Geographies of a crisis: Venezuelan migrants in Colombia

Keywords: Migration, race, class, gender, inequality
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper argues that a concerted ethnographic focus on the intersection of class, race, and gender can provide a better understanding of the reinforcement of structural inequalities faced by racialized Venezuelan migrants settled in Colombia. Specifically, it will draw on Colombia’s media representations of non-white Venezuelan migrants from the lowest socio-economic strata. Since 2014, Venezuela began to experience a multifaceted crisis underpinned by an economic collapse that has driven the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis in Latin America. The current current crisis, has prompted over 6 million Venezuelans to leave Venezuela, many of them undocumented, due to hyper-inflation, erosion of wages; de-facto dollarization; inability to secure medicines, healthcare, food, water and electric power; and erosion of security and governance has driven the forced displacement of Venezuelans. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR, 2021) at least 1.8 million Venezuelan refugees have resettled –legally– in Colombia. The total figure is larger due to the entry of irregular migrants who have faced hurdles while trying to obtain legal identity documents such as passports and identity cards to leave Venezuela. However, there is little understanding of how xenophobic discourses intersect with racial disparities embedded in the process of Venezuelan migrants settling in Colombia. This paper will provide a fuller exploration of how the intersections of race, class and gender emerge in the context of the current crisis and how the presence of irregular migrants is rendered in Colombia’s media.