Shownotes
Rachel is a Hispanic woman of Chilean descent, raised in a Jewish family. She shared her feelings of otherness trying to connect with other Spanish speaking children with her limited proficiency. Rachel describes her father’s blindness to her heritage, and her unbelievable luck to have strangers who went out of their way to help her meet her birth mother in Chile.
Read Full TranscriptRachel: 00:03 It took me a while to sort through it. I remember talking to my grandmother about it and she said, you know, Rachel, it’s not about how you get here, It’s about what you do with yourself once you’re here. So she was like focused less on that event that led to you being here and focus more on what you want to do with yourself and how you want to, you know, make a name for yourself. And that is something that I’ve always held onto
Voices: 00:35 Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
Damon: 00:47 This is Who Am I Really? A podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members. I’m Damon Davis and on today’s show is Rachel. She called me from right here in Frederick, Maryland. Rachel is a Hispanic woman of Chilean descent, raised in a Jewish family. She shared her feelings of otherness, her father’s blindness to her heritage and her unbelievable luck to have strangers who went out of their way to help her meet her birth mother in Chile. This is Rachel’s journey. In Rachel’s family, adoption was a fairly open topic. Her brother was adopted three years before her and they always knew they were adopted from young ages. When they got older, they understood a little bit more what that meant.
Rachel: 01:37 I feel like I was my only like person in my group of friends that was adopted growing up. And I think that kind of felt a little bit strange sometimes.
Damon: 01:48 Do you remember mentioning it to other people or did you just, you just couldn’t see other adoptees so you figured you were the only one?
Rachel: 01:56 No, I think I always mentioned it like, I feel like it was something that I talked about a lot. Um, I know that I asked a million questions. My brother didn’t talk much about his biological family or didn’t really express like a lot of curiosity about it, but I was always asking questions like, can you tell me about my biological mom or why was I given up for adoption? Or Can we talk about this? And, um, my parents didn’t ever answer questions. It was kind of always like, when you turn 18, we’ll let you know. But I still was always asking. So it was definitely something that I would mention to friends or to, you know, people within my community. Um, I was always telling everybody like, I’m from Chile and I thought that was a, a pretty cool thing.
Damon: 02:43 Yeah. That’s really interesting. So what, what do you, why do you think you were always asking about it? It sounds like you were somewhat self-aware about it from a very early age. What do you think sparked your curiosity to want to ask about it? It sounds like from even the very beginning.
Rachel: 03:01 Um, I wish I knew the answer to that question. I don’t, I don’t necessarily know, um, when I look at myself, I look at myself as a person who’s like very in touch with who I am. And I think that adoption is such a big part of who I am. And it was something that I couldn’t, I didn’t have the answers to, I didn’t have explanations about and I couldn’t, I guess I couldn’t really figure out that part of me. So I was super inquisitive about it and I always wanted to ask about it. And, and try to kind of find that out. Um, maybe that’s why I was so curious. But my parents will like looking back on everything, they’ll always say to me like, we always knew you were going to find your biological family cause you were always asking, asking, asking.
Damon: 03:47 She asked questions about her start in life, her birth mother and why the woman couldn’t take care of Rachel herself. After a few vague answers, the end of the conversation was always, we’ll tell you when you’re 18. The promise was her parents would deliver her adoption papers to her at that age. But that was a long time to wait, especially in her teen years when Rachel wondered what the difference was between knowing her history at 15 versus learning it three years later. Still, She said she was always proud to tell people that she’s originally from Chile because she felt like it was a pretty cool thing. I asked about the makeup of her family.
Rachel: 04:24 So my brother is also from Chile. Um, like I said, he was adopted three years before I was. And I’ve always said to my parents that I feel like the greatest gift they’ve ever given us, cause they’ve given us the world, my parents are great, but the greatest gift we ever got with each other. Cause growing up with someone in my family, um, who could number one relate to being adopted, but number two, shared, you know, a cultural connection with me even though we weren’t biologically related. Um, was just super awesome.
Damon: 04:54 Rachel’s parents are white and Jewish and their community was similar. She and her brother were raised Jewish as well, going to Jewish summer camps, Hebrew school and her brother went to a Jewish day school. But Rachel didn’t go when she was offered the option when she was little, she went to public school where she saw more diversity in Montgomery County, Maryland. That exposure allowed Rachel to connect more with the minority shhe knew and she really wanted to feel that connection with other children of Spanish descent.
