‘El Canguro’ Opera About Guatemala’s Black Market Baby Industry

“El Canguro”: The world premiere of this opera written by Ferrell and composed by Peter Michael von der Nahmer will begin at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 10 in L.A. at AT&T Center Theater; PEN award winner Donald Freed will give a pre-opera talk at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 general admission, $20 students

If any readers get the opportunity to attend the talk or opera, please let us know. We would love to hear more.

“Cynthia Lewis Ferrell encountered — and was transformed by — both “species” in Guatemala.

While traveling there in 2007, the “kangaroos” she heard so much about were not the pouched marsupials native to Australia, but rather “canguros,” or “kangaroo mothers,” a term used to describe impoverished Guatemalan women who breed and sell their babies to American couples who can’t have children of their own; “canguro” also means “baby sitter” in Spanish. The babies are sold for as much as $50,000. After intermediaries take their share, the birth mothers end up with about $800 to $1,000 — to them, a fortune.

Ferrell also was mesmerized by Guatemala’s leaf-cutter ants, destructive insects that can tear apart a tree in one day, cutting off all its leaves and carrying the green bits back to their colony to grow a fungus that feeds the ants’ larvae. The ants return, again and again, to the same tree, denuding but never totally destroying it.

The title of Ferrell’s opera is “El Canguro” (The Kangaroo), and leaf-cutter ants “are symbolic in it,” she said.”

“”It just makes for opera,” she continued, referring to the ants, trees, moms, babies, corruption, violence, infertility, patriarchal power and everything else in the opera.”

“ADOPTION ‘INDUSTRY’

So how did an American woman end up writing an opera about Guatemala with music by a European composer?

Ferrell, an Oak Park resident for 19 years, is a longtime author, playwright, librettist and musician whose works have been developed by venues including the Colony Theatre, 24th Street Theatre and Theatricum Botanicum in Los Angeles, and Stage Left Studio in New York. She has a master’s of professional writing degree from USC, where she won many awards and honors for her writing, and was an adjunct writing professor at Pepperdine University.

Ferrell, who’s directing the production of “El Canguro,” explained that in 2007, a year after her mother died, her father, Chuck Lewis of Studio City, wanted to study Spanish in Guatemala, staying at the home of a close family friend. Ferrell joined him, and after their language studies they traveled extensively through Guatemala, including Antigua.

She first heard about child trafficking when a holding house for infants was raided in Antigua. Infants placed for adoption were collected and hidden at this house, she explained, then transported to Guatemala City, to hotels where foreign adoptive parents were staying.

“The whole industry was scandal-ridden,” she said. “I had only been aware of adoptions in Guatemala like most people are: People went down there because paperwork was fast and you could get an infant, and for infertile couples that was a wonderful thing.” But Guatemalans have a different perspective, she said. “As we were driving past this house, the local who was driving us suddenly became furious. He said, ‘You Americans, you think you’re coming down here to save our children from poverty, but what you’ve created is an industry.’ ”

As a storyteller and writer, Ferrell immediately started researching anything she could find about illegal adoptions, and learned that at the time, Guatemala was exporting 1 percent of its infants, and child trafficking was a significant part of the country’s economy.

A Marriott Hotel in Guatemala City, she said, was a hub of illegal adoption activity. She and her father stayed in the hotel, where a “baby lounge” served as a spot for the moms to meet Guatemalan babies, and for “notaries” to strike financial deals. The hotel’s restaurant, Ferrell said, was full of “pale white Caucasian women holding very dark indigenous babies and just glowing.”

When she returned home, Ferrell signed up for some classes at the Academy for New Musical Theatre in North Hollywood, where she met von der Nahmer. They collaborated on an assignment to write a short musical about “anything ripped from the headlines.”

“EMOTIONAL FALLOUT

“El Canguro,” Ferrell said, “is based on collected stories from the tour guides, and people I met and talked to. The main plot has to be fictional so I’m not stepping on anyone’s toes, but all of the facts surrounding it are true.”

The opera, she said, is about a father with a son and daughter, the only two surviving siblings from an initial nine children. They live in poverty in the rain forest, and the daughter supports the family by supplying babies for the foreign adoption market, with her very patriarchal father acting as the notary.”

“Ferrell explained that in 2007, international pressure was about to force a shutdown of Guatemala’s corrupt adoption industry. As of Jan. 1, 2008, Guatemala had to improve its adoption procedures or the U.S. would no longer provide visas for babies.

“So the race was on to place as many babies as possible,” she said. In the opera, “the family has already sold two babies into the market, and the daughter has been pregnant with a third, and because it’s shutting off, the father has taken deposits from three different couples. And he owes money to a gang, for the house. As the opera opens, the girl has miscarried in the night. So it’s all too late, right from the beginning. And that’s the story, how this little family is going to try to survive, and the emotional fallout from it.”

Oak Park writer finds inspiration in Guatemala’s black-market baby industry
[Ventua County Star 9/2/11 by Karen Lindell]

REFORM Puzzle Piece