Until I Find You

Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala

Rachel Nolan

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Hardback

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English

Harvard University Press
20 May 2024

History of the Americas; Adoption & fostering; War crimes

"The poignant saga of Guatemala's adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession.

In 2014 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption-but in 1986 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat's mother at all, but a jaladora-a baby broker.

Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala's civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army's genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war's second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a ""sender"" state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.

Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South."

By: Rachel Nolan
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 27mm
Weight: 635g
ISBN: 9780674270350
ISBN 10: 0674270355
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 20 May 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Rachel Nolan is Contributing Editor at Harper’s Magazine and has written for the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Salvadoran investigative news outlet El Faro. She is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University.

Reviews for Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala

Hugely ambitious. With painstaking research and deep sensitivity, Nolan addresses an important and little-studied topic, getting close to stories that are often shrouded in secrecy. -- Betsy Konefal, author of For Every Indio Who Falls: A History of Maya Activism in Guatemala, 1960–1990 Important, compelling reading. Nolan has interviewed countless people, obtained access to adoption files, read the human rights reports, and sorted through the legal history. This will become a key, authoritative account of the deeply corrupt state of Guatemalan adoption from the 1970s to the 2000s. -- Laura Briggs, author of Taking Children: A History of American Terror Like a dark historical fairy tale pulled from a bewitched archive, Until I Find You illuminates the Guatemalan international adoption trade’s cruel corruption and heartrending complexities in a boldly original way. Nolan’s meticulous research and her beautifully lucid, empathetic writing show how the seemingly benign event of the foreign adoption of an innocent child leaves behind an invisible trail of personal, economic, political, and essentially imperial horrors. -- Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder and Monkey Boy