Fragile Families. Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez
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and supported by U.S. donors, volunteers, and staff. Although the vast majority of Tijuana orphanages are privately run, they are certified and overseen by the DIF Tijuana agency. Children are placed in orphanages and out for adoption by DIF social workers. Although DIF social workers do visit private orphanages, because there are only a small number of DIF Tijuana social workers—eight during the time of my research for the entire city—their oversight of the daily care and medical needs of the children is infrequent at best. As one orphanage director, Carlota, told me, “El DIF es como el Papá, y nosotros como mamá” (The DIF is like the father and we [the orphanage] are like the mother).14 Carlota, who had grown up herself in the very orphanage she was directing, went on to explain that the orphanage provides the daily care, keeping the DIF informed and asking for permission for issues regarding schooling, placement, or medical treatment. She clarified, though, that unlike a traditional “papá,” when a child needs expensive surgery or school fees the orphanage goes to donors rather than to the DIF for funding.
Because concerns in Mexico about child abuse or neglect must be made by a public “denuncio,” as opposed to the option of making an anonymous call as in the U.S. child welfare system, many observers of child maltreatment are understandably hesitant to involve themselves. For this reason, many children are put under DIF’s protective custody by the extended family when concerns about abuse or ongoing parental drug use become too extreme to ignore. It is also quite common for family members simply to provide care for children without involving the state agency in any way. Abandoned children, or children living on the street, are often brought to orphanage shelters by concerned neighbors. Although DIF offers parenting classes and reunification plans for parents, orphanage directors reported to me that reunification was a rare occurrence in Tijuana. Many children were regularly visited by their parents but did not return to their custody. Instead, they completed their youth and their schooling within the orphanage system, leaving at age fourteen of their own accord, often to live with extended family members with whom they had stayed in touch, once they were old enough to contribute to maintaining the household through their labor.
The child welfare systems in both Tijuana and San Diego took shape through extensive public-private partnerships. In Tijuana, this took the form of privately funded orphanages, often run by U.S. church groups and staffed by a mixture of local Tijuana residents and U.S. volunteers. In San Diego, it took the form of nonprofit foster family agencies (FFAs). FFAs recruited and trained foster parents, and supervised the placement of foster children, through a subcontracting relationship with the county-run child welfare system. As in the Tijuana system, the public system in San Diego retained exclusive control over the initial intervention and removal of children, the selection of a placement option, and the court process associated with decisions about reunifying families, terminating parental rights, and pursuing adoptions for children.15 Foster family agencies took on some of the county’s workload by providing and overseeing additional foster homes, but they did not replace the work of the county social workers or reduce the number of children on a county worker’s caseload. Furthermore, while the subcontracting relationship was monitored through a formal contract process, the financial relationship was complicated. Nonprofit FFAs, like Tijuana orphanages, received no funding from the county system for the services they provided. Although each foster family received monthly government funds for the provision of food, clothing, and other incidentals for their foster child, none of this money went to the agency itself.16 Recruitment and training of families, program maintenance, building rental, and staff salaries were all underwritten by private donors or grant funding.
Figure 1. The child welfare system: key agencies and actors.
Esperanza, the agency through which I met Alba and where I conducted the bulk of my research on the San Diego foster system, was one such FFA. Esperanza’s mission incorporated a focus on children under age five with the primary goals of keeping siblings together, addressing the specific needs of Latina/o foster children, maintaining small social worker case loads, and obsessively pursuing the goal of “one home for one child” to counteract the trend of foster children moving through multiple homes in the first few years of their lives. Esperanza aimed to provide specialized care for Latina/o foster children through the provision of bilingual social workers, specialized training for foster parents about “Hispanic cultural needs,” and recruitment strategies that targeted Latina/o families through media campaigns on local Spanish-speaking TV and radio stations, as well as Mexican grocery stores and other such venues. When I asked Esperanza social workers and staff members to speak more explicitly about what they saw as “Hispanic cultural needs,” their responses focused on the importance of bilingual social workers, service providers, and therapists who could work with both child and family, maintaining the ability of a foster child to communicate with biological parents even after a substantial period of separation.
Esperanza social worker Corinne explained to me, “As a bicultural social worker, being raised on both sides of the border, I just get things. The [foster] parents sometimes imply things to me that I don’t think an English speaker would get.” Corinne went on to note that this was important to county social workers who placed children from Spanish-speaking families at Esperanza. When I asked whether this was primarily to preserve their native language skills, she replied, “I think it’s more practical than that. They want the kids to keep up the same language practices as they do at home so that it eases the transition back home and doesn’t create more work for the bio[logical] parent.”17 Esperanza staff also mentioned such things as understanding the importance of extended family in the Latino community as well as the sorts of foods children would likely have been exposed to in their natal home or the language-based challenges they might face in school. The official Esperanza mission statement outlined the following goals for foster parent training around the issue of the specific needs of Latina/o foster children:
• Assure each child’s healthy identity development by connecting him/her to her heritage, language and culture.
• Orient parents about the importance of home language development especially as it relates to school success in English.
• Offer families strategies for dual language development.
• Infuse concepts and strategies for achieving cultural and linguistic continuity into other topics of training.
• Acknowledge and celebrate the funds of knowledge, skills, and resources the families already have and can share with their foster and/or adoptive child.
• Every effort will be made to secure culturally and linguistically appropriate services when referring families for additional social, support, health, and educational services.
Esperanza’s founder, Becky, contended that the county system repeatedly failed to address these sorts of specific needs for the Hispanic population. She took the position that “private money allows for better recruitment, screening, training, and support,”18 and gave her the flexibility to address these concerns without the restrictions and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures of the public county agency.
Importantly, children were brought into these public/private partnerships, and provided with services including food, shelter, schooling, and medical care, by the child welfare systems in Tijuana and San Diego without regard for citizenship status. While each system was expected to alert the other to the presence of minor citizens across the border, they were not authorized to reclaim their own citizen children without express authorization by the other state or to repatriate noncitizen children of their own accord. In the U.S. context repatriation was not typically pursued for children within the child welfare system, and thus under state guardianship. However, children who were apprehended by border patrol authorities were frequently repatriated across the border into DIF custody, where they would commonly reside in temporary shelters while their family members in Mexico were located and contacted to collect them. Adults, and older youth who could pass as adults, were simply returned to the border and released into Mexico. The cases I turn to below involved Alba, a Mexican citizen child entangled in the San Diego child welfare system, and Tommy, a U.S. citizen sheltered in a Tijuana orphanage. The divergent trajectories of their two cases illuminate the ways that narratives of