Adoption as colonial identicide genocide
Adoption as colonial identicide genocide analyses modern adoption as a form of structural violence that delocalises, alienates and indoctrinates in order to eliminate origins, roots and genealogies.
The text defines modern adoption as a technology of ontological erasure: a device of power that destroys filiation of origin, substitutes natal identity and turns kinship into a matter administered by the State.
Starting from the Minnesota Adoption Act of 1917, the article situates adoption within a colonial, biopolitical and eugenic genealogy. Against the adoptive myth, it proposes a realist reading: recovering one’s name, origin and memory as acts of decolonisation and resistance.
Quick access
The publication is available on Zenodo in its Spanish version. The full English translation of the document is pending, but this website already maintains a full English mirror page as part of its bilingual structure.
Related
This page is part of the Undoing Adoption line of work, devoted to dismantling adoption as an institution of substitution, erasure of origins, identity violence and documentary destruction of filiation.
View the main Undoing Adoption page
Adoption as colonial identicide genocide expands the framework of identicide towards a colonial, biopolitical and genealogical reading of modern adoption. It should be read together with the other critical texts in the same line:
On this page
- What this text argues
- Central thesis
- Methodological note: knowing from within
- Minnesota 1917 and the origin of modern adoption
- Adoption as a colonial device of identicide power
- Biopolitics, coloniality and necropolitics
- The theory of identicide genocide
- Delocalise, alienate, indoctrinate
- Psychosocial and political consequences
- Realism as resistance
- Memory, name and origin
- Key concepts
- Structure of the text
- Publication, versions and records
- Access to the publication
- Recommended citation
What this text argues
This article argues that modern adoption cannot be understood as a neutral institution of child protection, but as a historical device of identity substitution.
Its function is not limited to moving a child from one family to another. Its core is deeper: to erase a filiation, interrupt a genealogy, substitute an origin and produce a new identity under State authority.
From this perspective, adoption does not appear as a humanitarian exception, but as the civilised continuation of colonial forms of dispossession. The body is not necessarily eliminated, but origin, memory and belonging are.
The text proposes naming this structure colonial identicide genocide.
Central thesis
The central thesis is that modern adoption constitutes a structural violence that eliminates origins, destroys genealogies and substitutes identities under the authority of the State.
The text argues that adoption turns filiation into an administrative construction and kinship into a matter of government. What is presented as protection operates, in reality, as a technology of ontological erasure.
The identicide process acts through three movements: delocalise, alienate and indoctrinate. First, it separates the subject from their biographical territory; then it substitutes their consciousness with another narrative; finally, it demands emotional adherence to the system that destroyed their root.
Against that machinery, the recovery of name and origin is presented as an act of decolonisation, memory and realist resistance.
Methodological note: knowing from within
The text begins from a decisive methodological premise: adoption can only be understood from within. Any external gaze risks reproducing the very fiction that adoption imposes.
Adoption affects identity itself. For that reason, it cannot be observed as if it were a neutral object. Lived experience is not a sentimental addition, but the place where the real functioning of the device becomes visible.
The adopted person is not only an object of study. They are a living archive of the power that passed through them. Their biography makes it possible to measure the effects of the system with a precision that statistics alone cannot reach.
The subjectivity of the conscious adopted person is not a bias to be eliminated. It is the most exact point of observation for analysing an institution that destroys, administers and substitutes human identities.
Minnesota 1917 and the origin of modern adoption
The article situates the origin of the modern adoptive model in the Minnesota Adoption Act of 1917. That model introduced the logic of closed adoption: secrecy of origins, sealed records and the creation of a substitute legal filiation.
Through that operation, the State inaugurated a new form of power over filiation. The child was no longer inscribed in continuity with their biological history, but reborn as a legal creation.
Modern adoption was therefore not a simple humanitarian evolution. It was a work of social engineering that turned identity into an administrable matter.
From the United States, the model later expanded to Europe and, after the Second World War, to intercountry adoption. The national device of erasure became a global system of transfer, substitution and reorganisation of filiations.
Adoption as a colonial device of identicide power
Adoption, in its modern formulation, cannot be understood only as a legal or family act. It constitutes a technology of power that acts at the intimate scale of filiation.
Its central violence is the subtraction of identity and the imposition of a new genealogy under State authority. This operation turns individual biography into a field of biopolitical experimentation.
The adopted person does not consent to their adoption, nor to the erasure of their name, nor to the substitution of their genealogy. That lack of voluntariness turns adoption into a total social experiment.
If a human being can be uprooted, rewritten and domesticated from infancy, adoption reveals itself as a test of power’s capacity to fabricate functional subjectivities.
But if the adopted person remembers, searches, resists or breaks the adoptive narrative, then the device partially fails: it shows that there is still a core of truth that could not be suppressed.
Biopolitics, coloniality and necropolitics
The text articulates three critical frameworks: biopolitics, coloniality and necropolitics.
From biopolitics, adoption appears as a technique for administering life. The State decides who may be a child, of whom, under what conditions and with what authorised memory.
From the coloniality of power and being, adoption is understood as the production of subjectivities. It does not only move bodies: it substitutes worlds, languages, lineages, memories and forms of belonging.
