Babies Without Borders

by Dubinsky, Karen

• ISBN13: 9780814720929
• ISBN10: 0814720927
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-28
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

While international adoptions have risen in the public eye and recent scholarship has covered transnational adoption from Asia to the U.S., adoptions between North America and Latin America have been overshadowed and, in some cases, forgotten. In this nuanced study of adoption, Karen Dubinsky expands the historical record while she considers the political symbolism of children caught up in adoption and migration controversies in Canada, the United States, Cuba, and Guatemala.Babies without Borderstells the interrelated stories of Cuban children caught in Operation Peter Pan, adopted Black and Native American children who became icons in the Sixties, and Guatemalan children whose "disappearance" today in transnational adoption networks echoes their fate during the country's brutal civil war. Drawing from archival research as well as from her critical observations as an adoptive parent, Dubinsky moves debates around transnational adoption beyond the current dichotomythe good of "humanitarian rescue," against the evil of "imperialist kidnap." Integrating the personal with the scholarly,Babies without Bordersexposes what happens when children bear the weight of adult political conflicts.

Author Biography

Karen Dubinsky is a professor in the Department of Global Development Studies and the Department of History at Queen's University. She is the author of The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls and Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Children and the Stories We Tell about Them	p. 3
The National Baby: Creating Monumental Children in Cuba, from Operation Peter Pan to Elián González	p. 23
The Hybrid Baby: Domestic Interracial Adoption since the 1950s	p. 57
The Missing Baby: Transnational Adoption and the Vanishing Children of Guatemala	p. 93
Conclusion: Setting the Agenda for a Happy Childhood	p. 127
Notes	p. 133
Selected Bibliography	p. 173
Index	p. 191
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.