Rachel: 05:23 But I didn’t speak Spanish and I could be like, yeah, I’m from Chile. But then when they would start talking to me about cultural things or speaking to me in Spanish, I couldn’t respond. Um, so I feel like that kind of put me in a little place of isolation. Um, you know, but I, I think a lot of my inner circle of friends were, you know, minorities.
Damon: 05:45 I always wonder about a person’s connection to a culture or religion that’s not native to them. And from time to time guests will say that they didn’t feel a connection to the way they were raised. I asked Rachel about her connection to Judaism.
Rachel: 06:00 So I actually love being Jewish. Um, you know, I’ve explored a little bit of different stuff as far as religions go and I always feel like Judaism really has a lot of, uh, non artificial symbols I guess would be the best way to describe it. And not that I’m trying to knock that or anything. Um, but I just felt like when we would look at different things growing up, we didn’t have like the whole, like commercialized stuff going on. So it was, you know, Hanukkah time was about like oil and frying foods and this is why, because the oil lasted this amount of days and it was kind of a thing that I felt like there were, there was just explanations for everything. Whereas I would say to my friends who are Christian like, well, why do you have a Christmas tree? And they’re like, I don’t know, We just do. So I felt like a lot of that stuff made sense. Um, and they were, you know, explanations to things. You know, I was appreciative of that and I felt like I was connected to it, but I don’t necessarily feel like I fit in. Like I was always faking sick so that I didn’t have to go to Hebrew school cause I looked really different from everybody. And then my parents would say, OK, well you don’t have to go to Hebrew school, we’ll send you to like a private Hebrew tutor type thing. And then like I’d go to this woman’s house and there would be like eight kids in the class and I’d be like, Oh yeah, I’m so sick right now. And she’d be like, well go lay on the couch and be like, okay. I almost did like anything I could to like, you know, get away from that stuff.
Rachel: 07:32 Like they put me in these Jewish, um, like youth groups. So as a teenager you would go to these like meetings and talk about being Jewish and all these different things. And I would, my mom would like drop me off and I’d hop in the car with a group of kids that were a lot older than me and we’d go to like McDonald’s and skip out on the meeting. Um, so I was always like, you know, I, I liked the actual religion. I still like the religion but I don’t necessarily feel like I fit in socially. If that makes sense.
Damon: 08:04 Yeah, it does. I wonder then if you could switch gears for a minute and tell me a little bit about how your parents helped you to feel any kind of connection to Chile and your culture as a Hispanic woman.
Rachel: 08:20 They never helped with any of that. In fact, I think, I’m pretty sure that there were times where, you know, I would talk about being a Hispanic female cause I would check that box, you know, on standardized tests or whatever else, I would always check the Latina box. And I remember at some point my dad saying like, well, you have to understand like I don’t see you as Latina. Um, to me you’re Jewish and Caucasian. And I remember being like, what? I just couldn’t understand how he didn’t see me that way. And I guess when you get adopted you don’t necessarily want your parents to see you as different, like you want to be a part of the family. So in that regard it was really good. Um, but our parents took us all over the world. You know, we traveled to Israel, we traveled to France and Italy and you know, all throughout Europe and we went to Mexico and all these like, you know, different islands and my family are big, they’re big on traveling. So they took us everywhere, but they never took us to Chile.
Damon: 09:29 I thought back to Rachel’s father’s vision of her as his daughter. On one hand, he acknowledged and fully accepted her as his daughter, making sure she felt that they were family, but his vision was warped because he saw her in his own image, which could have the opposite, an alienating effect of not acknowledging who she actually is. He wants her to be one thing, but in fact she is very much someone else. At 18 years old, Rachel never got her papers. The finish line in her marathon to wait to get her adoption records was moved to when she turned 21 but at 18, Rachel got pregnant and she became a mother herself. She had those first intense feelings of knowing a biological relative for the first time.
Rachel: 10:16 After having my son, I spoke to my parents about, I really wanted medical history. Um, I talked about what it was like to, you know, give birth to my first kid and for the first time in my life I was seeing a biological relative. I had never met anybody that was related to me that had the same blood as me. Um, it was a really like intense moment in my life and I talk to them about that and I said, you know, I really need these papers. And at some point, maybe when my son was three, so I guess I would’ve been about 21. Um, I had just been asking and asking and being so much more aggressive, I guess in my desire to get those papers that my mom called me one day and said that they would give me my papers and my mom didn’t come. I was living on my own with my, at the time he was my fiance, now he’s my husband. And my mom said, you know, we’re going to give you the papers. And I said, okay. And My dad came by himself to my apartment and handed me a Manila envelope and he said, you know, the answers to all of your questions are in this envelope.
