Until I Find You

Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-0-674-30489-5
Verlag: Harvard University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 440 g

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction Shortlisted for the 2025 Juan E. Méndez Book Award “Detailed and heartrending. uses years of research to show the way that a country destabilized by war can invite merciless profiteers to break apart families” —John Washington, Harper’s The poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession. In 2009 Dolores Preat traveled 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 didn’t meet her mother, but she did meet Colop Chim, who turned out to be a jaladora—a baby broker. Preat and some 40,000 other Guatemalan children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by poverty and civil war. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. Eventually adoption became a private enterprise, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of files from war crimes investigations, Until I Find You reckons with the human toll of an industry that builds loving families in the Global North out of exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nolan, Rachel

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Soziale Fragen & Probleme
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Genozid und ethnische Säuberung
• Sozialwissenschaften Pädagogik Pädagogik Pädagogik: Sachbuch, Ratgeber
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Indigene Völker
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Gewalt Völkermord, Ethnische Säuberung, Kriegsverbrechen

Über Autor(innen)

Nolan, Rachel
Rachel Nolan is Contributing Editor at <i>Harper’s Magazine</i> and has written for the <i>New Yorker</i>, the <i>London Review of Books</i>, the <i>New York Times</i>, the <i>New York Review of Books</i>, and the Salvadoran investigative news outlet <i>El Faro</i>. She is Assistant Professor of International History at Boston University.