Rachel Nolan’s Book “Until I Find You” Named Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Congratulations are in order for Professor Rachel Nolan, who earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her debut book Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions from Guatemala in the category of General Nonfiction. Based on her research on Guatemala’s harrowing adoption industry between 1977 and 2007, the book is a tragic account of how the Global North families benefited from civil unrest, inequality, and exploitation in the Global South. By pulling this untold story to the surface, the journalist-turned-historian hoped to educate more people about the atrocities endured by innocent children and families in Guatemala.
To provide a statistically solid and emotionally moving narrative of what unfolded during those 30 long years, Nolan dug up government archives and a rare collection of adoption records while meticulously documenting oral histories. Through her extensive study, she discovered that around 40,000 children, mostly Indigenous, were abducted or forcefully separated from their families against the backdrop of civil war and destitution. In the subsequent decades, this egregious practice metamorphosed into an organized oppression helmed by lawyers who profited massively by matching children to overseas families. During this period, Guatemala emerged as a leading “sender state,” outpacing China and Russia, also well-known for facilitating private adoptions.
Published by Harvard University Press, Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions from Guatemala is Nolan’s first book. She’s currently working on her second book covering histories of deportation to Latin America.
To read more about her Pulitzer Prize nomination, click here.
Professor Rachel Nolan is an Assistant Professor of International History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. A historian of modern Latin America, her work focuses on migration, political violence, the Central American armed internal conflicts, and U.S.-Latin American relations. Her scholarly pursuits have been supported by Russell Sage Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and Social Science Research Council. Additionally, she is an active contributor to media outlets including The New Yorker, New York Times, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and El Faro and serves as a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.