Irregular adoptions and infrastructures of memory in Spain: remnant practices from the Franco Regime

Abstract

The irregular adoption of displaced children during the Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship and the early years of Spanish democracy remains silent and unrecognised. The difficulty in recognising these irregular practices is linked to remnant infrastructures of memory (Rubin (2018) How Francisco Franco governs from beyond the grave: An infrastructural approach to memory politics in contemporary Spain. American Ethnologist 45(2): 214–227). We propose that the time to speak openly about irregular adoptions of forcibly disappeared children in Spain is arriving, and doing so could be a way of exposing a series of ‘unknown knowns’ (Simmel, (1906) The sociology of secrecy and of secret societies. American Journal of Sociology 11(4): 441–498; Bellman R and Levy A (1981) Erosion mechanism in ductile metals. Wear 70: 1–27; Taussig M (1999) Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Solidarity exclusions: Problematizing kinship and humanitarianism from the perspective of transnational adoption

“…However, in Spain, transnational adoption's appearance as a method of family formation was “delayed” due to almost 40 years of dictatorship, during which secrecy predominated in politicized and weaponized forced adoptions (Marre and Gaggiotti 2021; Marre and Leinaweaver, forthcoming). Shortly after Franco's death and the transition to democracy, in the 1980s, a flurry of important changes to family law occurred; subsequently, transnational adoptions to Spain began only in the mid‐1990s.…”

“…77Interestingly, our data reveals very little evidence of the Catholic Church's involvement in transnational adoptions, which is not to say that there was no involvement. The long history of domestic adoption and child theft (Marre and Gaggiotti 2021; Marre and Leinaweaver, forthcoming) suggests otherwise. However, the brokers most commonly identified are representatives of governmental and nongovernmental organizations.…”

Perfectos (des) conocidos: búsquedas y encuentros entre adultos adoptados y sus hermanos/as de origen en Chile, Argentina y España

“…In this article, we analyse the results of a multisited comparative international project, carried out in Chile, Argentina and Spain, about searches for origins in adoption. All three countries share a long tradition of adoptions characterised by secrecy, taboos and irregular practices (Gesteira et al 2021;Marre and Gaggiotti 2021). However, given the global movement towards openness in adoption, particularly in the past decade, in these three countries, the number of adult adoptees searching for their birth relatives, especially birth mothers and birth siblings, is increasing every year.…”