A Collective Dream: Reimagining the Adoption Industrial Complex

We are honored to share the reflections of Katelyn Rivas, a longtime AMCer and current Network Liaison, as we bring this chapter of the AMC to a close.

In the middle of summer 2020, I went to my second AMC. It was virtual, it was Zoom Doom Room land but it was all the things I remembered AMC to be- radical moments of alignment with others who you didn’t know existed but always knew you needed. That’s what it was like for me attending , “Dream-Mapping Adoption and Foster Care Abolition” facilitated by Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez, Emily Ahn Levy, Genevieve Saavedra, Liz Latty, Miriama J Lockington, Suzi Martinez Carter and Schulyer Swenson. I was 32 and sitting in a virtual room with 30 plus other adopted, fostered and trafficked people. It was my first time being with so many adult adoptees in my life. I had only met one or two folks that I could remember with my lived experience before. I had spent my whole life not knowing where I was born due to sealed adoption files. Much of my life, it felt as if there were no roots inside of me. Because I had known nothing but repotting. Every five years another house, another container to put yourself in. Until that container can no longer hold. I was raised by white people in rural middle America and I was told that was the way God had ordained it to be. My parents were called to raise me. And here is this zoom doom room were 30 other adoptees, all raised in houses, containers, with pictures of white Jesus next to a family portrait with parents who do not look like you. There were no mirrors of sameness anywhere to be found– until now.

The conversation the panel led was all things abolition within the adoption industrial complex and how that system intersected with the oppressions of white supremacy, settler colonialism, reproductive injustice, ableism and Christian nationalism. This setting was the first time I heard someone articulate that adoption is child trafficking. The instagram account No White Saviors said, “As long as people are profiting off of the separation of families, there will never be a real movement to keep families together.” This goes in direct opposition to what I was raised to believe, that the adoption agency was set in place to help mothers, that social workers helped parents who wanted children and that my first mother loved me so much which is why she decided to give me up. In reality, the adoption agencies profit off the buying and selling of Black and brown children to mostly white evangelical families by coercing Black and brown mothers and families to relinquish their children. This is inherently linked to reproductive justice especially now ( and forever, for all of time) because with the overturning of abortion rights and access, many pregnant people are being preyed on by adoption agencies as viable and “moral and just” alternative to abortion. In sociologist Gretchen Sisson’s book “Relinquished:The Politics of Adoption and Privilege of American Motherhood”, the idea that adoption is child trafficking is reinforced by the history of family separation and policing parenthood. Which is exactly what we talked about in the AMC session that afternoon. But we didn’t stop in the trauma of separation for long, this session was an experience in worldbuilding through dream mapping abolitionists practices participants wanted to breathe into existence in their own worlds and throughout society. Together we thought up ways of liberatory kinship. I think my number one dream was and still is to see my first mother again, face to face but after that it was to continue building community with these amazing activists, artists and dreamers in this room. 

In 2022, I joined AMP Staff as a network liaison to build capacity for our projects making media for liberation. It has been such a lovely experience to craft what it looks like to do fiscal sponsorship from an abolitionist and liberatory framework. Fiscal sponsorship through the AMP model is a lot like the worldbuilding we alchemized during the AMC. There may not be a blueprint for what we want to orchestrate but we know there is an inherent abundance in the network of projects, many of whom were seeded during the conference. I think it is even more important and impactful to uplift our work because as we shift to more in-person activities during the ongoing epidemics of COVID-19, racial injustice and violence on innocent Black and brown bodies everywhere, including in Gaza, there is a disparity of funding and resources for people on the ground doing this liberatory work. This is why it is imperative to build our own infrastructure of mutual aid and continue to broadcast the stories and injustices that did not end just because it was not newsworthy anymore.

It’s been four years since the initial adoptee conversation and many of my dreams have manifested. I have met more BIPOC adoptees in person and virtually, participated in the social media campaign, “Adoption is trauma, and…”, written more about my story, received solidarity and support as I began my own reunion process with my first family and reconnected with folks in the hybrid AMC of 2022. Currently we are organizing to create a Palestine Solidarity Zine and the VOICES: BIPOC Adoptee Conference in Portland this summer. It will be my first time meeting so many of these beloved comrades in person, I imagine it will feel a lot like it did when I left the zoom room in 2020, no longer filled with doom but with inspiration.  It felt like the night I spent on the sandy shores of Lake Superior to watch a meteor shower. It was supposed to be the biggest meteor shower of our lifetime. I remember watching stars falling from the sky as the moon descended and the sun climbed back to claim the sky. All these falling stars, beautiful balls of fire that wanted to tell me, we are out here too. Shining in this dark canvas that was meant to erase us. But we are still here. And so are you. I wanted the night with the meteors to stay. I wanted each star to electrify my organs and throw me into the sky, so that I could dance in the river of streaming light.

There were many beautiful things that came out of this experience but this graphic by @lizar_tstry is one of the most informative and representative of what we learned and built together.