



































Coming Out of the Fog of War and Adoption Trauma: Central American Adoptees and Social Media Support Groups


    

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FINDING HOPE: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN HELP CENTRAL 

AMERICAN ADOPTEES HEAL AND THRIVE 
  

 

Juan Pablo Hernandez-Martinez 

Northwestern University, USA  

  

Abstract: Central American adoptees are a unique part of the Latinx population, as they were often brought up 

by White adoptive parents in White communities completely outside of their birth cultures. This can lead to 

feelings of uncertainty and fragmentation in relation to their connection to Central America. Social media and 

other digital technologies have been instructive tools for these adoptees to explore their identities and lessen the 

psychological stress caused by being removed from their birth cultures and communities. 

Keywords: Central American adoptees, Transnational/racial adoptees, Social media. 

  

 

 Introduction 

Displaced by civil war, transnational acts of state violence, and a system of international adoption with 

little government oversight, tens of thousands of infants and children were adopted from El Salvador and 

Guatemala into U.S., European, and other White Western homes beginning in the 1970s through the early 2000s 

(Briggs, 2012, 2020; Nolan, 2019; Rossi, 2022). Central American adoptees are a unique part of the Latinx 

population to consider, in part because they were often brought up by White adoptive parents in White 

communities completely outside of their birth cultures. Although commonality with other 1.5 and 2nd generation 

U.S. Central Americans can be found in shared backgrounds that are full of uncertainty and fragmentation in 

relation to their connection to Central America, adoptees differ in that they were not brought to the United States 

with a cultural representative or relative who may have helped them maintain their birth culture. They also did 

not come to the United States on their own and were not necessarily brought up near Latinx population centers. 

Consequently, social media and other digital technologies have been instructive tools for transnational/racial 

adoptees to explore their identities and lessen the psychological stress caused by being removed from their birth 

cultures and communities.  

Accordingly, this study focuses on how adoptees from Central America digitally make meaning of the 

state violence that culminated in their adoption and the symbolic violence that often results from being a child of 

color raised in an adoptive White home governed by colorblind ideologies. I examine how Central American 

adoptees use online support groups to build community and fight feelings of isolation. By doing so, this study 

brings insight to this underexplored outcome of U.S. Cold War politics and the ways in which social media can 

be used to bring visibility to shared trauma and help individuals feel less alone. Further, by proposing the 

framework of “coming out of the fog,” this study provides a critical vocabulary for understanding the “fog” of 

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imperialism that haunts the international adoption industry, as well as the “fogginess,” or complexity, of online 

community building built through affect. Through interviews completed with Salvadoran and Guatemalan 

adoptees, I discuss the intricacies of adoptee digital organizing and establish the potential for transnational/racial 

adoptees to use social media networking as a tool for enacting change that crosses the boundary from online to 

offline. Although transnational/racial adoptees share the common origin of adoption, it is significant to note that 

adoptee lived experience is not monolithic, and as a result online spaces for adoptees remain sites of negotiation.  

The research questions guiding this article are as follows.  

RQ1:  

  

How have transnational/racial Central American adoptees used social media 

networking on Facebook to make meaning of state and symbolic violence?  

RQ2:  How does the proposed framework of “coming out of the fog,” a phrase commonly 

used by the participants in this study to signal the ways in which 

transnational/racial adoptees begin to question the adoption-as-rescue paradigm, 

help us understand the affordances and limitations of adoptee community building 

online?  

This study begins with a brief overview of the theoretical framework used, which considers the 

intersections between social media networking, affect, and digital meaning making to examine the phenomenon 

of online community building centered around emotion, feelings, and sentiment. Next, it outlines the 

methodology and the ethical considerations taken in producing knowledge with and about marginalized Latinx 

communities. The findings and discussion section begins by presenting an overview of the paradigm of “coming 

out of the fog,” which this study offers as a critical lens for understanding and measuring how digital spaces 

provide a structure that transnational/racial adoptees can use to make meaning of state violence and complicate 

White savior adoption-as-rescue narratives. Subsequently, three key findings from this study of Salvadoran and 

Guatemalan adoptee online groups are presented that establish how adoptees use social networking to “come out 

of the fog,” find belonging, and suture online and offline spaces in their work to create visibility for 

transnational/racial adoptees. I argue that digital community building can make offline lives more livable by 

affording transnational/racial adoptees the opportunity to connect to others with similar lived experiences and 

consider avenues for enacting change online and offline. However, online spaces remain contested spaces, and 

consequently online adoptee groups have the potential to more closely facilitate individual, rather than collective, 

healing. The conclusion reflects on these findings and offers suggestions for further research.  

