Caracas Chronicles

Photo by Mauricio Ocando: Torres del Saladillo in Maracaibo’s city center.

“Much of our conversations about Venezuela revolve around what it once was: television programs, old music, cultural festivals that no longer exist. Talking about tomorrow is almost always met with silence or a bitter joke.”

This is what Valentina Rodríguez, a journalism student at the University of Zulia (LUZ), says while her mother, social worker Lidys Hernández, nods silently. For both of them, and for many families in Maracaibo, the conversation about the country automatically shifts to memories that once brought them joy: concerts at the Luis Aparicio Stadium, regional fairs, or family outings that marked Sundays. 

I also grew up in Maracaibo, amidst stories of family exodus and tales of achievements that are no longer repeated, and at 22, I’ve seen how memory functions simultaneously as both solace and limitation for projecting new horizons. “It’s as if the future has no name. Even we, who are older, speak of the past as if it were the only certainty,” says Lidys.

Venezuela faces a historical paradox: its shared past has become a dominant psychic space, while its future is perceived as an empty or threatening territory.

This paradox is not just a local phenomenon, but a global trend that we see today in various societies, where political leaders appeal to an idealized past—as in the case of “Make America Great Again” in the United States—to mobilize emotions and justify political programs. In Venezuela, however, this tension takes on a dramatic form because a significant portion of the population has left the country, another lives in constant survival, and few can imagine with certainty what the future holds.

The structural population loss due to mass migration—including professionals, young people, and families—is not just a drain on human capital; it is a displacement of memory, affections, and collective expectations.

Memory and nostalgia: between the past and the future

In the sociocultural literature on migration and memory, it is observed that nostalgia is not an abstract idealization of the past, but a concrete form of Transnational Migrant Nostalgia, a phenomenon that connects migrants emotionally and symbolically to their country of origin while they navigate their lives in their destination. This nostalgia is not just a collection of intimate memories, but a mechanism that allows them to maintain their identity, reinforce their sense of belonging to a community, and emotionally organize the experience of displacement, helping them cope with adverse conditions, uncertainty, and daily precariousness in cities that are not their original home.

For example, Venezuelans in Peru remember the smells of arepa stands in Caracas, the long lines at iconic markets, or typical neighborhood jokes, and they activate these memories as mechanisms that allow them to maintain a sense of continuity and dignity amidst migration. These memories do not necessarily imply a concrete plan to return, nor a physical reconstruction of Venezuela. Instead, they generate a symbolic or emotional “future,” an internal horizon that allows them to imagine life scenarios that are more just or coherent with their identity, even when the years in the host country are lived with uncertainty and tension. 

For some, these memories fuel a desire to return or to contribute to changes in their country of origin. For others, they function primarily as an emotional support that helps them feel less vulnerable as a minority in the face of the host society, reinforcing the shared identity of the Venezuelan community and offering resilience in the face of isolation or discrimination.

Without critical mediation or historical reflection, collective memory doesn’t transform into a consciousness capable of collectively projecting the future.

From my generation, this inherited memory appears more as a shared wound than as a possible project, a record that preserves affections and losses, that protects against the fragmentation of identity, but that does not always translate into a tangible horizon of the future.

This phenomenon is not limited to those who have left the country. The circulation of images, sounds, and references to the recent past within Venezuela—television series, iconic urban landscapes, or cultural symbols of a city that no longer exists as we remember it—shows how many cling to a time that no longer corresponds to current material and political conditions. This way of recovering lived experience is not always simply evocation: it has also been the subject of reflection in Venezuelan cultural and literary criticism.

For example, in the essay Fugas de la nostalgia: memorias excéntricas sobre el fin del siglo XX venezolano (“Escapes of Nostalgia: Eccentric Memories of the End of the 20th Century in Venezuela”), Magdalena López analyzes how novels like Pim Pam Pum (1998), La última vez (2007), Bajo tierra (2009), and Valle Zamuro (2011) construct an alternative archive of the memory of the 1990s. These works show how memories of the recent past are organized into complex narratives that neither idealize nostalgia nor reproduce polarized discourses. They allow for the exploration of subjectivity, everyday experience, and the emotions of previous generations, demonstrating that literary memory can serve to interpret the present rather than project a specific collective future.

