Until I Find You, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and 2024 publication by Professor Rachel Nolan, Assistant Professor of International History, was recently given two awards which recognizes its deeply researched account of Guatemala’s international adoption industry, tracing how a system framed as humanitarian became entangled in inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession.

The first recognition comes from the Latin American Studies Association, giving it the Best Book Award on Recent History and Memory, a biennial honor highlighting outstanding scholarship on the region’s past.

It also earned the Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize from the New England Council on Latin American Studies, whose citation underscores the work’s scholarly and human impact. As the award committee wrote,

Until I Find You draws on adoption files, police records, court cases, and interviews to show how international adoption from Guatemala were linked to local and national political violence. By centering the experiences of parents and children who have been separated and disappeared as a result of international adoption, Nolan provides a new angle to understand the decades-long civil war effect on families and communities. This is a major contribution to recent Guatemalan history.

Anchored in the story of adoptee Dolores Preat, who discovered that her supposed birth mother was actually a jaladora, or baby broker, Nolan uncovers a vast network through which an estimated 40,000 children, many from Indigenous Maya communities, were separated from their families. Drawing on archival documents, court records, and rare adoption files, the book exposes how Guatemala, during its civil war and its aftermath, became one of the world’s leading “sender” countries, supplying children to adoptive families abroad under conditions often shaped by coercion, poverty, and violence.

A paperback version of Until I Find You is expected to be available in May 2026.

Professor Rachel Nolan is an Assistant Professor of International History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. A historian of modern Latin America, her work focuses on migration, political violence, the Central American armed internal conflicts, and U.S.-Latin American relations. Her scholarly pursuits have been supported by Russell Sage Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and Social Science Research Council. Additionally, she is an active contributor to media outlets including The New Yorker, New York Times, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and El Faro and serves as a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.