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

本项目调查（1）新的法律的倡议和政府的做法，鼓励收养儿童是如何重新配置的家庭和国家的关系在墨西哥;（2）的方式，新的法律的概念的亲属关系与其他跨类收养的家庭服务的做法相交。自20世纪80年代以来，随着墨西哥州遵守国际收养公约，以及2000年后墨西哥政治向右翼转变，联邦和州一级政府调整了现有法规，以促进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，标志着远离早期简单的收养条款，其中收养被定义为两个人之间可以撤销的合同。这些以前的法律对普遍存在的非正式收养做法的监管很薄弱，在这种做法中，富裕家庭将贫困儿童作为家庭佣人或因为他们的母亲为收养家庭工作而收养。这项研究以莫雷洛斯州为人种学地点，将使用社会科学方法-档案工作、访谈、个案研究和参与者观察-来说明（1）收养的法律的和行政结构及其可能的包容和排斥形式;（2）在国家机构内，关于收养的法律的规定被解释和转化为政府惯例的方式;以及（3）较早的和新的收养法所可能实现的亲属关系形式。该项目将提供关于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，通过研究如何在长期存在的家庭服务形式的背景下重新发明收养，这项研究还将阐明亲属关系如何与种族和阶级不平等形式相互作用并受其影响。

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.