Natural Disasters, Diasporas and International Adoptions

 

by Jenifer de la Rosa | Jul 1, 2025

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As a little girl, I was always afraid to cross bridges over turbulent waters.  This irrational fear complicated things for my parents since I grew up in Valladolid, a small city in northeastern Spain with a river passing through it.  Every time we crossed the Pisuerga River with its abundant current, I asked them to grip my hand and not let go.  I had recurring nightmares in which the river overflowed and I was swept away; my parents were unable to rescue me.

The years went by and I learned to manage this terror until last October 30, 2024, when I saw the images of the unexpected flash flood that swept through several municipalities of Valencia. My memory could not stop the images of my childhood terror and the reason for which I grew up in Europe and not in my country of origin, Colombia.

I saw photos of Valencia’s destroyed streets, immersed in water and mud, cars carried away by the current, 227 dead, families looking on helplessly as they gathered up the little that remained of their possessions. “Why didn’t they warn us sooner?” was a constant refrain.  I thought my wounds were a thing of the past, but with the relentless floods in Spain, my emotional memory brought me back to the disaster—the mud and water— that marked my life before I could truly remember it: the tragedy of Armero, Colombia.  

It has been 40 years since my town was completely destroyed by the eruption of a volcano, taking the lives of more than 23,000 people. I am one of the survivors, but I also belong to the silenced past of thousands of forced migrations and the open wounds of a diaspora of people adopted throughout the world.

 I was given in adoption and taken to Spain, where I grew up with a family that always told me the little they knew about my history of adoption, but always with many unanswered questions about my roots.

For many years, these questions lay dormant inside of me, like the lava accumulating under a volcano that appears to be sleeping. But the fire inside sooner or later seeks a way to get out. 

My reply has been the creation of Hija del Volcán (the Volcano’s Daughter), a documentatry that tells the story of my search for my origins as an adopted child in the context of one of the worst natural disasters in Latin America. The film began not only as an exercise of personal memory, but as a way of putting into context that which had never been named.

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The night of November 13, 1985, the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz set off a huge avalanche of ice from the  melted crater, mud, ash and rubble down the natural channels of the volcano’s slope at great speed, leaving hundreds of children without family, without history and thousands of victims in the diaspora. Armero was a prosperous city that became a cemetery, shattering the lives of thousands forever.

Still from Hija del volcán. Mothers look for their disappeared children. Armero, 2021. Photo credit: Andrés Campos.

I’ve worked with images from the catastrophe and every year in November, I watch the anniversary commemorations and special programs about Armero. In Spain, a public television reporter paid special attention to the story year after year because while covering the 1985 disaster, he had discovered a little girl trapped by the walls of her house. She could not be rescued. Her name was Omayra Sánchez; she was only 13 years old and she died slowly as the world looked on and all rescue attempts failed. She became the visible face of the disaster.  My inner director and documentary filmmaker learned to watch these televised images in a disconnected fashion, disassociating so I would not feel the pain. I have used this protective mechanism most of my life and that now, after years of therapy, I understand.  

During the filming of Hija del volcán, 2019, Omayra Sánchez’ tomb. Photo credit: Andrés Gutierrez.

 

We adoptees frequently confront institutional silence, lack of records, bureaucratic forgetting that transforms our identity into incomplete files. Before beginning a search, if we take the step, we also face ourselves, with many fears.   

The hardest thing for me was my conflicting loyalties, thinking that I was betraying my adoptive family by learning about my biological parents. Indeed, even after I talked to my parents, from whom I hid my first trips to Colombia, even after my mother told me with absolutely no reproach, “It’s normal that you want to know your roots, to travel to the country where you were born,” even then, I felt as if I were betraying them.  

My teenage years were really hard, because my physical appearnce was different from that of my family, and we lived in a conservative city that didn’t experience immigration until the end of the end of the 1990s and early 2000’s. I began to tell my group of friends that I had been adopted. I had previously remained silent on the subject. In my early 30s, I began to think about the Hija del Volcán project and to get my friends involved; it was my way of ceasing to hide a part of me that was very painful. I know understand from firsthand experience that art heals.  

By the time I saw the news about the disaster in Valencia, I understood more: the people urgently evacuated, disappeared families, communities that lost everything in just a couple of hours cannot be measured just with statistics nor material losses. The victims’ true pain is in the disorientation, the loneliness, the invisible wound of mourning the fact that one cannot go back and the awareness of the need for justice.