Theoretical Considerations  

Affective Networks, Digital Meaning Making, and Finding Community Online  

Scholarship on online networks has begun to illuminate the dynamics of digital community building and 

consider its affordances and limitations for the fostering of emotional connections and affective networking. boyd 

(2010) uses the phrase “networked publics” to describe “the space constructed through networked technologies 

and . . . the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice” 

(p. 40). She claims social networking sites such as Facebook are “networked technologies” that have reorganized 

“how information flows and how people interact with information and each other” (boyd, 2010, p. 41). In other 

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words, social media sites complicate past understandings of publics through their structural affordances that allow 

for among other things, scalability, searchability, and the formation of relationships un-reliant on geographic 

proximity. “Networked publics,” however, do not automatically constitute community. Indeed, the affordances of 

digital structures also come with their limitations. As Van Dijck (2013) argues, social networking sites’ 

appropriation of key terms such as “social,” “collaboration,” and “friend” “resonate with communalist jargon of 

early utopian visions of the Web as a space that inherently enhances social activity. In reality, the meaning of 

these words has increasingly been informed by automated technologies that direct human sociality” (p. 11). Put 

another way, Van Dijck (2013) brings attention to the contradictory nature of new media, in which social media 

companies have rhetorically presented themselves (and been represented in popular discourse) as platforms for 

enhancing human networks and interaction while simultaneously being engineered and automated systems that 

“manipulate connections” through algorithmic design (p. 9).  

Several scholars are likewise documenting how networked publics are offering new ways of performing 

affect and/or building affective connections (Aziz, 2022; Döveling, 2015; Döveling, Harju, & Sommer, 2018; 

Papacharissi, 2014, 2015; Rajabi, 2021; Wilding & Winarnita, 2022). Papacharissi’s (2015) notion of “affective 

publics,” for example, gives a name to “networked publics that are mobilized and connected, identified, and 

potentially disconnected through expressions of sentiment” (p. 311). Papacharissi (2015) uses this term to 

understand engagement around specific Twitter hashtags that materialize around news events and social 

movements that drive or are driven by emotional attachment. Likewise, Döveling and colleagues (2018) introduce 

the concept of “digital affect cultures,” as “relational, contextual, globally emergent spaces in the digital 

environment where affective flows construct atmospheres of emotional and cultural belonging by way of 

emotional resonance” (p. 1). They demonstrate how traumatic events such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters 

can create a sense of belonging forged through shared emotional sentiment collected through hashtags and 

regardless of geographical distance between users. Papacharissi (2015) warns, however, that one must not conflate 

a sense of belonging with an actual community engaged in changemaking: “depending on context, these affective 

attachments may either self-propagate a movement to generate community, and/or entrap people in a loop of 

sustained spectatorship” (p. 311).  

In relation to this study, both scholars and adoptees have established a meaning of community that goes 

beyond spectatorship or a simple emotional attachment. Parks (2010) considers “virtual communities” to be 

spaces in which group members can “engage in collective action,” “share rituals and information,” and “find a 

sense of belonging and attachment” (p. 108). They are also spaces in which there might be a pattern of “interaction 

among members” and a “self-awareness” of being a community (Parks, 2010, p. 108). In other words, there is an 

active element to virtual and nonvirtual community building that relies on participation. Similarly, Guatemalan 

adoptee Melissa Ramos (2021) defines community building as referring to the “activities, practices, and policies 

that support and foster positive connections among individuals, groups, organizations, and geographic and 

functional communities” (para. 4). In the case of adoptees, Ramos notes, community building is “founded on a 

shared identity” and is distinct from “community action,” which involves organizing “those affected by public or 

private decisions or non-decisions where the goal is to challenge existing political, social, and economic structures 

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and processes” (para. 6). The distinction between the two is an important one to make because as this study 

demonstrates, adoptees are not a monolith and take various paths in their approaches to identity construction and 

digital community building and action. Stuart Hall (1990) reminds us that diasporic identities are formed by the 

ways in which individuals and groups are positioned by outside forces, such as the media and other cultural 

institutions that mediate social meanings, and the way they position themselves in relation to others. As some 

adoptees come of age and begin to wrestle with and against the disciplining power of national or familial politics, 

they may turn to online communities to find belonging, negotiate cultural identity, or advocate for change in 

international adoption systems. Still, as scholars Baym (2006) and Gray (2009) argue, “offline contexts permeate 

and influence online situations, and online situations and experiences always feed back into offline experience” 

(Baym, 2006, p. 86). In other words, the separation between an individual’s online and offline lives has no clear 

boundary. Youth, like Central American adoptees, use new media as just one space to find belonging and may 

suture online and offline communities in their search for public space and legibility (Gray, 2009, p. 15).  

Although much contemporary scholarship has turned to Facebook and Twitter to consider contemporary 

journalistic flows and the spread of misinformation, communication and Latinx scholars have less frequently 

studied the ways in which private groups on Facebook function as significant sites of support. There are several 

studies on Facebook groups for people seeking health support, but these reports often rely on content analysis 

rather than exploring the root reasons of why people have turned to or been forced to rely on Facebook groups to 

find help through virtual communities. Likewise, Döveling and colleagues (2018) and Papacharissi (2014, 2015) 

offer significant theorizations on the intersections between social media sites, community, and affect, but their 

respective studies, which mainly focus on Twitter, do not consider the ways affective publics and digital affect 

cultures are functioning in less visible online spaces like Facebook groups. This study emphasizes that adoptees 

are in fact being driven to connect by “flows of affect online” (Döveling et al., 2018, p. 1), but they are doing so 

in ways that seek to make their lives more livable both online and offline. It further establishes how accumulations 

of online affect can lead to community action offline.  

