Knowledge Bank

The Venezuelan diaspora currently represents one of the largest forced migrations in the world, as an estimated 5 million individuals have fled the country. Especially following the exacerbation of the Venezuelan crisis in 2015, migrants began exiting in larger numbers and settling in less commonly sought out destinations, such as Brazil. In this paper, I investigate the conditions that facilitate, challenge, and channel Venezuelan migrants' access to and movement through Brazil. To do so, I reviewed secondary sources, conducted a media analysis of Brazilian and Venezuelan news sources, and interviewed individuals working to support Venezuelan migrants in Brazil. Basing my analysis on the intersection of new mobilities scholarship and migration studies, I focused principally on processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. I illustrate that, while the Brazilian government has materialized a broadly accessible, official channel of mobility in the border state of Roraima, the porous nature of the border has also enabled the development of localized practices to support alternatives routes of entry. In other words, there have been both official and unofficial attempts at deterritorialization. Furthermore, I demonstrate that there has been a series of discursive and embodied challenges to these flows, including deportations of indigenous migrants, attempts to close the border by both the Venezuelan and Brazilian governments, and local xenophobic attacks on migrants. Finally, I question the government's main integration strategy (the interiorization program), showing how mobility alone cannot guarantee integration and highlighting that the strategy cannot overshadow needs to transform the border region. These results confirm the dialectic between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, contribute to filling the spatial gap in research on the Venezuelan diaspora, and provide a new lens through which to evaluate the Brazilian response to Venezuelan migration.