From necropolitics, adoption can be read as a soft form of civil death: it does not necessarily destroy the body, but it deprives the subject of history, genealogy and symbolic continuity.
Taken together, these frameworks make it possible to understand adoption as a colonial technology of erasure: a modern way of governing life through the administration of origin.
The theory of identicide genocide
The theory of identicide genocide holds that modern adoption constitutes a complex form of colonial violence aimed at the collective elimination of groups of origin and the identity substitution of their individuals.
Identicide names the subjective dimension of that violence: the civil and ontological death of the biographical being, replaced by an identity fabricated by the State.
Genocide, in this framework, names the collective dimension: the destruction of lineages, communities, memories and maternal continuities. The taking of children does not affect only each separated child; it also affects mothers, families and peoples of origin.
Modern adoption thus acts on three levels: collective, by emptying communities of descendants; individual, by erasing the identity of the adopted person; and epistemic, by imposing a legal truth that suppresses real history.
This triple operation configures a total violence: it delocalises, alienates and indoctrinates.
Delocalise, alienate, indoctrinate
The identicide process is articulated through three successive and complementary operations.
Delocalise means separating the subject from their biographical, family, cultural and genealogical territory. Delocalisation produces a void of origin that can be occupied by an alien identity.
Alienate means substituting the self. The adopted person learns to narrate themselves from an administrative filiation and to recognise themselves in an image produced by the system that dispossessed them.
Indoctrinate means internalising the imposed filiation. The subject not only accepts their adoptive identity, but may come to defend it, reproduce it and transmit it as the only possible truth.
These three phases reveal the real function of the adoptive device: not to rescue lives, but to reconfigure the bonds that sustain them, transforming loss into virtue and substitution into salvation.
Psychosocial and political consequences
The text analyses the psychological, social and political consequences of adoptive identicide. Trauma does not appear as an accidental effect, but as the functional product of a system that requires the adopted person to live within an imposed identity.
The search for origin is interpreted as an attempt to reintegrate denied memory and restore coherence to the self. But that search is often denied, pathologised or turned into suspicion.
The legal and healthcare systems participate in that revictimisation when they protect closed files, validate false filiations or interpret the suffering of the adopted person as an individual pathology.
Adoption is thus immunised by the myth of good. The adopted person who speaks is not recognised as a victim, but treated as ungrateful, deviant or problematic.
This public denial constitutes an added violence: it transforms trauma into silence and turns the truth of origin into a threat to social consensus.
Realism as resistance
The article contrasts realism with adoptive magical thinking. Adoption is sustained by a collective illusion that turns violence into love, subtraction into rescue and loss into destiny.
Magical thinking allows institutions, adoptive families and society to act without guilt, protected by a moral narrative that turns appropriation into virtue.
Against that spell, realism appears as an act of rupture. It does not mean coldness or cynicism, but fidelity to lived truth.
Realism consists in looking without veils at what the system orders us not to see: harm, substitution, dispossession, alienation and the lie turned into kinship.
For the adopted person, realism is a form of decolonisation of the gaze. It means ceasing to perform the role of the saved child and assuming the position of lucid survivor.
Memory, name and origin
The memory of the adopted person is not a private story without political value. It is a legitimate source of knowledge.
Every adopted person who searches for their origin challenges a State architecture of oblivion. Every recovered name, every reconstructed filiation and every corrected document breaks part of the identicide device.
The recovery of origin is not nostalgia. It is restitution. It does not seek to return to the past, but to restore continuity between life and history.
In that sense, memory becomes resistance: memory against charity, truth against myth, origin against substitution.
Where power tried to write silence, the word of the adopted person appears as proof of existence.
Key concepts
- Adoption.
- Colonial identicide genocide.
- Identicide.
- Erasure of origin.
- Ablation of origins.
- Filiation.
- Genealogy.
- Memory.
- Delocalisation.
- Alienation.
- Indoctrination.
- Biopolitics.
- Coloniality of power.
- Coloniality of being.
- Necropolitics.
- Structural violence.
- Symbolic violence.
- Realism as resistance.
- Decolonisation.
- Adoption abolitionism.
Structure of the text
The document is organised as an extensive article of historical, philosophical, political and testimonial analysis.
It begins with a methodological note defending situated knowledge from the adopted person as a legitimate form of analysis. It then presents the historical context of modern adoption and its origin in the closed model of Minnesota in 1917.
It then develops adoption as a colonial device of identicide power, articulates its theoretical framework through biopolitics, coloniality and necropolitics, and formulates the theory of identicide genocide.
The later chapters analyse the genealogy of the modern adoptive model, the identicide process — delocalise, alienate, indoctrinate — its psychosocial and political consequences, and realism as a form of resistance.
The text concludes with a defence of lucidity, memory and truth as forms of decolonisation of adopted consciousness.
Publication, versions and records
Access to the publication
The publication is available on Zenodo in its Spanish version. The full English translation is pending.
Recommended citation
Gómez Aldaz, Olmo. La adopción como genocidio identicida colonial que deslocaliza, aliena y adoctrina para eliminar orígenes y raíces. November 2025. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17590565.