Notably, this study connects conceptualizations of affective networks with what Rajabi (2021) has 

discussed as digital meaning making to highlight how online communities can be a space for users to express 

emotions or feelings that are denied validity in offline contexts. Rajabi (2021) uses the concept of “symbolic 

trauma” to work through how digital media users and communities make meaning of suffering caused by state 

and symbolic violence and to give a critical vocabulary to those disabled by social and political systems whose 

suffering is otherwise made invisible by those in power. In other words, symbolic trauma, which can be both 

physical and psychological, is trauma unrecognized and/or denied by traditional hegemonic systems, but it is 

potentially rendered legible in digital worlds. Critical adoption scholars have previously established the invisible 

psychic trauma of transnational/racial adoptees that results from being removed from birth families/cultures 

and/or being raised through the principles of colorblind kinship that demand feelings of gratitude from adoptees 

(Eng, 2010; Merritt, 2021; Park Nelson, 2007; Rossi, 2022). As such, this study foregrounds how digital 

community spaces have enabled Central American adoptees to recognize these structures of symbolic violence to 

which they have been subjected and proposes the framework of “coming out of the fog” to give a name to the act 

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of questioning the emotionally stifling adoption-as-rescue paradigm, as well as to measure the affordances and 

limitations of digital meaning making after symbolic trauma.  

Methodology and Ethical Considerations  

This study weaves together analysis of adoptee social media organizing and qualitative interviews with 

Salvadoran and Guatemalan adoptees to garner a better understanding of the affordances and limitations of social 

media networking in creating community and political change both online and offline. Following Sandvig and 

Hargittai’s (2015) discussion of digital research methods, this study takes an instrumental approach to the study 

of digital media to explore how social media as an instrument or tool can provide new insights into the complexity 

of community building and digital diasporas. Put another way, this study is most interested in how digital media 

and technologies function as an instrument or “as a vehicle, a medium” for talking about race and cultural identity, 

state and symbolic violence, adoption trauma, adoptee lived experience, and the future (Akindes, 2003, p. 155). 

In what ways is new media, such as social media networks, a contributor to the everyday lived experiences and 

evolving identities of Central American adoptees?  

I conducted 16 semistructured, qualitative interviews with Central American adoptees, including seven 

Guatemalan adoptees and nine Salvadoran adoptees. All 16 have partaken in one of five online adoptee groups 

from which I solicited participants. I recruited interviewees by first asking group moderators if they would be 

interested in participating, and then I utilized snowball sampling. Participants ranged in age from 24 to 42 and 

were adopted between 1980 and 1997. Four men and 12 women participated in my interviews. Interviews took 

between 45 minutes to one hour to complete and were primarily conducted over Zoom. I began by asking 

individuals to a share a bit about their adoption journey and how their perceptions about their adoption and cultural 

identity have developed over time. Subsequently, participants were asked about their digital media use and the 

role of social media networking in finding belonging. Names have been anonymized to protect the privacy of my 

participants. To protect the privacy of these online groups, I also mostly refrain from discussing the specific 

content or affects present on their message boards. Rather, I have chosen to primarily use affective belonging as 

my main analysis and to rely on the responses I received from my participants to establish the complexity of these 

online spaces.  

Past studies have shown that as transnational Central American youth come of age and attend college or 

leave their home for the first time, they become interested in issues of identity, and in some cases, they learn about 

their birth countries’ violent histories for the first time (Coutin, 2016; Menjívar, 2002; Trujillo, 2021). Likewise, 

although some critical adoption scholars have utilized transnational/racial adoptee oral histories in their historical 

recoveries of the exploitative system of international adoption (Kim, 2010; Varzally, 2017), this study adds to the 

conversation by specifically exploring the perspectives of Central American adoptees and the role of new media 

in adoptee community building and identity negotiation.  

Further, the methodology of this study is ethically aligned with the goals of Aparicio and colleagues 

(2022), who position Latinx ethnography as “homework” rather than fieldwork, which they see as “an 

aspirational, future-oriented, and coalitional practice of ethnography that recognizes our research partners and 

interlocuters as collaborators and intellectuals in their own right and demands a deeper and more sustained 

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personal and political commitment” (p. xxiii). “Home” has a second significance in the context of this research 

because I myself am a Salvadoran adoptee who has found community, connection, and emotional validation in 

the online adoptee diaspora. Indeed, by utilizing the notion of “coming out of the fog” as a lens from which to 

understand digital meaning making, I aim to “listen in solidarity” with my participants and foreground Central 

American adoptees as engaged in their own analytics outside of the academy (Aparicio et al., 2022, pp. xxv, xxix). 

By doing so, this study inserts Central American and transnational/racial adoptee subjectivities into the fields of 

Latinx and communication studies through their own voices and knowledge production.  

Findings and Discussion: The Dynamics of Adoptee Online Network Building  

This study demonstrates the affordances and limitations of digital community building for 

transnational/racial adoptees from El Salvador and Guatemala. It begins by conceptualizing “coming out of the 

fog” as a framework for understanding and measuring how digital spaces provide a structure for adoptees to 

question the adoption-as-rescue paradigm and circumvent the emotional regulation required by the politics of 

colorblind kinship practiced by many adoptive families. From there, the study establishes three key findings. 

