ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand the circumstances that determine the inequality of power and its effect on child care, childhood and parenthood. It focuses on one particular international organization that is Holt International Children's Services, a US-based adoption organization that operated a child welfare and protection programme in the Ecuadorian context. The chapter explores the process of making governing norms workable by looking at interventionist encounters and processes that target the child and its care situation. It argues that people from the lower social classes, and particularly women, respond to interventionist practices with only partial subjectification. Interface situations such as the one presented above are constantly produced in the urban Latin American setting, as poor mestizo mothers place their children in institutions, often unwittingly crossing the line of formalization with all its inherent implications. In interface situations, then, difference and power are spelled out in concrete, crucial action, confirming one particular version of relational continuity at the expense of another.
