Dear Mexican: My wife and I chose to adopt children instead of having our own. We were living in Costa Mesa at the time, so we put down white or Latino as a preference, but were open to any ethnicity. We ended up adopting six—all Latino. It wasn’t until after we brought home a 7-year-old boy (now 15) that we were told that he was a Mexican citizen, abandoned here in the U.S. for years.
When we started the adoption process, the Mexican government fought hard to get him back. I did a little research and discovered that Mexico does not seem to want Americans to adopt Mexican children.
I can totally understand why a country would want to keep its children, but in that same year, Mexico allowed only 73 American adoptions, while tiny Guatemala allowed thousands. It pains us when we go with our church to help out at orphanages right across the border knowing that those children want families—and Americans just a few miles away are willing to adopt them.
Gringos Frustrados
Dear Gabacho: One of the reasons Guatemala had such high adoption figures in the last decade—numbering into the miles, as you put it, with more than 4,000 in 2007 alone—is that Guatemala is a poorer country than Mexico, and the government was more than willing to unload poor kids abroad; things got so crazy that the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala is no longer allowing adoptions from the country, period.
Mexico, on the other hand, has always been more tight-fisted with its chamacos getting into gabacho hands—a 2011 El Paso Times investigation found “virtually no new adoption requests from Mexico to the U.S. were processed between 2008 and late 2009” due to American, Mexican and international bylaws.
I feel how frustrated ustedes are about the situation, but Mexico and other countries need to guard against child exploitation. On the other hand, them fighting ustedes over a kid already in los Estados Unidos reeks of jingoism—it’s every Mexican’s mandate to fuck with gabachos at all time, after all. Just pay off those officials with pesos or something, and tell them to vayanse a la chingada.
Dear Mexican: Why is rock en español so mellow? You’d think that with so much injustice, Mexican rock bands would sound angrier.
El Gigante de Anaheim
Dear Anaheim Giant: You’d think so, right? Back in the Mexican’s rockero days, groups like Maldita Vecindad, Café Tacuba, El Gran Silencio and so many more were laying down tracks as political as they were moshable—for crying out loud, death-metal icons Brujería once recorded a song imaging hateful California governor Pete “Pito” Wilson getting assassinated with an AK-47! And who can forget rock gods El Tri singing about wiping their shit-stained culos with the border wall in “El Muro de la Vergüenza” (“The Wall of Shame”)?
But those days are long gone; nowadays, you’re lucky if the latest pop chanteuse even gives a shout-out to the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa. Answer is simple: Maná. Oh, “matando güeros/estilo O.J. Simpson,” where art thou?
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