Nolan Book Chapter Details U.S. History of Child Separation
Rachel Nolan, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, has published a chapter in The Long Year: A 2020 Reader about the separation of migrant children from their parents at the United States border and the country’s historic child separation policies.
In The Long Year – edited by New York University professors Thomas J. Sugrue and Caitlin Zaloom – some of the world’s most incisive thinkers excavate 2020’s buried crises, revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more equal future. Issues explored include redirecting police funding to communities, the need for a global battle against racism, factory farms in China, hospital overcrowding in India, and much more.
In her chapter, titled “As American As Child Separation,” Nolan outlines the historic patterns of child taking in the U.S., recently exemplified by the Trump administration’s child separation policy at the country’s southern border. She argues that the practice of family separation is engrained in U.S. history, and has occurred “at the auction block, at Native American reservations, because of the war on drugs, and now because of what’s happening at our borders.”
While protests erupted in the wake of former President Trump’s separation policy, Nolan emphasizes to readers that this is not a new phenomenon. As she writes, “if you belong to one of the communities most harmed by taking children, in the past or in the present, you already knew. If you didn’t know, once you see the pattern, read the stories, follow the footnotes, you can’t unsee it.”
Details of the new book can be found on Columbia University Press’ website.
Rachel Nolan is a historian of modern Latin America. Her research focuses on political violence, Central American civil wars, childhood and the family, historical memory, and U.S.-Latin American relations. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the history of international adoption from Guatemala. Read more about Professor Nolan on her faculty profile.