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

该项目调查(1)鼓励收养儿童的新法律倡议和政府做法如何重新调整墨西哥的家庭和国家关系；(2)新的亲属关系法律概念如何与其他与家政服务有关的跨阶层收养做法相结合。随着墨西哥州自1980年代以来遵守国际收养公约，以及2000年后墨西哥政治转向右翼，联邦和州一级政府调整了现有法规，以促进全面收养贫困儿童。这些改革将完全收养定义为建立生物纽带，标志着与早先简单的收养条款的转变，在以前的简单收养条款中，收养被定义为两个人之间可以撤销的合同。这些以前的法律对非正式收养的普遍做法提供了薄弱的监管，在这些做法中，较富裕的家庭收容贫穷的儿童要么作为家庭佣人，要么因为他们的母亲为收养家庭工作。这项研究以莫雷洛斯州作为其人种学网站，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--提供以下内容：(1)收养的法律和行政结构及其可能的包容和排斥形式；(2)关于收养的法律规定在国家机构内被解释并转化为政府实践的方式；以及(3)早期和新的收养法律使之成为可能的形式。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，通过研究领养是如何在长期存在的家政服务形式的背景下被重新创造出来的，这项研究还将阐明亲属关系如何与种族和阶级不平等的形式相互作用，并被其塑造。

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.