Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Missing Mila, Finding Family: An International Adoption in the Shadow of the Salvadoran Civil War

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-1903003

1527-1900

Laura Briggs,

Latin American and Latino Studies

With Missing Mila, Finding Family, Margaret Ward has given us a particularly affecting adoption narrative that exceeds the genre to become something else, a narrative about the disappearance of children during the civil war in El Salvador, including the involvement of the United States at the highest levels. It is also a profoundly particular, and hence human, story about how two families, one Salvadoran, one in the United States, work through their understanding of a wrenching series of events, including political violence, death, adoption, and the loss of a child, and somehow come out the other side with an extraordinary measure of grace.The world is full of adoption narratives. They tend to be sentimental, dwelling on falling in love with the child to be adopted, romanticizing the birth mother’s relinquishment or ignoring her altogether, and emphasizing the inevitability of the newly created adopted family, with a proud acknowledgement of its (slight) difference. Missing Mila turns all these conventions on their head. Mila is the birth mother’s name and the “family” they find is the gradual bringing together of Mila’s children and all the people who raise them into one remarkable group. Margaret Ward’s story of how she and husband Tom came to learn about the child they called Nelson and spend several weeks in Honduras as guests of Diana Negroponte (wife of US ambassador John Negroponte) is peculiarly flat and factual, preoccupied with what they knew and when, particularly about John Negroponte’s awareness of, and participation in, Honduras’s role in the wars in Salvador and Nicaragua. Peculiar, that is, until Ward tells us later that she wrote that account for Nelson’s Salvadoran family, whose understanding at that point was only that the baby Roberto (Nelson) had disappeared when his mother, an FMLN militant, had presumptively been killed. It’s hard to write about joy and tragedy in the same lines, and it suggests a great deal about the affective work of the sentimental in covering over violence (as feminist scholars have long argued) that it can have no place here.Instead, what takes the place of the emotional crescendo of that encounter is another, in 1997, when Nelson was 16 and he and his US family flew to Costa Rica to meet his Central American relatives. It was a wrenching, tearful meeting, and Nelson (and ultimately his adoptive brother Derek, as well), formed particularly strong bonds with Roberto/Nelson’s birth father and grandmother, but also with Nelson’s siblings, a sister and brother. The Wards’ gradual process of coming to understand how Nelson became available for adoption is wrenching — that his mother had been shot by Hondu-ran security forces, that he had a grandmother who had never stopped looking for him and a father, too. Understandably, they are terrified that they will lose him, that this challenges the legality of the adoption in Honduras and perhaps also their family and living arrangement, despite the gentle assurances to the contrary by Roberto/Nelson’s birth family.The rest of the book weaves together the voices of virtually everyone involved. Over the course of more than a decade, the children grew, completed higher education, helped each other in business, and wrote a blog together. Margaret spent months in archives, collected oral history from family and friends, and tried to find Mila, in a quest that perhaps became more important to her than to the children. They celebrated holidays, birthdays, the anniversary of Mila’s death, and shared vacations. In short, remarkably, they became a family.A final chapter on the disappeared children of Salvador tries, and to a considerable extent succeeds, in giving us a history of human rights efforts to find and demand jus tice for the children disappeared during the war, including prominently the work of La Asociación Pro-Búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desaparecidos. That group’s careful work in documenting the fates of children in the postwar period and in helping communities and families become reconciled has been little studied by historians and scholars. We have learned a great deal from and about Argentina’s Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, but aside from Pro-Búsqueda’s own books in Spanish, there is nothing about the comparable effort in Salvador (one almost certainly involving much larger numbers of children).The greatest contribution of this book, aside from the fact that the Ward and Escobar/Coto families’ stories are compelling in their own right, is the telling of an ultimately courageous narrative about what is possible in the aftermath of atrocious human rights violations in Central America. Not just gangs of torturers, mafias of demobilized militaries, the victories of neoliberalism, and mass migration, but rich, complex lives marked by possibility and — if one can say it without being trite — healing.