Paper short abstract:

This paper explores hope and hopelessness in the lives and narratives of transnationally-adopted people, who cultivate hopeful visions of motherland and natural families. Powerful feelings make them travel, search, and meet their natural mothers, fulfilling, surpassing or betraying long-held expectations.

Paper long abstract:

At some point in their lives, people who have been adopted fantasize about their biological parents and long to be able to meet them, nourishing hopeful thoughts about their reason for abandoning them, about their current state in a distant place, about how a possible reunion would clarify doubts, recover the time lost and fill emotional gaps.

This paper explores the themes of hope and hopelessness in the lives and narratives of a group of Chilean-born children adopted by Sardinian families a few decades ago. While some of them feel they perfectly fit into their adoptive land and family, others feel misplaced and dream of a utopian motherland where they feel they belong, and wish to be able to return home. The adoptees articulate visions and expectations regarding the native land, that often assumes a dream-like contour, and the natural parents, especially the mother. The powerful drive of hope and imagination, combined with the need to relate to a natal land and feel part of the group of its inhabitants, urges some adoptees to cross the geographical, cultural and emotional boundaries and travel to Chile in search of their natural families. In such cases imaginaries, expectations and wishes meet reality with unexpected results.

The hopeful imaginary of the adoptees is paralleled by that of their natural mothers, who never ceased to nurse hopeful feelings about the children they had to relinquish, designing in their minds their comfortable and successful existence in a distant land, where life is imagined easier.