The Hija del Volcán is not just my story. It reflects the experiences of so many other poeople who have been separated from their families because of a natural disaster or humanitarian crisis. The stories are repeated, whether in Colombia in  1985, Haití  in 2010  or Turkey or Syria in 2023. The names, climatic conditions, countries, all change, but the emotional core is the same: the fragility of human beings in the face of the unexpected and the urgent need to construct memory so it doesn’t disappear, as well as to make visible the fragility of communities in the face of negligent governments.

We so need to take care of ourselves as a society, to create support networks, preserve archives, stories, names. Because each lost document is the vanishing of a life, a story that runs the risk of not being told.

On the 40th anniversary of the Armero tragedy, I seek to focus attention on this collective memory, but also to denounce the mechanisms of silence that still operate today in many systems of international adoption. Because the forced separation is not always felt like a tragedy in the moment, but leaves profound wounds that take years, sometimes decades, to be recognized.  

Francisco González, director of the Fundación Armando Armero and promoter of the Centro de Interpretación de la Memoria y la Tragedia de Armero (Center for the Interpretation of the Memory and the Tragedy of Armero) always was clear that such a huge disaster should never be forgotten because as he says,  “Disasters are not natural, they are the fruit of vulnerable people.” Year after year, González meets more and more families who have related how they have spotted their son or daughter in newspapers, on the television or through an acquaintance, or how they had been separated in the hospital, and these children were alive and healthy, but could not be reunited with their families.  He began to publish this information in http://armandoarmero.org/ and I —and other people like me who knew about the past and were  tied to the tragedy—contacted him. This became a fundamental part of collecting testimonies and making reunions possible.

Still from Hija del volcán, a soldier looks at photos of children disappeared from Armero, 2021. Photo credit: Andrés Campos

Since 2016 with my first trip to Colombia, I have not stopped asking myself many questions. The reality is hard, the history of my life is tough, but I assumed the risks and the pain that led me to ask about my biological mother and my family, to know about them and perhaps to meet them.  

I could not have kept on with my life without understanding the magnitude of the past events. without the direct contact with those marvelous people I encountered along the way like the Red Cross rescue worker who took care of me as a baby in the shelter for disaster victims. She wanted to adopt me, but they wouldn’t let her because she was a single woman. 

Like the mom who took care of me in the group foster home in Colombia and who embraced me again in 2021. They wouldn’t let her adopt me either and lied, telling her that I had been sent to Italy. Despite the fact my parents sent her photos in care of the Family Welfare Institute (ICBF), they confiscated the correspondence so she couldn’t find me.

Still from Hija del volcán: Jenifer and Blanca Rocío in a Bogotá park, 2021. Photo credit: Andrés Campos.

It was very hard to learn about these denied adoptions, to learn that I could have grown up in my own country and not have a different culture, a different accent, like I do now, a life without uprooting, in a different situation, but where I was born.

I couldn’t find my family because papers were missing from the registry, because they changed names, because there are no subsequent legal records because my adoption was entirely legal in the two countries. This fact made me question what is justice and led me to, in a cinematic form, denounce my situation to reach families, adoptees like me, and professionals who work in the field so that as a society we can debate and talk about a problem that, in spite of the fact there are fewer international adoptions, exists in which increased migration of unaccompanied children who will become adults like me and who will require legislation that protects them and will provide them answers. Legislation at the present time is not sufficient.

Over the years, I have come into contact with many adoptees, from different cities, countries, with different languages and histories. We all defend our right to find out about our histories, of being accompanied both in the country of origin and the receiving country and an understanding of the difficulty of the path of return.  

We’re constantly told that we had the opportunity to grow up in a better place. However, that very harmful vision underestimates our psychological problems and our right to know our origins and identity, consecrated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, is repeatedly violated with no apparent consequence to the states block our history.  Today, from Spain, and with a heart that has learned that my two realities are important in my life, I see how the nature disasters continue to mark the lives of thousands of people.  And I reaffirm the necessity to keep on telling stories, to keep on asking questions, to keep on filming.  Because that which burns within, like a volcano, always looks for a way to get out.  And when it does, it transforms.  

Jenifer de la Rosa is a journalist, producer, screenwriter and director of fiction and documentary films. Her first full-length feature film, the documentary, “Hija del volcán” won the Seminci Joven Prize in 2024. The film premiered in Docs México, and is currently being shown in film festivals around the world.  De la Rosa is an activist for the rights of adopted people and also participates in conferences about diversity and anti-racism in film. 

EMAIL:  Contacto: jenifer@mayeuticaproducciones.com

Trailer with link to Spanish subtitles: https://vimeo.com/mayeuticaproducciones/trailerhdv-en