Video Vignette

Angela’s Official Adoption Papers

My papers below include my birth mother’s signature on them under the ‘Observaciones’ (observations) section. It also states that she was present for this process in 1979. When I met my birth mother for the first time in 2006 she told me that was not her signature and that she was not present. In fact, she did not even know if she had a boy or a girl, not until the day that I surprised her and found her. What significance do these official documents hold?

Click HERE to read more about Dr. Alvear, the lawyer who oversaw my adoption as well as other adoptees from the orphanage el Buen Pastor, in a NY Times article from 1978. Some potential adoptee families questioned the practices he used.

“A focus on the paperwork necessarily suggests a questioning of the sense in which the history of the child and the relations which precede the establishment of new bonds might be unknown: much is documented, written, recorded and, crucially, circulated in and through the adoption file.” (441)          

-Silvia Posocco, “Expedientes Fissured Legality and Affective States in the Transnational Adoption Archives in Guatemala.” Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2011.  

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