Fragile Families. Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez

budgetary constraints, alongside their sense of what a “good,” “safe” home looks like, give force to the lived experiences of categories of race, class, and gender and demarcate boundaries of citizenship and nationality. Judicial determinations solidify these assessments and give them the force of law. As such, the impacts of social workers’ and legal actors’ decisions are profound and often permanent, though the social categories that inform these decisions, as I describe in Chapter 2, are shifting and unstable.

      Many families come into contact with child welfare services because of the precariousness of their lives—unsafe housing, unstable employment, and the conditions of violence, drug use, and domestic violence made visible by the heightened police presence in impoverished communities. Yet the child welfare system itself, as I elaborate in the chapters that follow, is also a site where precariousness and vulnerability are produced. As social workers physically and legally sever relationships between parents and children, as they ask parents to meet goals that are outside the realm of parental capabilities due to economic or legal constraints, families teeter on the edge of dissolution, and often fall into the brink. Those families that are eventually reunited are brought back together after a period of extended separation, often filled with trauma, insecurity, and hardship for both parent and child. And few resources are available to help families heal and transition once the child welfare apparatus has receded from their lives.

      To be clear, this book does not argue for the primacy of the biological family, nor does it call into question the biological family’s centrality to current policy and law in the contemporary United States. The focus on the biological family as the de facto best place for children to be raised has been both lauded and critiqued in the realms of child welfare and immigration law (Bartholet 1999; Briggs 2012; King 2009; Yablon-Zug 2011; Zavella 2012). Rather than asking whether the biological family should be positioned in this manner, I accept this premise as a starting place. Throughout the chapters that follow, I argue that an inherent right to the integrity of a biological, or natal, family is not in fact equally extended to, and protected for, families with members who fall outside of the normative framework of “good” citizens. This may be due to a variety of factors that undermine an individual’s belonging to the nation and their rights to full citizenship, including circumstances relating to race, class, nationality, legal citizenship, language use, or other mitigating factors.³

      The research for this book was conducted in the San Diego-Tijuana region between 2008 and 2012. The cities of San Diego and Tijuana are deeply economically entangled and socially estranged.⁴ They share a history of exchange through the recruitment of laborers from Tijuana to compensate for San Diego labor shortages, the use of Tijuana by U.S. citizens as a site for access to goods and entertainment during the Prohibition era, and particularly through the Border Industrialization Program and the implementation of NAFTA in the mid-1990s (Proffitt 1994).⁵ The period from the establishment of NAFTA in 1994 to the present day has seen the tightening of business partnerships and explosive growth of the Tijuana population. Despite the fact that the Tijuana/San Diego area is the “busiest migration corridor in the western hemisphere” (Katsulis 2008:4), and thus an obvious site for considering the possibilities of binational collaboration and engagement, the two cities remain sharply separated by U.S. border enforcement and immigration policies.⁶

      The social ties that do exist are largely constructed through individual family and social relations rather than facilitated through official government channels. Communities are formed across international lines through “transborder lives” (Stephen 2007), as individuals move across national, racial, and linguistic borders, suspended between, and participating in, multiple geographic spaces, living “neither here nor there” (Zavella 2011).⁷ This lack of formal collaboration between governmental entities contributes to the absence of a clear protocol for navigating child welfare circumstances that engage individuals living on both sides of the border, as official means of collaboration would rely on an acknowledgment of connectedness that U.S. government officials are reticent to accept. As such, although the child welfare cases recounted throughout this book often draw in family members on both sides of the border, there is little protocol in place for formalized binational collaboration between the two social service or judicial systems.

      Laura, a veteran social worker and head of a regional office in San Diego County, lamented to me at a fundraising event that many foster children perhaps only ten physical miles from their grandmother’s home in Tijuana would be placed in a foster home with strangers in San Diego. Laura’s view was that this resulted from the unnecessary difficulty of cross-border collaboration, not because a San Diego foster home was understood to be best for that particular child. As I discuss in Chapter 2, however, some social workers and legal actors did interpret the best interest of the child to be equated with “not Mexico,” even if the child welfare system officially recognized family members as always preferable to a non-relative foster home, regardless of their country of residence. As such, the character of the relationship between these two cities, both connected and divided, established the conditions of possibility for shaping, and dividing, families in this region.

      Esperanza Foster Family Agency was my starting point, and from there I connected with families, legal advocates, dependency court authorities, policy makers, and other small foster family agencies. I attended trainings and orientation sessions for foster parents, dependency lawyers, and legal advocates, as well as the monthly meetings of the San Diego network of foster family agencies. I conducted more than 60 formal and informal interviews with lawyers, judges, legal advocates, social workers, and current and former foster parents, and met with many of my interviewees multiple times. In Tijuana, I initially made contact with local orphanages through a network of San Diego donors. From there I was able to build relationships with a number of orphanage directors who connected me to social workers, lawyers, and medical staff at the Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (DIF), which provided child welfare services to Tijuana residents. Driving between Tijuana and San Diego each week, and tracking cases in both cities, gave me a view of the San Diego-Tijuana region, the ruptures and continuities, which few San Diego residents without ties to Tijuana experience. As I describe in further detail in Chapter 1, the child welfare systems in San Diego and Tijuana operated largely as distinct systems, rather than as a single, regional agency spanning the international border. However, numerous child welfare cases did involve family members, agencies, social workers, and legal actors from both cities, and mechanisms did exist, including the Mexican embassy and the International Liaison Office, staffed by San Diego County social workers, to facilitate communication between the San Diego child welfare agency and the DIF Tijuana.

      I conducted participant observation as an intern at Esperanza Foster Family Agency, shadowing social workers and spending time with the foster families I met through the agency’s daily operations. Although I was fortunate to interact with a number of state-employed San Diego County social workers and administrators, and to conduct a number of informal interviews and observations, I was not given official research access to the public child welfare agency.⁸ This barrier shaped the material of this book in profound ways, and placed smaller agencies, legal actors, and foster families at the center of my analysis. Biological parents were primarily handled by the public agency, and for this reason my interactions with them were more limited than with the foster families, social workers, and other service providers involved in the child welfare system. And although I use the term “biological” throughout this book to refer to the parents from whom children are removed in the context of child welfare interventions, it should be noted that not all parents are necessarily “biological” in this context. Children may, of course, be removed from stepparents, adoptive parents, and other legal guardians. Social workers and legal actors commonly used the term “bio parents” to refer to the parents from whom foster children had been initially removed, regardless of the existence of a biological link between parent and child.

      My role at Esperanza was complex. When interacting with foster children and families, my role was as a researcher. Though I accompanied Esperanza social workers on their official business, I was careful to make it clear that I was not in any way part of the decision-making