‘I Am White … Even If I Am Racially Black’ ‘I Am Afro-Spanish’: Confronting Belonging Paradoxes in Transracial Adoptions

Abstract

Transnational adoption and ‘racial’ diversity as a result of immigration developed nearly at the same time in Spain. This circumstance offers a singular frame to examine what has been called the ‘new rhetorics of exclusion in Europe’, in which ‘race’ is replaced by ‘ethnicity’. Through four case studies of transracial adult adoptees in Spain, this text explores how the ‘racialisation’ of their bodies is (re)negotiated in their self-construction processes, and how they reproduce and resist the social dominant discourses on belonging and difference. The conclusions point out the failure of closed categories to content and hold the diversity of subjective positions and cultural identities in a globalised world. It is also suggested that the emergence of complex identities – in which individuals recognise themselves as simultaneously belonging to different ethnic groups – seems to need not only physical proximity among the different groups, but also relational; multiple identification seems only possible when establishing horizontal relationships with different groups.