Contending with coloniality: Unsettling migration narratives of Venezuelans in Peru

Abstract

This article explores how Venezuelan migrants in Peru negotiate sometimes-contradictory notions of identity, solidarity and modernity. Building from decolonial scholarship, it argues for the importance of situated racialized accounts of migrants’ experiences. I found that a common identity as Latin Americans facilitated migration, with an emphasis on solidarity and ‘brotherhood’. Yet, Venezuelans’ narratives also reinforced hierarchical notions of development that position whiter populations as more advanced than indigenous populations. Their stories reveal a constant negotiation between discourses of shared identity and hierarchical understandings of development and modernity that are constantly perpetuated under the coloniality of power. My findings reiterate a need to not only consider multiple intersecting components of migrant identities but also the ways in which identities shift and take on different meanings in different spatial contexts. Based on 18 migrant narratives, the article addresses a lacuna of analyses examining how migrants themselves re-theorize race and development. By centering coloniality and racialization in migration, I challenge linear narratives of migration from less developed to more developed countries and show how some migrants grapple with vulnerability while also reinforcing uneven power dynamics of racialized othering.