Doctoral Dissertation Research: Making Families Through Adoption: Legal Imaginaries and Child Adoption Practices in Morelos, Mexico

该项目调查了(1)鼓励收养儿童的新法律举措和政府做法如何重新配置墨西哥家庭与国家的关系；(2)亲属关系的新法律概念与其他与家庭服务相关的跨阶层收养实践的交叉方式。随着墨西哥自20世纪80年代以来一直遵守国际收养公约，以及2000年后墨西哥政治向右翼的转变，联邦和州级政府已经调整了现有的法规，以促进对贫困儿童的全面收养。这些改革将完全收养定义为建立生物联系，标志着与早期简单的收养条款的转变。在早期的收养条款中，收养被定义为两个人之间可以撤销的合同。这些先前的法律对普遍存在的非正式收养行为提供了脆弱的监管，在这种情况下，富裕家庭收养贫困儿童，要么让他们做家仆，要么让他们的母亲为收养家庭做佣人。本研究将莫雷洛斯州作为其民族志站点，将使用社会科学方法-档案工作，访谈，案例研究和参与者观察-提供以下说明：(1)收养的法律和行政结构以及它使之成为可能的包容和排斥形式；(2)在国家机构内对收养法律规定的解释和转化为政府实践的方式；(3)早期和新的收养法使亲属关系的形式成为可能。该项目将提供有关法律如何干预和试图塑造家庭和亲子关系的新数据和见解。此外，通过观察收养是如何在长期存在的家庭服务形式的背景下被重塑的，这项研究还将阐明亲属关系是如何与种族和阶级不平等的形式相互作用并被其塑造的。

This project investigates (1) how new legal initiatives and governmental practices that encourage the adoption of children are reconfiguring the relationship of family and state in Mexico; and (2) the ways in which new legal conceptions of kinship intersect with other cross-class adoption practices related to domestic service. With the Mexican state's adherence to international adoption conventions since the 1980s, and the shift towards the right in Mexican politics after 2000, federal and state-level governments have adjusted existing codes to facilitate the full adoption of poor children. The reforms, which define full adoption as the creation of biological ties, mark a move away from earlier simple adoption provisions, in which adoption was defined as a contract between two individuals that could be revoked. These previous laws provided tenuous regulation of widespread practices of informal adoption, in which wealthier families took in poor children either as domestic servants or because their mothers worked as servants for the adopting family. Taking as its ethnographic site the state of Morelos, this research will use social science methodologies--archival work, interviews, case studies and participant observation--to provide an account of (1) the legal and administrative structure of adoption and the forms of inclusion and exclusion that it makes possible; (2) the manner in which legal provisions for adoption are interpreted and translated into governmental practices within state agencies; and (3) the forms of relatedness that earlier and new adoption laws make possible. This project will provide new data and insights concerning how the law intervenes in and attempts to shape family and parent-child relationships. Moreover, by looking at how adoption has been reinvented against the backdrop of longstanding forms of domestic service, the study will also illuminate how relationships of kinship interact with and are shaped by forms of race and class inequality.