Adoptive Migration

Spain has one of the highest per capita international adoption rates in the world. Internationally adopted kids are coming from many of the same countries as do the many immigrants who are radically transforming Spain's demographics. Based on interviews with adoptive families, migrant families, and adoption professionals, Jessaca B. Leinaweaver examines the experiences of Latin American children adopted into a rapidly multiculturalizing society. She focuses on Peruvian adoptees and immigrants in Madrid, but her conclusions apply more broadly, to any pairing of adoptees and migrants from the same country. Leinaweaver finds that international adoption, particularly in a context of high rates of transnational migration, is best understood as both a privileged and unusual form of migration, and a crucial and contested method of family formation. Adoptive Migration is a fascinating study of the implications for adopted children of growing up in a country that discriminates against their fellow immigrants.

"In Adoptive Migration, Jessaca B. Leinaweaver brings her earlier work on kinship and adoption in Peru to bear on the lives of Peruvian migrants to Spain. Arguing for an integrated analysis of migration and kinship, she produces bold new insights into how children from Peru, including adoptees and immigrants, navigate their lives in a rapidly changing Spain. In the process, she raises important questions about nationality and identity."—Andrew Canessa, author of Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life, "In this lucid and beautifully written book, Jessaca B. Leinaweaver rethinks transnational adoption, considering it as a form of immigration. Focusing on Spain, an epicenter for both phenomena, she examines the notions of culture, assimilation, and childhood that make receiving societies treat transnational adoptees and other immigrants so differently. This book provides food for thought for all those touched by transnational adoption or immigration, which is to say, all of us."—Laura Briggs, author of Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption, “Both professionals involved with intercountry adoption and adult family members of intercountry adoptees would benefit from reading Leinaweaver’s book… [Additionally] researchers in the area of adoption, and more specifically intercountry adoption, will find Leinaweaver’s presentation of the complex issues to be intellectually stimulating and implying directions for future research.” , "A thoughtful and insightful study which describes the multiplicities inherent in the ways in which families experience both adoptive and labour migration.", "An astute understanding of the Peruvian experience in Spain and an ability to network and access the Peruvian population there."

Jessaca B. Leinaweaver is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. She is the author of The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru, also published by Duke University Press.