Silvia Posocco (Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck)
Expedientes: fissured legality and affective states in the transnational adoption archives in Guatemala
This paper examines controversies over expedientes, the files concerned with transnational adoption cases in Guatemala. Expedientes are complex, composite, and internally differentiated documents, which at once interrupt and establish relationships. Until very recently, their agential capacities rested principally in establishing identity, enacting a change in juridical status of the individuals concerned, and instantiating relations between the birth mother, the adoptee, and the adoptive parent or parents. With the completion of the adoption process, expedientes were filed in the offices of legal professionals, who were under legal obligation to eventually forward all files to the archives of the Guatemalan Supreme Court. This paper examines how expedientes have become the site of claims and counterclaims notably by Guatemalan women who, acting with the support and legal assistance of non-governmental organizations, argue that the children whose transnational movement these documents enable, have in fact been subtracted from them through violence and deception. In the very few cases of this kind which have reached the courts, access to the documents has allowed women whose children have vanished to identify them among the thousands whose files are held in the archives. Detecting forgery of the records, the women have pressed the courts to have the children returned to them. In this paper, I reflect on the place of these documents in fissuring the legality of the transnational adoption process. Further, I consider how the tortuous lives of expedientes reveal complex affective states which might be related to a more generalized 'archive fever' (Derrida 1995) in Guatemala. In the present historical conjuncture, when large archives such as that of the Guatemalan National Police are being systematized, a focus on adoption expedientes identifies the 'adoption archives', enabling, in principle, a consideration of the place of transnational adoption in the mechanisms of terror during the Guatemalan conflict (1954-1996) and its violent aftermath.
Silvia Posocco is a lecturer in the department of psychosocial studies at Birkbeck College, London. Her research interests centre on gender and sexuality, violence and conflict, secrecy, sociality, subjectivity, transnational adoption circuits, documents and archives.
