpreted as international. In such cases, ‘‘domestic adoption’’ becomes a misnomer. When the director of adoptions indicated that the term was inadequate, he may have been articulating the awkwardness he himself identified in attempting to apply these contradictory cultural definitions of national-identity categories to a transformed social setting. Despite the constant mobility of people between states, an assumption that stable populations align with national territory continues to underlie much international law. That the adoption of immigrants’ children is not treated as international may also index underlying cultural assumptions about the process that constitutes international adoption. International adoption involves thoughtfully choosing and traveling to a country. Prospective parents are asked to articulate their reasons for their choice, and I read some of their narratives during fieldwork in a Peruvian adoption o≈ce in 2001. One couple wrote, addressing Peruvian adoption o≈cials, ‘‘We felt attracted to your country. The smiles of the children we had the opportunity to see in photos, the color of the clothing, the richness of the culture, what we discovered in The Adventures of Tintin, all of this gives us a positive feeling about Peru.’’≤≠ International adoption also involves traveling to that country, an experience that the adoptive father Sergio had described to me as ‘‘like vacation, although the adoption was still in process.’’ And finally, international adoption should involve, upon return, developing the child’s ties to that sending nation and highlighting his or her national substance. These opportunities to interact with a foreign culture before, during, and after the international adoption are lauded by adoption workers as attractive features of this method of family formation (Jacobson 2008, 53). Domestic adoption should involve none of those things. As Raquel observed, 92

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international adoption has ‘‘a component of solidarity, another component of adventure or exoticism, another component of travel, leaving and returning, all things that domestic adoption doesn’t have.’’ The adoption o≈cial identified yet another reason why these adoptions fit uncomfortably under the descriptor domestic when he went on to describe them as ‘‘domestic adoptions with certain multiethnic characteristics.’’ U.S. adoption professionals would likely use the term transracial adoption, the form of adoption which is the social default in the U.S. public-adoption system (Seligmann 2009). As the o≈cial recognized, drawing a distinction between (unmarked) domestic adoption and the adoption of migrants’ children reveals an assumption that domestic adoption means the adoption of white Spanish babies. Moreover, it reveals an assumption that what makes these adoptions undomestic is, in part, the children’s ethnic di√erences from the Spanish majority population, and whatever other national-substantial characteristics they are perceived to inherit due to the foreign origins of their parents.≤∞ I came to believe that people’s desire to qualify the term ‘‘domestic adoption’’ when discussing the adoption of migrant children was also due to a fear that adoptive parents and professionals may share. The fear is that their adopted children will be misrecognized as not fully belonging to the nation, and more poignantly, to their parents. For example, the anthropologist Carlos Giménez Romero worries about internationally adopted children who are conflated with immigrants when they are asked by strangers, ‘‘when did your parents get to Spain?’’ (2008, 113). If international adoption and migration are kept carefully separate, such statements can be written o√ as racist or simply wrong. The domestic adoption of the children of immigrants uncomfortably blurs that opposition. Adopting the Undocumented

Raquel and her husband formally adopted Nicolás, who was born to a Peruvian immigrant. This is a singular case—neither the most representative nor a carefully selected compilation of many similar cases, but rather the only one I encountered. I give it careful attention here not because it is common, but because it is unusual within the parameters I set for my study and perhaps more broadly. Anthropologists may spend what practitioners of other disciplines see as an unwarranted amount of time on the unique or unusual case study. Yet in many instances a single case, situated in the social and political context Undomesticated Adoption

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in which it unfolded, can be extremely revealing. This is seen most vividly in anthropological life histories like those of the !Kung woman Nisa (Shostak and Nisa 1981), the Mexican peasant woman Esperanza (Behar 1993), and the institutionalized Brazilian woman Catarina (Biehl 2005). In other chapters I recount the stories that are more common or more representative, but here I spend some time with Raquel’s uncommon story because it tells me things about adoption, migration, Peru, and Spain that I would not otherwise have learned. That is, I stumbled upon Raquel’s story, purely out of luck, and I’m glad of it: had I not heard Raquel’s perspective on having adopted the child of a migrant woman, I would have missed many insights into how adoptive kinship is produced in Spain. Parents who adopt the children of labor migrants in Spain are reluctant to discuss their children’s backgrounds. As the moderator of a listserv for domestic adopters in Spain patiently explained while denying my request to post a call for research participants, ‘‘we aren’t sure if you know how this mode of adoption works, but no one talks about where their children came from, nor do we speak of the child’s race. We say nothing that could compromise the child’s privacy because these adoptions begin with a yearlong period of fostering before the baby legally becomes your son or daughter.’’ During that period of fostering, any perceived misstep (such as compromising the child’s privacy) could be taken as grounds to end the placement. Furthermore, the moderator added, such parents do not always know their child’s origins. They only know what adoption authorities tell them and what they imagine they can deduce about those origins from the child’s physical characteristics. Even if they do discover that their children’s mothers were Peruvian migrants, the adoptive parents might be less likely to claim and develop their children’s Peruvianness because the parents did not initially seek it out through the ‘‘component of adventure or exoticism’’ that Raquel had described. Raquel, a professor in her early thirties, explained to me that she and her husband hadn’t set out to adopt the child of a migrant. In the formal adoption application that they submitted to the Community of Madrid, they indicated that they would be willing to adopt a child with specific special needs but requested that the child be younger than their biological daughter.≤≤ Barely a week later they were notified that such a child was available and needed a family. All they were told about him, other than the fact that he met their conditions, was that his mother had left him in the hospital and that hospital sta√ thought he was Latin American, but said that they ‘‘don’t really know where from.’’ In sharp distinction to the long 94

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waits described in chapter 1, Raquel and her husband were approved to adopt almost immediately and were never required to enroll in adoptionpreparation classes. Nicolás came to live with them when he was only a few months old.≤≥ The domestic-adoption process required them to foster him for a full year before the adoption was finalized. Raquel described the discomfort associated with this liminal state: ‘‘We couldn’t baptize him. . . . We cared for him and loved him like a son, but he wasn’t our son, there were decisions we weren’t permitted to make. If he had become ill we wouldn’t have been allowed to consent to an operation, we would have had to call the Community of Madrid. He was our son, but he wasn’t entirely our son, nor was he only our son.’’ The couple discerned Nicolás’s connection to Peru from looking at the birth certificate that they were eventually given. His birth mother was identified as having been born in Lima. Raquel—like other domestic adopters of the children of migrants—had no way of choosing a child whose parents were from a particular country. While international adopters must cultivate and articulate their motivations for adopting from a specific country, any enchantment she would develop with Peru would have to come after the fact. Yet when I asked, she gamely talked about her feelings toward Peru, explaining, ‘‘I’ve wanted to visit Peru for a long time, and when they told me Nicolás was Peruvian, I was very excited.’’ She explained that her Catholic parish had particularly close ties with Peru, and that while in her twenties, she had made many friends who did volunteer development work there. Recalling these links between Spain and Peru facilitated by her Catholic Church, she smiled as she suggested that Nicolás, in a way, embodied those connections: ‘‘He came here through a di√erent route, but it’s him.’’ The way that Nicolás materializes ties to Peru is complicated, and Raquel gave several examples of how she tangles with, and in so doing helps to produce, those connections. For instance, because of her past involvement in development work, she has various souvenirs and articles of clothing that friends brought her from Peru long before her family adopted Nicolás. These material objects are now being reimagined. For example, a Peruvian embroidered blouse that her daughter wears to the beach has become ‘‘Peruvian, like Nicolás—but it’s not really connected to him, because he never dressed like a Peruvian!’’ And during ‘‘culture week’’ at school, where each child chose a country of interest to report on, her daughter chose Peru, because ‘‘that was where her brother came from. And we had to go to her school and explain that no—it wasn’t that we had Undomesticated Adoption

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gone to Peru in search of him. It was that he came from—well, he actually was never in Peru.’’ Here, again, national substance emerges as a meaningful category. Nicolás never dressed like a Peruvian and was never in Peru, Raquel says. But focusing too closely on the way that adoption is made possible by a legal ‘‘clean break’’ model precludes seeing how connections to a geographically and genealogically distant country can be entailed upon children in unexpected ways (Modell 1994). In Nicolás’s case, objects associated with Peru, and the country itself, come to be linked to him because his birth mother had herself been born there. Raquel also contemplated the possibility that Nicolás could one day obtain dual citizenship, situating that possibility within Spain’s history of migration and current economic woes.≤∂ She envisioned that ‘‘maybe, one day, he’ll say how great it is to have Peruvian citizenship; because this happened with the Argentines and the Spanish. . . . The day will come when we Spanish have to go back to Argentina, to return again, or in other words, to be from more than one place is a good thing.’’ Where earlier Raquel indicated that Nicolás is not from Peru, explaining to her daughter’s teacher that Raquel had not gone to Peru in search of Nicolás, here she suggests that whatever else he has inherited from his birth mother, he importantly bears some of her national substance—he is ‘‘from more than one place.’’ That is, Nicolás’s birth mother’s ‘‘from-Peru’’ quality is an important trait that she has passed down.≤∑ For Raquel, then, Nicolás has meaningful connections to Peru despite having been legally stripped of kinship ties to that nation and despite never having held Peruvian citizenship. Signe Howell has written of sending countries that ‘‘it is not so hard for the nation to let [adoptees] go [in plenary adoption] because it is only through other people that a person is connected to a place and to the nation’’ (2009b, 266). The same observation—that connections happen through people—can serve to prove the opposite point. Connections to nations endure in spite of plenary adoption (the form of adoption common in most Western countries in which a child loses all formal ties to birth family members) and immigration policies that strive to attenuate or erase them. As Raquel put it, very insightfully, she likes it when people think of Nicolás as linked to Peru because ‘‘it means recognizing something about him that right now means nothing to him but will probably one day mean something.’’ Here is where the national substance takes form and meaning: through recognition by others and by adoptees themselves (Ricoeur 2005). Raquel and her husband were never told why Nicolás was placed for 96

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adoption. Raquel explained that she occasionally tried to Google Nicolás’s birth mother because ‘‘we think of her sometimes, for example now, when Nicolás’s birthday is coming up. . . . We don’t know why she left him. We can imagine, but . . . So we think it must be a special day for her, whether it’s sad, whether she remembers, whether she couldn’t or didn’t want to, because we know of all kinds of stories like that—but we never found her and we don’t even know if she still lives in Spain.’’ When Raquel said that she could imagine why Nicolás’s birth mother might have left him in the hospital, she meant it literally. She had created a story that she shared with me later in our interview. She explained that she really wanted to know things about her [Nicolás’s birth mother], to find out about her and about him [Nicolás’s progenitor]. Why he didn’t recognize [claim paternity of] Nicolás, why . . . I don’t know, I picture that because of his disability it would have been too di≈cult, and she probably didn’t have any support. And for the father, removing himself from caring for the child and saying that he wasn’t going to recognize him, he couldn’t, or perhaps, he thought he couldn’t. She’s someone without an extended family, which I imagine might be the life of a Peruvian in Madrid, without grandparents, without resources, having to work and your partner saying no—so I think perhaps it is not that she felt a complete rejection toward Nicolás because of his disability, but rather because she felt herself unable to take on his care. She ended on a laugh, ‘‘But, I’d like to know if that’s how it was, or not,’’ recognizing the degree to which she had elaborated the story of Nicolás’s origins out of scraps of information and supposition. It was a story, though, which she had developed in part through family discussions. As she explained, We have tried to talk with our daughter about what it is like for a person who comes to live in Spain from another country, in order to be able to explain why Nicolás’s mother couldn’t keep him. The migrants we know here have almost all come with families, with grandparents, they are middle class. But our daughter’s classmates’ caregivers do come here without family, they live with the employing family, and . . . it’s very hard to care for a disabled child, it takes more time, you have to be able to take time o√ work sometimes, and if Nicolás needs someone to look after him we can just call my mother, but they probably don’t have their mothers here with them. Undomesticated Adoption

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In other words, she speculates that a lack of family is self-perpetuating: the absence of kin makes it more di≈cult to form new families. The imagination work that Raquel’s story hints at here—the quiet labor that goes into thinking through Nicolás’s origins and talking about the possibilities with her daughter—speaks powerfully to the empathetic position from which the adoptive parent of a migrant’s child can come to understand the experiences of migrants in Spain. Raquel’s story emphasized how migrants lose family support when they are separated from their extended kin that remain in Peru. She also took care to spell out some of the demands of the kind of work that migrants often do, such as live-in domestic work (Herrera 2010). She argued that a lack of family support intertwines with the high demands of work in such a way that migrant mothers are unable to meet their daily work and family obligations without the safety net that extended family can o√er. Raquel had constructed this narrative not only so that she could make sense of Nicolás’s abandonment for herself and eventually for him but also so that she could justify it to his sister, painting a picture of complicated personal circumstances rather than interpersonal cruelty leading to abandonment. the most recent time I saw Raquel, clad for the Madrid summer in a Latin American–style white cotton blouse embroidered with navy blue flowers, we admired pictures of one another’s children. Nicolás was almost four years old. She recounted some of the serious scares that Nicolás had given them with his delicate health, and said that the hospitalizations and special attentions he has required over the course of his young life would be prohibitively expensive in another country where health care is not viewed as a right. Bluntly, she said, if he were living in another country, he would be dead. I thought then, and still think, that this was a veiled criticism of the U.S. system of the kind I have heard from a few other Spaniards. But it is also true that Nicolás would not have fared well in Peru. The quality of health care he receives in Madrid gives a poetic spin to the rough story of his origins—that his mother migrated to Spain, bore him, gave him into the state’s care and disappeared into the hospital hallways and that all this gave him an opportunity for life that he would not have had in Peru. Many international adoptive parents to whom I spoke also did the kind of imagination work that Raquel had engaged in, inventing explanations of the circumstances behind their children’s abandonments so that they could one day relate those stories to their questioning children. However, 98

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it appears that thinking about the circumstances of a child’s abandonment in a distant country does not require internationally adoptive parents to consider how they may be implicated in that abandonment. On one hand, their desire for a child may partly produce child abandonments as o≈cials in sending countries attempt to negotiate significant external pressures. On the other hand, the choices adoptive parents can make as citizens of developed countries may lead to poverty or dependence in less developed nations, two proximate causes of child abandonment. By contrast, Nicolás’s birth mother lived, and may still live, in the same city as Raquel. It is a Madrid where middle-class native Spanish parents like Raquel may hire Latin American migrants to care for their children while they work. The work of child care is demanding and di≈cult to coordinate if the childcare worker is a mother herself. Raquel’s successful combination of marriage, work, and motherhood depends—as she gratefully acknowledges— on a migrant child-care worker, and in this way she could be viewed as partially complicit in the broader processes that produce the abandonment of children like Nicolás. In the relatively recent past, closed adoptions were the norm and secrecy helped protect adoptive parents against the possibility of a birth parent appearing to reclaim a child’s a√ections (Adroher and Berástegui 2000, 257). Raquel told me that international adoption seems to reproduce the e√ects that secrecy once had. It is a way of forming families that allows adoptive parents, if they choose, to entirely ignore the existence of their child’s faraway biological kin. For Raquel and other local critics of international adoption, that modality grants adopters the possibility of avoiding a consideration of the distant biological family. By contrast, domestic adoption means the possibility of meeting relatives one day, and for Raquel it means the knowledge that Nicolás’s birth mother ‘‘lives in this city,’’ something that Raquel said many adoptive parents find frightening. To respond to such fears, Raquel proposes the preemptive strengthening of the adoptive bond by building upon Nicolás’s national substance, coopting or incorporating a mutual a√ection for the country of origin. In this way the notion of national substance has political implications. The government’s campaign adds yet another approach to this mix, identifying the same dilemma that Raquel did in her analysis: that a vulnerable migrant worker, perhaps in Spain illegally, may feel herself unable to raise a child. Unlike Raquel, who went so far as to invent a story about her son’s origins, the campaign does not address the circumstances that may provoke child abandonment. The adoption o≈cial I interviewed Undomesticated Adoption

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noted that the abandonment of migrants’ children had emerged as a phenomenon only in the past decade, as one consequence of the undocumented status of mothers. The implication was that undocumented status is a factor (and an index for many other factors) in producing a migrant woman’s vulnerability in Spain, a socioeconomic marginality that might compel her to relinquish her child. So it is noteworthy that Madrid’s conservative government addresses this possibility not by assisting such mothers through paths to legal residence, facilitation of family migration, or the provision of employment assistance or day care. Instead it resolves this issue by making it easier for migrant women to relinquish their children. Noting that a woman’s vulnerable status may cause her to relinquish her child in Madrid does not necessarily lead to a critique of the global inequalities that ground international adoption. It does not cause people to think about what must be happening to women and families in sending countries or about the ways that prospective adopters from wealthy nations might be implicated in those processes. The poignant narrative Raquel produced of why Nicolás came to be her child is one that allows her, if she chooses, to avoid considering any role she might have had in generating the conditions that made Nicolás available for adoption in the first place. Scholars have argued that international adoption exploits global inequalities to give parents in the Global North a sense of safety and security because it will be virtually impossible for the birth mother in the Global South to come looking for her child (Marre 2009b). However, domestically adopting the children of migrants—particularly those without papers—rests on similar structural inequalities between the birth and adoptive parent. Still, it is promising that, against a background plastered with frightening images of lonely pacifiers in dark alleyways, a domestic adopter such as Raquel can articulate an understanding of, and an incipient identification with, migrant women. The domestic adoption of the children of migrants has great potential as a site from which both adoption and migration are transformed. As the numbers of international adoptions to Spain continue to plummet, ‘‘what we mistakenly refer to as domestic adoption’’ may take its place and transform the face of adoption and of Spanish families as they incorporate migrants’ children directly into their homes. Moreover, if native Spanish families are connected to migrants in Madrid directly through kinship, and if they seek out or even contemplate the possibility of bumping into

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these migrants in the streets or metro of Madrid with something less than fear, ‘‘undomesticated adoption’’ could become an entry point through which native Spaniards and migrants begin to discern their commonalities. It is not the answer to all of Spain’s—or all of adoption’s—problems, but it is a possibility worth contemplating.

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five

Solidarity postadoptive overtures

Up on the screen, Pepe and Lucia are arguing again. He’s already in a foul mood because he realized that he left Manu’s homework in a store across town and he’s going to have to go get it. He fires o√ a complaint about Manu’s nanny, Rosa. He says that Rosa has stolen his father’s watch and a Star Wars Stormtrooper action figure he has had for years; ‘‘She’s stealing from us, Lucia, the Peruvian is stealing from us!’’ Lucia rolls her eyes. He has no proof. She crossly replies, ‘‘What, Pepe, you have something against Peruvians? The other day you yelled at the grocery-delivery guy.’’ ‘‘Half the grocery bags were broken. Are you calling me a racist? Look. We got her because she was Peruvian. What is the point of her being Peruvian, if she doesn’t even sing him songs from Peru?’’ (Planell 2009, 20). That’s how we learn that this Madrid couple’s foster son is Peruvian in La vergüenza (Shame), a 2009 film from the Madrid director and screenwriter David Planell. We have already met Manu a few scenes earlier. The script describes him as ‘‘Latin American, about eight years old, with a patchy buzz cut, although what most stands out about the boy are his dirtylooking, gray teeth’’ (Planell 2009, 7) (see fig. 5.1). So far I have recorded unexpected juxtapositions of adoption and migration. But I haven’t considered the possibility that adoptive families might actually seek out migrants to be part of their lives, as the fictional example of Pepe and Lucia suggests. Class di√erences between the two groups may be enough to keep them physically separate during the early years of the adoptees’ lives. Migrant families are more likely to live in

figure 5.1. Left to right: Manu (Brandon Alexander Lastra Cobos) with Pepe (Alberto San Juan) in David Planell’s film La vergüenza (Avalon P.C., 2009). Used by kind permission of Avalon P.C.

working-class or migrant neighborhoods, while adoptive families are more likely to live in middle-class neighborhoods. This lack of overlap helps to ground a position, said to be common among Spanish adoptive parents, that their children are not immigrants, and, logically, should not hang out with immigrants. As the Spanish anthropologist and migration specialist Carlos Giménez Romero has stated, Spanish parents are concerned about their ‘‘child being treated like what he’s not—like an immigrant—when this category is generally negative and its di√erence and significance are exaggerated’’ (2008, 114). Yet the notion of national substance also implies that those who come from the same country are thought to share something important beyond simply a passport. Some adoptive parents acknowledge this possibility and work to foster those connections, whether by seeking out Peruvian migrants who will spend structured time with their children, or by building ties with Peru through development agencies and philanthropy. Some adopted youths acknowledge this possibility as well, by choosing to hang out with migrants. This approach is more contested, because of adoptive parents’ shared fear that their Peruvian-origin children could become the scariest kind of Latino around: a gang member. Although their approaches Solidarity

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di√er, both parents and children, by engaging with Peru and Peruvian migrants, are acting in line with an ethical attitude toward adoption expressed most commonly as ‘‘solidarity.’’ Solidarity Forever: Suspect Motivations

Transnational adoption is sometimes represented in popular discourse as philanthropic or as ‘‘a ‘humanitarian’ action interchangeable with sending money to support an orphanage or other local development programs’’ (Bystrom 2012, 224). This positive spin has been noted by others using a term that I frequently heard in Madrid: solidaridad, a kind of humanitarian solidarity. For instance, an article from 2008 in a weekly newsmagazine listing eight Spanish public figures who had adopted internationally was titled ‘‘Las estrellas solidarias’’ (The solidarity of the stars).∞ Giménez Romero has argued that ‘‘the image of adoption is actually structurally positive. . . . It gives an image sometimes of solidarity, of generosity’’ (2008, 110). Raquel, who adopted the Madrid-born child of a Peruvian immigrant, told me of the widespread perception that international adoption has ‘‘a component of solidarity. . . . It seems as if you are helping a child get out of poverty.’’ To help a poor child, as Giménez Romero suggests, immediately indexes the helper’s, or in this case the parent’s, generosity and goodness. The consequences of this might include a child who grows up feeling dependent and grateful, with the idea that his or her birth parents were the opposite of generous and good. This idea that solidarity might be a part of international adoption is directly criticized by adoption professionals. One showcase for this criticism is the free guide to international adoption written by a team of two legal scholars and a psychologist on behalf of the Community of Madrid. The eighty-three-page booklet exhorts prospective parents: If what draws us to adoption is nothing but the desire to help the needy children of the world, it would be far better for us to do so through one of the many established paths. Most of the world’s needy children have families . . . so financial assistance or contributing to development or children’s aid ngos would be the most direct way to meet this objective and help the most children. . . . Of course adoption is a way to help a child without a family, but one can only do that by giving that child parents who have the sincere and deep-seated desire to be parents. (Berástegui, Gómez, and Adroher 2006, 16) 104

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This desire to be parents is presented as being in opposition to the motivation to help a needy child. Antonio Calles, the immf sta√ member, reiterated this message to the session on international adoption that I attended. He remarked that some prospective parents are motivated by altruism, solidarity, or the idea of ‘‘saving a third-world child.’’ He bluntly said, ‘‘Adoption has nothing to do with solidarity. It should be the desire to be parents. Those kids you see on tv who are abandoned, working, living on the street—those aren’t the kids being looked after in orphanages. If you want to help [those] children, contribute to a development organization. We only want people who truly want to be parents to a child.’’ There are two aspects of this critique of the ‘‘solidarity motivation,’’ one that comes from a more applied perspective and one from a more critical perspective. The former is the argument that it is simply not good for children to be adopted out of solidarity or a desire to rescue a child. What children most need, according to both the adoption guide and the information session I attended, are parents who ‘‘truly want to be parents to a child,’’ as Calles had put it. Expressions of solidarity may suggest that prospective parents view adoption as an experience that will change their own lives, rather than solely as a commitment to a child (Berástegui 2006, 7). To depict adoption as a ‘‘rescue,’’ the sociologist Sara Dorow has argued, sets up parents as morally, socially, and economically superior to their children, an unsustainable representation that could easily backfire (2006, 62; see also Berástegui 2006, 7).≤ Meanwhile, critical studies of adoption argue that the desire to ‘‘help’’ a child inhibits any sustained consideration of the structural causes of children’s adoptability (Briggs 2003, 180; see also Dubinsky 2010, 95; Gailey 2010, 90; Kligman 1992, 411). Attempting to help a child through adoption may mean overlooking or declining to contribute to more e√ective ways to assist children and families in sending countries (Dubinsky 2010, 77; Berástegui 2006, 5). That adoption professionals must make this point so explicitly and so regularly suggests that it needs making and that they are arguing against something particularly deep-seated, as they also do in the case of the idealized infant adoptee. The tenacious persistence of the desire to help a child seems to stymie all that adoption professionals do to counter it. Adoption professionals’ ideal model of interpersonal political neutrality looks selfish from the perspective of many prospective parents who articulate feelings of solidarity (Frekko 2011). For instance, Paulina, who with her Peruvian husband adopted a child from Peru, told me that people ought to adopt not only for the experience of being parents but also to meet Solidarity

