Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Blackstone Publishing, and Rebecca J. Sanford for the advanced reader copy of the book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.
This is one of those books that hit me right in the gut. The author, Rebecca Sandford, doesn’t state that she’s an adoptee. If she isn’t, then somewhere along the lines she had some honest conversations with people who are. Her descriptions of what it’s like to be adopted are spot on.
Argentina in the 1970s was marked by “The Dirty War” where the US Government propped up a military junta as a protection against communism in South America. Political dissidents during this time were silenced by being “disappeared” and for a long time no one knew what became of them.
In this setting, we meet the Ledesma family. Jose is a mild-mannered man, concerned with protecting his wife, Lorena, and young son Matias. One night the junta arrives and grabs Jose and Lorena out of bed. Fortunately, her mother Esme is there at the time so Matias is left in her care. Esme never hears from either of them again.
In New York City in 2005, Rachel Sprague is contacted by a woman who says she can help her find her family. Rachel was allegedly abandoned at birth and adopted by John and Vivian, a couple desperate for a child of their own. Rachel grew up feeling the ghost in the house of the child that John and Vivian wished they’d had, and no answers to be found about why she was abandoned. The woman, Mari, tells Rachel she was actually the daughter of Lorena, born in Argentina.
The Disappeared is a powerful tale on many levels. On one hand, you have the US Government interfering in the politics of another nation. John was a soldier who served his country in many areas, including Argentina during this time. He turned a blind eye to much of what he saw, with the ends seeming to justify the means. That is extended to how he builds his family as well.
Beyond the political, there is the social implication of what he does, taking a baby away from her family because he thinks it will solve his marital problems as well as give the child an opportunity she would not have otherwise. He expresses this near the end, when confronting Rachel and stating she should be grateful that he brought her to the U.S. and raised her. This is what many adoptees face: we are supposed to be grateful to our adopters for “rescuing” us. Rachel’s feelings ring so true throughout her journey to figure out exactly who she is, especially as she is embraced by the family who lost her.
The story is based on real events, and I found it very interesting to read what the people of Argentina went through during this time. Reading about the junta and how the Abuelas stood up for their missing children and grandchildren as best they could kept me turning the page. It skips back and forth between he present and the past, with the entire story not coming out until close to the end. It’s tragic, and yet at the same time uplifting as Rachel learns the truth about who she is. Esme and Matias also finally feel like their life’s work is complete as they learned Lorena had given birth to a girl, but not what happened to either of them.
I highly recommend The Disappeared. It’s not just about adoption and the damage the secrecy and lies surrounding it do, it’s also about coming to terms with the mistakes that were made in the past. This country’s decision to prop up “friendly” governments like the military junta in Argentina had an effect on the people of Argentina that is still being felt to this day.
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Categories: Book Reviews
This sounds like an interesting book, although I’m sure that a swath of our fellow Americans wouldn’t like it because it talks about the seamier side of American foreign policy in South America during the Cold War.
My mom and I (joined by my older half-sister later) moved back to the States from Colombia in the spring of 1972, so Argentina’s “Dirty War” hadn’t started yet. However, Colombia was in the throes of its own guerrilla war (which, oddly, was one of those “out of sight, out of mind” events that I wasn’t aware of at the time), so I was in South America around the time that Nixon and Kissinger were encouraging the militaries in Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and other South American “allies” to take sterner measures to “fight Communism.”
The resulting “Operation Condor” brought about the coups in Chile and Argentina that placed similarly-minded (and brutal) military juntas there and caused many “disappearances.” Similar efforts in Central America exacerbated the existing societal imbalance and sent that region into a spiral of civil war, thus perpetuating the conditions that forced many people there, especially in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras, to migrate (legally and otherwise) to the U.S. The consequences of that disaster linger on to the present day, which is why we still see so many Central Americans coming here not to invade, as the American right wing claims, but to survive the effects of our cynical Cold War foreign policies.
Yep. Whenever people complain about migrants at the border, I remind them that they are fleeing the remnants of our interference there.
The book is very informative in that area. Sadly, you are right about how people will just shout “fake news” at things they don’t like hearing.