When my son was born, he had a sixth finger. My wife and I were able to address his condition, and should he ask, we’d be able to tell him about it. We are his connection to his past that he would not otherwise remember.
As a child playing with my friends, I would sometimes irritate strange scars on my hands to the point that they would bleed. Neither I nor my German adopted parents knew where these scars came from. Seeing my first blood relative, I thought about my childhood scars in a different way. That I might have also been born with a sixth finger that was cut.
For those of us born in Guatemala and adopted and raised in the Global North, access to our past is not straightforward. For some of us, it’s not available at all. So how can we answer the question, who are we? Maya Angelou taught us that, “if you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going.” How do we write our own histories with no genetic or historical context to place ourselves in? How do we sort truth from beliefs created to fill the void where facts ought to be? Finally, how does one understand all of these answers as a newborn or small child who is being adopted internationally?
Next Generation Guatemala was founded in 2012 and has brought hundreds of Guatemalan adoptees from around the world together to tackle these questions of identity. We connect in community, culture, and country. For some, a retrospective look at our beginnings before adoption is an integral developmental milestone no different from learning to walk and talk. For others, not so much. All angles constitute the adopted person’s story.
Together, we are exploring what autonomy means in the discussion about transnational adoption. Aware that we had no choice when we were adopted as babies or small children, our journey is to reconcile both our biological and our adopted identities into one person. We feel the inner pressure to be recognized for who we fully are. Our perspectives offer new insights into what it means to integrate multiple identities in the different societies we live in.
One solution to this ‘split’ between two identities is the conscious decision to claim only "whiteness" or other adopted family identity, rejecting anything about Guatemala or our birth families. Others decide to learn as much as possible about Guatemala; try typical food and clothing and study tradition, history and everyday life, visit Guatemala, and in some cases begin a search for our birth families. The organization that facilitated my search in 2016 thought that the detail about my extra finger would help identify my mother faster than official documents. In the context of thousands of irregular adoptions from Guatemala, any extra identifiers could make all the difference.
Some of us learn from our searches that the information we have is false, that our parents have passed away, or that they don’t want contact with us (arguably the most devastating). Inequality, poverty, and social pressure may have influenced the way our birth parents gave us up. Some of us were given into adoption as survivors of massacres and victims of forced disappearance. Those whose adoptions were either illegally or improperly handled may not find the answers to our questions no matter how hard we search. That kind of uncertainty asks a lot of faith, forgiveness, and strength to be able to create an identity that transcends biological ethnicity, culture, and genetic ties. Many of us go on to enjoy successful reunions. All of our searches require patience, emotional, material, and cultural resources and education to complete.
In May 2017, my mother was found. It was confirmed that she indeed had a sixth finger on both hands. I was completely shocked. Many expectations arose from there. Would I get all the answers I felt highly dependent on? Would I be able to heal by meeting her? After 32 years, I finally learned; who my father was, how many siblings I had, who my family was, and the day I was born. Where. What time. And that not only my mother, but that some of my siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins also have a sixth finger.
Not all of my questions were answered though. Why did my mother give me up? Out of poverty? Or was it more the social pressure? How can she give answers to things she barely remembers or has otherwise suppressed?
High expectations from both sides make the relationship with my birth mother and I difficult. There may always be a gap between our two different worlds. When we met after three decades of being apart, we were strangers to each other. Our reunion was an important step - but new questions arise. My life is and will always be affected by my adoption. Sometimes this leaves me feeling helpless. But there is one important difference; utilizing agency that I didn't have as a baby, it was my choice to search for my birth mother. From now on, I define my role in our relationship.
Though circumstances for how and why we were adopted differ, we were all touched by early separation from our birth mothers. For some from our community, this can manifest in addiction, mental health issues, and suicide (rates of which are high within the adoptee community). Others find different ways to cope and heal. In the end, we are products of global socio-economic structures characterized by inequalities between the Global North and South. These structures had and still have a strong impact on Guatemala and on our individual lives.
Today, my son can choose to connect to his Guatemalan heritage. So can I! Though challenging from time to time, I benefit from the choice to fully embrace both my genetic Guatemalan and my adopted identity.
If a full and complete person is considered 100%, the adoptee is privileged to fully immerse in 200% identity, as both 100% Guatemalan and 100% global northerner. Yet we should not simply be grateful for this unique privilege. Early childhood trauma from adoption, suffering and pain, is a part of the process. Our privilege to immersion is not equal to full acceptance.
So, would we have been better off in one country over the other? As one identity over the other? The reality is that these questions fail to recognize the topic`s complexity. That we were adopted from Guatemala is a fact. But to be a part of the next generation of Guatemalans is an act. An expression of a complex identity that is not something to be frightened of. On the contrary, it can be liberating.
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Formal adoptions from Guatemala began in the 1960s. The U.S. provides some numbers (from 1999 to 2018 almost 30,000 babies were adopted from Guatemala), but with regards to other adopted countries, basic information is lacking. Formal adoption reached their peak in the 1980s and 90s along with the Guatemalan civil war (1960 to 1996) and again before they were formally ended in 2006.
Gemma Givens was adopted from Guatemala to California in 1990. In 2012, she founded Next Generation Guatemala. She works at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Carlos Alberto Haas was adopted from Guatemala to Germany in 1985. He works in the History Department at the University of Munich.