On November 26, 1985, a Guatemalan social worker made recommendations to the family court about a toddler named Daniel. Two and half years earlier, Daniel, an Indigenous boy, had been found wandering the mountains near Huehuetenango without his parents, or at least, so claimed the Guatemalan army. In her petition to the family court, the social worker asserted that because Daniel had been abandoned, he should be included in the adoption program of the Ministry of Social Welfare, so as to “be integrated into the society to which he belongs.” The court agreed, approving the petition and facilitating Daniel’s placement in the program. In so doing, the Guatemalan family court determined that the society to which Daniel “belonged” was not his people, nor even Guatemala, but instead the US. His adoption by an American family was finalized in April 1986.

But was Daniel abandoned? How could the army officials and social workers who encountered him in the mountains and at the public orphanage in Quetzaltenango have possibly known? Was “Daniel” even his birth name, or just a name given to him by army officers, social workers, or a judge?

Social workers did not conduct a search for living relatives. Still, somehow, they presumed Daniel was an orphan: paperwork they submitted to the family court reported that his parents had died. When a social worker requested a birth certificate for Daniel, the certificate omitted information about his parents and falsified details about him including his weight, the date, and the place of birth. Social workers did acknowledge that there was a lack of evidence “to prove [Daniel’s] situation.” Nevertheless, he was transferred to the Elisa Martínez Orphanage in Guatemala City and declared in a state of abandonment, making him eligible for adoption.

In Until I Find You, historian Rachel Nolan carefully navigates the omissions and fabrications in the documentary record associated with adoptions of children in Guatemala like (and unlike) Daniel. To address these silences and recover as much of this history as possible, she sifted through an enormous set of adoption files, police records, court cases, and truth commission reports, among other documents. But because details in files like Daniel’s had been falsified—or, in the case of the private adoptions, were much less complete than their public counterparts—she tracked down and interviewed the few willing attorneys and social workers to cross-check the available source base. Nolan’s close readings and astute investigative work were honed by not just her historical training but also her experience as a journalist.

Nolan reveals that Daniel might have been the survivor of an army massacre, and also a member of either the Chuj- or Q’anjob’al-speaking community. In the area where Daniel was “discovered,” Indigenous Guatemalan families were being subjected to violent scorched-earth campaigns. And Ministry of Social Welfare records from these years confirm that the ministry maintained close contact with the army.

Separately, a social worker Nolan interviewed reported that after massacres, army officials called the ministry to pick up children in remote areas. Daniel’s case also reflected features common among adoptions during the most genocidal period of the Guatemalan armed conflict: the swift decision to put Daniel up for international adoption; the presumption of his orphanhood; and the quick processing of his adoption.

Thus, Until I Find You isn’t just a history of transnational adoption. It is also a crucial reappraisal of the history of mid- and late-20th century Guatemala and the armed conflict that took place between 1960 and 1996. Instead of telling this story from the perspectives of the guerrillas, army officials, student leaders, union activists, or intellectuals, Nolan retells the history through the lens of childhood, family, and adoption. Doing so allows her to reveal urgent, if devastating, insights not just about political violence and genocide but also about the “best interests of the child” standard, the brutal consequences of inequality, and the imagined future of a nation.

Nolan pieces together the fragments of evidence related to cases like Daniel’s—however misleading or incomplete—and pairs them with interviews and clues from the historical context. In so doing, she offers a “history through children,” as historian Sarah Maza described in a 2020 roundtable on children’s history in the American Historical Review. Maza describes the historiography on childhood and youth as tending to document either the “lives of the very young” or “the abundant evidence of what children make adults do.” But in recent years, an important shift has been emerging “from writing the history of children to writing history through children.”

What Maza means is that historians are not just chronicling the lives of children themselves or what they compel adults to do (both of which, to be clear, are important topics of study). Instead, historians of childhood are now also generating new insights about well-studied histories by treating childhood and youth as an entry point into a host of other issues, which are of deep consequence not just to children but to us all.

Nolan shows exactly how, as Maza says in her 2020 AHR roundtable, “very small people can hold the key to very big questions.” Nolan argues explicitly and compellingly that “separating parents from their children, disappearing children, and arranging adoptions without the consent of surviving family members are acts of political violence.” Disappearing children through adoption or otherwise forcibly transferring children of one group to another group was already considered genocide by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

Therefore, it is no surprise that the earliest years of the adoption boom happened at the same time as the genocidal phase of Guatemala’s armed conflict: in the early 1980s. During this moment of intense state terror, the Guatemalan army kidnapped children in unknown numbers for adoption. Modest estimates suggest that at least 500 of the children disappeared during the conflict were put up for adoption—likely a substantial undercount.

The army’s treatment of children was meant to “terrorize the population in general” and “to punish the parents through damage inflicted on the children,” according to the director of the Peace Archives, who testified at former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt’s genocide trial in 2013. Documents from the Ministry of Social Welfare and the few accessible army plans from the 1980s reveal the army’s commitment to the elimination of the Indigenous people of Guatemala, who were seen as an “internal enemy” and a “bad seed” that needed to be stamped out. Child disappearance, whether through murder or adoption, “was another way to attempt to destroy a community and to make regeneration impossible,” says Nolan.

