The Racial and Ethnic Identity Development Process for Adult Colombian Adoptees
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Research Design
2.2. Participants
2.3. Data Collection Methods
2.4. Data Analysis Process
2.5. Measures for Ensuring Trustworthiness
3. Colombian Adoptees and Their Racial and Ethnic Identity Process
3.1. Putting the Puzzle Together: “It Is a Dynamic Process”
I think when I was a little kid, I really couldn’t talk about anything and was very shut off about being Colombian, obviously, I knew that, but I didn’t really wanna talk about race … I think it’s changed a lot since I was a kid versus now.
3.2. Brown on the Outside, White on the Inside
3.2.1. “I Am Not White”
3.2.2. Racism
For the longest time, I really didn’t identify myself as a person of color because I felt like I had grown up into a such a Caucasian household, but as I grew older into adulthood and I started talking to other people of color, I realized that I guess I was technically a person of color, I wasn’t considered to be someone of African-American descent or any of that, but I realized I was a minority and I maybe didn’t have it as rough as other people of color might have, but I still was facing discrimination.
Well, like with ethnicity, I felt I had it because I felt like when I was around a lot of Colombians, that I wasn’t really Colombian enough. I noticed that one day we were invited, my husband and I were invited to a dinner from a friend of mine up in Fargo, and she was from, I believe, Bogota, and she knew a bunch of people here that were also Colombian. And so she invited me over there and I was looking forward to it, but then when I got there, I just felt this immediate disconnect because everyone there assumed that I spoke Spanish and when they found out that I didn’t speak Spanish, they didn’t wanna speak to me anymore.
And then also Colombian immigrants here in the Seattle area who [chuckle] who would claim that because I didn’t speak Spanish and that because I wasn’t raised in Colombia, that I had no right trying to call myself Colombian, trying to wear “la camiseta” [Colombian’s soccer team shirt] during games. Right? Like, “Who do you think you are, you a nerd? You’ve never lived in Columbia, you weren’t raised there, you don’t speak Spanish”. “No tienes derecho”. It’s what they would always say. And it wasn’t happening all the time, only when I would go to like a de julio celebration here or like a … Yeah, a soccer game, and I would come with my jersey on or something and … Or with a flag or something [chuckle] And sometimes people would say, “Oh yeah”. And they started speaking to me in Spanish, and it’s like, “Oh no, sorry. Lo siento. I don’t speak Spanish”. Yeah, yeah. And the response was, many times, “Oh, then, what are you doing here? You’re not really Colombian. You’re not Colombian enough”.
3.2.3. Racial Isolation
3.3. A Chamaleon with Imposter Syndrome
Now I’m kind of fluctuating between all three, but lately, I’ve been using the Indigenous one, the Native-American sort of one. So, I almost get to pick and choose, daily, which one I want to be, which is in its own way nice and at the same time it’s, again, no less confusing. So, it went back and forth. It did, but it always changed, it kinda would change to suit the situation. After 10 years old, it just started going back and forth, like a tennis match.
In terms of race, I would say I have Indigenous ancestry and Spanish, so White-European, so a mix of those two. And I typically have a lot of issues with the way the US census puts race down. I always have a lot of issues with that because if I say I’m Native American, they’re gonna think I’m from one of the tribal nations in the United States, but we all know that in the Americas, there’s multiple Indigenous groups, and then if I put … I don’t identify as Caucasian, so yeah, so I guess it’s like how I’d say race.
3.4. Adoption as a Loss
3.4.1. Unethical Adoptions
Well, there’s two versions, there’s the version that’s in the adoption documents and then there’s the version that she told me, and they are opposite. The version that she told me was that that’s not true, that she never gave me up for adoption. She wanted to send me to live with her sisters and her mother in Tumaco like she did with my brother, but then she said that social workers took me and then promised her that she could go back and get me after a few days after she healed ‘because I was a C-section baby. And she went back and then I was gone by that point. My bio mom said, well, there’s nothing I could do. And I didn’t have money to pay a lawyer to fight the case and so I just hoped for the best.
