Nolan on Guatemalan Adoption for the Center on Forced Displacement’s 2026 Conference

On April 13th, Professor Rachel Nolan, Assistant Professor of International History, opened Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement’s 2026 Annual Conference with a powerful keynote and discussion of her book Until I Find You, moderated by Carrie Preston.

Drawing on her historical research, Nolan reframed international adoption as more than a humanitarian practice, describing it instead as a form of “silent migration” that, in Guatemala’s case, often amounted to forced displacement. From the 1960s until the program’s closure in 2008, approximately 40,000 Guatemalan children were taken from their families, many through kidnapping or coercion—amid civil war, extreme poverty, and a U.S.-backed military campaign that targeted Indigenous Maya communities.

Nolan’s talk traced how adoption became a lucrative, privatized industry overseen by lawyers, allowing Guatemala to surpass much larger countries as a major “sender” state of adopted children to the United States and beyond. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and rare adoption files briefly opened during war crimes investigations, she highlighted the profound human toll of an international system that thrived on inequality and exploitation.

Her keynote set a critical tone for the conference, underscoring how forced displacement can take hidden forms—and why historical accountability remains essential to understanding migration, human rights, and global responsibility today.

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.