KRISTEN FRENCH inteviews ERIN SIEGAL
The investigative journalist on the search for Maria Fernanda, the role of Christianity in the trafficking of Guatemalan adoptees, and funding the research for her book via Kickstarter.
Erin Siegal’s first book, Finding Fernanda, is also her first big investigative story, one that began in an airport in Guatemala, took her to Columbia Journalism School’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, and led to two years of thorough on-the-ground reporting in both Guatemala and the U.S. Siegal’s book tells the powerful story of Maria Fernanda, abducted by an illegal adoption ring as a child, and the two mothers who spent years searching desperately for her—her Guatemalan birth mother, Mildred Alvarado, and Betsy Emanuel, the tenacious Tennessee housewife who wanted to adopt her and later crusaded to return her to Mildred.
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Guernica: You began your career as a photojournalist and initially approached this project in that way. What made you decide that this was more of an investigative story, and what kinds of stories do you feel are best suited to photojournalism?
Erin Siegal: I got started with this story completely by accident. I had been in Guatemala with my little sister on vacation, and our trip was cut short because my grandmother passed away. We were in the airport leaving, really tired—it was early in the morning. It was a flight from Guatemala City to Houston, and we were sitting there just looking around, and this was December 2007, which was kind of the height of the adoption industry in Guatemala. There were over a dozen adoptive parents with their new sons and daughters, and just seeing the multiplicity of that image made me think, wow, this would be such an amazing photograph. When I got back to New York I started doing a little research because I figured, OK, I can pull some kind of story out of this, some kind of simple angle, a happy adoption story. I’ll talk to my agency, they’ll give me a couple of grand, send me back to Guatemala. When I started the basic research that you would do for any photo essay—reading old clips, that kind of thing—the same types of abuses kept on popping up over and over again, about how there was so much fraud, how things like kidnapping would happen, and I just didn’t understand why the same kinds of stories kept repeating over a ten-year period. That made me think, let’s look at the legislation and the players and the lobbying around this issue. Why has nothing changed? Why have no reforms been implemented? The more I read about it, the more interested I got in the story. I read old Congressional testimony about adoption laws, and that’s the kind of stuff you can’t photograph, right? It’s really hard to think of in a visual way.
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