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the needs of a child who needs parents. She argued it was selfish to adopt solely because you wanted to be a parent. One adoption psychologist also told me about a young woman of Latin American origin whose adolescent misbehavior was (in the psychologist’s view) a clear manifestation of her resentment toward her parents who adopted her out of selfishness. The psychologist channeled the daughter’s feelings toward her parents: you adopted me ‘‘so you could have a child and be normal.’’ Interestingly, selfishness was critiqued elsewhere in Spanish ideologies of reproduction; it was tied to Spain’s low birth rate by a single mother who told me that Spanish young adults are selfish and don’t want to give up the life of going out with friends and staying up late. Not having children is selfish, in this framing, but Paulina would add that adopting children just because you want them is selfish too. Critics of the solidarity motivation, which include adoption professionals in Spain as well as in Peru (Leinaweaver 2008b, 41), contrast ‘‘helping children’’ to ‘‘the desire to be a parent.’’ This is an interesting opposition, because it suggests that the acts entailed in parenting are being intentionally depoliticized. Purity of motivation equates to a singleminded desire to be a parent.≥ Most prospective parents understood this even if they did not accept it. The Spanish researchers Cristina Charro and María Jociles found that prospective parents understand very well that they are expected to be motivated only by a desire to be parents, so that should they feel any desire to help a child, they should keep it to themselves (Charro and Jociles 2007, 6; Jociles and Charro 2008, 114).∂ All other options must be excised in the adoption applicant’s self-presentation if not innermost heart (Frekko 2011), because the desire to be a parent cannot have any political overtones. If becoming a parent is, in this model, a personal choice with shades of consumerism (Briggs 2012, 12; Solinger 2001), then the developing of articulation points between migrants and adoptees is unexpected, and constitutes an ethical stance. Furthermore, it is notable that the ink spilled about ‘‘solidarity’’ and ‘‘rescue’’ is largely over their status as suspect motivations for adoption, suggesting that they are largely not a consideration once the child has arrived. What might solidarity look like in the postadoptive day-to-day? What might it look like in a contemporary Spain where—in the words of one young Peruvian migrant—‘‘Spain is the number one country in terms of solidarity. It contributes, collaborates with all kinds of countries where there is poverty, where there’s an earthquake, whatever. But here, in their own house, is where you see them living this lack of solidarity overall. 106

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They’re not all like that, but you can see it on the news, in the paper, you see what happens on a daily basis with a kid who, just because he’s black, Indian, or a cholo, Spanish people pick a fight with him because they think so much of themselves.’’ So if something like solidarity frames parents’ postadoption approaches, it might be viewed as an important and ethical di√erence from business as usual. Of Maids and Mentors

Because solidarity is a contested motive, the current ideal for adoption suggests that someone should adopt a child only because he or she wants to be a parent. Speaking to that person, Calles advises, ‘‘choose a country you have an a≈nity or an a√ection for, so you can transmit a positive vision, help your child construct his own identity.’’ The onus is on the parent to help the child construct an identity—it is rarely explicitly encouraged for the child to spend time with others from his or her country.∑ Yet some adoptive parents seek out Peruvian migrants who will spend structured time with their children. One relatively safe way to do so is what we can see in Planell’s film: hiring a maid or a nanny from the child’s country of origin (see also Gailey 2010, 110). As Pepe says in the film, the nanny, Rosa, could sing songs from the child’s country. Later in the film, Rosa advises Pepe on the correct ingredients for ceviche. The adoption psychologist Lila Parrondo told me that particularly in cases where children are from non-Spanish-speaking countries, parents will hire a maid from that country rather than learn the language (‘‘Chinese, Russian, Hindi, or Amharic,’’ she listed) themselves. Children’s songs, ethnic food, and even language all represent nonthreatening forms of connection to roots, a rather folkloric and reified version of culture. But these are each cultural tokens that migrant workers can provide adopted children and their families, objects that the parents themselves may not be able to o√er. The historian Karen Dubinsky, writing critically about transracial adoption in Montreal in the 1950s, proposes that the ties parents develop with employees are framed solely by market logic and not by genuine interest in cultural exchange (2010, 129). But Planell suggested when we spoke that the employers in these cases think they are doing something appropriate and significant by hiring workers from the children’s countries of origin. As Planell explained to me, in writing the script, he was convinced that it would be crucial for the couple that Manu’s nanny be Peruvian, because ‘‘for them Peru, Ecuador, Solidarity

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Colombia, the Dominican Republic are not all the same, and they are proud of knowing this, because they are leftist.’’ To hire a migrant worker from the child’s country of origin may have several positive outcomes: she can share with him nonthreatening cultural tokens that help support the child’s identity construction, and the parents demonstrate their own cosmopolitanism and leftist credentials by recognizing Peru as distinct from other Latin American countries. Spoiler alert: the remainder of Planell’s movie materializes a fear that may lie behind some internationally adoptive parents’ resistance to seeking out ties with migrants from their child’s country of origin. When I asked him why he had decided that the child would be Peruvian, he said that it was because his friend Norma Mendoza, a Peruvian stage actress, had agreed to play Rosa, the nanny. Because the film is predicated on the nanny being the boy’s birth mother, the boy—Manu—had to be Peruvian, too.∏ Although this is a somewhat improbable twist, it is also revealing. Parrondo summed it up after the film screening we attended: ‘‘It is a fiction, it’s an exaggeration, but it is a fear many families have: that the birth mother could come find the child.’’π It is also a fear that some critics say grounds the choice of international adoption over domestic (on the importance of unambiguous rights to a child, compare Dorow 2006, 59; Gailey 2010, 85).∫ The fear was almost palpable in a story Gabriela told me about when she and Diego were in Peru adopting their daughter. She recalled that the night before they left Peru they had gone out to eat with another Spanish couple that had also just completed an adoption of two young siblings. As the families were eating dinner, the older biological siblings of those two children appeared and asked for the couple’s contact information so that they could keep in touch with their birth siblings and one day come to Spain themselves. The mother burst into tears and their adoption agency representative took the matter in hand, escorting the siblings out of the restaurant to talk to them privately, after which nothing more was heard from them. It is not implausible that fears like these might ground the resistance of some internationally adoptive parents to forge relationships with migrants from their child’s country of origin. Hiring a nanny from the child’s country of origin is potentially a safer form of such a relationship because it keeps things safely in the economic terrain.Ω Yet I encountered other instances of adoptive parents seeking connections with Peruvian migrants that were far from market based. One adoptive mom, Elvira, had gone out of her way to find Peruvian migrants who would be able to spend time with her adolescent daughter Lucy. Although 108

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I never met Elvira, who lives several hours away from Madrid, I heard about her often from my migrant Peruvian friends. They told me that sometimes Lucy—who is short of stature and has deep black hair—seems to want to ‘‘be Spanish,’’ and when that happens her mother brings her to visit my migrant friends. After a few days with ‘‘her cousins,’’ as she calls them, Lucy brightens. On one such visit, Lucy arrived wanting to dye her hair blue. They rented the movie Twilight and stayed up far too late, and by the time Lucy had to go back home, she liked her hair again. I am suggesting that there is something here that may spring from the same fount as does the solidarity motivation, something that is expressed in adoptive parents’ understanding that their children do not only require knowledge about Peru and its songs and cuisine. They would benefit, too, from contiguity to other people of Peruvian origin. I use ‘‘contiguity’’ here in the sense established by early anthropologists writing about magic: the idea that, as sketched by Sir James Frazer, ‘‘things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed’’ (1923, 11). So being cared for by a Peruvian nanny early in life might give a fictional adopted child some of the key symbolic tools he would later use to construct his own identity, just as a serious and kind Peruvian migrant can mentor an adolescent adoptee like Lucy and instill in her an appreciation for her deep black hair and a self-confidence that will aid her in her daily life. In both Planell’s imaginary scenario and Elvira’s and Lucy’s real lives, the contiguity of Peruvian migrants to adoptees of Peruvian origin is deemed positive, because they o√er a moderating influence that can lead the adoptee to accept who he or she is. The idea that the adoptee ‘‘is’’ something similar to the migrant is grounded in evaluations of their phenotypes as similar and their national substance as shared. Doing Good and Reaching Out

Cora, the Peruvian representative of a Spanish adoption agency whom I met in Peru in 2012, primarily works for a Peruvian ngo that provides aid to impoverished children. In the late 1990s, when Cora assisted with more than a dozen adoptions each year, the Spanish adoption agency formalized ties with the Peruvian ngo. Their organizational relationship means that Cora was (and is) not paid directly for her services to adoptive families. Instead, the prospective parents make contributions to her ngo for her work in Peru on their behalf. During the Spanish international adoption Solidarity

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boom, the funds received through the ngo’s association with the adoption agency represented a significant part of its budget. For the adoption agency, collaborating with this ngo was not simply a professional relationship, though that was an important part of it. It was also a social contribution. This kind of relationship with formal aid organizations is another possible way to express ties and debt to Peru. It may not be surprising that adoption agencies look for ways to formally contribute to associations in Peru, given the discourse that—as Calles put it—the best way to help needy children is to ‘‘contribute to a development organization.’’ But it is interesting that some adoptive parents also express their ethical stance toward the origins and e√ects of international adoption by building ties with Peru through development or philanthropy. My migrant friends told me that Elvira founded an association called Peruvian Ties soon after she adopted her daughter in the late 1990s.∞≠ Peruvian Ties, based in Elvira’s hometown in western Spain, exclusively focuses on volunteering and development in rural Peru. Its website describes the association as ‘‘a bridge between Peru and Spain.’’ Its goals include developing Spanish children’s stance of solidarity and contributing to social development for poor children, or those ‘‘who are victims of abandonment or terrorism,’’ in Peru. The organization’s statutes are divided between supporting Peru and its desire to raise awareness in Spain about underdevelopment, a project that, it is hoped, will lead to a progressive commitment among Spaniards to create positive social change around the world. I met Graciela, the adoptive mother who set up the group interview I discuss in chapters 2 and 3, through a mutual acquaintance who knew Graciela’s daughters. Graciela is well respected in the Spanish adoption community, which she has served through a leadership position in cora, Spain’s Federation of Adoption and Foster Care Associations. Graciela told me that she was one of the first Spaniards to adopt from Peru, completing her adoptions in the early 1990s (her daughters are now in their early twenties). She founded an association, Voyager, more than a decade ago in her small city outside of Madrid. In her case, after finding herself in an internationally adoptive relationship that was novel both to her and in the Spanish context, she began forging ties with other parents. She explained her motivation to me: ‘‘back then it was harder; those were the early years of international adoption and I didn’t get any kind of help at the o≈cial level from people who went there before me.’’ She wanted to mentor other prospective families, providing the support that she had not received. This 110

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trajectory corresponds to one identified by Diana Marre, who notes that adoptive-family associations and online forums appeared simultaneously with the first international adoptions in Spain, so that the parents in these novel families could educate and support one another, and so that their children would know others with similar experiences (2004; see also Jociles and Charro 2008; Howell 2002). As the adoptive families that Graciela united began to meet more regularly and exchange experiences and concerns for the children in their own children’s countries of origin, Voyager’s aims—like those of Peruvian Ties—soon expanded to encompass Peru and Peruvians. Voyager’s statutes now list several goals of the association, beginning with the wish to ‘‘contribute to the improvement of the sociocultural situation of children and youths in developing countries (via adoption, foster care, sponsorship, cooperation with institutions, etc.).’’ This statement presents adoption, philanthropy, and development work as comparable ways of aiding children, implying that adoption is indeed a way to help a needy child. The association’s remaining goals address both adoption (for instance, supporting prospective and new parents throughout the process and being vigilant about any irregularities) and marginalization within Spain, where the association wants to work in favor of the integration of youths ‘‘from other countries or marginal environments’’ through activities such as tutoring or outings. Graciela told me in 2012 that even during the economic crisis, Voyager has still managed to continue fundraising and it recently sent donations to Peru to help pay for physical therapy for disabled children. Such cases are unusual. Scholars who have written about international adoption have found to be more usual contributions to charities supporting the countries of origin (Dorow 2006, 277), contributions directly to members of adoptees’ birth families if they are known (Yngvesson 2010, 168; Dubinsky 2010, 126), or continuing correspondence with caregivers or children’s homes. Stories of associations such as Voyager and Peruvian Ties show that adoptions and international solidarity have the potential to be intimately linked, with the associations’ founders going beyond both a straightforward contribution to someone else’s charity and a private contribution solely to their own children’s birth families to innovate a form of implication that is both personal and far-reaching.∞∞ In both cases, the associations’ founders ultimately developed personal ties to migrants in Spain as well: Elvira and Lucy befriended some of the migrants I knew, and Graciela helped to bring Clara, the woman who assisted with her adoption many years before, to Spain. These friendships show that someSolidarity

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thing else is going on too: some adoptive parents are interested in befriending migrants and forging connections based on the national and ethnic origins of their children. Ecuadorian Friends and Latin Kings

A nanny is by definition older than the child cared for. Lucy’s migrant ‘‘cousins’’ are probably twice her age. Clara, who helped with Graciela’s adoptions, is older than Graciela’s children, whom she sees regularly and often gives guidance to. In other words, all of my previous examples are of migrants who are older than the adoptees they engage with and mentor. Relations between peers—between adoptees and migrants in the same age and social frame—raise more, and di√erent kinds of, anxieties. Some Catalan adoptive parents have reported ‘‘that their adolescent children began to make contact with immigrants from their country of origin, looking for ‘their people’ or seeking a sense of belonging, speaking like them and adopting their mode of dress. This attitude often includes a sense of solidarity similar to that experienced by their parents in the past’’ (Marre 2009c, 239–40).∞≤ The reference to immigrants, language, and attire obliquely symbolizes what is probably Spanish parents’ greatest fear about their Latin American–origin children: that they will join a gang. This fear is grounded in the way that—as one Peruvian migrant, worried about her Spanish-born nephew, told me—Latin gangs recruit based on phenotype: ‘‘They see that you’re Latino, South American and they find you and pressure you.’’ In Planell’s film, Pepe calls Manu’s recent uneven haircut a ‘‘latinking look’’ (Planell 2009, 21) (see fig. 5.1). It is a phrase that compactly, tidily evokes the ethnic di√erence between Manu and his parents and the father’s willingness to racially stereotype the son. Lucia tells Pepe that Manu’s just done it to get a rise out of him, but another parent later phones to reveal that bullies put gum in Manu’s hair, and so the do-it-yourself haircut is explained. The sinking feeling that the viewer gets, alongside the parents who misread the hair and assumed that their son was aligned with gangs rather than the victim of bullying, compresses the anxiety parents of Latin American children hold about the place of gangs in their children’s lives. In the present-day Spanish environment, many adoptive parents want to ensure that their children, who resemble Latinos, avoid getting caught up in the gang lifestyle so commonly associated with Latino youths. At the screening of the film I attended, Parrondo, the psychologist, spoke afterward about ‘‘how adopted 112

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kids relate to their ‘groups of origin’ [people from the same place as them]. Adoptive parents have a fear about what this relationship might be, and you can see that in the comment about the Latin Kings.’’∞≥ I heard more about this fear and the way it is expressed when I met with Laura Heckel, a Colombian adoptee involved with a recently formed association in Spain called La Voz de los Adoptados (The Voice of the Adopted).∞∂ The association is made up of adult adoptees, both domestic and international, and their supporters. As an advocate for young international adoptees, Laura had developed a set of talking points that she shared with new or inexperienced adoptive parents, both in everyday exchanges and in the formal presentations she and her peers make to adoptive-parent groups. The first thing she told me that she tells them is, ‘‘You had better be prepared for when the kid comes home with a girlfriend or boyfriend who is an immigrant or black.’’ Laura recalled an encounter with a worried mother who said, ‘‘My Colombian daughter only hangs out with Latinos and that’s not normal.’’ Laura asked the mother if the Latinos in question were drug addicts, gang members, troublemakers, or ‘‘just immigrants.’’ Her question sketched the clear and troubling lines of the roles available to people of Latin American origin in Spain. The mother responded ‘‘No, just immigrants, but it’s not normal.’’ Laura explained to her that it is indeed normal: adoptees want to see people who look like them; they want to belong.∞∑ The loaded term ‘‘normal’’ speaks volumes here. In the mother’s interpretation, a normal Spanish child should want to hang out with native Spanish children. And in Laura’s interpretation, it is normal to want to hang out with others who physically resemble you.∞∏ In both cases the term ‘‘normal’’ reveals what each speaker considered to be the trumping feature of children’s identity and therefore what makes them like someone else, what makes them resemble others: it is their Spanish culture and ethnicity in the mother’s view, and their racial otherness in Laura’s. Both of these qualities boil down to something like national substance, so in a sense both this mother and Laura share the position that young people ought to surround themselves with ‘‘like’’ people, a likeness that comes to stand in for other things. Laura invited me to attend one of her presentations to adoptive parents later that week. Right on cue, almost as if following the script she had outlined for me earlier, during the question-and-answer part of Laura’s presentation, a woman behind me raised her hand and asked whether South American adoptees ‘‘start to identify with street gangs when they reach adolescence.’’ Laura and her copresenter, a fellow adoptee, responded Solidarity

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that parents should not react to that possibility by saying, ‘‘You’re not like those kids in gangs. You’re good, they’re not.’’ This approach, they felt, would create a chasm between adoptees and migrant youths that could negatively a√ect the adoptees’ developing identities. Laura then spoke about her own brother, also of Colombian origin, who remarked a few years ago, ‘‘I’m not going to that disco because there’s a lot of sudacas there,’’ using a pejorative term for South Americans. She said that she replied to him, ‘‘Have you looked in a mirror lately?’’ Things have changed, and her brother now surrounds himself with South American friends and his Dominican girlfriend. To Laura this is positive and means that ‘‘he’s accepting where he’s from.’’ Like many in Spain, Laura equates being from South America with something you can see in the mirror.∞π Largely because of the hold that Latin gangs have on the Spanish imagination, Laura is quite unusual in perceiving an adoptee’s hanging out with South American youths as positive. Another reason parents might resist their adopted children hanging out with South Americans is that such camaraderie prevents the possibility of di√erentiating their children from other migrants. Some kids who were born to migrants in Spain also seek out immigrants as friends and partners, yet this is not perceived to be troubling by their parents. One ‘‘second-generation’’ youth chalked this up to the fact that ‘‘we have the same tastes, like the same foods, and we have Latino heritage, salsa dancing, things like that in common.’’ Both Diego and Gabriela’s family (described in the introduction) and Carmela’s family (introduced in chapter 1) had at least one adolescent child whom the parents considered to be potentially problematic because of developing a≈nities with immigrants. One sixteen-year-old adoptee I met, Pedro, was—in the words of Diego, his father—‘‘a real rebel. . . . He got involved with a group, a gang.’’ His mother, Gabriela, clarified: ‘‘Like a Latin King type.’’ Diego went on: ‘‘Yes, but it seems like he gave it up since he started going out with his girlfriend and became more centered.’’ Pedro’s girlfriend is the daughter of Peruvian immigrants, and she originally came to Spain through family reunification when she was ‘‘perhaps eight years old,’’ in Diego’s estimation. Diego explained that adoptees try to identify with their social milieu, and what that looks like in Spain right now is people without much culture, who haven’t put down roots, their families are uprooted or separated or unstable, and they’re problematic. And that attracts Pedro. He dresses—well, 114

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you didn’t see it today, but sometimes he puts on earrings, a bandana, and we tell him not to wear them, but I know he puts them on once he leaves the house. . . . Until just a few years ago, his friends were all Spanish. But now he looks in the mirror and he tries to identify with the others. And who are the others? Normally they are kids who have problems in school. To my surprise, Diego then ascribed Pedro’s involvement with immigrants to the presence of immigrants. He compared his family to another couple with Peruvian children that live in a northern Spanish city of about twenty-five thousand people and said that ‘‘they [the adopted children] don’t have as much trouble becoming integrated. There are fewer immigrants.’’ Later Carmela would make a similar observation about Peruvian adoptees in southern Spain, where there are fewer immigrants and those that do reside there don’t ‘‘form ghettoes’’ (on adoptees’ experiences in large, diverse, and impersonal cities, compare Hübinette and Tigervall 2009, 344). These statements suggest that parents feel the presence of immigrants makes things harder for adopted children. I could not tell whether this was because strangers assume that adopted children are actually the children of immigrants, creating the conditions for a painful misreading, or whether it creates a temptation and possibility for adoptees to a≈liate with immigrants. But it was also interesting that for Diego, immigrants were both the problem (the source of Pedro’s bad attitude) and the solution (a tempering influence o√ered by his migrant girlfriend), suggesting the potential for at least a partially positive evaluation of association with other immigrants, not unlike the one Laura had o√ered. It is di≈cult to ascertain to what extent the ‘‘sudden’’ desire to be among those who look like you aligns with demographic changes in Spain, and to what extent it springs somehow from the mysteries of adolescence. For Diego and other parents, if their children begin to seek out immigrant peers, it happens at adolescence when adopted children negotiate questions about their own abandonment and about racial di√erences within their families. As the anthropologist Christine Ward Gailey warns about the U.S. context, ‘‘Adolescents whose parents are inattentive to racism tend to fare ill in these identity-sorting years, having been reared to think of themselves as white and suddenly having to negotiate a world in which they are judged immediately on the basis of skin color’’ (2010, 51). There is something about adolescence that parents in Spain understand to be tied to the search for identity, not just in the sense of ‘‘who am I?’’ but in the Solidarity

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sense of seeking those who are identical in some important way. Gabriela added that adolescence was so much harder for adopted kids—that they go through all the usual challenges, but on top of that they face issues of identity and of reconciling what happened to them as children. ‘‘No one told us about this part,’’ she said. I commented on the ages of her children and proposed that the di≈cult phase would at least be over soon, and she said in a tone of half-joking desperation, ‘‘Really? Do you really think so?’’ The moment of adolescence, of coming of age, has been highlighted by other social scientists as a crucial time when young people revisit or make ‘‘fresh contact’’ with their ‘‘accumulated sociocultural heritage,’’ and come to make sense of it in new ways (Mannheim 1972, 368). This is a timely observation, because—as one social worker reminded me in 2012—this is when the bulk of internationally adopted kids, the ‘‘boomers,’’ are on the cusp of adolescence. The challenges observed by the ‘‘early adopters’’ such as Diego and Gabriela will only multiply in the years to come. Diego and Gabriela referred me to their friend Carmela, a pretty teacher with dark blond hair falling in waves to her shoulders. When we first met, I asked Carmela rather obliquely about the degree to which her children ‘‘identify with Peru.’’ Her reply suggested that she understood me to mean the extent to which they spend time with immigrants. Her daughter Jimena, an excellent student and very well adjusted, had not been particularly drawn to immigrants as friends, Carmela told me. However, Jimena did have a preference for Latino boys over Spanish boys. But Carmela felt that ‘‘this makes perfect sense! At fourteen, a Spanish boy is just a boy and he only cares about sports. A Latino boy acts much more grown up—even Spanish girls prefer Latinos at this age.’’ (This is of course not a universal preference; when Graciela told me her daughter was in a serious relationship, I asked automatically if the boy was from Peru. Graciela laughed and said her daughter would never stand for that because she thinks Latinos are too macho.) It is her eldest, Franklin, who at sixteen was rejecting school, dressing ‘‘in reggaetón styles’’ and drawn to Ecuadorians as friends. Carmela linked his di≈culties in school to his susceptibility to recruitment by ‘‘a group of Latinos,’’ which seemed like a veiled reference to gangs. Carmela said that she and her husband want to ‘‘detach’’ Franklin from this group, ‘‘because it’s not in his interests. Those kids have di√erent ways of life and they conflict with ours.’’ Her specific critique was that because migrant parents work such long hours, they do not supervise their children, nor do they forbid their daughters from having boyfriends. Two years later, Carmela 116

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caught me up with the latest news: their Ecuadorian neighbors had brought their children from Ecuador, meaning that Franklin was now just a stone’s throw away from young people who had lacked parental guidance while growing up and were now uprooted from their familiar context. The son of the family was particularly troublesome, periodically spending time in juvenile detention, and Carmela was so worried about Franklin’s growing friendship with the boy that she sent him away to stay with her aunt for the summer. Surely the oft-discussed Spanish experience of having immigrants flood into the neighborhood feels even more invasive for someone like Carmela, whose children share a resemblance with the immigrants’ children and who therefore feels that she must send her son away to protect him. It is a curious inversion: the Ecuadorian parents arrive, then their son arrives, then Carmela feels that she must send her son away. Perhaps it will not be long before Carmela will leave as well. Still, Carmela recognized the possibility that Franklin might be drawn to someone who looks like him or shares his national substance and a part of his history or identity. She thought that his interest in gangs was actually the way that he expresses his Latino identity, or connects with that part of himself. Carmela recounted the story of a Spanish friend of hers who married an Ecuadorian and whose daughter accordingly has ‘‘Latina features.’’ As a child the girl had no problems, but in high school, the students collectively began linking her to Latino groups and she began to experience racism. Carmela mused that it was probably like ‘‘when we travel abroad and see another Spanish person, we’ll talk to them; maybe a Latino who sees another Latino reaches out.’’ Her observation further grounds the idea that national or ethnic groups ‘‘naturally’’ seek one another out and want to spend time together, and that the extent to which the national substance is visible enables this.∞∫ Things seemed to head in opposite directions for Carmela’s son and Diego’s children. In 2012 Carmela told me with a visible pleasure that her son no longer hangs out with the Ecuadorian neighbors. Things got so bad at one point that she and her husband considered sending Franklin to Peru where he could ‘‘finally get grounded,’’ but they were advised by the adoption psychologist in Peru that he would have the same problem there that he has in Spain: with only low-wage work available he would end up unemployed and hanging out with troublemakers. So she put her foot down and got Franklin involved—first working, then vocational training, then volunteer work and church attendance. The influence of the Ecuadorians has been surpassed by a Peruvian friend Franklin made in the Solidarity

