Leaving Venezuela: Four stories of Venezuela’s displacement crisis from the diaspora
The Venezuelan displacement crisis is the largest in Latin America’s modern history. Driven by economic collapse, political repression and a breakdown of services, about eight million people – one quarter of Venezuela’s population – are now displaced globally. Here, Shandra Back captures the stories of four remarkable women from one family, each branching off from their family tree across distances previously unimaginable.
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Note: each interview was conducted in Spanish, and all quotes have been translated into English for this story
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The enormous yellow house still stands in the tiny town of Pedregal, Venezuela. It’s now an inn, called Posada Doña Bertha, but to the Hernandez family it will always be frozen in memory as Grandma’s house.
Rebeca Hernandez’s thumb swipes across her phone. “Oh my god! It’s huge!” she laughs out loud, the memory rushing back.
Time has muddled the image in her mind, but the phone photo brings it back into focus. “I can almost see myself playing out front,” she grins.
The entrance, now a snack shop, used to overflow with cousins—draped in hammocks, sleeping late into the morning during family vacations at Grandma’s.
The cousins, part of a huge Hernandez family unit, imagined that when they outgrew those hammocks, their own children would replace them in those sweaty, swaying nets.
Now strangers fill their rooms. And their children sleep far from this house, far from cousins, and far away from Venezuela.
* * *
In Venezuela, the Hernandez family lived a comfortable middle-class life. Leaving was never part of their story.
This was home to their roots—their parents’, their grandparents’, and, they assumed, their children’s and grandchildren’s too. At least, that’s what they believed during those endless parties in the big yellow house, that the legacy would continue for generations to come.
Those who stayed never imagined that soon they’d find themselves unable to afford basic necessities like bread. Many who fled expected a quick return, waiting on a political change.
None envisioned themselves to be migrants.
The Venezuelan displacement crisis is the largest in Latin America’s modern history. Driven by economic collapse, political repression and a breakdown of services, about eight million people are now displaced globally, around one quarter of Venezuela’s population.
Now, the Hernandez Family is just one among millions who are displaced from Venezuela – each person, branching off from their family tree across distances previously unimaginable.
Within each family, the stories of individuals continue to meld, evolve, break and regrow, changing the unit as a whole. This is the story of four women–cousins–within one family and one culture who found themselves traveling far beyond Grandma’s house.
### Rebeca: Framingham, Massachusetts. Date of departure: 2004
The door whooshes open with a scent of clean candles. Warm white light fills the space – sleek, yet cozy. Toddler toys litter the ground. The smell of _arepas_ sneaks out from the oven.
The house was supposed to be in Venezuela. But somehow it’s here in the United States. Now, looking back, maybe it was always meant to be.
Twenty-one years prior, in another home, on another couch, Rebeca watched fists hit the walls. She wasn’t asking her typically even-tempered father for permission, she was telling him she was going.
She had frozen her studies, got engaged, and planned to return soon to Venezuela with tons of money to buy a home and begin her life.
“You’ll never come back!” sputtered her father, unsure where to put his limbs in this fit of rage. His voice echoed through their living room to the one next door, prompting the neighbors to call her mother and ask what could cause such a racket.
In no corner of her mind did Rebeca fathom her father would be right. Yet neither daughter nor father thought that in the end he would be the one urging her not to come back. She could think only of the money and her return.
“We imagined we would have a party and gather everyone together,” she says, sighing as she keeps one eye on her toddler circling the coffee table. “But it never happened, I never went back. People started dying, and others left.”
Rebeca followed her now-husband from Venezuela to Massachusetts in 2004 when she was 21. She’d had visas approved to come to the United States since she was a child. Her boyfriend, Jesus, had always been denied. He’d tried so many times, he’d almost given up hope when he waltzed casually into his visa appointment, hardly any money in his account, and the man said. “Congratulations.” “And he was like, ‘What?’” laughs Rebeca.
Rebeca and her husband cooking arepas in their Framingham kitchen – a small ritual that keeps the taste of home close.
In October, when it arrived in the mail, the memo read: Framingham, Massachusetts. December 15 to December 31, 2003. Only 16 days. They didn’t have much time.
Within two months, Rebeca paused her studies and married Jesus, who then left first on his ‘short winter vacation’, followed by Rebeca. After this ‘vacation,’ they’d remain in the country, undocumented, to earn the money they needed to buy a house and return home to Venezuela rich.
“We can work, and in two years we’d do the math and become millionaires,” she remembers thinking. “Over there, you can pick money from trees!”
At 5am in the tiny airport in her hometown of Maracaibo, the tarmac filled with everyone Rebeca knew. Her family, friends and neighbors blew snot into tissues with runny red eyes.
“I’ll be back so soon,” she said, passing around reassurances between hugs.
Jesus places a plate down on the coffee table, and with a soft din of ceramic, Rebeca’s eyes snap back to her youngest, who’s never been to Venezuela. None of her three children have.
Rebeca, her husband, and her three kids dressed in Venezuela’s colours for their annual holiday party: a tradition that keeps their roots alive.