There was not necessarily a concerted plan to use adoptions as genocide. Even so, the transfer of children still produced a genocidal outcome. Disappearing Indigenous children was carried out with a particular future in mind: one in which they did not grow up to make claims on the settler state.

As Nolan recounts, the history of transnational adoption out of Guatemala is also about inequality. Especially persuasive—and above all, deeply sensitive and humane—is how she analyzes the way conditions of social inequality, manufactured and sustained by the Guatemalan elite and the government, helped produce adoptable children.

This story echoes other histories of the forcible transfer of Indigenous children to other families or institutions, like those in the US, Canada, and Australia, in which parents were deemed unfit to care for their own children or too “broken” or “disintegrated” to raise their own offspring. Yet what most often broke apart these families was economic exploitation, sexual violence, the pressures of migration, or state terror.

Many of the adoption files that Nolan carefully scrutinized showed that extreme poverty was the most common reason for relinquishing children. Guatemala’s first formal adoption cases were organized through a state-run program created in 1968. But after 1977, state-run adoptions were outpaced by the separate track for privatized adoptions created by the Guatemalan Congress in the wake of the 1976 earthquake. Privatization gave rise to speedier, for-profit adoptions that enriched a small group of well-connected lawyers and an unregulated market of “children for export,” sometimes pulled away from their mothers by jaladoras or baby brokers. Baby brokers who participated in adoption rings often operated just inside the boundaries of newly permissive laws.

Private adoptions were outlawed in Guatemala in 2007. But by then, about 40,000 children had been placed with families in the US, Canada, and Europe.

There was not necessarily a concerted plan to use adoptions as genocide. Even so, the transfer of children still produced a genocidal outcome.

From the earliest years of the formal adoption program, social workers at the Ministry of Social Welfare didn’t just bend or break the law to further the adoptions themselves (sometimes over the objections of birth parents). They also bent the law to further what was in the social workers’ view “the society to which [the child] belongs,” or the best interests of the child.

This determination was almost always defined not by the children themselves, their parents, or their community—as Daniel’s legal proceedings demonstrated—but by the state and its various actors: judges, social workers, politicians, or attorneys, almost all of whom were non-Indigenous or ladino. In their assessment, the children’s “best interests” were often framed individually and in contradistinction to the interests of the family. In fact, Nolan argues that the “principle of the best interests of the child was defined in a straightforward way: material wealth.”

Nolan’s discussion of the “best interests of the child” determination presents important lessons for understanding the continued formulation of this standard in more recent history—especially recent Latin American child migration history. Although Until I Find You is not centrally about immigration, scholars of migration have tried to understand transnational adoption as a form of migration, perhaps forced migration, since adopted children had no choice about where they went. Their forced migration coincided with the mass emigration of Guatemalans forced to flee the very violence described in Until I Find You.

In the last ten years, the conspicuous arrival in the US of Indigenous and non-Indigenous migrant children from Latin America, especially from Mexico and Central America and particularly from Guatemala, has provoked vigorous debates about their best interests and who gets to determine them.

In 2018, when the Trump administration separated children from their families, their “best interests” were again framed in terms of the individual child, who was supposedly put in harm’s way not just by smugglers but also by their parents. The administration insisted that it needed to protect the children, even from their own families. Some of these children were transferred to foster care.

“Best interests” are again being invoked by the US government about migrant teenagers, including Indigenous Guatemalan youth, in situations of dangerous labor exploitation in workplaces across the US today. In parallel ways to the history Nolan recounts, the main reasons for the deprivations and potential dangers these children face is not their parents but socioeconomic inequality, as well as both restrictive and permissive laws. The US government and the mainstream media’s narrative, however, insists on demonizing parents and sponsors for the exploitation of their children, while also maintaining that the US government alone can determine the child’s best interests. This, in the government’s view, often means keeping the kids in prolonged government custody and treating families with suspicion until they can place them where they determine the children belong.

Today, Central American migrant children’s choices are severely constrained by socioeconomic inequality and the enduring legacies of anti-Indigenous violence in countries like Guatemala. Yet US officials refuse to take into account the root causes of their migration and circumstances, much less their unique family and cultural contexts.

Until I Find You contains valuable lessons about the shortcomings of the “best interests of the child” standard, which can sometimes cause harm to those it purports to protect. But history also shows that this doesn’t have to be the case: there are, and have been, alternative modes for understanding and codifying the standard.

For a few short years, the Guatemalan government explicitly framed “the best interests of the child” in the context of the whole family. Between 1949 and 1954, the Children’s Code stated that children have the right to “live with moral and material security and possess a home” and “to live always at the side of [their] mother.” It added that “a lack of economic resources is not considered sufficient reason to separate a minor from his parents.”

Knowledge of this history, therefore, can reveal the possibilities afforded by a more culturally sensitive and holistic “best interests of the child” standard. But it also warns of the consequences of not allowing Indigenous and nonwhite families a say in determining what exactly that means. 

Featured image: Detail of “Guatemalan Children Today” publication by the Guatemala Human Rights Commission (1986). Image courtesy of Latin American and Iberian Studies Collections, Guatemala News and Information Bureau Archive (1963-2000) of the Princeton University Library