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vocational training class who works at a respectable Spanish restaurant chain and shows him other possibilities of how to be a Peruvian in Spain.∞Ω He also has had the positive experience of mentoring a young Peruvian adoptee in the youth group he volunteers with. And one day, Carmela marched Franklin into the barbershop and said that she wanted him to look handsome, and also for the police not to stop him in the street. So he no longer has a ‘‘Latin King haircut,’’ the same haircut that the parents in La vergüenza worried about: instead it’s ‘‘just a normal haircut,’’ and Franklin even likes it. But on my most recent visit with Diego and Gabriela they seemed more subdued. Pedro seemed to be doing all right, still with his migrant girlfriend, but his parents had new concerns: they had recently become grandparents via their teenaged daughter Consuelo and a young Peruvian migrant who had since returned to Peru. As Gabriela walked me to the metro station in the warm quiet night I asked her if she had any last observations to share with me about adoption. She said that, to be perfectly honest, speaking only from her own experience, she would not recommend it, and that she tells this to anyone who asks her. She elaborated: ‘‘I don’t think cultures should mix.’’ Although earlier in the evening she and Fernando had recalled choosing Peru so many years ago because they thought the language would be easier and the culture was similar; now she said that it is not the same culture: South Americans are di√erent. Especially Pedro and Consuelo, who, Gabriela said, only hang out with other South Americans. She concluded, ‘‘I often say that they’ve entered Spain, but Spain hasn’t entered them.’’ the latin kings are the dark side of national substance. They represent the possibility that young people, because of an ensemble of features ranging from the way they look to the way they sound that ultimately point back to a national origin in a Latin American country, are seen as natural conscripts. As they negotiate the racism that at times emerged, reflected o√ their national substance, some chose to channel their response into gang membership and others into more neutral forms of solidarity. Latin gangs are a real threat, and joining them has costs. Parents are legitimately concerned about their children’s potential gang involvement. But the frequent references to Latin gangs I collected suggest that there is something about their Latinness that makes them even more of a threat to adopted youths who do not have a lot of other opportunities to associate 118

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with people who, as Laura put it, look like them. Partly, I found gangs to be a sort of proxy through which adoptive parents express anxiety about their children identifying with immigrants or with Peruvians. But I also think that interest in gangs is a way that adopted youths of Latin American origin manifest their growing sense that there are few easy or natural ways forward for them. This is in part because most of the people who ‘‘look like them’’ live across the ocean in the country they came from. It is also partly because of class and spatial segregation within Madrid, where adoptees (just as some children of migrants) may be some of the only Latin-origin children in their classrooms. And finally, it is because in many cases the idea of solidarity that grounds (in a contested fashion) many adoptions is itself a proxy for wanting to help in a safe way, rather than wanting a sustained and messy relationship with a country that is, or a group of people who are, in some way marginalized. I don’t mean to say that only friendships between adoptees or their parents and migrants from Peru are real, authentic solidarity and that all other forms of engagement are just phony attempts to look like a good person. I have recounted here a range of expressions of solidarity: employing a conational, as seen in the fictional example of Pepe and Lucia’s hiring of a Peruvian nanny for Manu; founding associations to contribute to development in Peru and seeking intercultural connections within Spain alongside friendships with Peruvian migrants, as seen in the case of Graciela and her daughters or Elvira and her daughter; and, most provocatively, Franklin’s tentative seeking out of an Ecuadorian neighbor. Each of these expressions of solidarity are ways in which adoptive parents, or adoptive migrants, are working out the implications of relocating a young Peruvian into a Spain populated with a sizable contingent of Peruvian labor migrants and out of a Peru where poverty and neocolonial race relations contribute to produce adoptable children and large numbers of immigrants. An alternative interpretation of these encounters between adoptive families and Peruvian migrants or Peruvians in Peru is that, however laudable their actions, connections produced based on national and ethnic origin are nonetheless somewhat conservative. Kinship scholars make much of the fact that transnational adoption creates expanded forms of kinship, both through adoption itself and through the kin-like connections that adoptive families make with others like them. As the sociologist Heather Jacobson notes, though, it is that very expansion of kinship to Solidarity

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others ‘‘like them’’ that reinscribes the centrality of racial and national similarity to kinship (2008, 174). Indeed, the forging of ties with people from a child’s country of origin can play up the notion of national substance, and in so doing locate ethnicity and nationality as central in a relationship that is by its very nature supposed to transcend both—a transracial, transnational family. I think, however, that this interpretation does not take full account of the work that adoptive parents, adoptees, and other migrants are doing in seeking out points of contact with others who resemble them. This is because we have to analyze their actions within the context in which they unfold. All of these people are living in a Spain where everyday racist encounters are common—epitomized by one infamous incident where a Spanish youth kicked an Ecuadorian woman in the face on the Barcelona subway, a violent encounter captured by the subway’s security cameras and distributed widely on YouTube.≤≠ Similarly, they live in a Madrid where ‘‘Latin gangs’’ are an object of common fear and loathing. In that context, for adoptive families to seek points of commonality with migrants rather than to take the line ‘‘adoptees are not immigrants’’ is an ambivalent stance, one that is simultaneously progressive and conservative. To disregard the significance of national substance—to pretend that racial and national similarities do not exist and do not matter in the contemporary world—would be to reinscribe the ‘‘color-blind’’ adoptive stance that scholars have critiqued, identifying it as fear of the idea that ‘‘discussing racism will somehow make the child obsess about race and, in keeping with that fear, reject the adoptive parents’’ (Gailey 2010, 36). Building on their conception of what a child’s national substance represents, Spanish parents develop the idea that their child shouldn’t be the only one of his or her kind. Encounters that would otherwise be unusual are encouraged, but simultaneously the idea of ‘‘kind’’ is produced, as the child is slotted in alongside other people of Peruvian origin. Perhaps the production of links of solidarity also partly mitigates the negative links, epitomized by the possibility of gang a≈liation. That is, perhaps o√ering help through employment or development translates to a position of superiority and a lessening of any risk of joining gangs. It is also worth pointing out that most of these tentative expressions of solidarity or ethical engagements with the migrant ‘‘other’’ are initiated from one side only: adopted children or parents seek out migrants or Peruvians, but the initiative does not flow in the other direction. In that way, solidarity is still a one-way street. 120

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It is not di≈cult to generate a critique of adoption, based on the way that children—a country’s human resources—flow from south to north. Such a flow recapitulates everything we know about extractive economies and the larger political economic context that gives rise to adoption in the first place: adoptees are relocated from underdeveloped nations to developed ones, materializing a national hierarchy with their transnational movements. But some parents take this kind of macropolitical analysis and use it to ground a rethinking of development, a philanthropic stance, a reinterpretation of migrants as having positive roles, or a strategic relocation of children in order to reinforce their Spanish sides. The way that adoptive parents, and eventually their children, negotiate the stark disparities between Peru and Spain on one hand and Peruvian migrants and adopted children in Spain on the other constitutes adoptive families’ ethical engagement with geopolitical and globalized inequalities. Adoption ethics are worked out not only in the geopolitical framework but also in the di√erent possibilities that Spaniards perceive for potential connections and engagement between adoptive and other migrants.

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Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian culture, ethnicity, and race

‘‘Let’s try not to base our decisions on stereotypes about the minor’s physical appearance,’’ Antonio Calles, a lawyer for Madrid’s Department of Children and Families (Instituto Madrileño del Menor y la Familia, immf), urged the audience at an information session for prospective adoptive parents in Madrid in 2011. ‘‘That cute little black baby is going to grow into a big black man.’’ At that moment, the forty white attendees burst into (uncomfortable) laughter for the first and only time during the otherwise intensely serious two-hour session. Calles later added, ‘‘Adoption is visible to outsiders. As parents, we have to be able to deal with that.’’ As Carmela, mother to three Peruvian children, told me, ‘‘You’ve got to make your kids strong. When they’re little everyone notices them because they’re so cute.’’∞ It was true—a great-aunt sitting next to me at a bar one afternoon, unsolicited, told me about her nephew who adopted a smart, cute waif from China, whom she sometimes picks up from school. Yet, as they get older, international adoptees who resemble immigrants become less cute and more threatening to many native Spaniards. The older adoptees get, the more likely it is that they could move unaccompanied by a white family member through the streets of Madrid. That absence of a white kinsperson to help ‘‘place’’ the young person of color as an adoptee makes all the di√erence. A recent article in the Spanish news reported on an experience that must be very common among the thousands of Chineseorigin girls who now live in Spain: Lucia ‘‘sometimes goes to a store run by Chinese and feels uncomfortable because she was once mistaken for a

salesgirl. If you ask her whether she feels identified when she goes to a store like this or a Chinese restaurant, she says she feels ‘afraid.’ ’’≤ At this stage in the global ‘‘boom’’ of international adoption, as Spanish adoptees are transitioning into adolescence, the fear of misrecognition is no longer one held by parents who think they will not be seen as parents (Anagnost 2000, 396). Instead it is held by parents who fear that their children will be seen as immigrants. Carmela made her son cut his hair because she didn’t want the police to stop him in the street. This was not an idle fear; it was something that had actually happened before, and because her kids had made the innocent mistake of imagining that they were just hanging out in their own neighborhood, they didn’t have their ids with them. They did not yet realize that any setting is one where they may be formally challenged to identify themselves. Or informally—Carmela also recounted a time where she was walking with her husband, and their kids were up ahead. Separated by a few paces from their parents, the siblings paused to admire a car just long enough for its owner to snap, ‘‘What are you doing?’’ Another adoptive mom, Graciela, reminded her daughter: ‘‘In the supermarket it [misrecognition] happens when you’re with me and they don’t see me.’’ Sandra agreed with her: ‘‘My mom is behind me and they say, ‘we’ll ring her up separately.’ ’’ Her mother finished the thought: ‘‘It’s as if she is an immigrant and I am a separate person, and I say ‘no, she’s my daughter.’ ’’ Each of these brief examples highlights the way that race is talked about in the international adoptive context. Adoption is visible—outsiders notice the children—and they are periodically challenged by everyone from police to property owners to supermarket clerks. But only the adoption professional mentioned race outright, drawing nervous laughter at his mention of a big black man. There are two opposed ways that adoptive parents and their children can address the racially motivated mistreatment that is anticipated to fall upon their children. Both are political. The historian Karen Dubinsky argues that transracial adoption in the 1950s ultimately led to the politicization of white parents who watched ‘‘their children move from cute ‘raceless’ babies to youngsters exposed to adultsize racism’’ (2010, 75). The implication is that seeing one’s child treated in a racist fashion can lead to antiracist activism. An alternative to this sort of politicization is to draw careful lines between one’s child and those racially di√erent people he or she is being mistaken for. Arguing that one’s child is not an immigrant does not require working against racism on behalf of immigrants. It instead requires demonstrating the ways in which Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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one’s child is not like those others. In the words of the Finnish social scientist and adoptive parent Anna Rastas, ‘‘Reinforcing di√erences between di√erent racialized and oppressed groups does not help children. It only makes it more di≈cult for them to forge alliances that could be important in their everyday struggles against racism’’ (2009, 39). These two sets of options are available for youths as well: becoming activists or aligning themselves with immigrants, on one hand, or rejecting immigrants and becoming racist, on the other. In Spain, race and culture are tightly merged. Transracial adoption has been criticized for condemning children of color to grow up in families that are unable, despite their best e√orts and strong desire, to teach those children the skills they will need to ‘‘survive in a racist society,’’ as the ‘‘Position Statement on Trans-Racial Adoption’’ by the U.S. National Association of Black Social Workers put it in 1972 (Bremner 1974, 777). O≈cials in Colombia indicated to a Spanish reporter that transracial adoption to Spain poses such concerns, so much so that Spanish applicants are typically assigned ‘‘children with lighter skin; those with darker skin can be assigned to other European countries with fewer prejudices.’’≥ We see this in the ways that adoptee and migrant visibility is highlighted, in the steps that adopted and other migrant youths and their families take to highlight their Peruvianness, and in the ways that they can also attenuate or even erase their Peruvianness. Adopted and other migrants’ experiences show how the politics of identity for adopted youths involve understandings of race and nation, and can provide a novel perspective on ideas about immigrant integration. Racialized Visibility

A decade ago in Peru, I listened to a radio interview between a dj in Ayacucho and the director of adoptions in the city. The adoption director explained that ‘‘it is truly comforting how they [foreigners] take in our children. They don’t care about race, color . . .’’ Here the dj interjected, ‘‘Color, right? We’re exotic for the gringos. With our ugliness, our color and everything, they really like us—they really like us in Europe.’’ The director’s secretary later o√ered a contrasting opinion. She told me that while Chinese adoptions bring to Spain children who look di√erent because of their ‘‘yellow skin and small eyes,’’ Peruvian children look more like Spaniards, so their parents can decide whether or not to tell them that they are adopted, and so people don’t comment on or make fun of their 124

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di√erence. In both cases, sta√ at Ayacucho’s adoption o≈ce conveyed their belief that race was not an issue for adopted Peruvians in Europe. Spanish adoptive parents are also highly optimistic about the ease with which a new child can be incorporated into their lives: as the psychologist Ana Berástegui argues, they are ‘‘unaware of the real problems that ethnically di√erent people face in terms of integration into our country, and they never equate the experiences immigrants may have with those that adopted children may have in terms of social integration’’ (2006, 7; see also Múgica 2008, 102). The infamous ‘‘where-are-you-from-originally’’ question (Beck 2006, 165), addressed to people who don’t resemble the asker’s ideal of a fellow citizen of fill-in-the-blank nation, demands that perceived ethnicity align with our understandings of nations as coherent bounded entities. The question is rooted in what Heather Jacobson calls ‘‘interracial surveillance’’ (2008, 148), and its answer fuses nation and other aspects of identity in an articulation of national substance. Directing that question to the child of migrants causes vexation, because while—to take one example— Lucas was born in Spain, he and other children of migrants I spoke to will still often answer ‘‘Peru,’’ because they know what the question really means. As Lucas put it, ‘‘If I say I’m Spanish, people don’t believe me. I tell them, really, I’m serious; I am Spanish. I know how to speak like a Peruvian and like a Spaniard, so if someone asks me ‘where are you from?’ I say, ‘I’m Spanish,’ and I speak like a Spaniard and they begin to believe me.’’ In other words, his linguistic abilities work against the assumptions that people make based on his phenotype. Another young man who was born in Spain, Jaime, told me, ‘‘When they ask me I say I am Spanish. They ask me, ‘what part of South America are you from?’ Because if you just look at me, I’m dark; I don’t look Spanish. So sometimes I say Peru and that’s the end of it.’’ I pressed: ‘‘Are you from Peru?’’ He replied, ‘‘I’m not from Peru, I was born in Spain.’’ His mother, Naldi, chimed in: ‘‘But your genes. They’re Peruvian. Your blood,’’ she continued. ‘‘ . . . I suppose it’s Peruvian,’’ he answered. I asked Jaime if he thought an adoptee might have similar experiences to his, and he said yes: In my school there’s a Peruvian guy who is adopted, he was one or two when he was adopted. Compared with the other kids, he doesn’t stand out much, he . . . it’s like he’s just another Spanish guy; you don’t notice him. I mean, he is dark and so on, you can tell Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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he’s South American, but just looking at him you don’t ask ‘‘where are you from?’’ Compared with the Latinos here, who are more assertive and alert, he’s just kind of introverted. I asked someone where he was from and they told me, ‘‘he’s Peruvian.’’ The teacher told me he was Spanish, but this other person said, ‘‘no, he’s adopted.’’ His aunt said, ‘‘Maybe it’s his character. Or his parents, you know, that influences him.’’ Jaime responded, ‘‘His parents are really old. I saw them the other day and they looked like grandparents! With all due respect.’’ Naldi added, ‘‘Maybe they couldn’t have kids and adopted him.’’ In the conversation between Jaime and his mother and aunt, ideas about adoption, nation, and heritage flowed freely: just as his blood and genes give Jaime his Peruvian national substance, in the family’s interpretation, such material also gives the adopted boy a ‘‘character’’ distinct from that of his ‘‘really old’’ parents. And yet his quiet demeanor doesn’t resemble other assertive Latinos Jaime knows. Adopted children have in a sense the opposite problem as do the Spainborn children of migrants: their race and national origin do align (‘‘I am from Peru,’’ they could reply guilelessly, if they wanted to), but almost everything else about them is Spanish. This is a form of racialization that shows up as a ‘‘constant bombardment of questions regarding the national, regional, ethnic and racial origin of the adoptees’’ (Hübinette and Tigervall 2009, 344; see also Dubinsky 2010, 69). Carmela, an adoptive mother, put it even more bluntly, saying that both migrants and adoptees share the condition of ‘‘nunca eres español’’ (you’re never Spanish), in the sense that native, white Spaniards always wonder where the migrants and adoptees are from. One adoptee, Juan, recounted to me his version of the ‘‘where are you from’’ question: ‘‘When our family is out together, people notice, because it’s unusual, and they ask you, ‘where are you from?’ You say, ‘I’m from Spain,’ you say, ‘I love Madrid,’ and they say, ‘but were you born here?’ And you say, ‘No, I’m adopted, blah blah blah . . . ’ ’’ But when I asked twelve-year-old Tina, ‘‘If someone asks you where you are from, what would you answer?’’ she responded, ‘‘Peru.’’ Her mother Beatriz chimed in, ‘‘And if they tell you you’re Spanish?’’ ‘‘Fine.’’ ‘‘ ‘Fine,’ ’’ her mother mocked gently with a laugh. I said that Tina seemed, basically, Spanish to me, in everything except where she was born. Beatriz agreed, noting, ‘‘When I do taxes, her place of birth is Peru, her nationality Spain. In the United States when you fill out the forms there are little boxes for 126

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race or ethnicity, ‘white, black, Asian, Hispanic,’ and they don’t have that here; they don’t care.’’ Spanish tax agents may be uninterested in Tina’s race or ethnicity. But at an immediate, local level, Tina knows that when a stranger asks her where she is from, it is a question meant to make sense of the racialized disconnect between her body and her surroundings. Tina’s mother raised the issue of ‘‘race or ethnicity.’’ What is ‘‘ethnicity’’? Too often we use it in everyday conversation as a euphemism for ‘‘race,’’ a more polite or delicate way to frame it, like ‘‘gender’’ sometimes serves as code for ‘‘sex’’ in sentences like ‘‘Are you going to find out the baby’s gender?’’ But scholars working on transracial adoption in Europe have summarily dismantled the idea that these adoptees are ethnically di√erent: although they look di√erent from their parents, those who came to Europe at a young age clearly share their parents’ ethnicity (Hübinette and Tigervall 2009, 340). Under such circumstances, the European tendency to describe adoptees’ ‘‘ethnic’’ (rather than ‘‘racial’’) identity ‘‘is arguably a mechanism for avoiding engagement . . . with practices of racial discrimination that a√ect adopted children’’ (Yngvesson 2010, 202 n. 13). Similarly, ‘‘culture’’ is also sometimes an encoded way to refer to racial di√erences, but the same children likely share their adoptive parents’ culture as well. As Diana Marre has argued, ‘‘international adoption creates a multiracial society that is not really multicultural’’ (2009c, 238).∂ It is the concept of national substance that allows nation of origin to stand in for biologized and other features like race.∑ Describing race with the term ‘‘culture’’ responds in part to the widespread claim that Spain is not a racist country. It is uncommon to talk about race in Spain (del Olmo 2004). People talk about culture when they are referring to issues that are more accurately described as racialized. When I write of ‘‘race,’’ I follow anthropologists in the United States who use the term to refer not to anything inherent in one’s physical or biological aspect but rather ‘‘an ideology about human di√erences.’’∏ So as the Spanish anthropologist Carlos Giménez Romero argues, in Spain, ‘‘everything is explained by culture, di√erence is exaggerated’’ (2008, 113–14). One consequence of talking about race with the word ‘‘culture’’ is that it conveys the idea that ‘‘culture appears to be heritable’’ (Marre 2009c, 226), a ‘‘proxy for race’’ (Jacobson 2008, 109). The Spanish researchers María Jociles and Cristina Charro have argued that ‘‘experts don’t clearly distinguish between the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘culture of origin,’ so that culture of origin sometimes appears as biologized . . . unavoidable’’ (2008, 117). The term ‘‘second-generation migrants’’ stems from the same sort of Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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place. The phrase encodes a sense that migrant status itself is inherited, so that the children of migrants, rather than being Spanish, instead bear the legal or social status of their parents. At the same time, of course, like the ideology of race itself, and rooted within it, the idea of migrant status as heritable has real social consequences for these children. ‘‘Second generation’’ is code for racially di√erent youths. I noticed this when a Fulbright sta√ member remarked to me that it is in the second generation where immigration really stands out as a problem, because while adult migrants are generally accepted as workers, Spanish parents are deeply concerned about their children attending school with foreigners. In this observation, ‘‘foreigners’’ is code for racially di√erent, since logically second-generation youths are not legally foreigners. In this context national substance is ‘‘the new race’’—it is something that is inherited, perpetuating unequal categories. Like adopted youths, the ‘‘second generation’’ may be misread as migrant ‘‘others’’ by white Spanish natives and asked for id by police at the metro stations. Both age at time of arrival and citizenship status matter as a young person grows into adulthood. So too, as the misreading of both adoptees and second-generation youths as ‘‘not Spanish’’ shows, do questions of race and ethnicity, glossed as heritage or origin. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall has developed a model of cultural and ethnic identity that captures the crucial sense of permanence entailed in Spanish and Peruvian conceptualizations of national substance. As Hall explains, there is a widely held notion of what cultural identity is—that is, ‘‘one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self,’ . . . which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common’’ (1990, 223). Similarly, ethnicities represent themselves as ‘‘perfectly natural’’; Hall’s example is ‘‘born an Englishman, always will be,’’ and he asks rhetorically, ‘‘What is the point of an identity if it isn’t one thing?’’ (1997, 175, my emphasis).π Yet Hall also argues that identity is simultaneously something that we believe to be ‘‘that stable core of the self, unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change’’ (1996, 3) and something that is never complete but always becoming, produced, and created through comparing, narrating, and drawing on historical, linguistic, and cultural resources (4).∫ In Spain the form that such cultural resources take is pointedly biologized. Resources such as biologized culture, ideas about the importance of language, and retellings of history all get taken up and newly circulated by migrant parents and adoptive parents, for whom culture is a valued possession they want to instill in their children. Following Hall, I treat this 128

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notion of Peruvian cultural identity and national substance as simultaneously something seen as stable and essential, and something that is constantly and laboriously produced by those who value and participate in it. For both migrant and adoptive parents, developing their children’s sense of Peruvian culture can be a source of strength and resilience when those children are faced—as they ultimately, inevitably will be—with racializing and racist treatment. Producing Ties to Peru

Esteban, an adolescent migrant I spoke with, told me that migrants ‘‘come here to work for their children, to get them educated, to help them in everything they can and then, when their kids have a job or are studying or whatever, then the parents can relax and go home [to Peru] and live calmly. . . . So my mother, and many like her, want to return.’’ Indeed, scholars investigating family migration have shown that children are a central reason for migrating (see Leinaweaver 2010; Orellana et al. 2001; Pribilsky 2001). A concern or drawback of displacing their children—as parents like César articulated for me (discussed in chapter 2)—is that the children may integrate too successfully and lose something that, in the parents’ view, is important. Esteban continued his train of thought by adding, ‘‘I . . . well, I will also go back to Peru, but on vacation, to get to know it and find out what’s there.’’ His plans to remain in Spain and his sense that he doesn’t know a lot about Peru are evidence that migrants’ anxiety about cultural loss is not wholly misplaced. I saw migrants’ formalized preoccupation with their children’s culture when I interviewed Susana, the director of Juntas, a Latin American women’s association. Susana told me her association’s position: that migration is hard on children who are made more vulnerable through the separation of families. Cultural knowledge and practices, she explained, are a form of strength, a source of resilience, for those vulnerable youths. Susana said that most migrants’ associations in Spain revolve around the arts and culture, and that the aim of Juntas is to encourage these associations to actively and purposefully incorporate young people so that they begin to truly identify with their cultures (see fig. 6.1.). The folkloric model of cultural identification that Juntas espoused had a counterpart in the personal experience of Susana’s son. Susana described her eighteen-year-old son, Lucas, to me as ‘‘100 percent Peruvian,’’ because she and her husband are both Peruvian, although Lucas was born in Spain. Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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figure 6.1. The children of migrants performing as part of the Peruvian Inti Raymi festivities in Madrid. Photo by author, 2010.

