Research on adoption in Bolivia
Although the practice of transnational adoption from Bolivia to countries in the Global North has existed for more than 50 years, few studies have been carried out to better understand this practice. In this page, we aim to provide an overview of academic research on adoption in Bolivia.
Articles
Cawayu, A. & Sacré, H.P. (2024) Can first parents speak? A Spivakean Reading of first parents’ agency and resistance in transnational adoption. Genealogy 8(1).
Abstract: This article analyses the search strategies of first families in Bolivia contesting the separation of their children through transnational adoption. These first parents’ claims to visibility and acknowl- edgement have remained largely ignored by adoption policy and scholarship, historically privileging the perspectives of actors in adoptive countries, such as adoptive parents and adoption professionals. Filling in this gap, we discuss the search strategies employed by first families in Bolivia who desire a reunion with their child. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s feminist postcolonial theory, we analyse ethnographic fieldwork with fourteen first families in Bolivia. We read how the agency of first parents, severely limited by the loss of legal rights through the adoption system, is caught in a double bind of dependency and possibility. While hegemonic adoption discourse portrays first parents as passive and consenting to the adoption system, the results of our study complicate this picture. Moreover, we argue that the search activity of the first parents can be read as a claim and request to revise and negotiate their consent to transnational adoption. Ultimately, we read first parents’ search efforts as resistance to the closed nature of the adoption system, which restricts them in their search for their children.
Cawayu, A., & De Graeve, K. (2022). From primal to colonial wound: Bolivian adoptees reclaiming the narrative of healing. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 29(5), 576-593.
Abstract: This paper provides a critical analysis of the narratives of Bolivian adoptees in Belgium. We discuss how the adoptees look back upon the imagery of family and culture invoked by their parents and wider social environment and how this imagery has affected their sense of self and belonging. We argue that the adoptees’ narratives testify of a discursive struggle to reclaim control over their lives and histories. While they draw upon prevailing discourses that tend to imagine adoptees as ‘wounded’, they do so in diverse, complex and at times contradictory ways. Their perceptions of the familial and cultural imagery show that while they do not entirely reject the idea of being hurt, they seem to make a shift from explaining this ‘wound’ in individual-psychological terms to explaining it in social terms, making use of emerging anti-racist and decolonial perspectives.
Piché, A-M. (2015) Los retos de la adopción local en Bolivia. Unpublished paper.
Abstract: El número de niños abandonados o privados de cuidados familiares ha aumentado de manera alarmante en Bolivia. Este estudio de caso documenta los retos de las adopciones locales en este país. El gobierno ha llevado a cabo nuevas regulaciones que impiden la adopción internacional, pero los organismos de Cochabamba pretenden desarrollar una cultura de adopción local. Tienen experiencia en el desarrollo infantil, e identifican y apoyan a las familias bolivianas de acogida. No obstante, encuentran dificultades para realizar su trabajo por falta de colaboración y sensibilización de las instituciones estatales y jurídicas, las cuales tienen el poder de decisión.
Van Vleet, K. (2009) ‘‘We Had Already Come to Love Her’’: Adoption at the Margins of the Bolivian State. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 14(1),. 20–43.
Abstract: This paper explores informal adoption in Bolivia as a window onto broader social, emotional, political relationships and discourses. I focus on cases in which an adoptive parent raises a child who has not been officially declared abandoned by the state. Drawing on ethnographic research in the rural highland region of Sullk’ata, Bolivia and in the cities of Cochabamba and Sucre, Bolivia I demonstrate that Sullk’atas draw on local ideologies of relatedness as well as a distinction between public and private to maintain their claims to a child. In Sullk’ata the fosterage and informal adoption of childrenisgenerallyaccepted.Sulk’atassometimesdistinguishtheirparienteslegı ́timos (Sp.), or ‘‘true kin,’’ from others, but they also emphasize the circulation of energy, food, and blood through bodies as the ground of relatedness. Although Sullk’ata migrants to Bolivian cities draw upon these local ideologies of relatedness, and voice resistance to state bureaucracy, they also turn to lawyers to further legitimate their adoptions.In their talk about these adoptions which are not ‘‘really legal’’ but have demanded personal sacrifices, adoptive mothers voice moral assessments of relationships that at once are embedded in systematic gender, ethnic, and class asymmetries.
Book chapters
Cawayu, Atamhi (2023). Irreguliere adoptiepraktijken en eerste families in transnationale adoptie uit Bolivia. In Voorbij Transnationale Adoptie. Een Kritische en Meerstemmige Dialoog. Edited by Sophie Withaeckx, Atamhi Cawayu and Chiara Candaele. Brussels: ASP Editions, pp. 247–57.
Piché, A-M. (2021) Bolivia: Create a culture of adoption and the rights of the child. In A panorama of adoption practices in South America: Cases of countries undergoing transformation. Montréal, Quebec: Child Identity Protection.
Cawayu, A. (2023). A Letter to Future Adoptee Researchers: On Being a Researcher of Color in Belgium. In O. Burlyuk & L. Rahbari (Eds.), Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe (pp. 191-199). Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.
Books
Cawayu, Atamhi (2023). Searching for restoration. An ethnographic study of transnational adoption from Bolivia. Ghent University: Ghent. (PhD dissertation)
Escobari de Querejazu, L. (2020). Nacer sin cuna. Historia del Hogar Villegas, La Paz, 1909-1996. La Paz: Plural editores.
Kirigin, M. A. (2011). 100 años de amor. Historia del Hogar Carlos de Villegas, 1909-2009. La Paz: EDOBOL Ltda.
Escobari de Querejazu, L. (2009). Mentalidad social y niñez abandonada. La Paz, 1900-1948. La Paz: Plural editores.
