Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Leinaweaver
Adoptive Migration
raising latinos in spain
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
comparing adoption and migration 1
five Solidarity
postadoptive overtures 102
Conclusion
what adoptive migration might mean 148
In the six years that I have been planning, working on, and completing this
project, I have amassed countless debts. To those who supported (intellec-
tually, 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 Anthropo-
logical Research, the Fulbright iie Program, the Social Sciences and Hu-
manities Research Council of Canada (sshrc) Standard Research Grant,
and the Howard Foundation. Special thanks to Deb Winslow at nsf, Mary
Beth Moss at Wenner-Gren, and Aitor Rubio and Patricia Zahniser at Ful-
bright 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 Fellow-
ship, 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 Interna-
tional 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 writing-
group 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 conversa-
tions 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, Car-
ina 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 undergradu-
ate 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 Pon-
tificia 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, Gil-
lian Feeley-Harnik, Claudia Fonseca, Susan Frekko, Britt Halvorson, To-
bias Hecht, Marcia Inhorn, Eleana Kim, Esben Liefsen, Bruce Mannheim,
Susan McKinnon, Ruben Oliven, Karsten Paerregaard, Jennifer Reynolds,
Liz Roberts, Linda Seligmann, Sonja van Wichelen, Ceres Victora, Sylvia
Yanagisako, Kristin Yarris, and Barbara Yngvesson.
Colleagues in Spain were unfailingly welcoming and cordial, and sev-
eral took the time to meet with me and give me advice and further con-
tacts. I am particularly grateful to Ana Berástegui, Joaquin Eguren, An-
geles 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 Pal-
acios, Maria Sanchez, and Liliana Suarez.
Professionals working in adoption in Spain were very kind and forth-
coming, and I particularly wish to thank Lila Parrondo of Adoptantis,
Felipe 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 Adop-
ciones, 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 Ari-
Perú 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.
xii 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 Span-
ish 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 Peru-
vians like Rebeca and Zaida forge their new lives.
2 introduction
of opportunity are also the forces that produce adoptable children. ‘‘Adopt-
able’’ is a euphemism describing children whose parents or extended fam-
ily members are unable to assume their care, often due to the same poverty,
war, or disaster that motivated the migration of their peers. As a result,
labor migration and adoption can occur simultaneously, often sharing the
same origins and destinations. For this reason, I sometimes refer to inter-
national adoption as ‘‘adoptive migration.’’ Adoptive migration highlights
the similarities between international adoption and other forms of border-
crossing, 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 ques-
tions 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 sub-
stituted with new ones (Berástegui, Gómez, and Adroher 2006, 20). Yet
the powerful image of rebirth can sometimes enable a child’s family and
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 Sun-
day best and with every hair perfectly in place, greeted e√usively by family
whom the confused children may not recognize. As the adoption psychol-
ogist 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 chil-
dren 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 play-
ers 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 de-
velop in chapters 3 and 4. In those two chapters I take up unexpected jux-
tapositions—atypical sites where I found migration and adoption consid-
ered jointly, itself an unusual finding, if one accepts my contention that
adoption and migration are typically treated separately both in the litera-
ture 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, biolog-
ical reproduction, and adoption) are inflected with understandings of
national substance. Chapter 4 examines an unusual but growing phenom-
enon, domestic adoptions of the children of immigrants, which I call
6 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.
8 introduction
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, migra-
tion, 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 Mel-
huus 2007; Hübinette and Tigervall 2009, 337; Marre 2009c, 240, Rastas
2009). The comparative literature scholar David L. Eng has labeled trans-
national adoption ‘‘one of the most privileged forms of diaspora and immi-
gration in the late twentieth century,’’ and in the same breath he 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 anthro-
pologists who begin their careers in a sending nation and end up working
on communities of migrants from that nation. After many years of anthro-
pological fieldwork in Peru (2000–2007), I had developed a deep knowl-
edge of the way that Peruvian adoptions worked. I had a network of con-
tacts 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 adop-
tions take so long is because some judges and attorneys are against adop-
10 introduction
departures of Rebeca and Zaida for Spain, I had already begun to under-
stand 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 pro-
duced, 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 in-
crease; 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 coinci-
dences 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
12 introduction
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 res-
taurants 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 re-
ferred to by pseudonyms, with the exception of those persons I inter-
viewed in their capacity as experts (for example, lawyers and psycholo-
gists). When I first introduce each research participant, I pause to 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 par-
ents 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 adop-
tive families I spoke to were middle class, although, as might be expected,
they did tend to cluster at opposite ends of that category.
The anthropological tool kit I used for this study emphasized semistruc-
tured interviews, unlike my previous work, which drew more heavily 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 spend-
ing 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 im-
practical 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 mem-
bers 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 adop-
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 stud-
ied 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 relation-
ship 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 coun-
tries 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 Sel-
man (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 num-
ber 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 popu-
lation was made up of immigrants. Of those foreigners currently residing
16 introduction
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 exam-
ple, 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 replace-
ment level (Population Reference Bureau 2012). I heard many explana-
tions 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 eco-
nomically and politically. Or perhaps children cut too sharply into the
famous Spanish nightlife. Or maybe it is that there are not enough ex-
tended family members around and available to shoulder some of 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 pres-
sures 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 immi-
grants bring their children to Spain from many di√erent countries, I
found that there is something particularly meaningful about raising Lati-
nos 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
18 introduction
have been privileged in recent years to be able to migrate with a work con-
tract alone, as opposed to first requiring further paperwork that demon-
strates that potential Spanish workers were not available. People I 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 histor-
ical 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 hu-
manitarian aid (Sinervo and Hill 2011); ‘‘good migrants,’’ in contrast with
North Africans, courteous and kind and ready to assimilate (Rogozen-
Soltar 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 Ger-
many.’’) 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
20 introduction
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 sched-
ules), 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 class-
mates 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 trans-
formed. I met one migrant mother and her Spanish-born son who partici-
pated in a commission on migration that formed part of the protests 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 mani-
festo—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 chil-
dren’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 citizen-
ship 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 Peruvian-
origin 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 mi-
grants, whose parents must navigate those connections and attempt to
tease them apart on their children’s behalf. For adoptive parents, these
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 dictator-
ship 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 rela-
tively permissive during the 1990s and early 2000s, and periodic amnes-
ties 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 con-
struction 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’ unem-
ployment 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 re-
turning to Peru—including three of the friends I first met in Peru and later
encountered in Spain.≥∞ During the Peruvian elections in 2011, the candi-
date 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 con-
ducted 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 Car-
mela, 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 fi-
nancial 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 prob-
lems, so adoption no longer seems like such a good idea. Another contribu-
tor to the decline, she thought, was the decrease in adoptable children with-
out special needs in sending countries (Selman 2009, 589). Every year, from
24 introduction