Bird in Hand Bookstore, 11 E 33rd St

The Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism are pleased to welcome Rachel Nolan, Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University, for a conversation about her recent book,

Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala

(Harvard University Press, 2024). The poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession. Following a brief presentation, Prof. Nolan will chat with Prof. Casey Lurtz (History, JHU) about the research and implications of his work.

In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption—but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora—a baby broker.