First, despite the utopian promises of digital community building, some adoptees fail to find meaning/support 

online. Second, online groups of adoptees have found success in using their digital platforms to create substantive 

change offline and therefore have worked to suture online and offline lived experiences. Finally, digital groups 

built around collective affect remain contested spaces in which adoptees grapple with divergent ideas on how to 

make meaning of adoption trauma.  

Defining the “Fog”  

The phrase “coming out of the fog” is popular within transnational/racial adoptee circles and signals a 

rejection of the White savior adoption-as-rescue narrative that is commonly told by adoptive parents, social 

workers, and popular media. This study uses this concept as described by adoptees themselves to better interrogate 

the complex politics of online community building among the Central American adoptee diaspora. Adoptees have 

described “being in the fog” as being an adoptee who has internalized the Western adoption-as-rescue paradigm 

(Yue, Santizo-Malafronti, & Vazquez-Kelly, 2020). In other words, a transnational/racial adoptee living in the 

“fog” views their adoption as an apolitical act of love and fails to interrogate the geopolitical factors that make 

children from the Global South into adoptable products (Briggs, 2020; McKee, 2019). As interviews for this study 

were completed, it was a phrase repeated by several participants. I now turn to some of my participants to better 

explain the “fog.”  

One of this study’s participants, Kyle, was adopted from Guatemala in 1996. He is a participant in two 

online Guatemalan adoptee groups, as well as a few other adoptee digital collectives. As he explains, he had been 

living in  

the fog of whiteness, the fog of privilege, classism, the fog of imperialism, just like believing everything we’ve 

been told since we were kids and really thinking that that’s the whole truth without doing any questioning of that; 

and then coming out of the fog is when you really start to realize, “Oh, there’s a lot more here.”                                        

In other words, for Kyle, to come out of the fog means to question the systems that enable the international 

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adoption industry, the ways that racial projects shape transnational social relations, and the myth of American 

exceptionalism.  

Another participant, Angela, was adopted from Guatemala in 1997. She is a participant in two online 

adoptee groups and was in reunion with her birth family. Her narrative is one of several Guatemalan adoptees 

whom I spoke to, who told me they were trafficked. At the time of her birth, Angela’s mother’s doctor had told 

her that she had died shortly after birth, but in fact, she was taken by the doctor and adopted to the United States. 

For Angela, the fog can be hard to escape, particularly when one is  

raised in a family of primarily White people, and you’re in a community of primarily White people . . . you are 

socialized to believe this idea of, to accept a perspective on your adoption that comes from the White American 

perspective. And coming out of the fog means, you’re reconnecting with the fact that you are not a White 

American, and you have a reality that faces you in a very different way.  

In other words, the model of colorblind kinship that governs many adoptive families confines 

transnational/racial adoptees to the fog, or a mythology in which they may ignore or bury their racial otherness, 

accept popular images or rhetoric of their birth countries as backward, and consistently be told that their birth 

families were incapable of providing any semblance of a “good” life for them. Coming out of the fog signals a 

contestation of colorblind and colonial politics and a rejection of the phantom lives commonly constructed by 

adoptive parents that imagine a child’s “life [without being adopted] as located in a grim and soulless orphanage 

and followed by a life of street crime” (Honig, 2005, p. 218). To come out of the fog, then, is to interrogate the 

systems that allow for an adoptees’ physical and psychological displacements from their birth families, countries, 

and cultures.  

Notably, to come out of the fog can also be a painful experience in which one must confront the ghosts 

haunting them. Gordon (2008) uses the concept of “haunting” to describe the instances “when home becomes 

unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when 

what’s in your blind spot comes into view” (p. xvi). Still, given the transparent and blurry nature of ghosts, these 

apparitions may not always be identifiable. As Stoler (2006) argues, “to be haunted is to be frequented by and 

possessed by a force that not always bares a proper name” (p. 1). In other words, to be haunted by the violence 

of empire is to not necessarily have the language to describe or the power to make others aware of the pain of 

forced family displacement and ghostly hauntings. This article works through how “coming out of the fog” is 

both a process enhanced by adoptee digital community building and digital meaning making, as well as a 

descriptor of the murkiness, or fogginess, of contested community spaces. To recognize the fog is to give a name 

to the imperial ideologies behind international adoption, a way of making meaning of the state violence and 

symbolic trauma that some transnational/racial adoptees from Central America have faced, and a way of 

recovering memory of the effects and afterlives of the United States’ Cold War intervention in the region. 

However, it is not a universal process, and as evidenced by this study’s interviews with Central American 

adoptees, it can have different meanings for everyone dependent on their own relationship to their adoption. 

Rajabi (2021) argues, “users go online to be a part of something, and they participate to establish a new meaning-

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making schema, and thus new understandings of their lives” (p. 53). Yet this study also seeks to consider how 

some adoptees fail to find meaning of their ghostly pasts online.  

