Episode 1: Guatemalan Adoptees with Rachel Nolan

Rachel Nolan, an assistant professor of history at Boston University’s Pardee School of International Relations, is the author of Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, due out in 2024 from Harvard University Press. Professor Nolan unravels the complex and harrowing history of how Guatemala became such a large “sender” of children to the United States, Canada, and Europe, until the end of the private adoption trade in 2007. She draws on a trove of innovative archival sources to show how the roots of Guatemala’s adoption system lie in the particulars of the country’s forty-year armed conflict, and genocide against its Indigenous Maya population.