She remarked that, in fact, he used to tell people that he was from Spain, his birthplace, but now he tells them he is from Peru. Susana told me that Lucas has gravitated toward Peruvian friends, girlfriends, and even accent as he has moved through adolescence. At seventeen, he wanted to obtain his Peruvian National Identity Document, something required of seventeenyear-old Peruvians living in Peru. So she took him to the consulate to formally apply for the document. When he received word that it was ready, he went to the consulate by himself to retrieve it, and immediately sent Susana a text message that read ‘‘ahora soy peruano’’ (now I am Peruvian). Lucas was also rewarded for finishing high school by getting to go to Peru by himself for the first time, where—according to his mother—he ‘‘sees all his cousins and se peruaniza [he Peruvianizes].’’ Although similar demands for cultural identification are often placed upon adopted youths from Peru, the meanings ascribed to those ties are somewhat di√erent. Parents are repeatedly told by adoption professionals that it is in the child’s interests to maintain a positive sense of Peru’s importance (for the same position in Flanders, see De Graeve 2010, 369). This is a position partly grounded in the testimonies of adult adoptees, especially those from Korea, who insist that ‘‘isolation from birth culture and forced assimilation into whiteness has been damaging to their own 130

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self-esteem and to relations with their families’’ (Jacobson 2008, 68). In Madrid, at a talk I attended by two adult adoptees and activists titled ‘‘The Search for Origins as Identity Construction,’’ an audience member asked the speakers what they would have wanted their parents to do di√erently. They responded ‘‘to speak about our origins from the very beginning, rather than speaking about adoption or about our life since adoption.’’ Professionals shared this opinion. For example, Calles, who led the immf talk I went to, said there that parents should respect the children’s countries, customs, and origins, in order to help them construct their identity. This attitude can also be seen in any random cross section of statements by adoption professionals, so I o√er a few instances plucked from the pages of Spanish texts. For instance, the Instituto Universitario de la Familia (University Institute of the Family), associated with the Pontifical Comillas University in Madrid, has developed extensive teaching materials for incorporating international adoption into the classroom. In a high school lesson plan published for use with the film La vergüenza in a magazine produced by the education, psychology and social work departments, the instructors propose that the students reflect on this theme: ‘‘In the film, Pepe complains that Manu’s caregiver doesn’t sing him any songs from Peru, their shared homeland. How do you think it would help Manu to know the music from his homeland and maintain his roots?’’ (Gutiérrez and Pereira 2011, 4). In another example, a Chinese diplomat asked Spanish adoptive parents to ‘‘maintain the child’s cultural roots, because even though it is true that the children are very happy here, sometimes they forget to learn Chinese and they forget the Chinese culture; I hope that in the future they study Chinese for their own good and for the development of Sino-Iberian relations.’’Ω The result of this repeated emphasis is that ‘‘the vast majority of adoptive parents are convinced of the need to maintain some kind of link with their children’s country of origin, at least during early childhood’’ (Marre 2004; see also Yngvesson 2003). And many of them do so.∞≠ The Peruvian reporter Yolanda Vaccaro wrote the story of a Madrid couple who adopted three Peruvian children and who told her, ‘‘We love the country. . . . We do as much as we can to make sure that the children keep in touch with their roots [mantengan contacto con sus raíces]. We always buy them Peruvian books, books about Peru. Most recently we got an encyclopedia about Peru and we ordered some cds of marinera, Peru’s national dance.’’∞∞ And Diego told me that when the Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez performed in Madrid, he invited his children to go, but, sadly, they had no interest, and Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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‘‘only want to listen to rap.’’ The perpetual parental lament about a child’s di√erent and unseemly musical tastes is transmuted, in the case of international adoption, into a concern about a child’s lack of connection to his or her origins. This strategy of inviting a child to partake of ‘‘the culture’’ of his or her national origin is done with the best of intentions, responding to the insistence of adoptive professionals and the narratives of adult adoptees. But it has some interesting side e√ects that tie back to the regular and insistent racialization of transnational adoptees. As Katrien De Graeve has written about the adoption of black Ethiopian children in Flanders, Belgium, ‘‘Adoptive parents state that they realize their child is prone to racialization and discrimination. They say that this inspires them to develop strategies to empower the child against it. Remarkably enough the parents indicate that their major strategy consists of giving the child pride in [his or her] own (i.e. Ethiopian) culture. It could be argued that although meant as a strategy against stigmatization, the parents’ cultural labour is at the same time stressing the impossibility of a black person’s becoming Flemish’’ (2010, 371; see also Jacobson 2008, 72–74). The emphasis on Peruvian culture, in a context where race is downplayed and culture is biologized, may carry a similar subtext both for adoptees and for other migrants. What is glossed in migrant parents’ discourse as a loss of knowledge contrasts with adoptive professionals’ and parents’ discussions of the maintenance of roots. This contrast manifests in some shared and other divergent approaches to instilling the culture of a distant land into children. Language in the case of Chinese adoptees and folklore like music and dance in the case of Latin Americans are both significant symbolically, but as parts of an everyday experience or exposure, they seem relegated to the margins. A language class or an encyclopedia about Peru isolates the culture into a containable, safe field. The exhortation to retain the child’s culture, one grounded in child-development theories about what will help a racially di√erent child form an identity, is complied with, but it is maintained at a safe distance. If adoptive parents over-emphasize the significance of their child’s ‘‘birth culture’’ they risk highlighting the ways in which they and their children are di√erent, which include racialized ways (Volkman 2003:42). They must simultaneously express love for Peru, as the couple interviewed by Vaccaro did, to remind the children and themselves of a common ground that they share. It is the preemptive

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strengthening of the adoptive bond by co-opting or incorporating a mutual a√ection for the country of origin. Laura, the Colombian adoptee and adoption activist, told me that until about five years ago, adoption professionals in Spain charged with determining whether people were suitable parents instructed those parents not to talk about the other mother, ‘‘that it would be confusing to have more than one, and so to diminish the birth mother.’’ She followed this by relating that she was shocked to hear the results of a recent study that a third of parents don’t tell their internationally adopted kids where they are from.∞≤ That Laura would link a silence about the birth mother with a silence about the nation of origin is telling. As the fact and act of adoption fade into the past and the everyday lived reality of being a parent and a child takes over, parents may encourage or permit their children to let any ties with Peru fade away too—perhaps because of the way that ties to more than one country can symbolize ties to more than one mother or father. One very focused, and perhaps safer, way that roots are ‘‘maintained’’ is in the decision to retain or change part or all of the child’s name (Anagnost 2000, 407–8). When I did research in Peru on adoption I had been struck by the importance the adoption coordinator placed on retaining the child’s original first name (Leinaweaver 2008b, 38). During the first adoption to Spain that I witnessed in Peru, the social worker happily told the orphanage director, ‘‘[The baby will] keep his own name’’ (emphasis mine), a name that had been given to him by the orphanage sta√ after they encountered him on their doorstep. One Spanish father, Sergio, clearly agreed that this was a significant choice. He told me, ‘‘We believe this is absolutely essential. . . . We thought that kids who are adopted, the only thing they have that’s theirs, theirs, theirs is their life and the name that has been given to them. So we can’t take that name from them.’’ He added that it was fortunate that their son wasn’t named something like—plucking one from thin air—Rigoberto, which, he said, is viewed as a rather unattractive name in Spain. They liked the name that had been given to their son, Nelson—he was probably named after the doctor who delivered him, Sergio added. But when I came across more than one parent in Spain who had changed their child’s name, it made an impression on me because it contrasted so starkly with what I had come to understand was the norm. In one case the mother explained that she just didn’t like the child’s name, and had changed it to the name she always wanted for her child. In several other cases,

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parents had transformed the names but not replaced them completely. So, for example, one child’s name, Simón, was left unchanged, but his Basque parents call him Ximun. Nicolás, adopted domestically by Raquel, was originally named Nikolai.∞≥ As Sergio had, Raquel mentioned to me that her son had been delivered by a doctor named Nikolai, which I understood as pointing to the fact that his name was not a meaningful tie to his family or nation of origin, but only to the immediate context of his birth, so it was acceptable to change his name. Even so, she simply changed it to the Spanish version of the name. In one last example, Diego and Gabriela changed the names of their two sons because the boys themselves (older upon adoption) had asked them to do so, but they insisted that the boys each ‘‘at least keep one of their names, as a keepsake.’’ So Richard formally became Pedro Richard, though he goes only by Pedro, and Jhonathan Enrique became Juan Enrique.∞∂ As Diego said, ‘‘We kept his name for him [le hemos conservado su nombre] in case he wants to use it one day.’’ In each of these examples, both for migrant and adopted youths, the idea is that the parents are creating, to the best of their ability, conditions of possibility for the children to form or maintain links to Peru. This suggests that ties to Peru are valued, at least among parents and parenting professionals, and that if parents did not create these links, their children wouldn’t bother. This idea that they might want to use their birth names someday—that the name is an important keepsake—begs the question: why don’t they want to use them now? Or, more to the point, why might youths of Peruvian origin want to downplay or even erase parts of their pasts? Avoiding Culture and (or of) Poverty

Two Spanish anthropologists separately suggested to me that it would be interesting if I followed a narrower research design that explicitly compared Peruvians who maintain ties to Peru with those who—as one put it—‘‘decide not to nourish those ties so that their child assimilates.’’ While I agree that this could be fascinating, I think it would be a challenge to track down a negative: ‘‘please contact me if you are not interested in being identified as Peruvian!’’ Ultimately I decided it was more plausible simply to view the very suggestion itself as another data point about Spanish ideals of integration. Yet, despite my initial focus on the Peruvianness of these children, I managed to find several who had very little interest in Peru. 134

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For example, at thirteen, Karla wants nothing to do with Peru. ‘‘It’s the place where she was abandoned,’’ her mother, Marcia, explained to me. When Karla’s younger sister invited her to watch a tv program about Peru, Karla retorted, ‘‘What do you want me to love about Peru? I’m not interested.’’∞∑ Marcia insisted that she go back to Peru someday to learn about it, but Karla has so far proved resistant. Karla’s story is not so uncommon among the adoptive families I came to know in Spain: the desire to retrace steps to the country of origin and to constantly save a place for it within an inner map of a child’s identity is a project of the parent more than it is one of the child. Such children receive mixed messages: you are Spanish, yet you should be interested in Peru (but not so interested that you go hang out with or date Peruvian immigrants, is the implication). It is this double identity that characterizes the young transnational children of Peruvian origin growing up in a rapidly aging, depopulating Spain. There are two features of Karla’s attitude toward Peru that I want to explore here: first, the sense that it is a place where bad things happened to her and where bad things happen more generally, and second, her framing of her attitude toward Peru as disinterest, which can transmute into an active rejection in other cases. It is di≈cult to extricate these from one another in the narratives I collected—kids’ disinterest in Peru is thoroughly enmeshed with their parents’ evaluations of what Peru might mean for their children. But each narrative had moments that highlighted the negative characteristics of Peru and others that described the everyday stance of disinterest or rejection, so I can analyze them separately while recognizing that they are part and parcel of the same experience. ‘‘It’s the place where she was abandoned,’’ Marcia said about Karla to explain her lack of interest in Peru. This was the same kind of explanation that Diego and Gabriela gave me to explain the rejection expressed by their oldest son, Juan. Diego, like Marcia, mentioned Peru’s mediated appearance as a trigger for his son’s refusal: ‘‘Often something about Peru will come on tv —like a report about Machu Picchu and Cuzco, and we all come to watch.’’ But Juan, the oldest, does not, and Diego ascribed Juan’s disinterest in Peru to the fact that he had su√ered so much there. He had been seriously malnourished at the time of his adoption: ‘‘It must have hurt him so much to be abandoned, that he didn’t want to eat. . . . In the children’s home, he was a child who let himself go [se dejaba morir], he was really thin, he didn’t eat. For him, his life began here.’’ So for Diego, Juan’s lack of interest in Peruvian culture is directly tied to the fact that, for Juan, ‘‘his life, because of the circumstances he was in, began when he came to Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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Spain.’’ Nonetheless, Diego makes an e√ort: ‘‘I tell them, you have a culture. . . . It’s that they su√ered so much there, it’s something they want to put aside, as if it didn’t exist. But I think they’ll come back to it when they are older.’’ Another father, Sergio, compared his son’s first trip back to Peru to ‘‘the soldier who goes back to Vietnam after the war, twenty years later, you know? ‘After what happened to me here, the memories . . . ’ I don’t mean to say Nelson’s are negative memories, because he didn’t really have memories at that age, but . . .’’ While for some adopted youths the memory or knowledge of very real and unhappy experiences is crucial in grounding their avoidance of being linked to Peru, others express their resistance in broader terms. Their general idea is that Peru is—as teenaged Isabel, another of Diego and Gabriela’s children, put it not five minutes after I first met her—‘‘very backward.’’ Sandra, in her early twenties, remembered a trip to Peru in 2008 when, she said, ‘‘I didn’t have a good time because I thought about my mother, . . . and I saw the environment that is there and it’s so di√erent. The houses, the way they’re built, I thought it was very strange.’’ Her mother, Graciela, remarked that Sandra had been so uncomfortable that she wanted to leave early and had asked for a new plane ticket. Sandra continued to focus on the poverty she had witnessed: To be honest I didn’t do that well—you see people begging, and what really got to me was the children in the street, selling gum, and I had money so I gave it to them and I bought the gum so they would have a little money, and . . . and then I started feeling better, but at first I really did feel bad. I really saw the di√erences. But . . . then you also don’t feel that di√erent because when you go to the street you see people like you, your color, or you see Peruvians, which is not like here—I go out on the street here and I don’t feel odd exactly, but there I feel normal, because they are people like me, my same color; they look just like me. This sensitivity to poverty and to a certain kind of disconnect and inequality of globalization is not a phenomenon unique to adopted youths. Lucas, the son of two Peruvian immigrants, asked me at the end of our interview what, if anything, I don’t like about Peru. After a moment of thought, I said the unequal distribution of wealth and the poverty. I returned his question back to him and he answered that he didn’t like the way the cops stop you just to take your money. There are things he likes about visiting Peru—seeing extended family, experiencing the ‘‘personal 136

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warmth’’ (calor humano)—but it is not a place he ever wants to live. He has grown up surrounded by Spanish people who ‘‘think Peru is like they see on tv —you know, poor kids, you have to sponsor them, right? From villages, you know? They think it’s all rural. People don’t know there are cities.’’ Javier, a labor migrant from Trujillo, might agree with this assessment; he told my research assistant Alfredo Aguirre in 2009 that ‘‘Peru and Spain are about 100 years apart in social and economic development’’ (Aguirre 2011, 9). Such attitudes about Latin America may also be applied to Latin Americans in Spain, and both adopted and other young migrants resisted entering spaces where they might be read as part of a broader immigrant collective. The anthropologist Jennifer Lucko quotes an Ecuadorian student who was reluctant to go to a park heavily used by immigrants because—in the girl’s words—‘‘It makes you a little afraid, seeing so many people the same color as you, from your country, in one place’’ (translation in original). Where Sandra had felt normal upon traveling to Peru and walking among people she resembled, Lucko argues that the immigrant student experienced an opposite sensation: ‘‘she was uncomfortable being identified with the group of working-class immigrants in Madrid’’ (2011:223). From the narratives of adoptive parents that Christine Gailey collected in the United States, she concluded that ‘‘the significance of class mobility in adoption has received short shrift in the adoption literature. The older the child, the more likely ‘adoption transition’ becomes a gloss for sudden class change’’ (2010, 121–22). Gailey argues that many well-o√ international adopters ‘‘seemed to conflate [their child’s background] with their child’s social class or an image of underdevelopment from the child’s country of origin’’ (145). Further, ideas about Peru’s or other sending countries’ underdevelopment and poverty are built into the very fabric of international adoption. As Calles, the sta√ member at Madrid’s adoption o≈ce, presented it to the classroom full of attentive prospective parents, ‘‘The health system of many of these countries is quite poor—if Spain has only recently resolved its own, theirs will naturally be in worse conditions.’’ He made a similar point about the legal sphere later in his presentation, describing ‘‘good’’ (transparent, ethical) international adoptive countries like China and Colombia and then sharing the disappointing news that it can be a four- to six-year wait for a young child in those countries: ‘‘They just don’t have sta√. If we think our judicial system is slow, imagine that of Colombia, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand.’’ Whether Karla, Juan, and Sandra are picking up these ideas from their Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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parents or whether the ideas have come to them through other ways, it does seem clear that these adoptees associate Peru with poverty. Responses like disinterest, sadness, or rejection all seem like understandable ways to confront what each of them are observing and coming to terms with: namely, the stark di√erences between Peru and their current reality in Spain. Peru represents a whole set of possibilities that encompasses how their own lives could have been or how their birth siblings or relatives still live. It is a deeply personal experience of what many people simply take as a given—those stark socioeconomic di√erences, the di√erences between developed and underdeveloped, third world and first world. While those whose lives do not so directly bridge the two worlds may be able to observe or analyze those di√erences clinically and dispassionately, an adopted youth of Peruvian origin intimately knows that if things had only been a little di√erent, that life could have been his or her life. Such a youth is constantly reminded of that state of a√airs because of a ‘‘double identity’’ phenomenon where parents and other members of Spanish society are convinced of the significance, and heritability, of an essentialized model of ‘‘culture’’ (Marre 2009c, 226; see also Giménez 2008, 113–14). The observation of important di√erences between poor, backward Peru and developed, modern Spain leads in some youths to a manifestation of indi√erence and in others to a more finely honed rejection. I saw the former, perhaps more benign instance in the case of twelve-year-old Tina, adopted at the age of seventeen months. I interviewed Tina and her mother together, and it was one of my first and clumsiest interviews. I first addressed my questions about Tina’s personal history directly to her, wanting to hear her perspective on how she came to be in the Cuzco orphanage. She responded, ‘‘I don’t know. I have a bad memory. I don’t remember anything.’’ Her mother, Beatriz, jumped in to present Tina’s story mixed with her own pleasurable recollections of her trip to Peru. I then tried to get Tina involved again with some more questions, and tried particularly hard to get her to tell me something about Peru—anything—perhaps about it as a country, its history, or who lives there. She wrinkled her brow for a moment and asked uncertainly, shyly, ‘‘the Castros?’’ Beatriz corrected her with a smile: ‘‘The Incas. The Castros lived in Galicia [in northern Spain], which is where I’m from.’’ To me Beatriz explained, ‘‘I told her I came from the Celts, the Castros, but that Peruvians were Incas; there were Incas there.’’ Turning back to Tina, she said, ‘‘Remember how I used to say you were my Inca princess?’’ Eventually, when I failed to inspire any interest in Peru for Tina, Beatriz remarked, ‘‘I’m seeing and hearing that I’ve not done 138

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much on this. We’ve always said nice things about Peru; we’ve gone to handicraft stands and things like that,’’ but she concluded that Tina simply wasn’t very interested. Beatriz analyzed the divergence in her and Tina’s attitudes toward Peru as having sprung from what Peru meant to each of them, and included in her analysis her friends who had also adopted from Peru and their own similarly reluctant children: ‘‘As a mother—we had a wonderful time. It’s exciting to me to talk about Peru, I like it, and for them it’s like ‘whatever.’ . . . For me that’s odd that they don’t feel it like we do because for us it really was a huge moment in our lives and it isn’t for them.’’ As Raquel had observed about Nicolás, and as Diego said about his children, the imputation of Peruvianness is probably quite meaningless for a child, but it might be an important resource as he or she ages. Similarly, Beatriz noted, ‘‘You know how you age and start looking back, but when you’re young what you see is what is coming, not what you’ve had.’’ I appreciated Beatriz’s willingness to turn the magnifying glass back on herself as she suggested that her own excitement about Peru did not align with Tina’s experience. She also paused for a poignant recollection that seemed to explain something about their ambivalent everyday relation to Peru. She said that she had observed that various South American festivals and gatherings occurred in Madrid over the past several years, and that she had contemplated going to one and bringing Tina, but she felt reluctant to do so: ‘‘I don’t know what the reaction would be, because I’m not Peruvian, my daughter is, but I’m not, so in a place where everyone’s Peruvian, I don’t know how she would fit. To go with her, I don’t know. . . . People might think ‘what are you doing, bringing her here to turn her in [entregar]?’ ’’ In a way Beatriz’s observation resembled the disjuncture between a magicalrealist cinematic portrayal of a birth mother migrating in search of her displaced child and the reality of adoptive parents’ largely ungrounded fears. That is, Beatriz’s worries seemed to be less about something people would plausibly expect, that she could take her child to a migrant community in order to ‘‘send her back.’’∞∏ Her concerns seemed to be more likely connected to persistent messages that, despite the emotional and legal ties that bind them, the racial di√erences between them cannot be silenced. A related anxiety about the child’s ‘‘people’’ judging the inadequacy of interracial parenting was expressed by the white mother of an African American child in the United States, who recounted to Linda Seligmann, ‘‘Who wants to be afraid to walk to the Target and have a black family come up to you and say, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing with her hair?’ What Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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that can imply is, ‘What are you doing raising a black child?’ ’’ (2009, 133). Spanish adoptive parents, while duly emphasizing ties to Peru, may also permit their children to attenuate those ties—perhaps because of the way that ties to more than one country can uncomfortably index other kinds of dual relationships, such as ties to more than one mother or more than one father. Tina’s disinterest in Peru appeared as an ignorance of the place and people, perhaps a disinterest made more pointed by strangers’ (including my own) desires to tease out some way in which it was meaningful for her, in order to align our perception of her physical appearance and the personal history it alludes to with her current way of thinking and being. She may be nothing so much as an ordinary Spanish preteen: equally interested in the Spanish pop singer Melendi and the American pop singer Lady Gaga. But Juan isn’t simply disinterested. As Diego put it about his son, Juan ‘‘doesn’t want anything to do with South Americans.’’ Juan, a handsome and slender young man with red highlights clad in a thin gray cotton T-shirt, added immediately, ‘‘When someone [from South America] approaches me, I say, ‘no, I don’t interact with that kind of person,’ and I stop talking to them or I move away from them.’’ Of immigrants, Juan said, ‘‘Sometimes I think there are too many of them here.’’ Juan’s brother, Pedro, appeared in chapter 5 as one of the adoptees who is more closely aligned with immigrants, given his Peruvian girlfriend and his own history of gang involvement and gang attire. Juan, however, downplays any ties to Peru and reiterates to all who will listen that he looks like a Colombian, which is a way of expressing that he has lighter skin than his siblings. The distinction even appears in their soccer appreciation: Pedro follows Atlético, Madrid’s working-class team, and Juan prefers Real Madrid, a team whose o≈cial club of superfans, the Ultra Sur, is often publicly associated with white supremacists. Three years later, when I visited Diego and Gabriela’s family again, I saw more indications that Juan was disinterested in Peruvians. He was actively interested in Asia—he was taking university-level Chinese and Japanese courses via distance education; he had befriended many young people of Chinese origin online, including a girlfriend; and he enjoys Korean popular music. He articulated a fascinating analysis of eye surgery in China, saying that contrary to public opinion, this is not a horrible trend in which young Chinese women want to be Occidentalized, but rather it is a way to distinguish themselves from Japanese and South Asians, because it highlights their Chineseness. He also said that he had 140

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thought about getting his own cosmetic eye surgery to make his eyes look ‘‘more Asian.’’ Gabriela told him this was outrageous and that people ought to be happy with what they have. China had come up often in my study, because it is the big adoption country in people’s minds and it is one key comparison for Peru. For Juan, China represented something different. It seemed to me that he was saying he would never be Spanish, even though he could express dislike for immigrants and follow the Real Madrid team. But perhaps he could still avoid being Peruvian: listening to K-pop, texting his Chinese girlfriend, learning Japanese, and perhaps even getting cosmetic surgery make up a full complement of folkloric, social, and physical strategies to de-Peruvianize. Juan’s growing a≈nity with different features that he understood as Asian recall Stuart Hall’s observation that ‘‘identities are constructed through, not outside, di√erence. . . . It is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to what it is not[,] . . . that the ‘positive’ meaning of any term . . . can be constructed’’ (1996, 4–5; see also Hall 1997, 174). An active rejection of Peru and Peruvians such as what Juan expressed is a very clear way to manifest one’s lack of connection to the country and that piece of one’s history. As Sergio told me about his twelve-year-old son, Nelson, ‘‘He has become very, very racist. . . . I think he is not that racist when it comes right down to it, but as an adolescent you have to make yourself feel like you’re somebody.’’ That is, the class and social locations of adoptive children are sites where such children work out the identity issues presented by persistent questioning of their racialized ‘‘misfit’’ with their family and surroundings. In such a context, an adopted child may even develop prejudiced or racist attitudes against Latin Americans, as Juan and Nelson have. As Sergio said of Nelson, ‘‘The kids he hangs out with, [when they talk about immigrants] they’re a little like ‘oh those so and sos, those whatevers’—so the ideas he has are a bit mistaken. I say, ‘If you’re from a di√erent race, how can you say no to people from another race, from another country, immigrants?’ . . . He still has a lot of conflict inside.’’ Nelson’s friends (other than two other adoptees) are all white Spaniards. As Sergio explained, ‘‘When he sees the photos of the shantytowns we visited in Peru, he laughs a little and says ‘Look at those houses. They’re so poor in Peru.’ I say, ‘Nelson, come on, Peru’s really big. It is a country with a lot of poverty but even in their poverty people are happy.’ ’’ Afterward he mentioned that even though Nelson does say racist things about immigrants, ‘‘later he’s very sweet; he goes on the street and asks, ‘Dad, give a little money to this man, give some to that man.’ He’s really sad to Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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see people without an arm or a leg, begging. So he’s very sensitive, but he is in this moment where he’s analyzing it all.’’ Sergio’s observation—that Nelson is both racist and troubled by poverty—ties indi√erence to and rejection of Peru to broader global inequities. Critical Erasures: Becoming Spanish and Papering over Peruvianness

