365 Days of Latino Heritage

Latino Heritage Month has been commodified and commercialized with the real meaning behind heritage and history lost in a push to make Latinos spend and make us a brand. We are not a brand. We are not a marketing demographic. We are a complex mescla of people, culturas y lenguas.

Originally this started as a project for Latino Heritage Month, 2009 pero because our lives as Latinos, Latin Americans and the other names we respond to in our hearts are live every day, this is 365 days of Latino heritage.

Compiled and Curated
By Maegan la Mamita Mala Ortiz of VivirLatino

Guatemala mother searched 5 years for stolen daughter, trafficked to US for adoption

thecurvature:

Loyda Rodriguez Morales felt someone tug at her daughter as she tried to enter her simple home with three young children in tow. She turned to see a woman whisk the 2-year-old away in a waiting taxi. After nearly five years of searching, posting fliers, being turned away at orphanages and even staging a hunger strike, Rodriguez now holds what’s believed to be an unprecedented Guatemalan court order declaring the child stolen and ordering the U.S. couple who eventually adopted her to give her back.

The foundation doesn’t allege the U.S. couple knew the girl they adopted had been kidnapped, only that the girl was snatched by a child trafficking ring and put up for adoption with a new name. 

Guatemala’s quick adoptions once made this Central American nation of 13 million people a top source of children for the U.S., leading or ranking second only to China with about 4,000 adoptions a year. But the Guatemalan government suspended adoptions in late 2007 after widespread cases of fraud, including falsified paperwork, fake birth certificates and charges of baby theft - though they still allowed many already in process.

My god. And then there’s this:

Smolin said this is the first case he knows of a foreign judge ordering an American family to return an adopted child to her native country. He adopted two children from India who he later discovered were stolen, a situation he resolved by allowing the birth parents regular visits.

Well, my. DOESN’T THAT SOUND NICE.

I’m going to just go cry in the corner, now.

And you know that people are going to argue that it’s “wrong” to move the child back to the mother she was stolen from. “Sure it was wrong to steal her,” they will say, “but two wrongs don’t make a right.” And besides, she is BETTER OFF in the U.S. than in Guatemala! Just look at the “spacious house on a large, wooded lot with a carriage driveway and an orange soccer ball on the porch”!!! How could that not be better than wherever her mother lives in the icky country where they steal children to send to nice places like the U.S.??? Why is her mother so greedy and selfish, to want her stolen daughter back? Why doesn’t she LOVE her and want her to have a BETTER life?

(Source: abbyjean, via bad-dominicana)

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  14. fivelettered reblogged this from karnythia and added:
    My heart literally twisted. what the fuck? this is why i always worry about people who are so invested in doing...
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  17. karnythia reblogged this from madamethursday and added:
    And this is why I have many many concerns about this trend of “saving” children for poor countries by uprooting them...
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  30. iamthethunder reblogged this from aenaithia and added:
    I think things are more complicated. If the girl was taken at age two and has been with her adoptive family five years,...
  31. lafillej reblogged this from abbyjean and added:
    This is devastating. I wish Ms. Rodriguez much luck in getting her daughter back, though it will be intensely painful...
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  34. thespitfireemporium reblogged this from bad-dominicana and added:
    Not a fan of international adoption, so fucking racist and corrupt.
  35. chlorophyll reblogged this from the-womanifesto and added:
    I… can’t even and FUCK that blatant imperialism.