The Mexican Adoptee

Not looking for sympathy.

Just for proof of another Mexican-American adoptee.

Not a "half-breed." With a white mother and a Mexican father.

But the child of a Mexican mother with one of those big, extended Mexican families that, but rarely, give their children away because of close knit family ties, etc.

I have an adoptive cousin who is Mexican. He doesn't know who is mother is, but apparently he didn't leave the family. A childless couple in the clan raised him. So that doesn't count.

It really drives me crazy when somebody points out that Latino's don't give away their kids. I'm not arguing with this "rule." I believe it. Because, it appears, I'm the exception. My mother gave me away despite family pressure to keep me. She was Mexican. According to cultural tradition, she should have kept me. I'll give her this. She was a rebel.

It drives me nuts because it FEELS like I'm only the Mexican adoptee of early 1960's vintage. Which only adds to feeling like the damaged product of a really bad experiment, otherwise known as the Closed Era.

PLUS!...

The double whammy of knowing that the social worker must have sized up my mother: poor, minimally educated and, of course, Mexican. Never mind she was a Mexican of European descent with fair skin. A Mexican, she must have thought, was a Mexican. What difference could there be?

So much to my mother's HORROR (as revealed in reunion), I was placed with DARK Mexicans of Indian ancestry. Raised just as poor as my mother, complete with major family dysfunction, and who had achieved one slim rung higher on the socioeconomic scale. While the difference in skin color was disorienting (me being the only "light" one in my adoptive home), the difference in temperament and - what the hell? - intellect was profound. My adoptive parents were hard working and street smart, but without one bit of intellectual curiosity. They never read a single book and preferred television. They mocked anything smacking of culture, calling museums boring and going to college "a waste of time." They did not wonder about how other people live. I, on the other hand, wanted a life beyond the closed family system. I wanted to live in the world. As did my mother. THIS is what she'd WANTED for me when I was born. To live, as she dreamed, in the "white" world.

Hah! She had no idea that the practice of the time was "matching" and that I was not destined for "better," but the same. A lateral move. Because my a-father was and is a narcissist, I argue, worse off.

But time is funny.

Without me to tie her down, my mother was free to move UP and UP she did...the old fashioned way: a financially successful marriage. Never mind that the man turned out to be, well, a pervert. She traveled around the world. Read non-fiction. Is able to talk about all sorts of things, places and ideas.

I have a picture of myself at 12 in 1972 and my mother in the same year, after achieving her "dream" of upward mobility.

God, I hate looking at that picture. We look so much alike. But I'm not with her. She is posed, still very youthful, with her two grandchildren. I'm sitting in the middle of two people of no relation, a human sacrifice to the hopes and dreams of three people.

Some days, this being the lone exception to the "fact" that Mexicans don't give away their babies for adoption, is a real downer.