Inequality near and far: Adoption as seen from the Brazilian favelas

Law & Society Review, 2002 by Fonseca, Claudia

A good number of children claim to have set up their own arrangements. It is not unusual to hear an 8-year-old explaining, "Auntie asked me to visit, I liked it, so I told my mom I was just going to stay on." Adults will include in their life histories a list of various households in which they lived during childhood, with a predictable variety of commentaries. Some foster parents are remembered as wicked slave drivers, and some as fairy godmothers, but most are described in quite matter-of-fact terms. Many, many people will speak of two, three, and four "mothers" with no embarrassment or particular confusion.

Thus, as children scatter among different foster families, they acquire new parents and siblings. However, as historians and ethnographers throughout the globe have demonstrated (Collins 1992; Goody 1982; Lallemand 1993), such additions do not necessarily imply a rupture or replacement of previous relationships. Instead, just as with ritual kin (which adds godparents to a child's list of relatives), foster arrangements serve to enlarge the pool of significant others in a person's social universe. It is as though the child's social identity were "multi-layered" (Yngvesson 2000), revealing a perception of self that is inseparable from the various relationships that form a background sociality to his or her existence.

The case of Inez well illustrates the comings or goings of children within the deep-rooted fosterage culture prevalent in many Brazilian working-class neighborhoods. There are moments, however, when children are given away on a permanent and irrevocable basis, much as in the system of legal adoption. With the following case, we come to know a woman who, faced with intolerable conditions, actually surrendered her maternal status. However, in stark contrast to legal plenary adoption as it is practiced in Brazil, this birth mother took an active role in the selection of her baby's adoptive family. The story of how she gave up her third-born child highlights how, working between local values and state mandates, the favela residents have fashioned a creative bricolage to ensure the reproduction of future generations.

Eliane's Story: Clandestine Adoption in Context

Eliane, a tall, thin black woman, received me in the front room of the little wooden house where she was living with her husband and four of her children. Between chuckles and sighs of exasperation, she had chatted with me for well over an hour about the exploits of her various offspring when suddenly she fell silent. Taking a long puff on her cigarette, tears welling in her steady gaze, she let out an almost inaudible whisper, "I forgot to tell you. Now that you mentioned adopted kids . . . I gave one away [pause] ... I gave one away."15

Eliane tells a story not much different from that of many other mothers from the outskirts of the city. Her extended kin group had been able to absorb her first two unplanned children, but, still unmarried and living with her mother when she got pregnant a third time, Eliane had reached the limits of her family's endurance. Her third child was simply banished from the kin group before he was even born.