Santiago Case Study

Client: Santiago, transracially adopted and navigating emerging adulthood (age 26), reported the tension he feels as his adoptive family struggles to recognize the several identities he has been working through.

Presenting Concerns: Santiago reports that his adoptive parents’ beliefs about the Black Lives Matter movement are in stark contrast to his. When he visits them, they lecture, “We’re all the same on the inside!” Santiago also finds it difficult to reconcile his sense of faith with what he knows about its origins. He grew up attending a local church; one in which his parents are still active members, led by a pastor committed to ideologies aligned with white superiority and Christian nationalism. Santiago was compelled to seek community with other adoptees with whom he could process his situation and questions.

Progress: In witnessing other adoptees engaged in similar dialogue, he has been affirmed in his quest to consciously negotiate the complexities of faith, adoption, identity, and social responsibility that are active in his life. Santiago finds himself receiving and contributing to community processes of art, collaboration, meaning-making, fellowship, and adoptee-centric activism. He reports an inward shift between identities he internalized during his youth into one that has room to hold the nuanced realities he has been experiencing since then. In this way he seems to be able to honor the breadths and depths of his personal adoptee journey even in the midst of the resistance presented by his adoptive parents.

Santiago’s path is by no means a simple and clean-cut formula. However, through his self-paced research and interaction with adoptee community, he continues to gain more clarity about his self without having to relinquish the essence points of his faith that are still significant to him.

Discussion Questions:

1. What elements of positive racial identity development do you notice happening through Santiago’s story?
2. What variables/resources might need to be present for an adopted youth/family in your community to experience a personal/social trajectory similar to Santiago’s?