Hybrid lives: The digitally mediated identity of a Salvadoran adoptee in the United States: Vidas híbridas: La identidad digitalmente mediada de una persona salvadoreña adoptada en los Estados Unidos

Drawing attention to the lived experiences of El Salvador’s disappeared children, in this article I examine the digitally mediated identity of Salvadoran adoptee Nelson de Witt. I examine how the literary theory of racial melancholia that has been used to better understand the transnational/racial adoptee experience is complicated by the use of digital media expression. Using the cultural works of de Witt and his family as a case study, I argue that digital cultural production can act as a third space, wherein the identities of transnational adoptees can exist in full, free of the negotiations required by the psychological limitations of physical geographic spaces. This article further considers the significance of digital cultural production as an act of unforgetting and digital self-making that reclaims past histories of the Salvadoran Civil War and complicates the international adoption as “rescue” paradigm that has been popularized by adoptive parents and mainstream media.