“I said goodbye, saying I’d see everyone in two years,” she smiles. Now, even if a return to the familiar tarmac was possible, they would be met not with family and friends, but mostly a bustle of strangers.
Two years slipped into three, four, five. Saving was harder than expected. “We weren’t the typical immigrants who just worked,” she laughs. “We partied.”
Yet soon finances began to grow. They upsized in apartments, all the while furnishing their newly bought home in Venezuela from afar.
Her father would visit them in Massachusetts, watching the evolution of their financial upsizing. He saw the beautiful apartment, the cars, the stability. And when Rebeca gave birth to her first, Camila, her father returned to visit.
The house in Venezuela was now fully furnished. They paid off a 30-year mortgage in four years. While they were still undocumented, their daughter came into the world, a US citizen.
It took longer than expected, but after six years, it was finally time to fulfil the promise Rebeca had made to her blurry-eyed loved ones on the tarmac. They were finally ready to go home.
This time her father was the one who sat her down. “I’m not sure if this is the best idea right now,” he said gently. “Things are not looking good here.”
A referendum that year legalized indefinite re-election, allowing the authoritarian president at the time Hugo Chavez, to run over and over again with no restriction.
Wait until the next elections, Rebeca’s father urged. See if things change.
“I’ll let you know when it’s better, when to come back,” he told her.
### María Alejandra: Lima, Peru. Date of Departure: 2019
On April 30th, she left. Or almost. Speeding toward Cúcuta, a city just over Venezuela’s border in Colombia, María Alejandra still wasn’t sure she could, or should.
“Wait just a second,” she leaned forward toward the taxi driver. “We might need to turn back.”
“Turn back!” her sister yelled through the phone. That day, the opposition leader at the time, had been released from governmental detention.
Her sister fed her the words she’d been clinging to as her internal battle tried to convince the 49-year-old mother-of-two not to leave: “It’s all going to get sorted out.”
The news fed her a thread of hope. The hope that they were on the verge of change. Things would get better.
Her heart, already pounding from the finality of her decision to go, tied in a knot.
Only miles from home, feeling torn, María already felt the urge of reunification “Wait, don’t go crazy,” encouraged the driver, insisting they stick to her original destination: the bus station.
Her siblings urging her return; her children pushing her departure. María closed her eyes tight, taking a second to pause while speeding through the roads of her country.
She knew what she wanted to do. Yet, she also knew what she needed to do.
As the bus creeped out of the station, she clutched her son’s hand. Her other hand, she held empty, waiting to fill it with that of her daughter, already waiting 3,500km away in Peru.
She pauses to take a breath, the memories are a lot to travel back to. María’s hand passes now again to her 22-year-old son as she hands him a cup of coffee. He barely looks up from his video game, mumbling a thanks.
Her daughter is now out of reach yet again, only this time much further than 3,500km. She’s moved to the United States, received by Rebeca.
Sitting down at the kitchen counter, María takes a sip and begins again. Those four days on the road felt like a limbo. Neither here nor there. And the amount of Venezuelans in line! Each border stretched out like a snake, exhausted and far too long.
The lines, the waiting – these were not new to María, nor to Venezuelans. She’d grown accustomed to standing hours in line for her meager grocery list.
There were weeks when they could only afford the basic essentials, and even after waiting in the long lines, sometimes she’d reach the front, only to be told they were sold out.
In 2018, the year before she left, hyperinflation rose to astronomical levels. Prices could double every few weeks. A cup of coffee costing 450 bolivars skyrocketed to 1 million, making the currency almost worthless.
María had watched her wealth crumble right through her hands. And here in Peru, this was not the life she was supposed to be living. Being a migrant was new, and it was certainly not for her. Washing clothes? Cleaning houses? “I already have a house!”
Constantly, her heart dragged her home to Venezuela. But her body remained in Peru.
“Come back, come back,” her sister would urge her over the phone. Nostalgia hit her hard. Depression, harder.
A knife slices through a freshly made flan, and she places the clean, jiggly slice on the counter. María’s voice is soft and matter of fact as she relays emotions that, at the time, threatened to tear her apart.
María in her small kitchen making a homemade flan in Lima, Peru.
Her partner, Alejandro, a Peruvian man she met online, strolls into the kitchen to turn on the fan, the breeze cutting through the stifling Peruvian summer heat.
María smiles. Despite the mental fight, she’s found love in this new country, and she even prefers Peruvian cuisine. This makes the waiting game easier.
And when she finally returns, she’ll bring Alejandro with her. They’ll rebuild life anew, in the familiarity of the Venezuela she’ll always know as home.
“The important thing is to have hope,” she says. Venezuela’s authoritarian dictator, Nicolás Maduro, has been in power for 12 years now. Although many opposition leaders have tried to take office, none has succeeded. “I always have hope that one day Venezuela will be free from dictatorship, and they will no longer be there.”
