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Our lives are a telenovela - this is often how Venezuelan migrants I have met in Chile described their family biographies. Venezuelan telenovelas are world-famous and known for being, at once, funny, and dramatic. Whilst telenovelas portray ordinary persons, the lives of characters are far from ordinary. On the contrary, they are bizarre, being marked by unexpected events and confounded trajectories. Like telenovelas, migration processes feature many plot twists and unknowns. Even when carefully planned, decisions about whether, how and where to move are generally taken in contexts of limited information and, often, in highly mutable biographical and historical circumstances. In the words of Luis, a Venezuelan migrant living in Chile: “there are so many changes taking place in my everyday life, that the minute I wake up I ask myself - okay, what is going to happen to me today?”.
Although feelings of future unpredictability can arise for various reasons in migration processes, mobility regimes represent an important source of uneasiness, especially for those with precarious migratory status. In fact, scholars have recently observed that migration governance is not only highly selective, as its also increasingly ruled through uncertainty. In South America, specifically, one common feature of migratory governance across countries is the assemblage of administrative regulations that are not necessarily coherent with one another . This is part of a more general contemporary tendency of governing mobility through piecemeal policies, processes of policy layering, and the combination of formal and informal rules. The constant shifts in entry, residence, and reunification regulations affect migrants’ projectivity: their ability to imagine possible trajectories of action, or even their everyday life. When I asked Luis what he thought was going to happen to his visa application, after having faced multiple bureaucratic hindrances, he shrugged his shoulders and answered: “Look, stay tuned for the next episodes of this telenovela, same time, same channel”.
Whilst various scholarly work has explored the role of future unpredictability on migrants’ life courses and biographies, there is only an incipient body of literature that investigates how uncertainty plays out for families who are spread across origin and multiple settlement countries and who may be facing different types of unknowns. In my PhD research, I draw on life-history interviews with family dyads to understand how transnational families’ care practices and migration plans intersect with shifting bureaucratic borders. To that end, I am focusing on the Venezuelan displacement to Chile and Colombia.
Despite a long tradition of protection to forced migrants in Latin America, the extension of refugee status towards Venezuelan migrants has seldom been used, and most countries in the continent have resorted to humanitarian protection visas. Crucially, policies which regulate the new protection instruments have been changing at an extraordinary pace, a pattern undoubtedly aggravated by the rise of sanitary-related restrictions since 2020. Since regulations change so quickly and because there is no specific family reunification mechanism, family members who have migrated at different times might be subject to different bureaucratic requirements. In my fieldwork in Colombia and Chile, I have found that families migrate separately because displacement is expensive, but not just that. Plans for family reunification – like any other plans – are contentious and prone to change. It is common, for example, to find people who were reluctant to leave Venezuela at first, but who, due to mounting inflation and deteriorating living conditions find themselves forced to reunite with their families elsewhere. Yet, because of increasing restrictions and changing rules, it may now be too late to do so through regular channels. As a result, some kin will remain separated, whilst others will choose to reunite through irregular pathways, leading to a rise in mixed-status families – those in which different members hold different migratory statuses. Such mixed-status families do not emerge due to rules of nationality acquisition, as in other contexts, but by the simple fact that some people had the means to issue passports before others or arrive to destination countries prior to a specific date. In the next episodes of this telenovela, which is also the PhD process, I hope to explore how such erratic timescales of migration governance intersect with families’ biographies, including their care practices, their spatiality, their life transitions, and even what they see as family-like relationships.