Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain

Jessaca B. Leinaweaver

Sep 2013 · Duke University Press

About this ebook

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.

About the author

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.