Karla, Juan, Sandra, Tina, and Nelson distanced themselves from Peru in their own ways. Unlike their parents, who mean to create or at least conserve their children’s connections to Peru, these five adoptive migrants each articulated ways in which Peru was not central to their own presentday realities. The renaming is one way in which their histories in Peru can be written out of their current lives. An even more extreme expression of this sentiment can be found in a way in which Peruvian nationality is actively erased: through the inscription of a new place of birth on a birth certificate. This is a possibility for both migrants and for adoptees. While Lucas and Susana had used Lucas’s new identity document to narrate connections to Peru, the same kinds of documents can be deployed in ways that allow migrants and adoptees to attenuate ties to Peru. One of my Peruvian friends, Nancy, told me about a Peruvian acquaintance of hers who had been adopted at a young age by an Italian family. When the young man came to visit her in Madrid, she was horrified that he claimed he was Italian, not Peruvian, and looked down his nose at all the ‘‘Latino immigrants’’ he saw in Madrid. Like Juan, who ‘‘looks like a Colombian’’ and capitalized on it, this young man had internalized his not-Peruvianness. But for Nancy, his behavior was sinful: she held that it is a sin to deny your country. She explained that to say that you aren’t Peruvian is to disrespect your parents: in other words, denying your country denies your parents, an elegant equation with national substance at its base. Nancy then told me that when you obtain Spanish citizenship, you get a new birth certificate that states that you were born in Spain. She said that she had it somewhere in her important papers and that the day she received it was supposed to be exciting and special, but for her it wasn’t because she knew she was still Peruvian. A few weeks later, I asked Nancy to show me the new birth certificate she was issued when she became a citizen. She went to her bookshelf and took down several thick manila envelopes and laminated folders bearing important documents—travel insurance, the validation of her high school 142

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degree for Spanish employment purposes, a legal document that allowed her to return to Spain although her residency had expired. Finally she found the piece of paper she had spoken of: labeled a certificado literal (certified copy), the document included her first and last names, her date and place of birth, her parents’ names, their places of birth and date of marriage, and the date of her Spanish nationalization, two years earlier. She told me that she had been given the option to change her surnames as well, but that she had been very clear about the fact that she didn’t want to. (This reminded me of Sileny’s refusal of the idea that her kids could have a new father listed on their birth certificates, her justification for why she did not want her new husband to adopt them.) Later I asked Sonia Castillo, a Peruvian who works in Spain as an immigration lawyer, about what Nancy told me. She said ‘‘Well, you do get something that is almost like a birth certificate, because when you acquire Spanish nationality, you have all the rights of a Spaniard. To get your national identity document you do need a Spanish birth certificate, and so once you get your nationality, you get a Spanish birth certificate where it says that the person was born in Lima on this day, and so on.’’ I said, ‘‘I think my friend understood that she could put Spain on her national identity card in the space it gives you for birthplace, even though she was born in Peru.’’ ‘‘No,’’ replied Sonia, ‘‘there they have to put the place you were actually born.’’ She tugged her Spanish identity card out of her pocketbook to illustrate, pointing to where it said she was born in Lima. But I eventually found out that Nancy was closer to right than I had imagined. Spain’s Civil Registry Law was modified in 2005 to allow place of birth to be changed in the formal record, both for international adoptees and for foreigners who acquire Spanish citizenship.∞π Although ‘‘births, marriages, and deaths will be inscribed in the Municipal or Consular Registry of the place they occur,’’ the law indicates that (3) In cases of international adoption, the adopter or the adopters can request . . . a new registry of birth which indicates . . . the adoptive parents’ home community as the place of birth of the adoptee. (4) Similarly for those birth registrations which result from those who were born abroad acquiring Spanish nationality, when they take their oath of citizenship and swear loyalty to the King and that they will obey the Constitution and Laws, they may also request that their birth record in the Municipal Civil Registry reflect the community from which they applied for citizenship. Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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Like the adopted youth Juan, whose ‘‘life, because of the circumstances he was in, began when he came to Spain,’’ as his father had put it, those adoptees and immigrants whose lives begin at the moment of their naturalization can indicate that by changing their place of birth to reflect the place where their lives, as they see it, began. At an adoption seminar I attended in Madrid, one mother posed a question about her daughter, who had been adopted from Ethiopia at a somewhat older age. The topic under discussion was whether, and to what degree, it is important for a child to get to know ‘‘the culture from which he or she comes’’; a topic raised in a Spanish context where many parents are still reluctant to acknowledge any foreign tendencies in their children. The mother had o√ered her daughter the option to legally change her first name and her place of origin, and the daughter had asked to do so. Further, in terms of the everyday trappings of ethnicity and culture—going to Ethiopian restaurants, learning Amharic, and so on—the young woman was quite unequivocally uninterested, like so many of the youths I have described. As the mother explained, ‘‘Sometimes it’s the children themselves who resist,’’ even when the parents are on board with ideologies of multiculturalism. The adoption psychologist who had convened the event responded: ‘‘Just because the law says you must listen to children does not mean that you should actually do what they want,’’ or in other words, children may not realize what is best for them. The psychologist explained that removing the place of birth on a child’s birth certificate shuts down yet another opportunity for discussing the child’s origins and as such would be tantamount to erasing those origins.∞∫ On the other hand, the privileging of the original birth certificate does something else: it adds fuel to the idea that the original document itself bears the truth of the child’s origins (Yngvesson and Coutin 2006). Yet young people born in Peru know that this is not necessarily the case. Nancy, who had refused to change her birth certificate upon her Spanish naturalization, actually has two birthdays—one corresponding to the day she was born and the other reflecting what her birth certificate states. Her birth certificate had been stored in her town’s municipal archive, which had burned down, requiring the production of a replacement which turned out to be factually erroneous. Similarly, Consuelo, a thirteen-year-old adoptee, told me that she was eight when she was adopted, but ‘‘they’’ changed her birth certificate. As her father, Diego, explained, ‘‘She was eight, but when they made her birth certificate—because she didn’t have one—they did it in Cuzco, and they put that she was nine, who knows why. 144

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. . . So she celebrates her birthday twice a year.’’ I asked Consuelo which birthday was the ‘‘real’’ one, and she told me that the real one was coming up in a few weeks, but the one that she had been given was December 25. Diego added that ‘‘in the home where she was, all the children—all those who don’t have birth certificates—have that birthday.’’ While I imagined that this designation was a deliberate and evocative allusion to the infant Jesus, born into poverty and adopted by Joseph, Diego drolly concluded, ‘‘That way they celebrate Christmas and the birthdays at the same time and save on money and gifts.’’ Neither Nancy nor Consuelo has a birth certificate that reflects her true date of birth, yet both were born into a Peru where the act of formally recording a child’s birth is given great significance. Peru is a signatory of the un Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that ‘‘the child shall be registered immediately after birth’’ (Article 7).∞Ω Recording the birth, whether or not it aligns with the child’s actual chronological history, is deemed foundational for the rest of the child’s life trajectory (Leinaweaver 2008b, 48). With a birth certificate one can obtain all other documents that make life possible, from the national identity document that Lucas was so intent on getting to a passport allowing one to leave, and to return.≤≠ The substitute of a Peruvian birthplace with a Spanish one betokens other important replacements: of the child’s original given name (Nikolai, Jhonathan, Richard) with a new one (Nicolás, Juan, Pedro); of the child’s original surnames with those of the adoptive parents; of the child’s original nationality with a new one. the ‘‘visibility’’ of international adoption that the speaker at the adoption information session described—its transracial dimensions—is part of what grounds parents’ urges to create ties to Peru for their children. They know that their children are observably members of a racial minority and that this, combined with other cues, such as a Spanish accent or the presence of white parents, means that strangers will unavoidably ask their children ‘‘where are you from?’’ Adoptive parents believe, partly because they heed the adoption professionals who tell them so, that instilling some of this heritage into their children to the best of the parents’ ability is important. They believe that creating an elective Peruvian-adoptive ethnicity (following Jacobson 2008, 141) will be a source of resilience that the children can draw from to answer that persistent question. But that visibility and the prevalent discourse about having pride in one’s origins coexists with another powerful discourse, one of integration Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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in a multicultural context. The coincidence of international adoption and international migration in Spain unfolds within a context where national politics of interculturalism and multiculturalism insist that there must be no exclusion or discrimination based on culture, ethnicity, and race and that the model to follow is not one of assimilation but rather integration (Giménez 2008, 115; for Belgium, compare De Graeve 2010, 366). From the perspective of a U.S. scholar, however, this prevalent discourse of ‘‘integration’’ looked a lot like what I understood to be assimilation. For example, an adoptive mother in Barcelona compared the children of immigrants to her own children, finding the latter more ‘‘integrated’’ into Spanish society because of having grown up entirely Spanish: ‘‘I would establish a distinction between adopted children and immigrant children because our children’s behavior and culture is ours. [Our children] are integrated into this country. Immigrants . . . are at a disadvantage. . . . They don’t know our behavior, attitude, manners, and culture’’ (Marre 2009c, 238–39). Yet this begs the question of whether adoptees should be so integrated, or so assimilated. The challenge that adoptive families face is ‘‘Should the adopted child be assimilated? . . . Is that the right approach? Or should there be a policy of respecting di√erence? What di√erence? Because in the adult immigrant it’s clear[,] . . . but what happens with a child?’’ (Giménez 2008, 115). What happens with many children is that they proceed through childhood and adolescence bearing this mantle of di√erence precisely when they most wish to fit in. Many of the parents I interviewed were concerned about their adolescent children who were seeking out migrants specifically at that key developmental moment as a part of their struggles to figure out their identities. Margaret Mead wrote more than eighty years ago that adolescence need not be a di≈cult, stormy period, and that young people come of age in a manner befitting the social and cultural context in which they grow (1961 [1928]). The so-called Western model of adolescence as a time of angst, trial, and resistance is, however, one that is heavily subscribed to throughout Europe. As the psychologist Ana Berástegui put it to me in 2012, ‘‘pasarlo mal es pasarlo bien’’—having a rough adolescence actually, paradoxically, means things are going well. ‘‘Respecting di√erence’’ is likely to come across not as a generous attitude of valuing multiculturalism but as precisely what a young person least wants. So both the discourse of integration, itself a kind of code for assimilation, and the point at which this is happening in a young person’s life course can motivate the attenuation of Peruvianness. The conflict that parents face, then, is how to 146

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resolve conflicting and contradicting messages about how best to equip their children for the life ahead. I don’t mean to give the impression that families formed through adoption are faltering now because so many of the children are entering adolescence. But I think the families’ stories should give pause to the sense of optimism that colored earlier research and policy making on international adoption. For example, Signe Howell’s book on transnational adoption, one of the first full-length anthropological examinations of the topic in Europe, found that ‘‘the transaction is running surprisingly smoothly’’ (2006, xii). And Maria Lillo, of the magazine Niños de Hoy (Today’s Children), told my research assistant, Maia Chao, in 2012 that sensationalist news stories about failed adoptions don’t characterize the fact that ‘‘almost all adoptions are successful. . . . All adolescents are di≈cult, and in some cases it can be more di≈cult, but nothing that a parent—with love, care, the help of a professional, a psychologist, can’t repair.’’ But the transition to adolescence that many international adoptees are now undergoing in Spain is causing some parents and scholars alike to express doubts about adoption more broadly. The challenges are characterized by the di≈cult bind that adoptive parents and their children are caught in: speaking of origins highlights the child’s di√erence, from parents, from peers, and from friends, while avoiding such a discussion, in the view of professionals and older adoptees, leaves that youth unprepared for future identity work. Here is another site where an examination of migrant children and families may shed some light on this quandary: migrant parents also worry about ensuring that their children develop a√ection for and ties to Peru. Yet perhaps because their children’s race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality align with one another and with the parents’ own identity markers, the children may be less likely to present an outright refusal to identify with aspects of Peru, and the parents may be less likely to accept such a refusal.

Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

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Conclusion what adoptive migration might mean

Sandra began to cry quietly as she recounted a moment that had unfolded in her vocational training course. One of the other women in the class was an older Peruvian migrant who had noticed Sandra when Graciela dropped her o√. Before the class began she sidled up to Sandra and inquired: ‘‘Was that your mother who dropped you o√? How is she your mother?’’ As Sandra recounted, the conversation went like this: ‘‘She’s my mother because she adopted me.’’ ‘‘And what’s that?’’ ‘‘Adoption is when a person seeks you out because she wants a child. She looked for me in Peru because she wanted to have a child, and then she brings you to Spain and then you are her child.’’ ‘‘But I never . . . I don’t understand, I don’t know what that is. Do people do this a lot?’’ ‘‘Yes, they do. My mom was one of the first to adopt internationally and now I know in China they do it all the time.’’ ‘‘Ah. Well, look, dear, I would never do that. I have my children and I had them there in Peru, but I have brought them all to Spain. And my eighteen-year-old daughter got pregnant and she has children and she doesn’t plan to abandon them.’’ ‘‘ . . . Okay.’’ ‘‘And you should know that a sow takes better care of its piglets than your mother took of you.’’

By the time this story arose, two of the migrant women had left the group interview I was conducting and there were only four of us around the table: me; Sandra; her adoptive mother, Graciela; and Clara, the Peruvian migrant who had aided Graciela with her adoption of Sandra so many years ago. Sandra added that the woman also asked her why she had been abandoned, to which Sandra replied, ‘‘because she didn’t have . . . because of economic reasons.’’ The woman found this unbelievable, but Sandra didn’t think up the right retort until later. She told us what she wished she had said to this importunate woman: ‘‘You don’t know what her circumstances were. And you yourself came to Spain for economic circumstances, leaving your kids in Peru, so how can you say that out of poverty you wouldn’t leave your kids if in fact you have done it yourself?’’ Sandra’s analysis is ruthless in its discovery that the conditions that give rise to adoption and migration are often one and the same. ‘‘Economic reasons’’ and ‘‘circumstances’’ lead adults to abandon their home countries—and at times to leave their children behind with relatives—just as they can lead poor parents to place children for adoption or to become otherwise entangled in a system of child welfare that leads to the same result (Leinaweaver 2008b). Sandra’s foil in this story, the older Peruvian migrant woman who refused to believe that Graciela could be Sandra’s mother, represents both a middle-class Peruvian ideology that genealogical kinship is paramount and the constant low-level hum of doubt that assails youths who look di√erent from their parents or di√erent from an ideological and constructed national norm. This unhappy exchange between an adopted Peruvian and a Peruvian labor migrant reveals the revelatory power for global anthropology of the methodological and theoretical strategy I have followed in this book. Following unexpected connections—here, the parallels between adoption and migration, which emerged over and over despite coordinated attempts to keep them apart—can lead to novel insights. Addressing adoption and migration within the same analytical frame can lead to a richer understanding of belonging. Two themes have emerged as central to making sense of belonging. The first is national substance as a way to understand how people think about identity. The second is the connection between kinship and integration that undergirds the ethical responsibility of host family and host community to produce a contemporary multicultural society.

What Adoptive Migration Might Mean

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National Substance

In the introduction I raised the problem of ‘‘methodological nationalism’’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, 302) and, specifically, questions about how scholars may, through the questions they ask, unintentionally reproduce the constructed idea of nation and national identity, an idea that is not just powerful but also sometimes harmful. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall observes that scholars have thoroughly deconstructed concepts like identity, yet these concepts have not been replaced with other more accurate ones, and in the meantime the concepts remain intensely significant to those who deploy them. In this way, identity is ‘‘an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all’’ (Hall 1996, 2). I think that the same is true for national identity, which I call national substance here to highlight the way it is embodied and heritable, and—like anthropological understandings of race—an ideology of di√erence. Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller conclude that ‘‘nationalism is a powerful signifier that continues to make sense for di√erent actors with di√erent purposes and political implications’’ (2002, 326–27). Given that this is so, I believe that scholars need to examine how national identities are imagined and experienced while being fully aware of the political implications of such an examination. What I found in Spain is that the nation retains a critical importance. What Lisa Malkki has called a ‘‘national order of things,’’ or ‘‘a powerful regime of order and knowledge that is at once politico-economic, historical, cultural, aesthetic, and cosmological’’ (1995, 5), persists as a defining concept even (or especially) in an era of transnationalism and globalization. As Deborah Boehm and her colleagues argue, ‘‘we still live in a world system where the rights and exercise of citizenship are largely ordered around state sovereignty’’ (Boehm et al. 2011, 16). Against rhetoric of a deeply interconnected world—produced through quick and easy telecommunications, international travel, and bank transfers—practices like international adoption and transnational migration are two important sites where we see the nation produced and reproduced in what is sometimes a painstakingly slow fashion, characterized by waits of indeterminate length and stacks of documents nestled in plastic sheet protectors. The stories recounted in this book show that adoptive migration gives particular insight into the ways that national identity, origin, and substance are constructed in present-day Europe. International adoption has 150

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many consequences. Children gain permanent families, while parents gain the children that transform them into families. Children move from impoverished countries to a Europe that until recently was economically and politically sound and powerful, and parents have the opportunity to travel and come to live with and love things about another country. Children become racial others in their new contexts, and parents become members of transracial families and discover a new sense of what immigrants experience in Europe. My sense that national identity is racialized, embodied, and substantial —an ideology about how people di√er—comes from many pieces of evidence collected together in the chapters of this book. One more piece of evidence is drawn from an adoption psychologist in Madrid who theorized that it was around eight to ten years of age when children begin to ‘‘reject the fact of being adopted.’’ But the phrases he attributed to children rejecting adoption were largely racialized. ‘‘I don’t want to be black or Indian or another race, I don’t want to be black, I don’t want to be mulatto, I don’t want to be Obama, . . . I want to be Felipe, I want to be Manuel,’’ he quoted his imaginary young client saying. The psychologist explained, ‘‘He rejects his skin, his personality, his history.’’ For this psychologist, being adopted is equated to an experience of being racially di√erent, a di√erence marked in other ways as well, such as with the tag of a name that parents think so carefully about retaining or replacing. This psychologist’s alignment of adoption with racial di√erence speaks to some of the similarities between migration and adoption that I have drawn out in this book. By explicitly bringing them into the same comparative framework, I found that several of the questions we ask about migration should also be asked about adoption, but aren’t—and vice versa. For example, migration raises questions about what country one belongs to, and adoption provokes anxieties about what family one belongs to. Switching around the actors in this quick analysis leads to new kinds of questions. That is, if adoptees are wholly Spanish, why must we talk about their ‘‘culture of origin,’’ and what other forms of di√erence do such conversations leave out? And if the children of migrants spend years in Peru before being ‘‘reunified’’ with their parents in Spain, might they too have multiple people who could be figured as their parents? The place of adoptees and migrants within their respective families has important bearing on how each is situated within the ‘‘national family,’’ and the opposite is true as well: their places within the nation, their own sense of national a≈liation, a√ect their situations within their families. What Adoptive Migration Might Mean

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Adoption and Integration

The linkage between nation and kinship is clearly visible in the metaphor that equates nationalization with adoption. In the group-interview setting I have described, the marital migrant Cindy explained that she tells people who ask if she is Spanish, ‘‘No, I’m Peruvian. And I’m also Spanish by adoption [española adoptada].’’∞ I asked her about this language, and she said, ‘‘It’s because I have citizenship now, and have for a long time. I’m adopted by Spain because I have Spanish citizenship. I also lived eight or nine years in Argentina, so I’m also adopted by . . . so part of my heart is in Argentina, you know?’’ This equation of naturalization and adoption has also been observed by Susan Coutin among U.S. immigration judges: one compared naturalized migrants to ‘‘those children who are as a matter of course outside the family, but adopted into the family. . . . You are the adoptees of this country, and this country has adopted you.’’ The di√erence between child adoption and naturalization, which was at the heart of the judge’s praise of new citizens, is ‘‘You made an active choice to give up your citizenship of birth [if required by the country of origin] and to join us’’ (2003, 517). Siobhan Somerville also counterposes the ‘‘nonconsensual’’ model of birthright citizenship to the ‘‘consensual process of conferring citizenship’’ represented by naturalization (2005, 662). The metaphor of the Spaniard who is adopted via naturalization reminds us that children, particularly the infants most desirable in the Spanish model of international adoption, are not granted the agency to make this choice to relocate. In part it is the anxiety surrounding their lack of agency that grounds so many of adoptive parents’ and professionals’ actions. What is really in the best interest of the child? How can we know that without knowing what will become of the child, what the child wants, and what the child will later on wish that he or she had? Occasionally I would ask migrant youths what they knew or thought about international adoptions. Fourteen-year-old Ashley remarked that ‘‘the di√erence is that it’s not the same when you aren’t with your own family.’’ In other words, she posited that the important di√erence between her and an adopted youth is that she is with her family of origin: her mother, her aunt, and her aunt’s nearby family. Clara, the migrant who assisted Graciela with her adoption of Sandra, gave a related but almost opposite answer. She told me that she thought ‘‘the di√erence between adoption and migration is how we [migrants] uproot ourselves and leave our family.’’ For Clara, adoption unites a family, but migration separates a 152

conclusion

family. Ashley, Clara, and the Peruvian migrant whose interrogation made Sandra cry all share the position that family, defined both genealogically and through coresidence, is of paramount importance. The term ‘‘adoption’’ is one that emphasizes the actions of the parents —they have adopted the child, not the other way around. By contrast the term ‘‘integration,’’ which is more commonly used about migrants in Spain, is much more ambiguous. It could describe the e√orts that migrants go to so that they are integrated—like Carmela’s Ecuadorian friend, a marital migrant who willingly took on Spanish lifeways—just as much as it could describe the e√orts of Spaniards to integrate migrants around them. The comparison of these two terms suggests that scholars of adoption could place new emphasis on how children ‘‘adopt’’ their parents. Might this be a more productive way to talk about ‘‘bonding’’ without a psychologization of the shifting relation? But it also suggests that migration scholars could more critically analyze the ideology of integration, and the imputation of agency within it. Anne Ríos-Rojas points out that Spain deals with immigrants not by attempting to make its host culture more welcoming but by pathologizing or attempting to transform immigrants themselves (2011, 65). The onus is on the migrant to change and assimilate, despite the dominant discourse of interculturality and tolerance. Here is where adoption o√ers a counterexample: there is at least some expectation among adoptive professionals that the parents will change to adapt to the child. Becoming parents, for adoptive parents, involves deliberate and careful work—classes and seminars with professionals, but also discursive and sociocultural work. That is, the parents are expected to regularly talk with the child about adoption and his or her personal history, using di√erent strategies according to the child’s age and interests. They must also seek out fellow adoptive families or aspects of Peruvian culture as pedagogical technologies for the child’s identity development. If members of a host society did half as much work to prepare for everyday life with immigrant neighbors, Spain would look very di√erent. These are transformations of individual Spaniards that may have a broader impact beyond their own families. I heard an example of this from the teacher Carmela, employed in a school in a working-class immigrant neighborhood. There was one immigrant student with whom she worked very closely in 2012. I was floored when she told me that having adopted her daughter at an older age helped Carmela help this child. She said that the boy arrived around Carnival time, when kids dress up and act zany. He What Adoptive Migration Might Mean

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was the exact age that her daughter had been on her arrival to Spain, and Carmela realized that he was scared. Carmela was able to perceive something about an immigrant student that she might not have seen had she not adopted her daughter. Her observation, made just in passing as we strolled from the metro stop to her neighborhood patio bar, suggests that adoption has broader repercussions for how migrants are incorporated— and perhaps too that migration has implications for how adoptees enter into and live in Spain. Adoption is an imperfect model for migrant integration, however. The stories I collected show that the challenges inherent to international adoption in Spain are only partly linked to racism and xenophobia, and have other roots as well. Neither adoptive migration nor labor migration will disappear any time soon, although both are on the wane—the former in part because of untenable ethical violations resulting from an imbalance of supply and demand, and the latter because of a far-reaching global economic crisis that has, in some ways, leveled the playing field so that Spain no longer looks like an undeniable step up from Peru. But the implications of the apogees of both phenomena continue to reverberate for thousands of adoptive families where children are coming of age alongside thousands more migrant families whose children and grandchildren are remaking the face of Spain.

