GESTEIRA, Soledad. “Legal but illegitimate”: senses on registration of filiation and personal documents for those seeking their origins in Argentina. []. , 20, 1, pp.5-31. ISSN 0873-6561.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork performed in an Argentinean association dedicated to persons seeking their origins and in-depth interviews to activists in this field, in this article I inquire the various ways the registration of paternity is assumed if there is an adoption or when they are falsely enrolled as biological children. I also analyze the meaning given by these people to their personal documents characterized as “legal but illegitimate” because there is no “real” data. Finally, I examine the strategies carried out by these activists to legitimate those documents by modifying and/or correcting their filiation record. The characteristics of these documents reveal the complexity behind this process in which biological parentage remains on hold waiting for “the truth” to be uncovered. These cases demonstrate the nature of the social construction around filiation and the multiple combinations that biological and social dimensions can assume.

: filiation; documents; adoption; false registration; origins.

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