Fragile Families. Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez
Adoption Narratives
Adoption of non-U.S. citizen children such as Alba privileges the citizenship status of the adopting parents while erasing the former citizenship of the adopted child (Yngvesson and Coutin 2006). These children are reframed, through such processes as reissuing of a new legal birth certificate, as nonimmigrants.33 Yet this reframing elides the similarities in the trajectories and lived experiences of children who move from one country to another as the children of labor migrants or as the international adoptees of citizen parents.34 Though these two categories of child migrants may have similar questions about their national belonging, their official reception and the ideologies that surround their presence could not diverge more drastically. The children of labor migrants are all too frequently categorized as dangerous, unruly threats, while adopted migrants are held up as redemptive and celebratory instances of multicultural inclusion. Yet the absorption of these international adoptees requires an explicit framing of them as “not-migrants.” The divergent discourses that surround adoptees as opposed to other migrants separate international adoption from labor migration. This delineation enables a narrative of humanitarian rescue to surround international adoption even in the context of blatant xenophobia and racism in relation to an immigrant labor community from the same sending nation.35 In this way, adoption circumvents the narratives that can be mobilized to frame even young children as “economic,” and thus “unworthy,” migrants.
The migration pathway of international adoption is not primarily based on the worthiness of the child’s own claim to citizenship status. Rather, inherent in these adoptive practices is the valuation of children as coveted items, who should not be held accountable for the circumstances that they were born into, and whose merit is based on their youthfulness and value to U.S. citizen parents.36 As such, the state authorizes international adoptees to enjoy full citizenship rights in a manner not readily available to children who migrate through other avenues. The economic conditions that may frame the context in which children become “adoptable” do not, in this case, erode their worthiness or impact their reception in the United States, perhaps largely because any future economic needs they may have are expected to be a burden on their adoptive family, not on the state. An explicit distinction between “adoptees” and “migrants” justifies the presence of one group while excluding the other.
Although the details of Alba’s case would have supported a strong argument for framing her as a victim of trafficking, it was primarily through Tatianna’s advocacy and her availability as a willing adoptive home that the case was set into motion. Alba’s “rescue” and path to citizenship was not put into motion by outrage at her tale as a trafficked child. As noted above, it was quite unusual for a child from Mexico to be framed as anything other than an “economic” migrant. Only recently have such pathways as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and the Violence Against Women Act been successfully claimed by Mexican citizens, who tend to be framed as “economic” migrants regardless of the specific circumstances of a given case. As such, these migration categories are shaped more forcefully by political trends and perceptions about which nations produce “legitimate” asylum-seekers and refugees than by the specific details of an individual’s experience. Alba’s framing as an adoptee positioned her as an object of value to her adoptive parents, and circumvented broader questions about the “worthiness” of her specific case.
Tommy’s Story
When I told Alba’s story to social workers in both Tijuana and San Diego, it often elicited tales of the dysfunction of the child welfare system, which focused on how the system’s task was so extensive and sprawling that children would invariably “fall through the cracks.” Yet underlying these reactions was a common perception, held by bureaucrats and lay people I spoke with on both sides of the border, that the Mexican state was less competent than the U.S. state—Mexico was, for example, the nation without documentation of Alba’s existence, a nation where selling a child could seemingly happen without consequence. Both U.S. and Mexican nationals described the Mexican government as an inadequate bureaucracy. However, Tatianna’s shock at the Mexican state’s lack of interest in returning Alba to Mexico was echoed by the U.S. government’s lack of efforts to repatriate U.S. citizen children in Mexico. Tijuana orphanage directors and staff introduced me to U.S. citizen children in their care and told stories of repeated calls to U.S. consulate workers who were responsible for collecting U.S. citizen children abandoned across the border. Those consulate workers never returned calls or appeared to claim these children. Thus, if Mexico was seen as disorganized and disempowered to make claims on their citizens’ behalf, the United States was framed as capable but uncaring, empowered to ignore Mexican officials and its own citizens residing outside national borders.
I met Tommy during my weekly visits to a Tijuana orphanage, where I helped the staff through their busy days by soothing crying babies, reading books, and chasing toddlers around the small concrete patio where they played on sunny days. The orphanage was in the southern part of the city, at the top of a pothole-marked dirt road. The facility was almost entirely staffed by local Tijuana residents with the exception of the official director, who was a member of the U.S. church that funded the orphanage project. The buildings housed children from infancy to ages twelve to fourteen, and efforts were being made to create separate housing units that would allow older children to remain on site.37 The infant room, where I spent most of my time during weekly visits, consisted of a playroom, a large kitchen, and an open room lined with twelve cribs and a single rocking chair. Children remained in the infant room under the watchful care of a rotating staff of female workers and U.S. volunteers until they transferred at school age to separate boys’ and girls’ dormitories on the other side of the main courtyard.
Each day I arrived at the orphanage and parked my aging Honda in the dusty front entrance. I’d forgo standing at the locked main entrance gate and head for the outer door to the kitchen, where I would lean my head on the metal bars and holler “Buenas Dias, Doña Mari!” until I heard a faint, “Mande?” from the kitchen and saw Mari moving over to the door with her large ring of keys. Mari was the main cook and spent her early morning hours chopping meat and vegetables for lunch for the children and staff, cooking big pots of soup or spaghetti. We got to know each other as I came and went through the kitchen. Mari was often working with donated ingredients and a chaotic assortment of groceries, and I’d often pause on my way out to help her decode some of these mystery goods. One afternoon we stood together as I translated the directions on a military-issue bag of sugar cookie mix, and I wondered how these packages had arrived in her kitchen and how she managed to feed so many children out of such an unpredictable jumble of ingredients. Usually Doña Mari let me out of the kitchen and left me to repeat my hollering procedure at the entrance to the nursery, but that day she walked me across the courtyard and unlocked that door as well, muttering, “Este hombre, todo cerrado!” (This guy, with everything locked up!).38
The “hombre” Mari referred to was the U.S. orphanage director. I had been told by various staff that there was some tension between him and the Tijuana staff—he was a good decade or two younger than most of them and had instituted policies, such as locking all the doors throughout the day, that many staff members felt made the place feel more institutional and less like home while also creating a huge nuisance for letting people in and out.39 Part of the reason I entered through the kitchen was to align myself clearly with the staff and avoid being escorted to the infants’ room by the director each day. Though he had been nothing but kind and welcoming to me I wanted to understand the space of the orphanage through the eyes of those who worked most closely with the children.
Tommy was the blond haired, blue-eyed terror of the infant nursery. He was four years old and almost ready to move into the boys’ quarters, and had a lamentable habit of tearing the toys he was interested in out of the arms of younger and smaller children. I spoke often with Sonia, a veteran staff member who handled the intake of new children to the orphanage and mediated all contact with the state in her role as the DIF liaison at the orphanage. Sonia and I were chatting about the “adoptability” of the children currently in the infant room, and Sonia surprised me by stating that, in her opinion, Tommy would never be adopted. She explained that Tommy was not Mexican, but was in fact the child of a U.S. citizen. His mother