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notes

Introduction. Comparing Adoption and Migration

1 This striking contrast has been observed by several historians and anthropologists of adoption (see, for example, Anagnost 2000, 414; Briggs and Marre 2009, 14; De Graeve 2010, 370; Dubinsky 2010, 20). 2 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this important point. 3 This statement was noted by my research assistant Maia Chao, who attended the session. 4 Compare Dubinsky 2010 on the idea that white ‘‘adoptive parents must e√ectively become black’’ (76) and Jacobson 2008 on a ‘‘China-adoptive ethnicity’’ (141). 5 The exception, interestingly, is demography, which treats international adoption as ‘‘an aspect of international migration,’’ and accordingly, as Peter Selman has argued, misses a di√erent set of insights that come from viewing it as directly tied to family building (2006, 184). 6 My discussion of adoption scholarship relies on Bowie 2004; Briggs 2012; Dorow 2006; Howell 2006; Howell 2009a; Hübinette and Tigervall 2009; Kim 2010; Leinaweaver and Seligmann 2009; Marre and Bestard 2004; Marre and Briggs 2009; Seligmann 2013; Volkman 2005; Wade 2007; Yngvesson 2010. Many of the scholars currently working on international adoption are adoptive parents. As the first generations of international adoptees begin to enter these circles (Hübinette and Tigervall 2009; Trenka, Sudbury, and Shin 2006), social scientific scholarship on adoption will surely begin to look di√erent. 7 Work on transnational families that has informed my approach includes Baldassar 2007; Constable 2003; Dreby 2006, 2010; Fresnoza-Flot 2009; Haikkola 2011; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Knörr and Nunes 2005; Lahaie 2009; Moran-Taylor 2008; Nicholson 2006; Orellana et al. 2001; Orellana 2009; Parreñas 2005; Sartorius and Seigel 2010; Schmalzbauer 2004; Yarris 2011. 8 On this issue, see especially Boehm et al. 2011; Constable 2004; Horton 2008; Pribilsky 2001.

9 Important studies in this wider field of transnationalism and migration include Appadurai 1991; Brettell 2000; Cli√ord 1997; Glick Schiller, Basch, and BlancSzanton 1992; Jackson 2008; Kearney 1995; Morris 1997; Ong 1999. 10 The Peruvian television channel Frecuencia Latina currently airs a program called Volverte a Ver (To See You Again), which highlights cases of birth parent searches. See http://www.frecuencialatina.com/volverteaver/. 11 The literature on transracial adoptions in North America (primarily analyzing white parents adopting children of African or Native descent) and the racial politics of such adoptions is extensive; see, for example, Briggs 2003, 2012; Dubinsky 2010; Gailey 2010; Strong 2001; Trenka, Sudbury, and Shin 2006; Yngvesson 2010. Dubinsky’s analysis of transracial adoption in midcentury Canada hits the key points: for white parents, transracial adoption can signify their liberal credentials and ground their belief that race is almost a disability that can be overcome through adoption, while for black and Native parents, the shared history of slavery, colonialism, exclusionary immigration laws, and forced sterilization can ground a rejection of such adoptions. 12 Ayse Parla has shown from another perspective the implicit assumptions that migrants are of a di√erent ethnicity than the majority population, noting that undocumented migrants from Bulgaria to Turkey who are of Turkish ethnicity are simply uncounted by scholars and policy analysts, although they share many other experiences (such as discrimination) with other migrants (2007, 160). 13 Argentine immigration to Spain is discussed in Goldberg 2007. 14 Two graduate research assistants were immensely helpful with this aspect of my study. Kristin Skrabut collected and analyzed adoption law, migration statistics, and the open online adoption forum. Josh MacLeod collected and analyzed migrant and mainstream news media. 15 See ‘‘España registra la tasa de natalidad más baja desde 2003,’’ El País (Spain), July 7, 2011, http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2011/07/07/actualidad/ 1309989608e850215.html. For Peru, see unicef, ‘‘Maternidad Segura,’’ http:// www.unicef.org/peru/efiles/notaseprensa/carpetasinformativas/ maternidadesegura.pdf. 16 For Sweden, see Hübinette and Tigervall 2009; Yngvesson 2010. For Norway, see Howell 2006. For the United States, see Dorow 2006; Dubinsky 2010; Gailey 2010. For Guatemala, see Briggs 2012; Dubinsky 2010. For Russia, see Jacobson 2008; Seligmann 2009. 17 See Giménez Romero 2008 (107) and Selman 2006 (189) on the coincidence of the two phenomena in Spain. 18 The idea that migrants ‘‘are sent’’ from Peru, as children ‘‘are sent’’ from this sending country, shows how the literature on migration removes agency from the migrants. They do not choose to leave, taking on enormous risk and at great personal cost; they are sent. This characterization is more apt for migrant children (Pedone 2006, 219), but they too often have a more important role than is commonly acknowledged (Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001). To ques156

Notes to Introduction

19

20

21

22

23

24

tion the lack of agency in the term ‘‘sending country’’ requires an examination of the way in which babies and children are ‘‘sent’’ in adoption. Certainly the government is sending them, as a means of protection, but it may be possible to identify ways in which children and even babies exercise agency by actively responding to their new parents’ overtures, ensuring that the adoption is completed. Important recent work on the migration of minors to Spain includes Empez Vidal 2011; Suárez-Navaz 2006; Suárez-Navaz and Jiménez Álvarez 2010. Carmen Giró, ‘‘El último reto de la adopción,’’ La Vanguardia (Spain), June 24, 2012, http://www.lavanguardia.com/magazine/20120622/54315274220/ carmen-giro-el-ultimo-reto-de-la-adopcion.html. ‘‘Cae la población inmigrante en Madrid por segundo año consecutivo,’’ El País (Spain), March 26, 2012, http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2012/03/26/madrid/ 1332763931e227852.html. It was not until 1985 that the first Ley de Extranjeria (Law of Foreigners) was passed (Tornos and Aparicio 1997, 33). It was passed so that Spain could join the European Union the following year, and it has been periodically modified since then to make it increasingly di≈cult to migrate (Empez Vidal 2011, 179). At the time of writing, the relevant law addressing ‘‘rights and freedoms of foreigners in Spain and their social integration’’ was Ley Orgánica 2/2009, de 11 de diciembre, de reforma de la Ley Orgánica 4/2000, de 11 de enero, sobre derechos y libertades de los extranjeros en España y su integración social. This is available at the Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado website, http://boe .es/boe/dias/2009/12/12/pdfs/boe-a-2009–19949.pdf. The law is actually put into practice through a reglamento (regulation): Real Decreto 557/2011, de 20 de abril, por el que se aprueba el Reglamento de la Ley Orgánica 4/2000, sobre derechos y libertades de los extranjeros en España y su integración social, tras su reforma por Ley Orgánica 2/2009. This is available at the Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado website, http://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2011/04/ 30/pdfs/boe-a-2011–7703.pdf. Amadora Espinar Gómez, ‘‘La banda de los peruanos,’’ La Vanguardia (Spain), August 2, 2008, http://www.lavanguardia.com/20080802/54061322595/labanda-de-los-peruanos.html. The Spanish anthropologists Carles Feixa, Laura Porzio, and Carolina Recio also used the term, ‘‘because of its widespread use among our informants and because of its semantic weight in the process of ‘ethnogenesis’ of a new cultural identity, although technically the appropriate term would be ‘youth of Latin American origin’ ’’ (2006, 11). Context for this claim is that other migrants are not permitted to join the Spanish army. Only those from seventeen Latin American nations and Ecuatorial Guinea may join (Gobierno de España, Armed Forces recruitment website, http://www.reclutamiento.defensa.gob.es/comoeingresar/extranjeros.htm). The El País reporter Natalia Junquera observed in 2010 that 42.9 percent of Notes to Introduction

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27

28

29

30

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Spain’s soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan and Lebanon were foreigners, but foreigners make up only 6.7 percent of Spain’s armed forces overall. See Natalia Junquera, ‘‘Cuatro meses de soldado, y a Afganistán,’’ El País (Spain), February 3, 2010, http://elpais.com/diario/2010/02/03/espana/1265151605 e850215.html. Richard Alba (2005) gives an analysis of di√erences between the United States, France, and Germany on that score. A few days after we met in the summer of 2012, the social worker e-mailed me a news story as evidence for his position. His message read, in part, ‘‘Observe how the (mainly conservative) news media emphasize how dangerous the gangs are, the youth’s origin (with a sensationalist and xenophobic approach), etc. But it’s not true. For example, the youth was killed with a bottle (as they had been drinking)—they didn’t even have weapons.’’ The news story he e-mailed was M. J. Alvarez, ‘‘La Policía detiene al ‘ñeta’ que clavó una botella rota en el pecho a otro joven,’’ abc.es, June 24, 2012, http://www.abc.es/ 20120623/local-madrid/abci-detenido-bandas-201206231343.html. Elana Zilberg (2011) has argued that the media-inspired emphasis on Latino gangs in the United States obscures the way that these gangs have partially developed as a consequence of U.S. involvement in Central America and broader processes of neoliberalism, globalization, and immigration policy. In Spain, Roma is viewed as an ethnicity, with the population being phenotypically identical to majority Spaniards. When I followed up on Diez’s comments, I found that the most recent data from the World Values Survey (http:// www.worldvaluessurvey.org/) actually listed drug addicts first with 81.6 percent of respondents preferring not to live next door to them, followed by heavy drinkers (48.6 percent), Roma (45.6 percent), and people with aids (20.5 percent). People of a di√erent race (8.6 percent), immigrants/foreign workers (8.3 percent), people of a di√erent religion (7.2 percent), and people who speak a di√erent language (4.1 percent) were all in the single-digit percentile response (www.wvsevsdb.com). I read this data with the usual skepticism of a cultural anthropologist confronted with tidy numbers. But indeed Spain looks relatively benign in quantitative terms compared with the counterexample of France (which Spaniards often cited as the epitome of racism), where 43.2 percent did not want to live next to immigrants/foreign workers, and 26.8 percent rejected as a neighbor someone of a di√erent race, 30.3 percent of a di√erent religion, and 27.6 percent a speaker of a di√erent language. Beltrán was quoted in Beatriz Roselló, 2009, ‘‘ ‘El racismo es oficialmente invisible en España,’ según Amnistía Internacional,’’ in El Mundo (Madrid), August 3, http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/08/03/solidaridad/1249326753 .html. This quote is taken from a draft of an article prepared in 2005 and sent to me by its author, the Peruvian journalist Yolanda Vaccaro, a Madrid resident. The

Notes to Introduction

manuscript is located in her personal archive. Vaccaro’s article is about a Madrid couple with three children from Peru. These are the mother’s words describing her child’s encounter in a Madrid public school. 31 On migrant departures from Spain, see Natalia Junquera, ‘‘ ‘Para vivir mal aquí, vivo mal en mi país,’ ’’ El País (Spain), June 10, 2012, http://politica.elpais.com/ politica/2012/06/10/actualidad/1339345173e164363.html. 32 Lola Huete Machado and Virginia Collera, ‘‘Emigrantes otra vez,’’ El País (Spain), December 11, 2011, http://elpais.com/diario/2011/12/11/eps/ 1323588415e850215.html; and Charo Nogueira and Javier García Pedraz, ‘‘Yo tengo un nieto en América,’’ El País (Spain), July 18, 2012, http://sociedad .elpais.com/sociedad/2012/07/16/actualidad/1342432815e826071.html. On Spaniards moving to Peru, see Mirko Lauer, ‘‘Tiempos cosmopólitas,’’ La República (Peru), July 10, 2012, http://www.larepublica.pe/columnistas/ observador/tiempos-cosmopolitas-10–07–2012. 33 Historians of adoption usually trace the origins of international adoption to the Korean War, when Bertha and Harry Holt promoted transnational, permanent adoption for the Amerasian children born to U.S. soldiers and Korean women. However, Briggs and Marre note that Europeans also fostered children endangered by the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi occupation (2009, 3).

One. Waiting for a Baby

1 Based strictly on who was sitting with whom, I estimated one single woman, two lesbian couples, and perhaps sixteen straight couples. Their ages appeared to range between thirty and forty-five. 2 A year later, my research assistant Maia Chao attended a similar session—led by the social worker Charo Gonzalez—and heard the same sort of discourse. Gonzalez told Chao’s group that ‘‘this is not the best time to adopt. There are more of you applying to adopt every day and countries’ requirements are getting stricter all the time.’’ 3 Those who stick with international adoption even after hearing this bad news may be motivated partly by the urgent desire to have a child and partly by something that the profession glosses as ‘‘solidarity,’’ which I describe in chapter 5. 4 A third feature that Calles mentions and that is deeply significant for adoptive parents, the choice of country, is of great interest, but my Peru-focused research design precludes considering it in detail here. In Madrid, he explained, one cannot do ‘‘simultaneous submission’’ to two countries, because it would be harmful to a child to be assigned and then rejected, for example because the other country had o√ered the parents a younger child. See Jacobson 2008 and Seligmann 2009 for discussions of how prospective parents choose whether to adopt domestically or internationally, and if the latter, from which country. 5 Thanks to Gisela Fosado for articulating this framing.

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6 After the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), tens of thousands of Franco’s opponents’ children were removed from their families and some of them were placed with pro-regime families. See Victoria Burnett, ‘‘Families Search for Truth of Spain’s ‘Lost Children,’ ’’ The New York Times, page a12, March 1, 2009. Details of this troubled history are still emerging, and it now appears that some parents were told that their babies had died in childbirth so that the children could be sold to adoptive parents. Diana Marre has argued that this vexed history grounds a peculiarly Spanish refusal to consider birth mothers’ wishes in adoption processes (2009b). 7 Barbara Yngvesson has made a similar observation about Sweden and the implications for international adoption in a context where blood ties are seen as so central that Swedish children who are removed from their parents are placed in long-term foster care rather than adopted (2010). 8 See Howell and Marre 2006; Marre 2007; Marre and Bestard 2004; and Selman 2009 (577) for this history in Spain. Laura Briggs has made the provocative and compelling argument that reduced fertility and serious barriers to domestic adoption do not explain the rise of international adoption—they describe the demographic context without acknowledging the political reality (2012, 6). 9 Tatiana Escarraga, ‘‘La empresa Ikea retira el eslogan ‘Redecora tu vida: Adopta un niño,’ ’’ El País (Spain), February 22, 2001, http://elpais.com/diario/2001/ 02/22/madrid/982844658e850215.html. See also Aitor Zuloaga, ‘‘La adopción, cada vez más mediatizada por la televisión, el cine y la publicidad,’’ Vertele (Spain), September 19, 2005, http://www.vertele.com/noticias/la-adopcioncada-vez-mas-mediatizada-por-la-television-el-cine-y-la-publicidad/. 10 I accessed the national data via Spain’s National Statistics Institute, ine.es, on July 14, 2012. Data from Madrid comes from Consejería de Familia y Asuntos Sociales 2008, Memoria Anual 2007, page 203. This document is available on the Community of Madrid’s website, http://www.madrid.org/cs/Satellite?c= cmePublicacionesefa&cid=1142531326609&language=es&pagename= ComunidadMadrid%2FEstructura. 11 Dirección General de Adopciones, Ministerio de la Mujer y Poblaciones Vulnerables, November 30, 2012. ‘‘Niñas, niños y adolescentes adoptados según país de procedencia de los/as adoptantes. 2007–2012,’’ http://www.mimdes .gob.pe/files/direcciones/dga/AdopcioneseNNAprocedenciaAdoptantese 30Nov2012.pdf. 12 Diana Marre notes this coincided with a moment when Spanish people had grown accustomed to Latin American women living alongside them as caretakers for children or elderly—something also mentioned by the migrants introduced in chapter 2—and Spaniards had observed the care and sweetness (dulzura) with which those women treated their charges (2009a). 13 This code was replaced in 2000 by Ley 27337 and adoptions since 2006 have also been governed by Ley 26981, Ley del Procedimiento Administrativo de Adopción de Menores de Edad Declarados Judicialmente en Abandono. Certain 160

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15

16

17

18

19

categories of minor adoptions (stepparent, of close kin, or of someone who has lived with you for more than two years) are still done by a judge; see Ley 27337, chapter 5, article 128. See ‘‘Isabel Pantoja aclara la adopción de su hija,’’ Hola!, May 9, 2002, http:// www.hola.com/famosos/2002050928944/famosos/isabelreaccion1/isabelre accion1/; ‘‘Primeras declaraciones de Isabel Pantoja tras afirmar un diario que pagó para agilizar la adopción de su hija,’’ Hola!, May 9, 2002, http://www.hola .com/famosos/2002050928945/famosos/isabelreaccion2/isabelreaccion2/; ‘‘Isabel Pantoja: La adopción de mi hija fue totalmente legal,’’ abc (Spain), May 10, 2002, http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-10–05–2002/abc/gente/ isabel-pantoja-la-adopcion-de-mi-hija-fue-totalmente-legale98083.html; César Romero Calle, ‘‘Cómo tener una hija en 24 horas,’’ La República (Peru), September 28, 2003, http://www.larepublica.pe/28–09–2003/como-tener-una-hijaen-24-horas; Ana Véliz, ‘‘Isabel Pantoja: Archiven mi caso,’’ La República (Peru), March 7, 2004, http://www.larepublica.pe/07–03–2004/isabel-pantojaarchiven-mi-caso; ‘‘Isabel Pantoja está acusada en Perú de pagar sobornos para acelerar la adopción de su hija,’’ El País (Spain), May 3, 2007, http://elpais.com/ elpais/2007/05/03/actualidad/1178180219e850215.html; and ‘‘La Pantoja, entre novelas y dramas,’’ La República (Peru), May 5, 2007, http://www.larepublica .pe/05–05–2007/la-pantoja-entre-novelas-y-dramas. Dirección General de Adopciones, Ministerio de la Mujer y Poblaciones Vulnerables, November 30, 2012. ‘‘Niñas, niños y adolescentes adoptados por tipo de adopción, 2007–2012,’’ http://www.mimp.gob.pe/files/direcciones/dga/ AdopcionesennatipoAdopcione30Nov2012.pdf. In Sergio’s opinion, the very guarantees of the process led to a spike in demand from Peru. As he explained, ‘‘there was a lot of demand, because it was a guaranteed process, people [adoptive parents] had been happy with the way it went.’’ In the early years of adoption much was done by word of mouth, and prospective adopters learned from others what countries managed things well. Adoption agencies in Spain are called ecais, which stands for Entidad Colaboradora de Adopción Internacional (Entity That Assists with International Adoption). The General O≈ce of Adoptions (Dirección General de Adopciones) is currently a branch of the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations (Ministerio de la Mujer y Poblaciones Vulnerables, mimp). The ministry was recently renamed by the new Humala administration, and was most recently known as the Ministry of Women and Social Development (Ministerio de la Mujer y Desarrollo Social, mimdes). There are seventeen autonomous communities (comunidades autónomas) in Spain, but twenty-three central authorities for purposes of adoption because two such communities—the Balearic Islands and the Basque Country—each have several authorities (Diana Marre, personal communication, e-mail, November 21, 2010). Notes to Chapter One

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20 This quote comes from ‘‘Guía de Procedimiento Administrativo de Adopción,’’ an unpublished document dated 2001 and prepared by Peru’s central adoption authority (at the time called the Ministerio de Promoción de la Mujer y del Desarrollo Humano, or promudeh). 21 This and all subsequent quotes come from posts dated 2011. The forum is public, but I have omitted the posters’ names and dates of posting, and freely translated their posts, in order to at least partly protect their identities. 22 The regulations corresponding to Ley 26981 (Peru’s law regarding the administrative procedure for the adoption of minors who have been legally declared abandoned) further describe the parameters of this choice. They emphasize ‘‘the most compatible, suitable adopter’’ (Article 19) based above all on the ‘‘Best Interests of the Child’’ (emphasis in the original) and next on the adopters’ position on the waitlist; willingness to accept older or disabled children or sibling groups; or preferences regarding age, sex, and other characteristics (Article 20) (see Reglamento 010–2005-mimdes, http://www.mimdes.gob.pe/ files/direcciones/dga/1221e0102005emimdes.pdf). 23 Raquel Rivera, ‘‘20,000 familias esperan desde hace años adoptar en el extranjero,’’ Cadena ser (Spain), December 12, 2010, http://www.cadenaser.com/ sociedad/articulo/20000-familias-esperan-hace-anos-adoptar-extranjero/ csrcsrpor/20101212csrcsrsoce4/Tes. 24 See Anagnost 2000; Gay y Blasco 2012; and Noonan 2007 for other analyses of online postings by waiting parents. 25 In one newspaper article, complaints about the long waits blamed two figures: the sending countries, which have made things ‘‘more di≈cult’’ since ratifying the Hague Adoption Convention, and the United States, as scandals there lead sending countries to tighten their regulations (Daniel Ayllón, ‘‘La espera también se generaliza en la adopción internacional,’’ Público.es (Spain), October 9, 2011, http://www.publico.es/espana/400603/la-espera-tambien-se-generalizaen-la-adopcion-internacional. 26 Mario Toledo, ‘‘La adopción de niños extranjeros toca fondo en la Comunidad de Madrid por las trabas legales,’’ 20minutos.es (Spain), March 1, 2010, http://www .20minutos.es/noticia/1324530/0/adopcion-madrid/extranjeros/toca-fondo. 27 Laura Tardón, ‘‘ ‘Embarazos’ que duran años,’’ El Mundo (Spain), December 2, 2011, http://www.elmundo.es/elmundosalud/2011/12/02/mujer/1322849243 .html. 28 The anguish of waiting is also the central trope in narratives of marriage migration (i.e., marrying and then working to bring a spouse from abroad with a green card or the equivalent) (Constable 2003, 175). The experience of waiting also echoes that of others living in the gap between deciding to have children and actually doing so. For example, a mother describing her daughter born to a surrogate called her ‘‘conceived in my heart before [the surrogate’s] body’’ (Ragone 1994, 126). 29 Yolanda Vaccaro, ‘‘Futuro Truncado,’’ May 4, 2003, El Comercio (Lima), em162

Notes to Chapter One

30

31 32

33

34

35 36

37

phasis in original; see also Berástegui 2008 for a psychological perspective on the pain of waiting. The anthropologist Linda Layne has made a related observation about women who have experienced miscarriage, some of whom consider themselves to be mothers mourning lost children, a self-identification that is not broadly accepted by others (2003). Participants in other online forums have also referred to the process of adoption as the ‘‘bureaucratic pregnancy’’ (Marre 2004; Jociles and Charro 2008, 113). Those couples whose average age is between forty-four and fifty are assigned a child in the three-to-six age range; those whose average age is between fiftyone and fifty-five are assigned a child who is six or older. Singles aged thirtyfive to fifty are assigned children age five and up. mimdes’s website explains this without explaining it, noting that the age parameters are related to the ‘‘best interests of the child’’ and that they ‘‘attempt to link the age of the adopters to the best care for the child’’ (Preguntas Frecuentes, http://www.mimdes .gob.pe/index.php?option=comecontent&view=article&id=1618&Itemid= 250#5). The relationship between the approved age ranges suggests an attempt to approximate the extending but still limited biological reproductive timeframe: the maximum allowable di√erence between the parents’ average age and the child’s age is forty-nine years. Sven Bergmann has observed that in Spanish egg donation, anonymity between donor and recipient is required by law (2011a, 285). The relatively unusual requirement of anonymity highlights this broader fear of another mother coming to take one’s child away (see Bergmann 2011b, 604). Like the longer waiting periods associated with the ‘‘sweet adoptions’’ in Latin America, encouraging parents to take even more time away from work before enrolling a child in day care or school assumes either a couple where only one parent works outside the home or parents who have extremely generous parental leave policies and pay to draw upon. See Howell 2006 (87) on psychology’s ‘‘backpack’’ metaphor. ‘‘cora emite un comunicado solicitando cambios en los procedimientos de Adopción Internacional,’’ Coraenlared.org, July 11, 2012, http://www.coraenlar ed.org/index.php?id=78&txettnews[ttenews]=229&txettnews[backPid]=1& cHash=e3520c0435. mimp, ‘‘Adopciones Prioritarias,’’ http://www.mimdes.gob.pe/index.php? option=comecontent&view=article&id=341&Itemid=349.