Salvadoran Adoptees and the Struggle for Community  

For Salvadoran adoptees, community building has proven to be challenging and fractured. The creation 

of online support groups for Central American adoptees has often been tied to connections made after completing 

at-home DNA ancestry kits. Several of the women who participated in this study founded or act as moderators of 

these spaces for Salvadoran adoptees to congregate, and they began their own personal adoption journeys with 

23andMe to try to find birth relatives. Still, Salvadoran adoptee Laura’s narrative complicates the utopian aspects 

of affective publics and digital meaning making. Laura was adopted into a Mormon family in Utah in 1989. Like 

several of the Salvadoran adoptees I spoke to, she is now married and has children. For her and others, having 

children was a moment that was significant in their adoption journey because they wanted to share their birth 

culture and histories with their children. As such, Laura turned to the Internet to seek a virtual space to discuss 

her at-home DNA test results and compare relative lists with other adoptees. She was unable to find any 

Salvadoran adoptee Facebook groups but was invited to join a Guatemalan adoptee page by a Guatemalan adoptee 

who was listed as a third cousin on 23andMe and with whom she had been messaging. She recalls being “very 

involved” in the group and relating to fellow Central American adoptees “who were confused about how to feel 

about being adopted or about being taken from their biological culture.” She added, “I was very loud on that 

Facebook page, and I was helping so many people, you know, with their DNA questions and these unanswered 

questions they had within themselves.” She described exchanging DNA relative lists with the connections she 

was making, but her search for mutual relatives always came up empty. At one point she posted in the group, “Is 

anybody out there and from El Salvador, anybody have any relatives from El Salvador on their relative lists?” 

She recalls feeling hurt after people responded to her posts with comments like, “This is a Guatemalan adoptee 

page; you should go to an El Salvador one.” This is just one example of the boundary-making practices that 

Central American adoptees in online diasporic groups have taken part in, and it demonstrates the complexities of 

building a community around a confined notion of identity, which in this case was tied to national origins. 

Disillusioned with the Guatemalan group, Laura started her own page dedicated to Salvadoran adoptees, and it 

has slowly accrued over 30 members. Given the smaller size of the group, however, it has struggled to maintain 

active conversations among members.  

The lack of activity in these smaller groups, which do not have the experience of meeting in person, speaks 

to the difficulty of performing vulnerability among strangers online. Online spaces both lessen and reinforce 

distance between users (boyd, 2010; Farquhar, 2012). As Merritt (2021) has noted, adoptees from across the 

country and even the globe can be a part of these groups and take solace in knowing that there are others with 

their shared origins and shared emotional sentiment that has arisen from being adopted. However, I would add, a 

lack of homogeneity of lived experience can make it hard to open up to others, particularly when there is little 

conversation already happening. Laura’s upbringing in a Mormon family, for example, would have been a very 

different experience from an upbringing in a secular family. Laura also ties the struggle for community building 

to a “hush-hush” culture around U.S. intervention in Central America, in which a lot of adoptees do not know 

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about the history of the Salvadoran Civil War and as a result may not know the contexts of their own adoption. 

There is also an important emotional labor aspect. Laura and other group moderators have felt an added 

responsibility to actively post conversation starters, garner traction, and be there as a resource and support for 

others. This can come with a toll. As Laura notes:  

It’s been a long time since I posted on there [the group page she founded], not as often as I should, because I go 

through these dips, you know, where I just don’t want to think about it. It consumes me a lot, and sometimes I 

just don’t want to think about it.  

A few months after I spoke with Laura, she turned her moderation duties over to another adoptee because 

she needed to take a break from the group and from trying to increase its activity.  

Papacharissi (2015) notes that her conceptualization of affective publics is influenced by Williams’s 

(1977) work on “structures of feeling,” or the emotions, moods, and atmospheres that generations are born out of 

and raised in and that define a moment in time (Sharma & Tygstrup, 2015). Papacharissi (2015) seeks to 

understand how digital media effect narration and structures of storytelling, arguing:  

Networked structures of feeling . . . help us tell stories about who we are, who we imagine we might be, and how 

we might get there. The same stories that may inspire powerful disruption, accumulate and diffuse intensity and 

tension, or simply, serve as an organically generated digital manifestation of who we are, and who we might like 

to be. (p. 311)  

This study emphasizes that transnational/racial adoptees telling their narratives is an organic or natural 

reaction to the state and symbolic violence that has resulted in their forced displacement in a geographical and 

psychological sense. The digital manifestation of their trauma in networked spaces, such as private Facebook 

groups, is simply how they make meaning of the complexity of adoption or how they begin to come out of the 

fog. These digital spaces are a place where digital sufferers “negotiate their place in the broader world given the 

catastrophic feeling that broke down their sense of place in the world” (Rajabi, 2021, p. 40). Still, it is significant 

to question these utopian ideas about digital narration in affective publics. As the case of Laura illustrates, online 

spaces for the narration of trauma can be extremely foggy places, in which adoptees may face hostility and/or a 

lack of engagement and connection with others resulting in their inability to digitally make meaning of their 

ghostly pasts.  

Guatemala Adoptees Groups and the Suturing of Online and Offline Lived Experiences  

Guatemalan adoptees have also founded and facilitated online groups to ease feelings of isolation and 

painful pasts. Two organizations, Next Generation Guatemala (NGG) and Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots, run 

various online platforms for Guatemalan adoptees. Although both are based in the United States, these groups are 

open to members of the Guatemalan adoptee diaspora residing in various countries across the globe. One 

difference between the two groups is that Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots distinguishes itself by being an 

incorporated nonprofit; it was founded by a few members of Next Generation Guatemala that sought to use their 

business and tech start-up experience and acumen to build strategic partnerships with outside companies and 

organizations with the purpose of integrating themselves and their members into the greater Guatemalan 

community. Both groups offer community spaces across mediums, including Facebook, Instagram, Discord, 

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YouTube, and Clubhouse, but they have also increasingly worked to build presence and change offline. 

