Geographies of generation: age restrictions in international adoption

International adoption relocates minors, and only minors, from one country to another. The centrality of age to adoptive migration may prevent us from seeing the significance of generation: the prospective parent's age is also examined and evaluated for its relationship to the child's age and what this relationship will mean for the creation of a family. Because international adoption results in children crossing borders to enter new kinship formations, the assumptions under which it operates require closer geographical analysis. Generation, or the age range that separates dependents and their caretakers, is a significant but unstated motivator of international adoption policies and practices. This article argues that a normative and biologized sense of intergenerational difference is embedded in international adoption. The presence of generational ideology in national laws and international norms regarding international adoption demonstrate a broader sense in which policies situate more privileged families as acceptable and others as inadequate. I draw material for this analysis from both legal documents and documents which aim to provide interpretation of those laws, with reference to international adoptions from Peru.     

The geography of transnational adoption: kin and place in globalization

International adoption involves crossing borders; it invokes space and geography as adoptive parents imagine distant countries, as children are moved from one nation to another, and as adoptees and their families return to their countries of origin. The spatiality of belonging and identity – but also of trauma and violence – are central concerns for the people involved and to the operations of their cultural, political, and legal practice. Yet surprisingly, cultural geographers have not yet developed a conceptualization of transnational adoption that theorizes it as a constitutive aspect of geographies of migration, domestic geographies, and geography of childhood. In this issue we seek to set out an agenda for the cultural and political geographies of transnational adoption. We do so by discussing three interrelated themes: the adoption-migration nexus, geographies of relatedness, and the biopolitics of mobility.     

Transatlantic unity on display: the “white legend” and the “pact of silence” in Madrid’s Museum of the Americas

This article examines the history and recent pro-immigrant installations of the postcolonial Museum of the Americas in Madrid. It critically relates the Hispanist “White Legend” regarding the benevolence of Spanish colonialism to both the “pact of silence” following Spain’s Civil War and the current Spanish orientation towards immigrants from Latin America. Despite significant recent reconceptualization, the museum continues to put forward a narrative in which Spain is represented as a benevolent and civilizing contributor to Latin America. The museum’s more recent inclusionist turn to welcoming and serving Latin American immigrant communities in Spain does not complicate the pro-colonialism stance but rather, through a strategically neutral curatorial style, further serves to insist on a positive framing of the past. The exhibit analysed in this article highlights the innocence of Latin American children in order to frame immigration as positive while simultaneously supporting the “White Legend”. Contemporary Spanish tendencies towards forgetting or silencing the past have a deeper history than is usually recognized, and in this case study, these tendencies work to occlude not just the violence of the colonial period but also the inequities of today’s immigration.