In Between Light and Shadow (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) veteran journalist Jacob Wheeler puts a human face on the Guatemalan adoption industry, which has exploited, embraced, and sincerely sought to improve the lives of the Central American nation’s poorest children. Fourteen-year-old Ellie, abandoned at age seven and adopted by a middle-class family from Michigan, is at the center of this story. Wheeler re-creates the painful circumstances of Ellie’s abandonment, her adoption and Americanization, her search for her birth mother, and her joyous and haunting return to Guatemala, where she finds her teenage brothers—unleashing a bond that transcends language and national borders.
Following Ellie’s journey, Wheeler peels back the layers of an adoption economy that some view as an unscrupulous baby-selling industry that manipulates impoverished indigenous Guatemalan women, and others herald as the only chance for poor children to have a better life. Through Ellie, Wheeler allows us to see what all this means in personal and practical terms—and to understand how well-intentioned and sometimes humanitarian first-world wealth can collide with the extreme poverty, despair, misogyny, racism, and violent history of Guatemala.
I just finished reading this book and I loved it. It hits so close to home. While I have a daughter adopted from Guatemala, she was an infant at the time of her adoption. I also have a daughter adopted from Ethiopia who reminds me so much of Ellie. She was adopted at almost 8, after being relinquished by birth family just around her 7th birthday. She remembers so much about her life in Ethiopia. I traveled back to meet her family last year and we’re traveling as a family to see her family next year. She will be 11 when she sees her family for the first time since relinquishment. We are both very excited and very nervous. It was very helpful to read about some of the emotions that both Ellie and Judy experienced during the reunion. Thank you for taking the time to write this book.