Imagining Transnational Orphanhoods: Nation-as-Family in Recent Spanish Children’s Books

In this article, I explore constructions of orphanhood in books about international adoption and irregular immigration tracing their relationship to broader sets of narratives on belonging, and, particularly, to the conceptual metaphor of Nation-as-Family. The stories about young adoptees aim to resist hegemonic discourses on the biological constitution of the family while justifying transnational adoptions overlooking the geopolitical order that facilitates them. Books portraying illegal immigrants, on other hand, unveil a broader discourse that presents third world countries as unsuitable for families and as unable to provide homes in which children can thrive. Stories about adoption and about immigration coincide in presenting kinship as the sole path for the belonging to the broader (national) community.