Accordingly, this section argues that rather than solely existing in digital spaces, the community building that 

results from Guatemalan adoptee groups has worked to suture online and offline worlds.  

Notably, both groups were started by founders with a desire for building community and visibility for 

those with lived experiences as transnational/racial adoptees from Guatemala. Gemma Givens, the founder of 

Next Generation Guatemala, describes its 2012 origins as coming from a moment of pain as a study abroad student 

in Guatemala and finding out that her birth mother had died before she had the opportunity to reunite with her. 

She told the Berkeley News, “I remember coming back home, sitting on my [adoptive] mom’s couch thinking ‘Is 

that it? Is that really it? That whole thing just happened, and there’s no one to talk about it with?’” (Brice, 2019). 

NGG, then, was started as an outlet for Guatemalan adoptees to share their experiences with peers that may be 

able to understand them better than their adoptive families or non-adoptee friends. The founder shared her story 

on online message boards for adoptive parents in hopes that adoptees themselves would see her message. She 

googled search terms like “Guatemalan adoptees” and “adoptees from Guatemala” to try to find other adoptees 

to join her group. In other words, it was built out of what can be characterized as “flows of digital affect,” or 

flows of adoptees seeking peers to share their adoption sentiments, leading to NGG’s Facebook group (Döveling 

et al., 2018, p. 1). Indeed, for these first few years of the organization, Givens searched for digital traces leading 

to Guatemalan adoptees to add to her group, rather than adoptees finding the community themselves. It was not 

until 2015, three years after she created the group, that there was a steady flow of adoptees finding NGG on their 

own.  

Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots was founded in November 2019 by five Guatemalan adoptees who had 

been a part of the NGG online community and saw an opportunity to reach for greater potential and organize 

around a central mission of giving back to and integrating with the country of Guatemala. Given that several of 

the founders had experience working with tech start-ups in the United States, Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots 

differentiates itself by treating their group in a similar fashion to a small business, which one of the founders told 

me means providing “concrete evidence of why it’s within the best interest of the entities of the people we’re 

reaching out to in Guatemala to give us some time.” In other words, one of the goals of this group is to build 

partnerships with other adoptee organizations, as well as organizations and government entities in Guatemala that 

might give adoptees resources or tools for finding their identity.  

Given their greater membership, the online spaces fostered by Next Generation Guatemala and Adoptees 

with Guatemalan Roots may more likely act as “affective publics” than Salvadoran groups and offer chances for 

adoptees to internally produce “disruptions/interruptions of dominant political narratives” around adoption by 

presenting underrepresented viewpoints (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 318). These contestations of the adoption-as-

rescue paradigm focus on how adoption, searching for birth family, and maintaining a relationship with both birth 

and adoptive parents are complicated, particularly when there is language barrier. Adoptees use these groups to 

search for information or to share their own narratives. Moderators often announce new members who are given 

the opportunity to introduce themselves if they would like to and share their relationship to their adoption. These 

introductory posts can be constituted as “platform enabled” testimonio, in which previously “invisible 

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conditions,” such as being a transnational/racial adoptee can come to light (Rajabi, 2021, p. 6). Instead of having 

their emotions or affect filtered through adoptive parents or social workers, adoptees are free to discuss their 

adoption from their own perspective.  

Collectively, these posts contribute to an affective public focused on recognizing and coming out of the fog. 

Rather than solely existing in digital spaces, however, the digital community building and increasing visibility of 

these groups has moved beyond the digital realm to create opportunities for change for adoptees in numerous 

aspects of their lived experiences.  

A good example of this suturing work between online and offline contexts would be Adoptees with 

Guatemalan Root’s partnership with the Confederacíon Deportiva Autónoma de Guatemala (CDAG) and the 

Federacíon Nacional de Fútbol (FEDEFUT) in Guatemala City. For this project, the Adoptees with Guatemalan 

Roots leadership team put together a digital presentation that they gave to other Guatemalan adoptee groups and 

adoptive parent networks to raise awareness that Guatemalan adoptees and their children were eligible to play for 

the Guatemalan National Teams. After putting together a pool of around 30–40 welltrained and talented adoptees 

who are soccer players aged 14–20, Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots presented this information to FEDEFUT, 

who had not thought to consider this potential group for talent. They have now built an established relationship, 

wherein Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots will help adoptees to meet with FEDEFUT scouts seeking new players.  

This model of using online community building to construct change offline has also been successful in 

making the Guatemalan adoptee diaspora visible to government leaders. Leaders from Adoptees with Guatemalan 

Roots met with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei in January 2021 to discuss the ways in which the 

Guatemalan government might aid adoptees in reconnecting with their roots and origins. To garner the attention 

and goodwill of Giammattei, the organization took the approach of proving the worth of the adoptee diaspora to 

encourage the government to work with them. One of the founders of Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots recalled 

letting the government know there’s 50,000 of us, well educated; you know, we bring a unique set of skills and 

talents to the country . . . our [Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots] leadership team has experience in finance and 

running start-ups. We provided a very detailed list with dollar figures, with projections of how we think adoptees 

can impact a country, and that was just really wellreceived.  

