Reconstructing Racialised Femininity: Stories from Venezuelan migrant women

ABSTRACT

This paper critically analyses how Venezuelan migrant women negotiate, challenge and at times reproduce oppressive gender relations as they navigate their new socio-economic realities within Trinidad and Tobago. These socio-economic realities include the ways they attempt to meet their financial needs within feminised labour markets such as engaging in care and domestic work. We focus on how the pervasive constructions of their femininity, based upon the social and cultural expectations they migrated with from Venezuela, re-produce unequal power relations in their everyday lives. We also examine how the gendered stereotypes of Venezuelan migrant women within Trinidad and Tobago reflect how their racialised identities are situated as desirable and exploitable within the Trinidadian labour market. We engage in a feminist narrative analysis that employs the qualitative method of in-depth interviews to gain gendered insights from Venezuelan migrant women about their lived experiences. We share these migrant women’s stories of survival to highlight how their liminal racialised identities lead to hypervisibility and invisibility, resulting in them experiencing multiple forms of discrimination, including xenophobia and stereotyping. Yet, despite these challenges, we explore how they remain empowered to find ways to challenge stigma, discrimination and xenophobia and access necessary material resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Venezuelan migration
• female migrants
• feminised labour
• immigration
• global south migration
• trinidad and Tobago

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See also Response for Venezuelans Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela (2018) for more information.

2. See United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ‘Guidance Note on the Outflow of Venezuelans’ (2018) and ‘Guidance Note on International Protection Considerations for Venezuelans – Update I’ (2019) for more information.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tivia Collins

Tivia Collins is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, whose research examines the lived experiences of migrant women within an intra-regional migration context. Her work demonstrates how migrant women experience borders and belonging/non-belonging, as well as navigate exclusionary, patriarchal, and classist state definitions of citizenship. Tivia is also a Research Assistant at the IGDS and is the editorial assistant for the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, a journal of Caribbean perspectives on Gender and Feminism.

Richie Daly

Richie Daly is an Afro Latinx genderqueer graduate student at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine. They previously worked at the Living Water Community as a Protection Advocate serving asylum seekers and refugees. Their research interests include forced migration, gender nonconformity and feminist phenomenology. Richie holds a Bachelor of Arts in Film from The UWI, St Augustine and a Postgraduate Diploma in Gender and Development Studies.