142 Babies Without Borders: Rescue, Kidnap, and the Symbolic Child Karen Dubinsky orture bequeaths extraordinary knowledge, though rarely that de- manded by its perpetrators. Thanks to the U.S. military, we know now thatT one of the most grueling forms of modern torture is not interrogation but what is termed “noise stress.” According to recent reports, detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been subjected to taped loops of various loud, unpleasant noises. One of the most stressful is the endless sound of human infants wailing.1 As I make my way through the history of interracial and international adoption, this knowledge confirms what I have been learning about the symbolic politics of children. That the sound of unhappy children provides common cultural ground in the torture chamber illustrates the symbolic and actual power of babies, in soul-destroying simplicity. The social category “child” is at once real and metaphorical—power- ful as a cultural construct but equally as forceful in flesh and blood. In my current research I am narrating the story of three sets of iconic children, all of whom have been fashioned from the experiences of actual children. By exploring the histories of children with the cultural and political narratives which were formed around them, I am learning how social fears operate through youthful bodies and why adoption across racial and national lines can be profoundly unsettling. An appreciation of symbolic politics of child- hood helps understand why adoption politics have been, and remain, so highly charged. I suggest that if we had a better appreciation of the varied and powerful cultural meanings of childhood, we could move beyond the two main narratives of adoption in the West: “rescue” versus “kidnap.” The three sets of symbolic children I have gathered under one roof are the Hybrid Baby, the National Baby, and the Missing Baby. I briefly introduce them and then discuss some of the research questions which are emerging from this and other explorations in the history and politics of adoption. The Hybrid Baby is my term for those children produced by the movement for interracial adoption in post-World War II Canada. Case files from two Canadian agencies which crossed racial lines (placing black and native children with white parents) offer remarkable vignettes of the encounter between birth mothers, children, and adoptive parents, as well as the social workers who mediated their relationships. The Hybrid Baby was also a creation of 1950s-era interracial adoption advocacy groups, such as Montreal’s Open Door Society, which espoused an integrationist, civil rights philosophy and worked with black communities to find a politic of © 2007 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 19 No. 1, 142–150. 2007 Karen Dubinsky 143 adoption that was unifying, not colonizing. The National Baby was an orphan of the cold war, specifically the CIA-backed “Operation Peter Pan.” This was a clandestine scheme which brought over fourteen thousand unaccompanied Cuban children to Mi- ami. Parents were motivated to send their children for several reasons, primarily because of CIA-sponsored rumors that the new revolutionary government was planning on nationalizing children and sending them to the Soviet Union for indoctrination, or worse. It is believed in Cuba today that people thought their children would be eaten. As U.S.–Cuba relations deteriorated, and parents were unable to rejoin their children, thousands of youngsters found their way into long-term foster care or orphanages throughout the United States.2 The Missing Baby is another product of the cold war, in its 1980s manifestations. Foreign adoptions of children during and immediately following the civil war in Guatemala have been extremely controversial. Attempting to refocus the discussion of international adoption, as Tobias Hübinette suggests in this roundtable, on its effects on sending nations, my aim here is to examine how foreign adoptions have been discussed in contemporary Guatemala. Any one of these stories could be the subject of a lengthy monograph (indeed, some have been and more will be). My purpose is different: I am using these diverse stories to raise questions about the history and social meaning of children and nations, themes which I will elaborate on in the rest of this article. Children as Bearers, but not Makers, of Social Meaning A generation of women’s historians has shown us how, to quote Judith Walkowitz, “what is socially peripheral is frequently symbolically central.” The insight that women acted as “bearers, but rarely makers of social mean- ing” can be applied even more strongly to children. 