The poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession.

In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption—but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora—a baby broker.

Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.

Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.

"Detailed and heartrending…uses years of research to show the way that a country destabilized by war can invite merciless profiteers to break apart families…and allow others overseas to reconfigure them according to their own desires." - Harper's

"Moves fluidly between political context and personal stories…[Nolan] wants us to reckon with this cold reality; with these blurred boundaries of coercion and consent, legality and illegality. She urges us to question how an international marketplace for children, in which so many predatory players acted with impunity, was allowed to flourish." - Times Literary Supplement

"A deeply reported, sobering history." - New Republic

"Traces the pull and push factors that drove the adoption of children from Guatemala between the 1970s and the first decade of this century…Meticulously reviewing archives of adoption files and court cases, Nolan finds that many adoptions involved fraudulent testimonies, suggesting that children were kidnapped or that their families were coerced into giving them up." - Foreign Affairs

"[This book] isn’t just a history of transnational adoption. It is also a crucial reappraisal of the history of mid- and late-20th century Guatemala and the armed conflict that took place between 1960 and 1996. Instead of telling this story from the perspectives of the guerrillas, army officials, student leaders, union activists, or intellectuals, Nolan retells the history through the lens of childhood, family, and adoption. Doing so allows her to reveal urgent, if devastating, insights not just about political violence and genocide but also about the ‘best interests of the child’ standard, the brutal consequences of inequality, and the imagined future of a nation." - Public Books

"A devastatingly important account of overlooked historical actors — children — and their place in Guatemala’s Cold War history. Nolan requires readers to confront the moral dilemmas inherent in humanitarian programs and situates children and birth mothers at the heart of Guatemala’s political violence of the twentieth century. It is a book that will continue to leave its mark and generate important conversations for years to come." - H-Net Reviews

"Heart-wrenching, heartfelt, and built through masterful and exceptionally difficult archival research and skillful fieldwork, Until I Find You situates Guatemalan adoptions in global history, explicates their inner workings, and traces the haunting human stories they entail. It is essential reading." - Hispanic American Historical Review

"Beautifully written…Full of stunning insights and revelations and narrated with grace and empathy, [this book] is essential reading for anyone interested in Latin American Cold War history, human rights, adoptions, and political violence." - NACLA Report on the Americas

"The author has provided an essential history and analysis of forced adoption in Guatemala over a 40-year period and the socio-political dynamics that enabled this poor country to play such an infamous role in a tragic global story of human-trafficking. …Until I Find You is a hard-hitting and disturbing insight into a dark corner of global capitalism, the profoundly racist attitudes of the Global North, and the most despicable of human vices." - Latin American Review of Books