until they transferred at school age to separate boys’ and girls’ dormitories on the other side of the main courtyard.
Each day I arrived at the orphanage and parked my aging Honda in the dusty front entrance. I’d forgo standing at the locked main entrance gate and head for the outer door to the kitchen, where I would lean my head on the metal bars and holler “Buenas Dias, Doña Mari!” until I heard a faint, “Mande?” from the kitchen and saw Mari moving over to the door with her large ring of keys. Mari was the main cook and spent her early morning hours chopping meat and vegetables for lunch for the children and staff, cooking big pots of soup or spaghetti. We got to know each other as I came and went through the kitchen. Mari was often working with donated ingredients and a chaotic assortment of groceries, and I’d often pause on my way out to help her decode some of these mystery goods. One afternoon we stood together as I translated the directions on a military-issue bag of sugar cookie mix, and I wondered how these packages had arrived in her kitchen and how she managed to feed so many children out of such an unpredictable jumble of ingredients. Usually Doña Mari let me out of the kitchen and left me to repeat my hollering procedure at the entrance to the nursery, but that day she walked me across the courtyard and unlocked that door as well, muttering, “Este hombre, todo cerrado!” (This guy, with everything locked up!).38
The “hombre” Mari referred to was the U.S. orphanage director. I had been told by various staff that there was some tension between him and the Tijuana staff—he was a good decade or two younger than most of them and had instituted policies, such as locking all the doors throughout the day, that many staff members felt made the place feel more institutional and less like home while also creating a huge nuisance for letting people in and out.39 Part of the reason I entered through the kitchen was to align myself clearly with the staff and avoid being escorted to the infants’ room by the director each day. Though he had been nothing but kind and welcoming to me I wanted to understand the space of the orphanage through the eyes of those who worked most closely with the children.
Tommy was the blond haired, blue-eyed terror of the infant nursery. He was four years old and almost ready to move into the boys’ quarters, and had a lamentable habit of tearing the toys he was interested in out of the arms of younger and smaller children. I spoke often with Sonia, a veteran staff member who handled the intake of new children to the orphanage and mediated all contact with the state in her role as the DIF liaison at the orphanage. Sonia and I were chatting about the “adoptability” of the children currently in the infant room, and Sonia surprised me by stating that, in her opinion, Tommy would never be adopted. She explained that Tommy was not Mexican, but was in fact the child of a U.S. citizen. His mother had contracted HIV doing sex work in Tijuana, where Tommy had been born HIV positive. Sonia said, with a wave of her hand that his mother was likely “indigente, andando por las calles” (indigent, wandering the streets of Tijuana).40 Tommy had arrived at the orphanage, like most children, without documents. He had been brought by a concerned neighbor, and it was from this neighbor that the basic circumstances of his life had been learned. This was quite common for children in Tijuana orphanages, and in fact, Sonia felt she had more information about Tommy than many of the children in her care. Although some children are brought to orphanages by relatives or concerned neighbors, others are simply abandoned at orphanage gates where young children, because they are unable to communicate with orphanage staff, are given names and assigned birthdays, their age roughly estimated by height, appearance, and basic skills. Sonia explained this process, miming measuring a child’s height with her hand, saying “Me parece como seis” (He looks about six to me).41
Tommy, like Alba, was effectively stateless and assumed to be a citizen of a nation-state from which he did not possess formal documents. Like Alba, who was afforded the protection of the child welfare system in San Diego, Tommy was provided with the shelter of his Tijuana orphanage without concern about his citizenship status. He received the same food, shelter, and medical care, and would likely follow the path of his fellow orphanage residents—out to work on the Tijuana streets in his teenage years, provided that he continued to receive the medical care needed to manage his HIV.
Although Tommy ostensibly had a right to U.S. citizenship through his perhaps still living, but, according to Sonia, likely deceased mother, there was no known relative to make that claim for him. Sonia explained that there might in fact be relatives in the United States, but there was no way for the orphanage to find them. She had, in the past, made telephone calls based on the name of a child in her care but these attempts proved entirely unsuccessful. Sonia’s institutional authority in Mexico did not translate into the leverage necessary to pursue U.S. citizenship for Tommy. Similarly, the U.S. consulate authorities had the right to make a citizenship claim on Tommy’s behalf, and to bring him into the U.S. foster care system, but Sonia laughed at the idea that the consulate workers would go through the effort of repatriating an HIV positive orphan with no known relatives.
Had there been someone well positioned to advocate for Tommy, he would have been a clear candidate for framing as a victim, deserving of U.S. citizenship on humanitarian grounds due to both his illness and his abandonment. The categories of an abandoned, neglected, or abused child would likely have been available to Tommy had he been found within U.S. boundaries. In that case, his physical presence would have necessitated the care of the state, likely resulting in Tommy being placed in a long-term foster care situation, locating any existing relatives, and attending to his medical needs. But because of his presence in Tijuana, and his lack of an empowered advocate, those categories did not have the force to move him into the United States or into a status that would enable him to draw on his ostensible claims to U.S. citizenship. Movement across state lines was theoretically possible, largely because Tommy was already assumed to be a U.S. citizen. However, unlike Alba, he lacked an advocate equipped to make those claims on his behalf. And, as discussed in further detail below, repatriation of Mexican citizens from the United States into Mexico was decidedly easier to facilitate than movement of U.S. citizen children from Mexico into the United States.
Enacting State Care
According to Sonia and other orphanage workers I spoke with in Tijuana, the challenge in addressing the circumstances of children with ambiguous citizenship claims like Tommy was not what the law allowed but rather the absence of an effective protocol for cross-border collaboration. Movement of children in social welfare systems is a complex problem due to the fragmentation of social service providers, which, in both Mexico and the United States, are governed directly at state, city, and, in the United States, county levels, and only loosely regulated at the federal level. Cross-border and crossagency collaborations are challenging not only across international borders but also from state to state or county to county. This is due to varying protocols among local agencies as well as complex funding streams that do not transition well between regions. The net result of this variation is that regional authorities are hesitant to take on the expense of caring for a child who is already being provided for by another regional agency.
This fragmentation of service providers meant that there were substantial obstacles to considering the extensive network of relatives, friends, and neighbors in which children and their families might be enmeshed, since these networks, particularly for Latina/o children, often extended across not only county and state borders but international borders as well. It presented challenges to working with families whose daily lives and social networks extended across the U.S.-Mexico border due to the practical need for individuals to be traceable and locatable in order to be provided with services. Additionally, cross-border collaboration took time, and children would often establish strong relationships with temporary care providers while waiting for agencies to work across borders. Child Welfare authorities’ prioritization of stability and permanency of relationships between children and their care providers often reduced the appeal of the lengthy process of working with family members and social service agencies across international boundaries. For children like Tommy, this fragmentation meant that his presence in Tijuana was placed solely within the purview of the Tijuana orphanage staff and the Tijuana social service agency, the DIF. His status as an alleged U.S. citizen did not in itself call forth the involvement
