Caracas Chronicles

When Venezuelans flee their country’s political and economic collapse, they don’t leave behind its social structure. In cities like Miami and New York, the Venezuelan diaspora has become increasingly visible, but not as a unified community. Instead, divisions around class and race have re-emerged abroad, amplifying the historical inequalities that shaped life in Venezuela.

That is what my field research suggests. I am a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, studying Venezuelan immigration to the United States. Since January 2024, I have conducted over 60 interviews with Venezuelan immigrants from different socioeconomic backgrounds in New York and Miami. 

During the height of Venezuela’s oil boom in the mid-20th century, the country developed one of the largest middle classes in Latin America. Fueled by oil revenues and a state-led modernizing agenda, many Venezuelans, particularly those in urban areas, experienced upward mobility through public education, state and private employment, and access to consumer goods. This prosperity was unevenly distributed. Urban Venezuelans tended to benefit the most, while racialized populations often remained on the margins of this petro-modernity. The appearance of national progress masked long-standing structural inequalities, many of which were obscured under the ideology of mestizaje (racial mixing), which promoted a myth of harmonious unity while avoiding open conversations about race and class.

The Bolivarian Revolution was propelled by these divisions. Under Hugo Chávez, the state promised social justice, a fair redistribution of oil revenues, and recognition for the poor and historically excluded from urban modernity. For many, this was the first time they felt politically seen. However, the revolution’s promises progressively gave way to repression, corruption, and economic collapse. The social contract fractured, and migration became the only option for millions across different social classes. One in five Venezuelans has left the country in the last decade. Who got to leave and how was shaped by the very inequalities the revolution failed to address. 

…my interlocutors mostly accused newly arrived, poor Venezuelans crossing the southern U.S. border of damaging the diaspora’s public image through their criminal behavior.

Wealthier Venezuelans, often with access to U.S. visas, savings accounts, a network abroad, and foreign passports in some cases, were able to relocate early and securely, in most cases. Many settled in South Florida, particularly in Doral and Weston, where they recreated familiar social worlds with gated communities, Venezuelan-owned businesses, and a strongly anti-socialist political identity aligned with American conservative political views. These neighborhoods became symbolic spaces of continuity. They represent an attempt to rebuild not just a home, but a class identity and its values. These cartographic extensions of Venezuela’s middle-class urban enclaves were a response to chavismo. The self-proclaimed socialist revolution made it increasingly harder for the middle and upper classes to exist in Venezuela, suffocating the possibility of reproducing what chavismo considered bourgeois moral values, worldview, and ways of life. 

Middle- and upper-class Venezuelan migrants are not only seeking economic stability. They are seeking social recognition in their new context, especially from white Americans. Many worry about being seen as “just another brown and poor immigrant group,” and distance themselves from poorer, darker-skinned Venezuelans who arrive with less legal protection and fewer resources. Respectability becomes a survival strategy implemented by many immigrant groups in the U.S. It is a way to claim whiteness, modernity, and legitimacy in front of a society suspicious of racialized groups. 

This anxiety is especially visible in moments of crisis like the one triggered when Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans came under threat in February of this year. TPS was approved by the Biden administration in 2021. It not only offered middle-class Venezuelans already in the US a legal way to stay, but it also provided a legal pathway for poor Venezuelans to enter the U.S. for the first time in history. When the Trump administration attempted to revoke it earlier this year, many wealthy Venezuelans blamed the poor for their bad habits, socialist mentality, and moral corruption. 

While some blame was directed at Venezuelans in the U.S. suspected of having economic ties to Maduro’s government, my interlocutors mostly accused newly arrived, poor Venezuelans crossing the southern U.S. border of damaging the diaspora’s public image through their criminal behavior. “The Venezuelan community in the U.S. is suffering a transformation with the arrival of the ‘new man of Chávez’s revolution,’” Carmen, a politically active Venezuelan and long-term U.S. resident, told me. “And the perception of the Venezuelan community is suffering, too. The type of Venezuelans who came here in the past, escaping from Venezuela’s debacle, were professionals, university graduates, and entrepreneurs who came to contribute. But with the arrival of these new people, we have been stigmatized, and in a way, they [American citizens] are right to do so because these Venezuelans have abused the system, committed crimes, and shown their lack of moral principles.” 

Some Venezuelans, like Carmen, even saw the attempt to revoke TPS as evidence that the poor were not ready to live in a modern, capitalist, first-world country, just like they were not ready to live in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods back in Venezuela. This scapegoating reflects prejudices that originated a long time ago in Venezuela. The notion that poverty is not a structural condition but a moral failure predates chavismo and continues to shape perceptions today, even beyond Venezuela’s borders. In the United States, this idea resonates with old libertarian ideas now closely associated with trumpism. 

Poor Venezuelan immigrants face immense challenges. They escaped Venezuela’s collapse and (post-)Covid economic stagnation and xenophobia in their second host country in Latin America. Many made dangerous journeys through the Darién Gap, Central America, and Mexico when the TPS was implemented. Once in the U.S., they took up precarious, racialized labor like working in construction, cleaning, caregiving, or delivery. These roles resemble the informal work they had back home, reinforcing a sense of continuity between displacement and dispossession. They have been associated with criminality and terrorism by government officials and the media. They are being detained and deported, and in some cases, placed in legal limbos, such as Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center. 

Different endowments of economic, cultural, and social capital determine who gets to live where, who speaks for the community, and who is allowed to have a future in the United States.

Poor migrants are also marginalized within the diaspora itself. Diaspora organizations, such as media platforms, and civic and advocacy groups—mostly based in Florida—are often dominated by middle- and upper-class narratives. On social media, they project an image of the Venezuelan exile as educated, entrepreneurial, and politically aligned with U.S. culture. They advocate for the rule of law, economic independence from the state, and Christian family values. Those who don’t fit this mold often remain invisible. This narrative portrays poor Venezuelans as living in migrant shelters, having many children, not working, and representing an economic burden for society. According to this narrative, that’s a common behavior among Chavez’s supporters who have grown accustomed to the state subsidizing their lives.   

This shows how migration doesn’t just move people across borders. It moves—and reveals—entire social worlds. It carries with it the spatial and socio-political divisions that defined life back home. Far from being dissolved by migration, these hierarchies are reproduced abroad. 

Different endowments of economic, cultural, and social capital determine who gets to live where, who speaks for the community, and who is allowed to have a future in the United States. 

At the same time, these dynamics shed light on the failures of Venezuela’s political system, both the chavista and its predecessors. The myth of mestizaje has long served as a national fiction to avoid confronting racial and class inequalities. Especially middle- and upper-class Venezuelans struggle to accept divisions along the line of race despite the evidence. Now, migration has made these inequalities visible. The fractured cartography of the diaspora is reflected in the blame games around the TPS revocation. It can be seen as a mirror held up to the nation itself. 

If Venezuela is to imagine a democratic future beyond populism and authoritarianism, it must begin by acknowledging the divisions it has long denied. These divisions fueled chavismo. Confronting inequality is not only urgent at home. It is also necessary in the diasporic spaces where Venezuelans are rebuilding their lives. Without that reckoning, the conditions that produced the current crisis will continue to reproduce themselves in the old geography of the nation as well as in the new cartography of the diaspora.