3 When, for example, a liberal, integrationist discourse of interracial adoption developed in Canada in the late 1950s, which positioned interracially adopted black children as innocent bearers of racial reconciliation, Canadians looked through the Hybrid Baby and saw, variously, a hopeful sign of cross racial tolerance, an unfortunate to be rescued by tender white care, or a measure of the superior social values of Canadians, who believed themselves to be in those years at the forefront of domestic interracial adoption. (At the same moment in Sweden, where some of the first formal mechanisms of international adoption were created, these also confirmed to their proponents Sweden’s egalitarian ideology.4) A few saw, in the Hybrid Baby, the political weak- ness of the black community. Almost everyone believed these children to be 144 Journal of Women’s History Spring offspring of doomed interracial romance between white women and black men; and thus almost no one (proponents or opponents of adoption) saw the extraordinary struggles of black birthmothers, many of them assisted immigrant domestics from the West Indies, whose very existence in Canada complicated a beloved national narrative of anticonquest. Thus the story of the increase in black children “in foster care was told in the feel-good terms of integrationist civil rights discourse, rather than, for example, the more complicated terms of the global labor market and limited immigration options of Caribbean black women.5 The symbolic power of children is so hegemonic we barely notice it any longer—until it goes over the top, as it did, for example, with the most famous National Baby in recent history, Cuba’s Elian Gonzalez, or in the winter of 2005, in the aftermath of the South Asian tsunami. When we are saturated with it, or when there is a high-profile scandal or dispute, we oc- casionally notice the enormous cultural weight children carry on their frail shoulders. For the past several centuries in the West, this cultural weight has been synonymous with innocence. How Social Fears Operate through the Bodies of Children Historians of childhood have explored how childhood has been con- stituted as essentially vulnerable in Western discourse, acting as a master identity for them.6 The more adult society seemed “bleak, urbanized and alienated,” wrote British historian Hugh Cunningham, the more childhood appeared as a garden, “enclosing within the safety of its walls a more natural way of life.”7 Vivian Zelizer calls this the “sacralized” child; excluded from the cash nexus, children became instead objects of sentiment.8 The psychic and political space occupied by the sacral child, several centuries later, is enormous. When children appeared on the international political stage in the early twentieth century, the discourse of children’s rights moved from legal reforms (such as education and maintenance) to the broader notion that all children had a right to a childhood, that is, a period of innocence.9 The sheer ordinariness of these ideas about modern children becomes evi- dent only in times of stress. Thus when anti-Castro forces planted rumors that the revolutionary government was about to revoke parental custody rights, nationalizing children along with sugar mills and factories, they invoked—but did not invent—the vulnerable child. This story of the at- tack of the communist baby-snatchers joined a long history of unsettled, postrevolutionary societies, whose national traumas are expressed through their children.10 Similarly, when rumors began to circulate in 1980s Guatemala that children leaving the country for adoption were actually being sold into 2007 Karen Dubinsky 145 prostitution or sex slavery, or killed and their organs harvested, it is certainly likely that these rumors were fuelled by very real issues such as lax legal and child welfare systems, and the perception that a handful of professionals are profiting enormously from the process. As Anne Collinson elaborates in this roundtable, in the past decade in Guatemala these anxieties have led to lynchings of foreign tourists suspected of baby theft, as well as two United Nations inquiries into adoption scandals. But I think such dramatic actions express much more than concern about internal adoption regulations. In Guatemala, suspicion about foreign adoptions has arisen in the aftermath of an intense period of civil war, re- pression, and terror, alongside extraordinary levels of poverty. The public presence of thousands of street children in Guatemala, as in other Latin American nations, heightens the perception that children’s lives are pre- carious. Guatemalans have actually experienced enormous loss, including countless children. When one lives in what anthropologist Nancy Scheper- Hughes calls a “chronic state of panic,” perhaps it becomes reasonable to assume the worst.11 In times of conflict, war, and social upheaval, children can become bear- ers of huge social anxieties; this has been true at many historical moments. Obviously, sometimes this is because it is true; awful things do happen to children. But there are dimensions of this anxiety that operate beyond strict questions of truth or falsehood. Veracity is not always the most revealing or even possible question. The Missing Baby is real and can be explained by the past decades of Guatemala’s violent history.