This project investigates (1) how new legal initiatives and governmental practices that encourage the adoption of children are reconfiguring the relationship of family and state in Mexico; and (2) the ways in which new legal conceptions of kinship intersect with other cross-class adoption practices related to domestic service. With the Mexican state's adherence to international adoption conventions since the 1980s, and the shift towards the right in Mexican politics after 2000, federal and state-level governments have adjusted existing codes to facilitate the full adoption of poor children. The reforms, which define full adoption as the creation of biological ties, mark a move away from earlier simple adoption provisions, in which adoption was defined as a contract between two individuals that could be revoked. These previous laws provided tenuous regulation of widespread practices of informal adoption, in which wealthier families took in poor children either as domestic servants or because their mothers worked as servants for the adopting family. Taking as its ethnographic site the state of Morelos, this research will use social science methodologies--archival work, interviews, case studies and participant observation--to provide an account of (1) the legal and administrative structure of adoption and the forms of inclusion and exclusion that it makes possible; (2) the manner in which legal provisions for adoption are interpreted and translated into governmental practices within state agencies; and (3) the forms of relatedness that earlier and new adoption laws make possible. This project will provide new data and insights concerning how the law intervenes in and attempts to shape family and parent-child relationships. Moreover, by looking at how adoption has been reinvented against the backdrop of longstanding forms of domestic service, the study will also illuminate how relationships of kinship interact with and are shaped by forms of race and class inequality.
