The Franco regime stole thousands of children. Or lost them, depending on how you tell the story.
Many of the "niños perdidos" had been born in jail to Republican mothers, but were then removed from the jails at the age of 3, because of a law that governed how long children could stay with their mother in jail.
Some were kidnapped at birth and re-homed with pro-Franco families. Some ended up in orphanages. Others in convents. All were trafficked away from their families.
I remember (well, I don't because I was two, but my parents continue to remind me) getting lost at DisneyWorld as a child. Something about it was raining, and we'd stopped to purchase ponchos, and I just followed all the knees.
It's pretty easy to get lost as a child when all knees look the same. It's even easier to get lost as a child when institutions intervene.
Many of the "niños perdidos" had been born in jail to Republican mothers, but were then removed from the jails at the age of 3, because of a law that governed how long children could stay with their mother in jail.
Some were kidnapped at birth and re-homed with pro-Franco families. Some ended up in orphanages. Others in convents. All were trafficked away from their families.
I remember (well, I don't because I was two, but my parents continue to remind me) getting lost at DisneyWorld as a child. Something about it was raining, and we'd stopped to purchase ponchos, and I just followed all the knees.
It's pretty easy to get lost as a child when all knees look the same. It's even easier to get lost as a child when institutions intervene.
EXCLUSIVE: Children from the southern border are being brought to NYC after being separated from their families.— Spectrum News NY1 (@NY1) June 20, 2018
Overnight, @joshrobin captured video of unusual activity at a foster agency in East Harlem. #MorningsOn1 pic.twitter.com/WhiN27wb5T
Children get lost every day. Sometimes they're in a grocery store, or a mall, or DisneyWorld. Sometimes they're kidnapped, trafficked or ransomed. Our goal as a society should be to try to minimize the numbers of lost children, not aggravate them by promoting policies that separate infants from their parents. Neither should we claim to be keeping families together by promoting the detention and jailing of refugees seeking political asylum.
I leave this post with the words of my colleague Joseph Pierce:
"We take children from mothers and fathers. We take them and we put them in cells. Like we took them and we put them in schools—in order to civilize them, save them from their own blood, from their inhumanity, from their fate to disappear to become the history that they were destined to become. And so we saved them from themselves. From their own disappearance. From their long braids and their almond eyes and their superstitions. Like we took them from the Black wombs of their Black mothers whose Black skin was a cosmic affront to the (manifest) destiny of a nation meant to forget itself and the bodies that grind within it.
Babies taken from mothers to be raised by white families. Because opportunity. And war."
And this is how rumors begin. You were lost in Disneyland, not DisneyWorld. One of the most terrifying times of ours as parents.
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