Indeed, within four months of their meeting, the Guatemalan Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriors had 

partnered with the Consejo Nacional de Adopciones (CNA) and Registro Nacional de los Personas (RENAP) to 

offer free services to adoptees of Guatemalan origins. According to Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots, this is 

significant because it is an official acknowledgment by the Guatemalan government of Guatemalan adoptees’ 

birthright to citizenship. The CNA program aims to connect adoptees with birth families, but it is contingent on 

adoptees already having access to accurate adoption papers and records, which is not a given for all Guatemalan 

adoptees. Through RENAP, adoptees can request Guatemalan birth certificates, passports, and national identity 

cards, which can help them find birth relatives, as well as move to, live, and work in Guatemala (O’Dwyer, 2021).  

Through this suturing of online community building and offline community action, Guatemalan adoptees 

have fought to find belonging and space in the United States, Guatemala, and in-between spaces of 

transnationalism that make up their worlds. Virtual communities allow adoptees to share connections based on 

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similar lived experiences and present opportunities to eradicate the fog through forging visibility that has enacted 

policy changes in Guatemala. Still, as Gray (2009) reminds us, “new media signal rather than create the fluidity 

between public and private [online spaces]” (p. 117). Put another way, the utopian virtues of online communities 

may not be fully translated offline. One of the central commonalities between NGG and Adoptees with 

Guatemalan Roots are their visions to connect Guatemalan adoptees and their fostering of an inclusive 

environment that meets all adoptees where they are in their adoption journey. For one of the leaders of NGG, that 

means that the “individual is at the center of the organization . . . everyone has a different motivation for 

reconnecting. So that’s what we try to be aware of and sensitive to as we develop programming.” As such, NGG’s 

main goal is to provide positive connections among its group members. In a similar fashion, Adoptees with 

Guatemalan Roots seeks to provide community and opportunities to build friendships among their online-

connected diaspora. Their programming is centered around identity and the idea that to find healing one must 

connect to their Guatemalan roots. In other words, both organizations have set up these digital spaces to meet the 

needs of the various individuals who take part in these communities. However, their focus on individual needs 

raises important questions about the distinctions between collective versus individual healing. Although the 

visibility of these groups might signal fluidity between online and offline acceptance, and collective and 

individual identity and healing, as I discuss later, this is not always the case.  

Fog and Contestation in Online Community Building  

Despite the utopian promises of digital community building, this study has found that there remain 

challenges to lifting the fog of international adoption trauma in online adoptee groups. The signaling, rather than 

direct creation, of a fluidity between online and offline is also illustrated by the obstacles that both groups face 

and contestation of viewpoints between group members. One of the greatest obstacles that NGG and Adoptees 

with Guatemalan Roots face is a transnational public that refuses to believe that an adoptee diaspora exists or 

accept that an unchecked system of international adoption could have resulted in tens of thousands of coerced 

adoptions and trafficked children. As one of the leaders of NGG emphasized, their actions are cognizant that the 

majority of the Guatemalan population is probably unaware of the number of out-of-country adoptions that took 

place between 1980 and 2008. If the casualties and Maya genocide that resulted from the Guatemalan Civil War 

are still not universally recognized, the generations of lost children are not either. They posited, “if you were to 

stop an average Guatemalan and ask them, ‘What do you think about the generations that want to come back?’ . 

. . They’d probably say like, ‘Huh, who? What adoptees?” They further added, “because we all didn’t go through 

the same agency, went through private lawyers, private notaries, hospitals, there isn’t one conglomeration” or 

channel that Guatemalan adoptees went through and can be measured by. Likewise, speaking from experience, 

they noted that when they visit Guatemala, they often get questioned by locals: “Why would you want to come 

back?” In other words, there is a belief that adoptees live with an element of economic privilege in the United 

States unknown to the average Guatemalan. As such, NGG’s actions are conscious of working within these 

parameters. Likewise, Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots strategies reflect a similar awareness of the need to 

maintain friendly ties with the government, public, and private entities with which they enter into partnership. 

Their tactic of bringing evidence of the value and worth of the adoptee diaspora to potential partners speaks to 

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the practicality of their approach to community action that avoids taking accusatory tones in favor of forming 

pragmatic business deals. In October 2021, Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots released a research report 

suggesting that the Guatemalan adoptee diaspora could end up holding the highest concentration of wealth among 

all Guatemalan citizens within the next 20 years. Based on the assumption that adoptees will inherit the wealth 

of their adoptive parents, the organization predicts the Guatemalan adoptee diaspora’s net worth could be up to 

$42 billion. Their neoliberal approach speaks to the varying forms of violence Central American politics can and 

have taken, in which the Guatemalan government will only acknowledge the adoptee diaspora when there is 

monetary exchange involved. Put another way, the narratives that Guatemalan adoptees are telling through media 

and born from digital connection have become significant enough to be recognized by the Guatemalan state. Yet 

it is not a utopian ideal, and only certain adoptees willing to work through this neoliberal lens are benefitting. The 

private pain that drives adoptees to seek out online support groups is unacknowledged by greater publics with 

political power, such as the Guatemalan government. Can the fog of the international adoption system lift if the 

pain of state and political violence is not equally recognized? As such, the approach of both organizations has not 

gone without criticism from Guatemalan adoptees seeking more efficacious reconciliation efforts.  

