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Reviewed by:
  • Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas
  • Laura Briggs
Karen Dubinsky. Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas. New York: NYU Press, 2010; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 204 pp. $21.95 sc.

The two publishers of this excellent book on the politics of transnational and transracial adoption in the Americas—University of Toronto and New York University—gave it very different covers. The Canadian version has a baby stamped with a bar code, a provocative image used in a Guatemalan campaign against transnational adoption. The U.S. version of the cover is a photograph that is less readily identifiable—tiny colored glass figures of a roller skate, a cowboy boot with spurs, and a stylized cow’s skull. While the image invokes ways of life across the Americas, it turns out that these are children’s toys unearthed from one of the clandestine mass graves that marked Guatemala’s armed internal conflict, the aftermath of the massacres by military and paramilitary groups. On the one hand, these images reflect the very different political contexts of adoption debates in Canada and the U.S.—Canada, an early adopter of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, halted adoptions from Guatemala in 2000, believing the country’s adoption system to be rife with abuse (shortly after Dubinsky adopted her son from there), while the U.S. has had [End Page 289] no comparable, forceful (or alarmist, to its detractors) discourse about human rights in adoption.

Ironically, though, the two covers also figure two of the global symbols that Dubinsky says we need to avoid if we want to grapple honestly with the complexity of transnational adoption: the “kidnapped/rescued baby” and the “missing baby” who stands as a symbol of past wrongs or unrealized future hopes. Together with the transracially adopted “hybrid baby,” she argues, these figures organize fierce political discourses about nations, politics, multiculturalism, and children, but do little to help us understand the heterogeneous contexts in which individual children come to be adopted, and even less about the uneven distribution of the innocent, idyllic childhood that a handful of nations have, over the last century, come to believe themselves to be the guarantors.

The book begins by exploring the kidnapped baby through stories about the United States and Cuba, from the Pedro/Peter Pan exodus of the Cold War to the Elían González conflict of 1999–2000 that arguably cost the Democrats the White House. From the end of 1960 until the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, about 1400 Cuban children came to the United States largely under the auspices of the Welfare Bureau of Miami. The strength of Dubinsky’s account of this event is her focus on its transnational nature, and she moves back and forth between Cuba’s account of Peter Pan and Miami’s Pedro Pan. Cuba saw parents duped by CIA rumors that their children would be nationalized, hence Peter—the important actors were in the United States. Lest that sound like Cuban Cold War hysteria or a bad movie plot, let us hasten to note that historian María de los Angeles Torres, through a Freedom of Information Act request, confirmed that the CIA really did spread rumors about Castro’s plans that sought to encourage Cuban parents to send their children to the United States. Pedro Pan, in contrast, emphasized Cuban parents’ decisions not to raise their children in a vastly changed Cuba. As one grown Pedro Pan émigré observed sadly, “They sent us away from Cuba so that we would continue to be like them” (38). Finally, though, as Dubinsky helpfully observes, neither kidnap nor rescue narratives really do justice to the complexity of the decisions in these families, much less nations, and these sweeping stories ultimately confuse more than they illuminate.

The second section of the book contrasts two kinds of interracial adoption in Canada: that of Black children and that of Native children. Stories about both kinds of adoption were articulated within a narrative of Canadian national multiculturalism (in contrast to U.S. racism, at least with respect to Black children), but Dubinsky’s account suggests that they were not...

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