Two. The Best Interests of a Migrant’s Child

1 A possible origin for the passport imagery is in the folk art of Arequipa, a Peruvian region with an independent streak where passports are often jokingly deployed to indicate the region’s separateness from the rest of the nation (Florence Babb, personal communication, January 16, 2012, Lima). Notes to Chapter Two

163

2 The figures in this and the following paragraph were compiled by my research assistant Kristin Skrabut. They come from a Peruvian report (Cooperación Interinstitucional inei-digemin-oim 2010), itself derived from information collected by the Dirección General de Migraciones y Naturalización via the Tarjeta Andina de Migración, a form filled out by everyone departing Peru. Less than half of Peruvians departing in the last fifteen years have formally changed their residency with the Peruvian consulate, suggesting that many of these have overstayed their tourist visas (Cooperación Interinstitucional ineidigemin-oim 2010, 16). Figures on migration are based on those Peruvians who o≈cially changed their residency. Other figures come from Organización Internacional para las Migraciones (2008), compiled from the Encuesta Nacional Continua in 2006, a sample survey of 380,000 households from around the country. 3 The five-year averages of Peruvians leaving the country annually are 59,563 (1990–94), 40,383 (1995–99), 93,866 (2000–2004), and 213,809 (2005–9). 4 It is second only to Buenos Aires, where a tenth of all Peruvian migrants reside. 5 Over the course of the last twenty years, 50.4 percent of Peruvian migrants have been women. Although this has varied across years, in the mid-1990s climbing to about 55 percent women, it recently leveled out to about 52 percent women (Cooperación Interinstitucional inei-digemin-oim 2010, 20). 6 Andrés Tornos and Rosa Aparicio argue that Peruvians migrate for four key ‘‘mythic objects’’: the opportunity for individual progress, the compelling lure of a developed nation, the access to opportunities that Spain o√ers, and the potential for individual achievement (1997, 65). More concretely, the commonly expressed desires are for money and gifts to send back home to Peru, a house that they can ultimately build in Peru with their earnings, and tastes of Peru, in the food that they consume while abroad (75–77). 7 An additional di≈culty arising when children migrate to Spain is that they lose the extended family support they have been accustomed to in their home country, as Claudia Pedone notes for Ecuador (2006, 213). 8 A migrant friend who has volunteered as a music educator in a juvenile detention center added one more layer of nuance to this criticism. She told me that many of the inmates are migrant youths whose parents work such long hours that the children were unsupervised and were led astray. But she also suggested that, as children of emigrant parents in Peru, the youths grew accustomed to the good quality of life sustained by gifts from the migrant parents and the low cost of living in Peru. Upon coming to Spain to join their migrant parents amid a much higher cost of living, they su√er a serious downgrade in lifestyle and understandably rebel. 9 There are no figures on this decision, but we can speculate that a significant number of children live in Peru while one or both parents live abroad. This assumption is based on Peruvian statistics that show that children under fourteen make up less than 10 percent of migrants from Peru, that most Peruvians who 164

Notes to Chapter Two

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11

12

13

14

15

migrate are of child-bearing age (between twenty and thirty-nine), and that 22 percent of the population receiving remittances in Peru is under fifteen (Cooperación Interinstitucional inei-digemin-oim 2010). The phrase represents the children from the point of view of the adult migrants. They are only ‘‘left behind’’ if the focus is on the migrant who has done the leaving. If the focus were redirected to be on the child, as a growing number of scholars are now doing, we might reinterpret these children as, for example, ‘‘children living the experience of parental migration’’ (Duque 2011, 15n5). Thanks to Kristin Yarris for this reference. The question of age is relevant for the children of labor migrants as well as adoptees, not least because only children who are minors at the moment of a migrant’s naturalization may share in the status change. I learned this from Violeta, who migrated via family reunification at seventeen and turned eighteen in Spain. Her parents obtained Spanish citizenship some time afterward, and her younger siblings automatically acquired citizenship at the same time, but because she was no longer a minor she retained the status of a reunified family member, and she still cannot legally work. In 2007, nearly twice as many permanent resident visas were issued to Peruvians for work (15,599) as for family reunification (8,211). By 2010 both figures had dropped precipitously, and the proportions had inverted: nearly twice as many permanent resident visas were issued for family reunification (2,826) as for work (1,543) (Secretaría General de Inmigración y Emigración, ‘‘Visados expedidos en Oficinas Consulares 2007’’ and ‘‘Visados expedidos en Oficinas Consulares 2010,’’ http://extranjeros.meyss.es/es/Estadisticas/operaciones/ visados/index.html). One can also see the opposed exclusionary and humanitarian tendencies in Spanish policy toward unaccompanied minors. As Núria Empez Vidal notes, ‘‘on the one hand, they are immigrants in an irregular administrative situation, that is, ‘illegal immigrants’ who should be deported; but on the other hand, as minors, they should be safeguarded by the child protection system’’ (2011, 174). A recent article in El País argued that ‘‘age determines the future of an immigrant who arrives to Spain: if he is an adult and undocumented he will be deported, if he is a minor he must be protected by the State’’ (Mónica Ceberio Belaza, ‘‘Menores con margen de error,’’ El País (Spain), September 29, 2011, http://elpais.com/diario/2011/09/29/sociedad/1317247202e850215.html). I follow the work of several important scholars of family reunification in making this interpretation (Bledsoe 2006; Bledsoe and Sow 2011b; Collard 2009; Hautaniemi 2007). Spain’s linguistic authority on the Spanish language, the Spanish Royal Academy’s Diccionario de la Lengua Española (the twenty-second edition), defines ‘‘reagrupar’’ as ‘‘Agrupar de nuevo o de modo diferente lo que ya estuvo agrupado’’ (bringing together again, or rearranging the grouping of things that were already previously joined). Notes to Chapter Two

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16 ‘‘Los extranjeros residentes tienen derecho a la vida en familia. . . .’’ (Ley Orgánica 4/2000, de 11 de enero, sobre derechos y libertades de los extranjeros en España y su integración social, Chapter ii, Article 16.1, available at http:// noticias.juridicas.com/baseedatos/Admin/104–2000.html). Family reunification was written into Spain’s immigration policy via a 1996 amendment to the original 1985 Ley de Extranjería (Law on Foreigners) (Paerregaard 2008, 387). The un’s International Labour Organization, by contrast, does not protect undocumented migrants’ rights to family unity (Bosniak 1991, 759n38). 17 A further potential circumscription is seen in Denmark, which has also recently limited family reunifications, prohibiting migration for spouses with insu≈cient ‘‘national attachment’’ to Denmark over some other country (Rytter 2010, 302). 18 A further potential circumscription has been proposed in France: testing the dna of migrants’ family members to prove biological relationships prior to approving the reunification application. See Hautaniemi 2007; Yngvesson 2010, 24; Elaine Sciolino, ‘‘Proposal in France to Test Some Immigrants’ dna,’’ New York Times, October 11, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/ europe/11france.html. For a contrasting case that is even more strict, consider Taiwan, where certain minors—namely, the children of Chinese women who later married Taiwanese men and migrated to Taiwan—are de facto prohibited from migrating entirely due to strategic restrictions on the child’s age and the mother’s length of residency (Friedman 2010, 85–86). 19 Ley de Extranjería (Law of Foreigners), Chapter ii, Article 17.1.d. Peruvian legal advocates argued that this requirement excluded the parents of many Peruvian migrants by setting the bar higher (‘‘documentable reasons’’) than required by Peruvian filial norms, in which aged parents often live at home (Leinaweaver 2008a, 44). Furthermore, aged parents lived at home in Spain as well, right up through the 1980s and the economic boom (Collier 1997, 178–83). 20 This information is located in Title iv, Chapter ii, Articles 54 (on income) and 55 (on the qualities of the residence) of the 2011 immigration regulations (Real Decreto 557/2011, de 20 de abril, por el que se aprueba el Reglamento de la Ley Orgánica 4/2000, sobre derechos y libertades de los extranjeros en España y su integración social, tras su reforma por Ley Orgánica 2/2009, available at http:// www.boe.es/boe/dias/2011/04/30/pdfs/boe-a-2011–7703.pdf). 21 Gerardo Pisarello and Vanesa Valiño note that the very specificity of these requirements for migrants contrasts with the vagueness of the law regarding the kind of lodging to which migrants have a right (2006, 192). 22 The specificity about the dwelling for the regrouped migrant may draw not only upon kinship ideologies of the house, where families are formed and constituted, but also upon anti-immigrant sentiments that manifest in discourses about unsuitable housing. Peruvian migrants in Madrid complained about Chinese migrants who, they said, housed multiple occupants in a single room and charged exorbitantly for these exploitative conditions. 166

Notes to Chapter Two

Three. Mixed Marriages

1 The rarity of mixed adoptions can be illustrated through reviewing records of adoption assignments. These records are posted on mimp’s website each month but are not archived there, so these figures come from the monthly records my research assistant collected for my personal archive. (The results for the current month can be accessed under ‘‘Resultados del Consejo de Adopciones’’ on mimp’s Dirección General de Adopciones website, http://www .mimp.gob.pe/.) The assignments from the first four months of 2011, including ‘‘priority’’ adoptions (special needs, older children, and sibling groups), show twenty-three domestic adoptions, thirty-seven international adoptions, and three adoptions (5 percent of the total) to mixed marriages living abroad. 2 The opposite case—mixed marriages of one foreigner and one Peruvian residing in Peru—is not formally discussed in adoption policy. See Lucy Hermoza de Rigal, ‘‘¡Mamá!,’’ Yo también me llamo Perú (blog), May 7, 2009, http://blogs .elcomercio.pe/yotambienmellamoperu/2009/05/mama.html. The implication here is that the significance of ‘‘mixed’’ is only relevant to adoption policy in the foreign context. 3 The same exceptions apply to Peruvian singles or couples who reside abroad, but mixed marriages outnumber both of these alternatives. 4 Regarding exceptions to the twenty-file limit, see the mimdes statement to Spanish adoption authorities dated October, 2010. The statement is available on the Junta de Castilla y León’s website, http://www.jcyl.es/ (Servicios Sociales/Infancia/Adopción internacional/Paises), ‘‘País: Perú,’’ August 2012, http://www.jcyl.es/web/jcyl/binarios/801/346/. 5 See ‘‘De los Adoptantes Peruanos Residentes en el Extranjero’’ (On Peruvian Adopters Who Reside Abroad), Article 17 of Reglamento 010–2005-mimdes (reglamentos are procedural regulations that outline steps for compliance with specific laws, in this case those set out in Peru’s Ley 26981, Ley del Procedimiento Administrativo de Adopción de Menores de Edad Declarados Judicialmente en Abandono, the 1998 law setting out the administrative process of adoption of legally abandoned minors, available at http://www.mimdes.gob.pe/ files/direcciones/dga/1221e0102005emimdes.pdf). 6 In 2009 these were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, the United States, and other South American countries (Secretaría Nacional de Adopciones, ‘‘Nota informativa sobre adopción internacional,’’ June 10, 2009, http://www .mimp.gob.pe). However, in practice this number is somewhat reduced because, as of December 2012, only nine countries had agencies that were accredited to conduct Peruvian adoptions: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Norway, Spain and the United States (Dirección General de Adopciones, ‘‘Registro de Organismos Internacionales Acreditados Autorizados Para Colaborar en Materia de Adopción Internacional en el Perú,’’ www.mimdes .gob.pe/files/direcciones/dga/organismoseacreditadosediciembre2012.pdf). Notes to Chapter Three

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7 The value placed on adoptions by mixed marriages is also a response to some of the anxieties about transracial adoption that emerged in concerns raised by parents and professionals. 8 Jordi Roca Girona’s review of Spanish statistics on mixed marriages found that during the thirteen-year period from 1996 to 2009, more than 150,000 Spanish men and more than 100,000 Spanish women married foreigners (2011, 488n1). Two-thirds of those Spanish men married Latin American women (489n4). 9 However, bringing her children would mean that she could no longer receive unemployment payments and head-of-household supplements, because a ward of the state may not apply to bring dependents. 10 Actually this phrase is attributed to Antonio Raimondi, but Sileny’s guess is a good one; the writings of both José Maria Arguedas, the twentieth-century mestizo writer and ethnographer, and Raimondi, the nineteenth-century Peruvian-Italian biologist and scholar, are often cited to support arguments about marginalization in or of Peru. 11 Peru’s law establishes that a child may be adopted by ‘‘the spouse of the child or adolescent’s father or mother, in which case the child or adolescent maintains the ties of filiation with the biological father or mother’’ (Article 128.a of Ley 27337, Código de los Niños y Adolescentes, 2000, http://www.mimdes.gob .pe/files/direcciones/dga/nuevo-codigo-ninos-adolescentes.pdf). 12 The Libro de Familia (Family Registry Book) is another story. This blue booklet, twice the size of a passport, is still issued to couples upon their marriage in Spain. Significant acts that are recorded in the Civil Registry are also inscribed in the Libro de Familia. The first page lists information about the marriage. Subsequent pages document children born to a marriage (people who have children outside of marriage are issued a Libro de Familia as well). Sileny said that when her children come to Spain they will be listed in this book, as if they are products of her marriage to Alonso. Spain has recently passed new legislation that will make the Libro de Familia obsolete, but it has not yet been replaced. 13 See Constable 2003, 84. Thai (2003) has also studied this phenomenon in marriages between Vietnamese women and U.S. men, as has Kelsky (2001) on Japanese women and U.S. men, and Cole on Malagasy women and French men (Cole 2011). 14 Recent Spanish films lean toward this representation, depicting modest and beautiful Latin American women finding success through marrying Spanish men: ‘‘The narrative surrounding cultural a≈nity proposes a seamless integration into Spanish society and the eventual erasure of any marks of ethnic diversity, while at the same time hinging its representation on the visual di√erence between the newcomers and the local inhabitants’’ (Song 2008, 58). 15 See Ministerio de Justicia, ‘‘¿Cómo se adquiere la nacionalidad española? Españoles de origen,’’ http://www.mjusticia.gob.es/cs/Satellite/es/ 1215198282620/Estructuraep /1215198295149/Detalle.html. 16 One case I recorded bore witness to some of the wrinkles in how this originally 168

Notes to Chapter Three

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worked. Lucas was born in Madrid in 1992, a year after his parents arrived from Peru, and very early in the history of Peruvian migration to Spain. Regarding that time, he said, ‘‘there were no children of Peruvian parents, children of foreign parents, at that time, so in a juridical sense I didn’t exist for one year. Peru said, ‘First he has to be Spanish; they should recognize him in Spain and then he can be Peruvian.’ And Spain said, ‘No, first he should be recognized in Peru and then here.’ So legally, for one year, I didn’t exist.’’ See Andrés Restrepo, ‘‘Los hijos de bolivianos ya no serán españoles al nacer,’’ Latino (Spain), July 10, 2009, http://www.enlatino.com/paises/bolivia/loshijos-de-bolivianos-ya-no-seran-espanoles-al-nacer. In contrast with U.S. policy, however, alien parents responsible for their Spanish minor child may not be deported, and they can be formally granted residency so that the child is not left alone. Peruvians, along with citizens of Andorra, Equatorial Guinea, the Philippines, Portugal, and other Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin American nations, may hold dual citizenship (Ministerio de Justicia, ‘‘Tener la doble nacionalidad’’ (Holding dual citizenship), http://www.mjusticia.gob.es/cs/Satellite/es/ 1215198282690/EstructuraOrganica.html). See Ministerio de Justicia, ‘‘¿Cómo se adquiere la nacionalidad española?’’ (How does one obtain Spanish citizenship?) http://www.mjusticia.gob.es/cs/ Satellite/es/1215198282620/Estructuraep /1215198295149/Detalle.html. This claim is complicated by Denise Brennan’s research on single mothers who strategically attempt to marry foreigners as a tactic to achieve their children’s migration as well as their own (2003, 155, 159). I thank an anonymous reader for this observation. In the cases of Cindy and Paulina, their narratives of marital migration did not hint at this possibility, and in fact explicitly rejected it. International adoption is not literally free of charge because of the costs of travel, obtaining medical and police certificates, compensation for the professional undertaking the home study, and so on. However, Peruvian law requires that ‘‘the process of domestic and international law is completely free of charge and does not require a private lawyer’’ (mimp, ‘‘Preguntas Frequentes’’ [Frequently Asked Questions], http://www.mimdes.gob.pe/). Article 4.b of the Convention, emphasis mine. The full text of the convention is available on the website for the Hague Conference on Private International Law, http://www.hcch.net/indexeen.php?act=conventions.text&cid=69. For example, the un’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (crc) suggests that it is good for a child to maintain his or her national identity. Article 7 of the crc gives the child the right to ‘‘acquire a nationality,’’ and Article 8 grants the child the right to ‘‘preserve his or her identity, including nationality’’ (http://www.2.0hchr.org/english/law/crc.htm). Article 116 of Ley 27337, Código de los Niños y Adolescentes, 2000, http:// www.mimdes.gob.pe/files/direcciones/dga/nuevo-codigo-ninos-adolescentes .pdf, emphasis mine. Notes to Chapter Three

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25 un Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 20; Hague Adoption Convention, Article 16.b. These statements about continuity in the crc and Hague Adoption Convention are also used by people in Spain to argue that Latin American adoptees would be better o√ in Spain than in other, more dissimilar foreign countries. Salomé Vélez, of Colombia’s child welfare department, told a Spanish reporter that ‘‘Spaniards are very warm with the children and adapt well to Colombians, we’re from the same family and have the same roots, language, religion, cultural identity and customs. All this helps the child integrate more easily’’ (Joaquim Ibarz, ‘‘Niños que vienen de Colombia,’’ La Vanguardia (Spain), February 28, 1999, Revista 10–11). Such an argument partly relies on downplaying the strong presence in Spain of several minority languages. I heard one anecdote about an older Peruvian child adopted by a family of Basque nationalists who insisted he speak only in Basque. Diana Marre also mentions in passing a Chinese girl speaking Catalan, ‘‘the main symbol of [Catalonian] national integration’’ (2009c, 237). 26 Additional evidence for this argument is that foreigners living in Peru for fewer than two years must adopt following the guidelines for international, rather than domestic, adoption (this is stated both in Article 129 of Ley 27337, Código de los Niños y Adolescentes, 2000, http://www.mimdes.gob.pe/files/direcciones/ dga/nuevo-codigo-ninos-adolescentes.pdf, and in Article 15 of No. 010–2005mimdes, the corresponding regulations). The implication is that such a prospective parent’s foreign national substance travels with him or her, and the importance of living in Peru falls away. 27 Both Paulina and Clara had experienced doubts from strangers about whether they were truly the mothers of their children, although Paulina is assumed to be an adoptive mother, while Clara is assumed to be a child-care worker (compare Gibel Azoulay 1997 on interracial families). The case of interracial white and Asian couples in the United States who adopt from China are another instance of how mixed couples can ‘‘pass’’ as nonadoptive: ‘‘The salience of race in negotiating kinship is underscored in those few families for whom it actually helped to relieve anxiety around origins’’ (Dorow and Swi√en 2009, 569).

Four. Undomesticated Adoption

1 Medical anthropologists working on migrant fertility have highlighted tensions in host countries along various axes, from Sarah Willen’s study of how ‘‘illegal’’ migrants in Israel are nonetheless entitled to state-subsidized prenatal care due to ngo activism and Israeli pronatalism (2005) to Carolyn Sargent and Stephanie Larchanche’s analysis of the dismissive treatment of pregnant Malian migrants in France because of assumptions about polygyny and patriarchy (2007). 2 A general information line, 012, connects Madrid residents to services o√ered by the Community of Madrid. 3 This and subsequent details about the campaign come from ‘‘Campaña en el 170

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metro y en los centros de salud para prevenir el abandono de bebés,’’ Madrid .org, May 14, 2009, http://www.madrid.org/cs/Satellite?c=cmeActualidade fa&cid=1142554624903&language=es&pagename=ComunidadMadrid%2 FEstructura. Recording the mother’s information prevents Madrid from falling out of compliance with the un Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that a child has ‘‘as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents’’ (Article 7). The Guardian reported in 2012 on concerns at the un about European ‘‘baby boxes’’ and ‘‘foundling wheels’’ (a practice with a lengthy history in Europe; see Kertzer 1993) where infants can be safely abandoned. Randeep Ramesh, ‘‘Spread of ‘Baby Boxes’ in Europe Alarms United Nations,’’ Guardian (United Kingdom), June 10, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2012/jun/10/unitednations-europe-news. Thanks to Wendy Chavkin for this reference. Both the campaign publicity and this o≈cial conflated the fertility of illegal immigrants with the problem of infant abandonment. Ministerio de Sanidad, Servicios Sociales e Igualdad, ‘‘Datos estadísticos,’’ http://www.msps.es/profesionales/saludPublica/prevPromocion/embarazo/ tablasefiguras.htm. By way of comparison, Spain’s 2010 rate of around 11.5 abortions per one thousand women aged fifteen to forty-four is significantly lower than the 2008 U.S. rate of 19.6 reported by the Guttmacher Institute (‘‘Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States,’’ August 2011, http://www .guttmacher.org/pubs/fbeinducedeabortion.html/). In Valencia, another autonomous community with a notably conservative government, Diana Marre has observed that in 2008, the social welfare department proposed a project to ‘‘arrange adoptions prior to birth in order to avoid abortions,’’ which Marre compared to surrogacy, a technology which is currently illegal in Spain (2009b, 117). Randeep Ramesh, ‘‘Spread of ‘Baby Boxes’ in Europe Alarms United Nations,’’ Guardian (United Kingdom), June 10, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2012/jun/10/unitednations-europe-news. Raíz puts out di√erent issues for the migrants from each country; Raíz Ecuador and Raíz Bolivia were both already at the bar, and someone brought in a stack of the June edition of Raíz Peru later that afternoon. In 2010, Spain’s total fertility rate (i.e., the average number of children a woman would be expected to bear in her lifetime based on that year’s national rates) was 1.38 and the U.S.’s was 1.93. Population Reference Bureau, ‘‘Fertility Rates for Low Birth Rate Countries, 1995 to Most Recent Year Available,’’ 2012, http://www.prb.org/pdf12/tfreTable2012eupdate.pdf. César Coca, ‘‘Uno de cada cuatro niños nacidos en España es hijo de extranjeros,’’ abc.es, August 31, 2010, http://www.abc.es/20100831/sociedad/cadacuatro-ninos-nacidos-20100831.html. Francisca García, ‘‘¿Por qué descienden los abortos en España?,’’ El País Notes to Chapter Four

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(Spain), February 14, 2011, http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2011/02/14/ actualidad/1297638011e850215.html. Ginger Thompson, ‘‘After Losing Freedom, Some Immigrants Face Loss of Custody of Their Children,’’ New York Times, April 22, 2009, a15, http://www .nytimes.com/2009/04/23/us/23children.html. The anthropologist Diana Marre told me that the opposition between poor and marginalized refers to a ‘‘common idea here [in Spain], very related to Catholic morality . . . , according to which you’re responsible—or guilty—for some things and not others. . . . Being poor implies just that, not having resources. By contrast marginalization, whether it’s because of alcohol, drugs, prostitution, bad company, not studying, stealing, etc., is your responsibility—and your fault’’ (personal communication, e-mail, February 16, 2012). This is comparable to domestic adoption from the public foster care system in the United States, where the available children are largely minorities (Gailey 2010). In the Castellón (Valencia) region, of the eighty-two applications for adoption that were filed in 2010, forty-eight were for a domestic adoption (Elena Aguilar, ‘‘Adoptar niños españoles ya es lo mayoritario,’’ El Periódico Mediterraneo, December 11, 2011, http://www.elperiodicomediterraneo.com/noticias/ castellon/adoptar-ninos-espanoles-ya-es-lo-mayoritarioe704259.html). I thank Kristin Skrabut for expressing this tension so clearly. The text of the Hague Adoption Convention (Convention of 29 May 1993 on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption) is available on the website for the Hague Conference on Private International Law, http://www.hcch.net/indexeen.php?act=conventions.text&cid=69. The text of Ley 54/2007, de 28 de diciembre, de Adopción internacional (the December 28, 2007, Law on International Adoption) is available at the Noticias Jurídicas website, http://noticias.juridicas.com/baseedatos/Privado/ 154–2007.t1.html#a1. This surely refers to two popular and widely translated books by the Belgian artist and author Hergé—The Seven Crystal Balls (1948) and Prisoners of the Sun (1949)—in which Tintin and his friends travel to Peru and discover mysteries of the Incas. I do not mean to accuse this o≈cial of racism on the basis of his discomfort with this term: others have also noted the di≈culty with which Spaniards talk about race, as it is understood in a U.S. context, and have noted that the concept is often supplanted by notions of cultural di√erence (Marre 2007, 89). I discuss this issue in chapter 6. The adoption process in Spain requires prospective parents to state precisely which disabilities would be acceptable and which would not. The request for a child younger than their daughter reflects a common belief that children should enter a family in chronological order. Raquel attributed the exceptional speed to Nicolás’s disability, suspecting that the authorities did not want to give her an opportunity to change her mind. Notes to Chapter Four

24 A Peruvian adoption o≈ce coordinator explained to me in 2002 that children who are adopted by foreigners ‘‘maintain their citizenship, because the birth certificate is obtained here. . . . Depending on the convention in place, they also acquire their parents’ nationality. They have double citizenship.’’ Also see the narrative of Alanya Santa Cruz (Leinaweaver 2011). However, because Nicolás was born in Spain, his eligibility is more complicated. Since he was born to a woman from Peru, a country which does not automatically give citizenship to the children of its migrants, he became a Spanish citizen upon birth. The Spain-born children of Peruvians are entitled to acquire Peruvian citizenship and may do so by registering at the consulate before their eighteenth birthday. In order to register, however, a minor would need a birth certificate identifying at least one parent as a Peruvian national (something made impossible through plenary adoption), and the identity card of that parent. See Consulado General del Perú, ‘‘Inscripción de Nacimientos,’’ http://www.consuladoperumadrid .org/nacimientos.htm. 25 An instructive comparison can be made here with transnational reproductive tourism. A German woman who traveled to Spain to be impregnated using a donor egg from a Spanish woman referred to the resulting children in later online postings ‘‘after the place of procreation in the lab: ‘my Spaniards’ or ‘my Valencianos’ ’’ (Bergmann 2011b, 604). The national substance is contained within the very gamete.