Please let’s not do that anymore, especially knowing what actually happened to my original mother, where she was forced to give me up or give up all her kids, I can’t see it as anything that is remotely a good thing, at least in that standard sense. The fact that my mother was forced to give me up for adoption because her first husband disappeared in the military, and she was receiving widowed benefits. She had three kids with him, she met someone else, he got her pregnant, and then when he found out, he left. She was told by the government and the military that, “If you don’t give up this new kid who’s out of wedlock, you’ll lose your widow benefits and you’ll have to also sacrifice your other three kids, all of them will go into child services”. She was also promised apparently, “Okay, so we won’t put him up for adoption entirely, he’ll go with a sponsor family and after a certain period of time, you can get him back”. She was also promised that. She changed her mind after I was … Immediately after I was taken out of her arms that first night, she changed her mind, she wanted to actually get me back, she would go back to the orphanage every single day, but they said, “No, you signed over your parental rights, he’s no longer yours”. Everyone in the organization seems okay at first, once we got back into United States, once they had me, they kept on wanting my adoptive parents to be a part of the organization, from what I was told, almost as a mascot, they wanted people to … They wanted them to say what a great story it was and how the process went so smoothly so they can get other people to continuously just try and adopt. It did take them a long time looking at my records to figure out what happened because it seemingly was written, handwritten, my number … It certainly was forged, so that happened with me, too. Yeah, so I can definitely see where the corruption is, or was at least between those couple of decades rampant in the country.
And from what we were told by our siblings was that my older brother was in charge of watching me and someone had a problem with my mother and called the welfare and they took us. And when they took us, because my mom was uneducated and didn’t have any resources or any help, she tried to take us back and they said that they took her rights away and they put us in the system, and we were adopted out. Catholic orphanages were falsifying their documents stating that their children were also abandoned, and they were giving them false cedula numbers, they were putting false names on the documents of who their so-called parents were, and so that’s why they were having a hard time finding their parents. There was a lot of confusion in it. My parents said in the papers they read us that my brother and I were living on the streets for about a year and then we got picked up and put into foster care. And we learned recently that a lot of the information was just stuff that was put in there because they needed to put information in. And I learned from a lot of adoptees that the term abandonment was used in many documents.
3.4.2. Ethical Adoptions
3.4.3. Internalized Symptoms
Only this past year have I been able to come to terms with why I have always felt … I’ve had depression since I was 10, literally, that’s not a hyperbolic. I’ve had depression that long, where I’ve always felt unloved, unlovable, and only now, recently in the past year, since my birth family came back into the picture, have I been able to, as a phrase goes, come out of the fog and understand why maybe I really genuinely felt like that, and it really just might be adoption, it might just be being adopted.
But the therapist that I saw when I was younger, it was more to deal with my depression. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized, this is why I need to see a therapist, because I have identity issues and I need to find out, what is the root to all of this pain that I’m having and this depression and why am I always being put into a depression? I don’t know if it made me an emotional eater. I was having a lot of anger and meltdowns and I didn’t know why.
4. Discussion
5. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
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Participant 1 | Place of Birth | Age of Adoption | Adoptive Parents’ Race | Place Where They Grew Up | Age |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Gonzalo | Bogota | 5 months | White | Midwest, USA | 33 |
Andres | Cali | 7 months | White | West Coast, USA | 37 |
Valentino | Bogota | 5.5 months | White | East Coast, USA | 34 |
Juliana | Bogota | 4 months | White | East Coast, USA | 36 |
Camila | Bogota | 4 months | White | East Coast, USA | 28 |
Carmen | La Mesa | 6 years | White | Midwest, USA | 36 |
Themes | Definition | Participants 1 Who Endorsed It |
---|---|---|
Theme 1: Putting the puzzle together. “It is a Dynamic Process”. | When racial and ethnic identity changes throughout the years. | Camila, Juliana, Andres, and Valentino. |
Theme 2: Brown on the outside, White on the inside. | When participants grew up in a White family, but they do not look like they are White. | Camila, Juliana, Valentino, Gonzalo, and Carmen. |
Theme 3: A chameleon with imposter Syndrome. | When the participant can adapt to the Colombian and White environment without feeling like they fully fit in either of these spaces. | Andres, Gonzalo, Valentino, and Juliana. |
Theme 4: Adoption as a loss. | When adoption is experienced as a loss or as a traumatic experience. | Camila, Valentino, Carmen, Andres, Juliana, Gonzalo. |
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Share and Cite
Cloonan, V.; Hatfield, T.; Branco, S.; Dean, L. The Racial and Ethnic Identity Development Process for Adult Colombian Adoptees. Genealogy 2023, 7, 35. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7020035
Cloonan V, Hatfield T, Branco S, Dean L. The Racial and Ethnic Identity Development Process for Adult Colombian Adoptees. Genealogy. 2023; 7(2):35. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7020035
Chicago/Turabian StyleCloonan, Veronica, Tammy Hatfield, Susan Branco, and LaShauna Dean. 2023. "The Racial and Ethnic Identity Development Process for Adult Colombian Adoptees" Genealogy 7, no. 2: 35. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7020035