Indeed, for some adoptees, these groups do not have a critical or radical enough perspective toward the 

system of international adoption. As Guatemalan adoptee Kyle explains:  

I always knew that I wanted something different; I didn’t want to just have tamale-making classes, you know, or 

language classes, or DNA service offerings through a third party, I don’t know, I appreciate some of those things, 

but I also realized pretty quickly that I want people who are ready to build the system [of resistance] with me. 

And it’s not the people in those groups, maybe a few of them, but I think the majority of people in both Next Gen 

and With Guatemalan Roots are really just looking for, really, yearning for community. And now that they’ve 

found some form of it, or some inkling of it, they have latched on and made it into something special for 

themselves, and that’s good. I think they have made real community; it’s just not exactly the community that I’m 

looking for. I’m looking for my collective, I’m looking to radicalize other adoptees, to pull them to the left, to 

pull them out of the fog.  

In other words, for Kyle, it is important to be in community with those who have not just a shared origin 

but also a shared politics. His perspective also illustrates how the Guatemalan adoptee diaspora is not a monolith 

and has a range of political views on U.S.–Central American relations and the system of international adoption. 

For example, there are some Trump supporters in these groups, and as Kyle emphasized, he does not want to be 

in community with them. Rather, he has formed his own adoptee collective that is focused on the abolition of 

international adoption and securing reparations for the birth families of trafficked children. His group is made up 

of adoptees from several different regions and countries and rejects the national origin model of other groups to 

emphasize how similar principles of White saviorism and empire shaped international adoption globally. 

Regarding NGG and Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots, it is important to recognize that groups based in and/or 

built around affective publics may not result in the forms of collective action desired by all (see also Papacharissi, 

2014, 2015). Kyle’s case and desire to build a more radical transnational group of international adoption 

abolitionists offers an alternative case from which transnational/racial adoptees are working to eradicate the fog.  

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Conclusion  

This article has discussed the complexity of Central American adoptee groups on Facebook. Through 

digital community building, Central American adoptees have constructed networks built in affect for 

transnational/racial adoptees from El Salvador and Guatemala to congregate, find belonging, and in some cases 

perform community action. Although Salvadoran adoptee diaspora groups have struggled to maintain active 

online participation, the digital spaces fostered by Next Generation Guatemala and Adoptees with Guatemalan 

Roots provide opportunities for adoptees to alleviate feelings of isolation. Their groups have also worked to create 

a fluidity between online and offline contexts to create visibility for a hidden diaspora that has had its history 

manipulated by the power of White saviorism discourses and made invisible by Central American and U.S. 

government leaders looking to downplay their perpetration of state violence.  

Yet there are significant limitations within these digital diasporic communities. As discussed earlier, 

transnational/racial adoptees have used the phrase “coming out of the fog” to describe the process of an adoptee 

questioning the fog of colorblind politics, White saviorism, and imperialism. By recognizing Central American 

adoptees as their own knowledge producers, this study has used that phrase to discuss the complexity of 

transnational/racial adoptee identities and adoptee online community building. Social networks have the potential 

to allow adoptees to “come out of the fog,” but this study has noted that adoptee groups online can also be 

contested spaces. Given the varying lived experiences of Central American adoptees, they do not have a 

monolithic view on the international adoption system and/or U.S.–Central American relations. This can be a 

hindrance to digital meaning making and community building turning into the community action desired by all. 

Still, social networking can be full of fleeting moments of identification, validation, and pedagogical possibilities 

for those who create and participate in online support groups. This may be more illustrative of the strengths of 

digital meaning making and online community building in making everyday transnational/racial adoptee lives 

more livable.  

In closing, this study contributes to the literature on online community building, affective networks, and 

digital meaning making of trauma. Through tying these strands together, I have established how those who have 

faced invisible “symbolic traumas” (Rajabi, 2021), such as the forced emotional regulation of growing up as a 

transnational/racial adoptee in a household governed by colorblind politics, both make and at times fail to make 

meaning of affect through digital community building. Following Döveling and colleagues (2018), Papacharissi 

(2014, 2015), and others (Aziz, 2022; Wilding & Winarnita, 2022), this study also brings attention to the 

complicatedness of affect in digital spaces. It meaningfully adds to the conversation by demonstrating how digital 

affect informs both online and offline lived experiences and by establishing the contestatory possibilities of 

participating in digital communities built around emotional sentiment. Indeed, the concept of “coming out of the 

fog” of imperialism and White saviorism in relation to international adoption, can serve as a model from which 

to better understand the online community building and digital meaning making of other transnational youth 

diasporas that result from political and state violence. Still, this study is not without its limitations. Although both 

NGG and Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots boast nearly 1,000 members each, it is important to recognize that 

this is only a tiny fraction of the total Central American adoptee diaspora. As such, future research might consider 

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or compare the emotional affects of both digitally active and nondigitally active transnational/racial adoptees, as 

well as consider the role that generational differences and/or gender play in the dynamics of adoptee community 

building and cultural identity negotiation.  

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