Five. Solidarity

1 Pilar Parra, ‘‘Las estrellas solidarias,’’ Tiempo de Hoy (Spain), January 11, 2008, http://www.tiempodehoy.com/espana/las-estrellas-solidarias. 2 The ‘‘rescue’’ framing also notably contrasts with the observable imbalance between supply and demand in the current adoption context: so many prospective parents are clamoring to ‘‘rescue’’ so few adoptable children. 3 If adoption should be about the desire to parent, rather than the wish to help a child, what follows is that the adopted child should be an ideal child. The implications of this position require further research, but it may mean that prospective adopters may elect not to adopt a child with special needs or that they may be disappointed if their child develops behavioral problems. Pepe, the father in the film, puts it as follows: ‘‘If we had known he was hyperactive we wouldn’t have taken him in—we’re not the Red Cross, we’re not Saint Angelina Jolie’’ (Planell 2009, 42). And Cora, the Peruvian representative of a Spanish adoption agency, told me in 2012 that she hadn’t hosted a Spanish adoptive couple for an entire year. She analyzed for me why there are far fewer adoptions from Peru to Spain than there once were. Because Peruvians are prioritized to adopt young and healthy Peruvian children, the children who are available for international adoption have various issues: health problems, birth parents with psychological problems, sibling groups, or older children. Cora Notes to Chapter Five

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said that prospective parents in Italy and in the United States are more open to children with such issues, but ‘‘Spaniards, not yet.’’ Applicants internalized or at least repeated this ideology when surveyed by the Spanish researcher Gabriel Dávalos Picazo, who found that only 8 percent of applicants for international adoption in the Community of Madrid indicated a desire ‘‘to help,’’ and 2 percent indicated that helping was actually their primary motivation to adopt, over and above the desire to parent a child (2002, cited in Berástegui 2005, 36). A Spanish exception is found in the scholarly work of the psychologist Ana Berástegui, who suggests that ‘‘it can be useful to get to know a person or organization from the child’s country of origin who can accompany the family’s evolution and orient or inform them about cultural aspects. A friend, a teacher, a cultural association—someone who can be a reference for parents and for the child when these aspects become important’’ (2000, 9). Literature on transracial adoption in the United States, both applied and analytical, is much more engaged with this possibility (Freundlich 2000). Incidentally, the young actor who plays Manu is actually from Ecuador. This ghostly fear, that a birth parent could cross the ocean and find the child and somehow wrest him from his adoptive parents’ arms, has its counterpart in the song that plays during the closing credits. ‘‘Arriba del cielo’’ (Above the sky), a children’s song ostensibly from Peru, includes the line ‘‘my parents want to sell me so they can buy chilies and tomatoes to eat.’’ In this way the film nicely captures fears about child tra≈cking and irregular adoptions musically, overlaying them with fears about the unexpected appearance of birth parents. See chapter 1, note 33 on a parallel in Spanish egg donation. Still, mothers’ discomfort with nannies’ closeness to their children is well documented (e.g., Colen 1995; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002). The association names are also pseudonyms. My description of Peruvian Ties and of another organization, Voyager, are drawn in part from interviews and conversations and in part from the associations’ websites, which I do not cite here in order to preserve the confidentiality of those involved. I first encountered such examples of materializing an ethical commitment to Peru in the early 2000s while conducting fieldwork in Ayacucho. There, I met Alanya Santa Cruz, a young woman who had been adopted to Holland as an infant and founded a home for street children in Ayacucho in 2002 because she ‘‘wanted to do something for [her] country and, especially, for the children.’’ I detail her story in Leinaweaver 2011. The solidarity experienced by parents refers either to the way that people adopt out of a hidden solidarity motive or to the sense that their parents’ generation was particularly leftist. When Pepe phones Rosa to ask her what exactly goes into the ceviche, two young men walk by behind them—they appear Latin American, perhaps Andean, and in the script it says they are wearing ‘‘rapper clothing’’ (Planell 2009, Notes to Chapter Five

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71). They help the viewer visualize this anxiety—that an adopted child is surrounded by such a context. The Spanish association was developed on the blueprint of the French association La Voix des Adoptés, founded in 2005 by two Peruvian adoptees. Many North American transracial adoptive parents go to great lengths to make sure that their child is not the only young person of color in their day care, school, or neighborhood. Laura’s remarks suggest that Spanish adoptive parents do not share this concern. One way that both of these interpretations can simultaneously be accommodated is for adoptees to spend time with nannies or mentors who resemble them while befriending native Spanish children. This hybrid approach fits more comfortably with many parents’ ideas of solidarity. This opinion was shared by professionals and scholars. The immf representative Antonio Calles remarked: ‘‘It’s painful for a child not to look like his parents. It reminds him of his sometimes painful past.’’ Felipe Marín, an adoption psychologist, told me that what adoptees and immigrants have in common is ‘‘gangs: those who aren’t integrated will take refuge in gangs. They identify with the other person’s poverty—adoptees didn’t start out life as bourgeois children, and when they don’t do what’s demanded of them, they seek out immigrants, because their skin is the same.’’ And in the view of the Spanish psychologist Javier Múgica Flores, adopted children and children in interracial families have objectively greater di≈culties accepting themselves than do immigrant children who reside among people who share their physical features (2008, 101). Infertility medicine and law in Spain hews to the ‘‘verisimilitude’’ model when dealing with donor gametes, further evidence that the belief that parents and children should resemble one another is widespread (Kahn 2000; Bergmann 2011b). It is notable that these examples fall out along gendered lines. Parents’ anxieties about adolescent girls have to do with their inappropriate friendships or romantic relationships; it is the boys who raise gang-related alarms. This has something to do with the gender composition of the gangs themselves, where boys are the majority, but it may also be related to the kinds of possible futures available to young men and women of Latin American origin in contemporary Spain. Waiting tables can be a respectable, lifelong career in Spain. See Jesús García, ‘‘Agresión racista en un tren de Barcelona,’’ El País (Spain), October 22, 2007, http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2007/10/22/actualidad/1193004008e850215.html. See also Marre 2009c, 227.

Six. Becoming and Unbecoming Peruvian

1 Mistrust of dark-skinned children is present when they are younger too, despite Carmela’s point about her cute children. One Swedish adoptive parent identified it as ‘‘playground racism’’ when kids refuse to play with her son, and it is only when she approaches and parents can identify him as adopted that Notes to Chapter Six

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they admonish their own children to include him in their play. As the mother put it, ‘‘And that is an interesting observation [that those other parents make]: ‘oh, he is not just any immigrant child’ ’’ (Hübinette and Tigervall 2009, 343). Carmen Giró, ‘‘El último reto de la adopción,’’ La Vanguardia (Spain), June 22, 2012, http://www.lavanguardia.com/magazine/20120622/54315274220/ carmen-giro-el-ultimo-reto-de-la-adopcion.html. Joaquim Ibarz, ‘‘Niños que vienen de Colombia,’’ La Vanguardia (Spain), February 28, 1999, Revista 10–11. This brackets the way that Spain is already multicultural even in its ostensible monoracial characteristics. Marre continues: ‘‘The adoptees are supposed to become fully Catalan or Galician and/or Spaniards,’’ but of course those would be read as distinct cultures in the Spanish context, as her ‘‘and/or’’ denotes (2009c, 238). Sometimes regional origin also serves the same purpose. For example, some parents had racialized ideas about their kids that related their behaviors to their places of birth. A few parents mentioned that their children were clearly from the selva (the Peruvian Amazon)—that in contrast with those from the sierra (Andes), their faces look di√erent and they have a lot of rage. Another mother whose child had been born in Arequipa said that sometimes ‘‘le sale su Misti’’ (she shows her volcanic side), which is an expression that refers to the volcano in Arequipa and indicated the child’s stubbornness. The original (racist) expression I have heard in Peru is ‘‘le sale su indio’’ (his or her Indian [i.e., savage] side comes out). American Anthropological Association, ‘‘American Anthropological Association Statement on ‘Race,’ ’’ May 17, 1998, http://www.understandingrace.org/about/ statement.html. Hall argues that this formulation of cultural identity is the product of a particular and long-lasting era of globalization and world markets to which ‘‘a strongly centered, highly exclusive, and exclusivist form of cultural identity’’ was a logical response (1997, 174). That the ostensible stability of identity is actually fictive ‘‘in no way undermines its discursive, material or political e≈cacy’’ (Hall 1996, 4). This is particularly important for historically marginalized people who are experiencing the rediscovery of such an essential identity (Hall 1990, 224; see Strong 1996 for American Indians). Noticias efe, ‘‘Caen un 80% las adopciones de niños procedentes de China,’’ efe (Spain), July 2, 2011, http://www.heraldo.es/noticias/caenelaseadopcionese procedentesechina.html. See also Louie 2009. Other parents contest the idea that their children should have an exclusive tie to Peru over other countries. Eager for her children to have a broader perspective, Carmela o√ered one of them a trip as a reward for doing well in school, and the child chose to go to a Caribbean beach, which Carmela thought was very ‘‘open’’—to go to Peru would have been self-limiting and ‘‘closed.’’ Notes to Chapter Six

11 This quote is taken from a draft of an article prepared in 2005 and sent to me by its author the Peruvian journalist Yolanda Vaccaro, a Madrid resident. The manuscript is located in her personal archive. Vaccaro’s article is about a Madrid couple with three children from Peru. 12 Ana Berástegui Pedro-Viejo, 2011, ‘‘Apertura de la comunicación sobre adopción: logros y lagunas,’’ unpublished manuscript, Instituto Universitario de la Familia, Universidad de Comillas. 13 Peru has a complex history with Russian symbols related to widespread admiration for key communist theorists preceding Shining Path’s rise, which helps to explain the Russian-sounding names of many children whom I met in Peru. 14 Another naming trend I observed in Peru is the prevalence of foreign-sounding names, and consonants like the ubiquitous ‘‘h,’’ which, more generally, is a display of modern cosmopolitanism. I met many children named ‘‘Jhonathan,’’ a name I interpreted as an attempt to emulate the English spelling and use a silent ‘‘h.’’ 15 Tobias Hübinette and Carina Tigervall (2009, 348) recount an almost identical story for a Korean adoptee. 16 Unfortunately there are instances of adoptive parents trying to ‘‘give back’’ their children in Spain, but they do so to the child-protective authorities so that the children are institutionalized or fostered. I have never heard of anyone in Spain attempting to bring an adopted child to a migrant community. 17 Ley, de 8 de junio de 1957, reguladora del Registro Civil (B.O.E n 151 de 10 de junio de 1957) (Law governing the civil registry); subsequently modified by Ley 40/1999, Ley Orgánica 1/2004, Ley 12/2005, Ley 13/2005, Ley 15/2005, and Ley 24/2005. See http://www.juecesdemocracia.es/legislacionvigente/civil/ derechopersonal/registrocivil.pdf. 18 Anecdotally, the psychologist indicated that families who adopt from Eastern Europe are more likely to formally change the child’s place of origin to Spain. Other scholars who have compared Russian adoption to transracial alternatives like Chinese or domestic adoption from within the U.S. foster care system have also observed that adopters of Russian children are often especially concerned with racial similarity and ‘‘passing’’ as genealogically related (Jacobson 2008; Seligmann 2009). 19 The text of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is available on unicef’s website, www2.0hchr.org/english/law/crc.htm. See also Peru’s Ley 27337, the Code of Children and Adolescents, which grants children the civil right ‘‘to be registered’’ in the Civil Registry (Chapter I, Article 7). The text of this code is available on the Peruvian congress’s website, http://www .congreso.gob.pe/ntley/Imagenes/Leyes/27337.pdf. 20 See Leinaweaver 2008b (149–50) for the story of a woman who registered her stepdaughter in a move that would technically have been deemed illegal, precisely so that the stepdaughter could obtain the national identity document.

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Conclusion. What Adoptive Migration Might Mean

1 I had heard this phrase before in Madrid, when attending a city festival in which the emcee, the singer Raphael, was identified as ‘‘madrileño by adoption.’’ He had been born elsewhere in Spain and moved to Madrid before turning one, yet he was not an unqualified madrileño.

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index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. adolescence, 5, 30, 51–52, 106–16, 123, 129–30, 141–47 adoption: adolescent di≈culties and, 5, 30, 51–52, 106–16, 123, 129–30, 141, 146– 47; class issues and, 3, 9, 40, 47–48, 89– 90, 101–9, 134–42; colonial legacies and, 8, 27–35; domestic, 5–6, 84–85; humanitarianism and, 104–6, 109–12, 173n2; kinship ideologies and, 36–44, 52–53, 95–101; legal and political aspects of, 3, 22–23, 27–35, 43–45, 59, 67, 73–74, 79– 80, 90–93, 142, 144, 152–54, 157n21, 162n25; migration and, 1–4, 7, 9–12, 15, 23–24, 59–60, 90–93, 112–21, 153–54, 156n18; mixed-marriage parents and, 5– 6, 67–74, 91–92, 162n28, 167n1, 168n7; national substance and, 5–7, 15, 40, 67, 81–83, 96, 101–2, 112–21, 150–51, 159n4, 173n24; origins-rooted identity construction and, 130–34, 142–44; paperwork and, 2, 31; preadoptive histories and, 3–4, 27, 31–32, 38–46, 67–74, 93– 101, 107–9, 148–49, 176n5; racialization and, 11, 21, 68–69, 85–101, 107–9, 112– 29, 150–51, 170n27, 175n1, 177n18; refusal of, 69–74; solidarity and, 103–5, 107–12, 173n2, 174n11; sweetness and, 29–38; undomesticated, 6, 85–93, 101; waiting and, 25–46, 67–68, 79, 93–95, 153, 162n25. See also Peru; privilege; Spain adoptive migration, 3. See also adoption; labor migration; marriage migrants; migration

adoptive refusal, 69–74 Aguirre, Esperanza, 85–86 Arguedas, José Maria, 168n10 assimilation. See integration; national substance; Peru; race and racialization; Spain babies. See infants bandas. See gangs; Latin gang trope belonging: citizenship and, 66–68, 73, 78– 83, 144, 150–54; family reunification and, 48–57; Latin gang fears and, 18–21, 102– 3, 112–21, 140; migration and, 5–7, 84; national substance and, 81–83, 149; preadoptive histories and, 38–44, 129–34, 148–49, 176n5. See also adoption; kinship; national substance; naturalization; race and racialization Berástegui, Ana, 86, 125, 174n5 birth certificates, 35, 45–46, 56, 68, 74, 142– 45, 150–51, 159n4 birth parents, 96–101, 104, 111, 133 birthright citizenship, 76–77, 80–81, 144, 150–54 Bledsoe, Caroline, 9, 52, 57–58 Bolivia, 77, 92 Briggs, Laura, 15, 90, 160n8 Calles, Antonio, 25–26, 38–43, 79, 105, 110, 122, 131, 137, 159n4, 175n17 Carsten, Janet, 67, 82 Casalilla, Juan Alonso, 40 Castillo, Sonia, 59, 144 children: desirability indices of, 27–33, 38– 47, 89–90; family reunification and, 48–

children (cont.) 65, 69–74; of labor migrants, 48–56; mixed marriages and, 67–83; national substance and, 66–74, 91–92, 96; preadoptive histories of, 3–4, 38–46, 67–74, 96–98, 107–9, 129–34, 148–49, 176n5; waiting and, 25–46. See also adolescence; adoption; infants; migration; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child China, 28–29, 31, 36, 140–41, 170n27 citizenship, 19–27, 35, 53–55, 64–66, 72– 83, 96, 144, 150–54, 173n24. See also belonging; birthright citizenship; national substance; naturalization; Spain Civil Registry Law (Spain), 144 class: education and, 40, 51, 55, 61–62, 64; migration politics and, 2, 8–9, 43, 49–56, 86–87, 99–102, 107–9; transnational adoption and, 9, 47–48, 53, 68–69, 95– 109, 134–42. See also globalization; labor migration; race and racialization colonialism. See Peru; Spain El Comercio (newspaper), 36 cora (Coordinadora de Asociaciones en Defensa de la Adopción y el Acogimiento), 45, 110 culture, 40–43, 51–52, 67–68, 79–83, 92– 95, 113–18, 134–42, 170n25. See also adoption; ethnicity; national substance; race and racialization diversity, 16, 21–22, 54, 80, 127, 144–46, 149, 168n14, 176n4. See also ethnicity; race and racialization; Spain documents. See paperwork domestic adoption, 84–85, 94–95. See also undomesticated adoption Dubinsky, Karen, 107, 123, 156n11 dulce espera, 35–38. See also adoption; parenting; waiting Durán, Cristina, 33, 34 The Dying Rooms (documentary), 27 education, 40, 51, 61–62, 64 ethnicity, 127, 145. See also national substance; Peru; race and racialization ‘‘Euro-orphans.’’ See family reunification

194

Index

families. See adoption; kinship; migration family reunification, 47–65, 68–77, 114, 151, 165n18 fertility, 14, 17, 27, 84–89, 104–6, 163n33, 170n1, 171n10. See also labor migration; Spain France, 89–91, 165n18 Franco, Francisco, 22, 27, 32, 160n6 Fujimori, Keiko, 23 Gailey, Christine Ward, 90, 115, 137 gangs, 18–21, 102–3, 112–21, 140, 158n27 Garcia Perez, Jesús, 21 gender, 6, 49, 56, 74–77, 89, 99–100. See also machismo Giménez Romero, Carlos, 21, 93, 102–4, 127 Giner Bou, Miguel A., 33, 34 globalization, 1–2, 5, 100, 120–21, 136, 140–43, 149. See also labor migration Hague Adoption Convention of 1993, 7, 32, 79–80, 83, 91, 162n25, 170n25 Hall, Stuart, 128, 150 Holt, Bertha and Harry, 159n34 Howell, Signe, 11, 96, 147 humanitarianism. See adoption; solidarity imagination work, 96–98, 104–5, 153. See also adoption; parenting immf (Instituto Madrileño del Menor y la Familia), 25, 32–33, 40, 105, 122, 131 infants, 3–4, 27, 38–47, 68, 85–90. See also adoption Instituto Universitario de la Familia, 131 integration (in receiving countries), 4, 15– 24, 39–40, 111–14, 125, 145–54, 168n14. See also Peru; Spain international adoption. See adoption; migration interracial surveillance, 125 Italy, 28 kinship: belonging and, 7–9, 39–44; family reunification policies and, 51–56, 151; legal structures of, 56–60; migration policies and, 56–60, 78–83, 100, 149; national substance and, 5–8, 24, 66–67, 73–77, 81–83; parental waiting experi-

ences and, 36–37; Peruvian ideologies of, 51, 60–65; preadoptive histories and, 38– 44, 93–101; Spanish ideologies of, 14, 17, 27, 84–89, 104–6, 163n33, 170n1, 171n10 Korea, 130, 159n34 labor migration: adoptable children of, 85– 101; adoptive families’ relation to, 101–2, 112–23; adoptive migration and, 2, 8–9, 67–74, 78–79; assimilation worries and, 4, 42, 47, 69; child-raising location and, 48–56, 81, 116–17, 164n8; economic circumstances and, 22–23, 148–49; family reunification and, 47–48, 56–60, 69–74, 114, 151, 165n12; fertility concerns and, 84–93, 170n1; jobs of, 10, 16–17, 99, 160n12. See also class; race and racialization; Spain language di√erences, 22, 62–65, 79, 125, 170n25 Latin gang trope, 17–21, 102–3, 112–21, 140, 158n27 Latinos: adoptee identities and, 63–64, 126, 142; definitions of, 17; fertility rates and, 89–95; integration worries and, 18–23, 62–63, 103–4, 112–17, 158n27. See also ethnicity; Peru; race and racialization; Spain machismo, 89, 116. See also gender Madrid, 85–90, 99–100, 104, 122 Marre, Diana, 6, 12, 27, 37, 111, 127, 160n6, 172n14 marriage migrants, 74–78, 162n28 Mead, Margaret, 146 methodological nationalism, 6, 150 metro stations, 85–90 Mexico, 55 migration: adoption and, 1–4, 7, 9–12, 15, 23–24, 38–44, 59–60, 69–74, 90–101, 153–54, 156n18; class issues and, 2–3, 9, 47–49, 53, 95–109, 134–42; colonial legacies and, 8; family reunification and, 47–65, 68–77, 114, 151, 165n18; fertility rates and, 84–85; gender and, 49–50; globalization and, 1–2, 48–56; labor, 2, 6, 47–60, 68, 85–93; Latin gang tropes and, 18–19, 102–3, 112–21, 140, 158n27; mar-

riage, 74–77; national substance and, 5– 7, 40–42, 67; naturalization and, 7–9, 16; ‘‘1.5-generation immigrants’’ and, 63–65; racialization and, 16–17, 21, 122; secondgeneration migrants and, 127–34; Spanish policies on, 18–19, 21–23; undocumented immigrants and, 85–90, 164n2 mixed marriages, 5–6, 67–84, 91–92, 139, 167n1, 168n7 nannies, 107–9, 174n9 National Association of Black Social Workers, 124 national substance: adoptee identities and, 40–42, 78–83, 91–92, 96, 101–2, 107–9, 112–21, 145–47, 149–51, 173n24; citizenship and, 66–68, 73, 76–83; definitions of, 5–7, 67, 80, 150; racialization and, 124–29; solidarity and, 109–12; Spanish law and, 142–45 naturalization, 7–9, 16 nongovernmental organizations (ngos), 109–12 Pantoja, Isabel, 30, 44–45 paperwork, 2, 25–26, 31. See also birth certificates; Civil Registry Law (Spain); Peruvian National Identity Document parenting: citizenship and, 66–74; desirability indices and, 31–33; imagination work and, 96–98, 104–5, 153; labor migrants and, 52–53, 84–90; migrant mothers and, 116–17, 164n8; motivations for, 104–7; national substance and, 78– 83; Peruvian kinship ideologies and, 51, 129–34; preadoptive histories and, 39– 44, 129–34; rights associated with, 27, 31–33; waiting experiences and, 25–46, 153 Parrondo, Lila, 5, 41, 86, 107, 112–13 Peru: adoption policies of, 1, 9–11, 28–35, 59–60, 67, 79–80, 173n24; adoptive refusal and, 69–74; assimilation pressures and, 61–65, 134–47, 149, 152–54; childraising norms in, 52, 62–65; colonial legacies in, 17–18, 27–35, 43, 60–65; family reunification and, 69–74; identifications with, 40–41; kinship ideologies

Index

195

Peru (cont.) of, 51, 60–65; labor migration and, 48– 56; Latin gang trope and, 101–2, 107, 112–21, 140; mixed marriages and, 67; national substance and, 6–7, 77, 79, 86– 87, 112–21, 173n24; racialization and, 124–29; second-generation migrants and, 127–34; solidarity and, 105–9; Spanish privilege and, 137–39 Peruvian National Identity Document, 130 Peruvian Ties (ngo), 110–11 Planell, David, 101, 102, 107–9, 112, 118–19, 131 plenary adoption, 7, 96, 173n24 ‘‘Position Statement on Trans-Racial Adoption’’ (nabsw), 124 preadoptive histories, 3–4, 129–34, 148–49, 176n5 privilege, 9, 47–48, 53, 67–68, 98–99, 107– 12, 136–37 race and racialization: adoptee (mis)identification and, 11, 87–93, 112–29, 139–41, 145, 150–51, 156n11, 170n27, 175n1, 177n18; double consciousness and, 137– 38; Latin gang trope and, 18–21, 112–21, 140, 158n27; mixed marriages and, 137– 39, 168n7; national substance ideologies and, 68–74; Spanish attitudes toward, 11, 17–22, 59, 68–69, 93, 99, 101, 112–22, 124–29, 158n28, 176n4. See also ethnicity; Latin gang trope; Latinos Raimondi, Antonio, 168n10 religion, 29, 87–90, 95, 172n14 Russia, 28, 156n16, 177n13, 177n18 Santa Cruz, Alanya, 173n24, 174n11 schools. See education; Spain second-generation migrants, 127–28 Selman, Peter, 15, 155n5 social class. See class solidarity, 103–5, 107–21, 173n2, 174n11, 174n12, 175n16 Sow, Papa, 9, 52, 57–58 Spain: adoption policies of, 3, 9–11, 22, 25, 30–32, 58–60, 91–92, 95, 99, 142, 144, 157n21, 165n19; adoptive parents’ respon-

196

Index

sibilities and, 9–11, 25; assimilation concerns and, 3–4, 18–19, 28–29, 40–42, 47, 62–63, 69, 125–29, 134–47, 149, 152– 54, 168n14; child-raising norms in, 52, 62–65; citizenship benefits in, 40, 51, 61–64, 72–77, 79, 144, 150, 152–54; colonial past of, 17–18, 27–35, 109–12; demographics of, 15–16; education system of, 40, 51, 55, 61–62, 64; family reunification policies of, 48–65, 68–74, 114, 151; fertility and family attitudes of, 14, 17, 27, 84, 88–89, 104–6, 163n33, 170n1, 171n10; labor migration and, 48–60; language differences in, 22, 125, 170n25; migrant fertility fears and, 84–93; mixed marriages and, 67–83; national substance ideologies in, 101–2, 150; race and diversity in, 11, 17–22, 59, 85–90, 93, 99, 101–2, 107, 112–29, 140–43, 158n28, 176n4. See also class; Franco, Francisco; Madrid; privilege sweetness, 29–38, 160n12 transnational adoption. See adoption; migration transracial adoption, 11, 21. See also adoption; migration; ‘‘Position Statement on Trans-Racial Adoption’’ undomesticated adoption, 6, 84–93, 101. See also domestic adoption United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 30–31, 80, 87–88, 145, 177n19 United States, 28, 49, 55, 83, 85, 90, 98, 124, 137, 152, 162n25 Vaccaro, Yolanda, 36, 131, 158n30 La vergüenza (Planell), 101, 102, 112, 118–19, 131 Voyager (ngo), 111 waiting: domestic adoption and, 93–95; mixed marriages and, 67–68, 79; paperwork and, 2, 25–26; parenting experiences and, 3, 26–33, 162n25; sweetness and, 35–38