Book Talk: Until I Find You by Rachel Nolan

The Center on Forced Displacement fosters interdisciplinary research and engagement with the global challenge of forced displacement. We bring together multidisciplinary teams of researchers, practitioners, and artists from across schools and colleges at Boston University, around the country, and around the world.

Center on Forced Displacement

Join us to discuss "Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala" with author Rachel Nolan and guest speaker.

928 Commonwealth Ave room 110

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.Author Rachel Nolan is a historian of modern Latin America. In archives and through interviews, she researches migration, political violence, the Central American armed internal conflicts, and U.S.-Latin American relations.Guest speaker Gemma Givens is the founder of Next Generation Guatemala and communications associate at the Inter-American Dialogue. Next Generation Guatemala is an organization that connects generations of Guatemalan adoptees around the world in community, culture and through their birth country.

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Book Talk: Until I Find You by Rachel Nolan

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Book Talk: Until I Find You by Rachel Nolan

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