In Memoria social y literatura: escenas y personajes de la Venezuela contemporánea, researcher Leonor Mora Salas examines how Venezuelan short fiction produced at the beginning of the 21st century constructs and records what has been called social memory. Through a hermeneutic analysis of narratives published between 2004 and 2012, Mora Salas demonstrates that contemporary literature does not merely describe events, but rather elaborates images of the past and present that shape collective identity and social imagination, often functioning as a repertoire of experiences, processes, and social practices without directly translating into projects for change or shared visions of the future.

Memory in Venezuelan literature reveals that writing about the past becomes part of society’s symbolic heritage and serves to interpret who we are and how we got here, but it does not always translate into a foundation for future social or political projects. This cultural memory acts as an archive of images, voices, and experiences that structures the collective imaginary and preserves shared identities, affections, and losses.

The tension between the emotional archive and historical consciousness becomes clearer when we observe symbolic gestures within Venezuela. The potential shutdown of El Helicoide and the opening of its doors to the public still represents decades of repression and control. For Joselyn Martínez, sitting with a now-cold coffee, this news doesn’t bring relief, but rather serves as a reminder of what once was: “This isn’t reconciliation. This is managing the damage after having normalized it for years.”

Collective memory can register deep wounds and acknowledge injustices, but without critical mediation or historical reflection, it doesn’t automatically transform into a consciousness capable of collectively projecting the future.

The lingering question is now a condemnation: how much longer can a society survive looking backward instead of developing the capacity to look forward?

In this sense, although collective memory can keep alive the shared experience of a time that no longer exists, its predominant function in contexts of trauma or crisis is that of an emotional archive: it preserves affections, losses, and ways of relating to the past that help sustain identities, communities, and internal narratives, without guaranteeing, on its own, the construction of future perspectives or clear collective actions.

The writer Rodrigo Blanco Calderón warns that nostalgia can “falsify experience”: transforming memories into functional narratives that sidestep the complexity of the present and the challenge of building the future.

Perspectives from within and abroad

José Ortega, a scholar at LUZ, reflects: “When a society spends too much time solely focused on survival, abstract thought and social imagination wither. Not because people are incapable, but because the environment punishes any form of projection that isn’t immediate.” For Ortega, this punishment isn’t just material—precarious wages, lack of job opportunities—but also symbolic: the cultural system absorbs available cognitive energy.

María Colina, a Venezuelan political scientist based in Argentina, adds: “Memory doesn’t just offer comfort; it often acts as a barrier against any idea of ​​change. If the past seems more complete than the present, talking about the future becomes painful and almost forbidden.”

At the Los Olivos private clinic in Maracaibo, in a waiting room with worn armchairs and barely functioning fans, two siblings watch a local television channel rebroadcasting an old game show from 1990. The applause, jingles, and music fill the room with an almost painful familiarity. There’s no news, no debate, no future; only echoes of what once made them proud and happy.

“Do you remember this?” asks 73-year-old Marlene Olivares.

“Yes… and the concerts at the Poliedro, the drums, the entertainment,” replies her brother, Nervin Torres. “But what about now? What do we do?”

Marlene lowers her gaze and fiddles with her purse strap. “I don’t know… it seems like it’s all over. Like we’re stuck here too.”

The conversation ends in silence. Outside, Maracaibo continues its rhythm: LED lights blinking on rusty poles, businesses closing early, motorcycles cruising along nearly empty avenues. They don’t discuss politics or economics. They discuss a country reflected in their own inability to imagine beyond what they remember. It’s the cumulative effect of decades of social trauma and forced survival.

Because that moment, everyday and banal, is symptomatic. Nostalgia ceases to be a refuge and becomes a prison. The future is viewed through the mirror of the past, and an invisible mark remains in the blood of Venezuelans: difficulty imagining, resignation as a social inheritance, and internalized cultural backwardness.

In that scenario, Nervin walks toward the door while the sound of the television—the same as always—hangs in the air, like an echo of what once was and will never be again. The lingering question is now a condemnation: how much longer can a society survive looking backward instead of developing the capacity to look forward? Venezuela didn’t collapse solely by force: it also allowed itself to sink into a collective lethargy, where remembering was safer than thinking, and silence more comfortable than imagining. In that state, the future wasn’t stolen; it was abandoned for years, confusing silence with peace and resignation with maturity.