### Gloria: Rancagua, Chile. Date of departure: 2018
In a sleepy city just south of Santiago, Chile, Gloria, who asked not to use her real name, slips from head to toe into spandex. It doesn’t matter that it’s summer, and the Chilean sun causes even the dust devils to falter. Her body still remembers the Venezuelan heat.
Everything moves slowly here. The wind seems to nudge wrappers and dried up plants down the street before giving up. Dogs bark once and then get bored. The sidewalks of Gloria’s neighborhood don’t seem to see many feet.
A Venezuelan in a small Chilean city would have been an interesting conversation-starter ten years ago. Now, it’s both commonplace and contested.
Gloria walks five minutes and stands in front of her work: the Chinese mall boasting 15 aisles of anything shoppers could and couldn’t imagine they needed. Five cars in the parking lot show that for this sleepy city, it’s a popular spot.
Gloria at her full-time job at the Chinese mall in Rancagua, Chile.
In the aisle of endless fake flowers, a woman grabs a bouquet off the shelf. As she makes her way into the games section, her hand reaches for Drinking Bingo, dropping the flowers in their place. A second hand whisks it up. Another Venezuelan woman. She drops the bouquet into a shopping cart at the end of the aisle and Gloria strolls over.
The work is slow. But it never ends. Each moment she brings an item back to its home, three more get displaced. Without a uniform, she works invisibly. Fixing the mess others make, hours meld into months.
Rancagua is not where Gloria belongs. She belongs to stability. To her home in Venezuela, where her son still lives.
Each morning, she wakes and walks through the dry streets of a city too quiet. The dust joins her, rising again and waiting to settle.
In her childhood, growing up in Caracas, middle class meant comfort. Money was never an issue.
She attended private school from high school through college, and carved herself a career in tourism and sports for the Venezuelan government, working along VIPs and organizing events like the men’s football tournament, the Copa America.
“My life was perfect because I had everything that I wanted,” she says.
But 2016 was the year everything fell. Amid a healthcare crisis, hospitals couldn’t even provide the basics. Patients began bringing their own medication and supplies in.
“Bring your mother home,” they told her. “We don’t have access to the medications that will cure her.” Her mother’s empty home fell into her brother’s possession. A familial betrayal never to be straightened.
Living in Gloria’s home, her mother became another mouth to feed, so she began denying her own. Gloria tried her best to support her own son, whose future shone only as far as the next meal.
Every day bread grew more expensive as the value of the currency dwindled. Gloria’s perfect life broke at the seams. Her mother whispered goodbye as she passed away. Gloria hugged her son tight one last time before selling her car and leaving.
Sipping on a mint lemonade in Santiago, she exhales slowly. Chile’s capital city is an hour by train from ‘home’, so she’ll visit sometimes on her off days for appointments and errands.
She lives in Rancagua with her partner, a Chilean man she met online.
She now knows too many parts of Santiago city. Got sick of moving. Of jumping between nannying, ironing, elderly care. She laughs at the consumerism of the Chinese mall because she learned long ago to live without everything but the essentials.
“I’m a Virgo,” she says. Her voice is that of a blues singer who’s smoked a few packs too many. “When you’re an earth sign, you need the stability of being in a safe, reliable place where you don’t have to move.” Gloria wasn’t made for movement; was never meant to migrate.
“That’s the problem,” she looks up with a tired smile. “I always need to find my place.”
### Karla: Santiago De Los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. Date of Departure: 2016
“A laundry room,” Karla sighs. “I wish I could live in the United States to have a laundry room.” She frowns each time she puts in a load and glances over at the toilet bowl.
Yet not even the most luxurious of laundry rooms is worth the price of a knock on the door, a yank from her house and a boot out of the country.
Here, a knock doesn’t make her jump. A stroll to the store is never laced with fear. Here she can stay. Even if she doesn’t always wish to. On paper, the Dominican Republic is also home.
Karla’s father, a Dominican man, met her mother who was Venezuelan. For Karla and her two sisters, Venezuela was their birthplace. It was always home.
Decades later, when her mother died and the Venezuelan economy imploded, the three sisters picked up the remains of their finances and moved with their aging father back to his roots in the Dominican Republic. And to make new roots of her own.
Stuck up on the entrance to the house are the letters H-O-M-E. Yet, it’s not really. “I don’t like living here,” Karla says, her eyes reflecting her sad smile. “But it’s what I can afford and where I can live.”
Karla’s 10-year-old daughter looking out of their window in the Dominican Republic.
She’s not attached to her too-small home, or the hidden neighborhood, or even her father’s country. Given an opportunity, she’d take the family and move to Portugal, or London maybe. Does she miss Venezuela? Other than a good _arepa rellena_ , she feels no real tug to return to the home she no longer recognizes.
Karla sighs. Her parents made Venezuela home. Now, her kids are her home. Yet the expense of raising a family in a country where saving is steep makes her feel trapped.
Everyone in the house pays their way. Karla, her husband, her father-in-law. They scrape by, but it feels near impossible to save for a vision of the future that isn’t this.
Karla in her kitchen in the Dominican Republic.
As white light turns golden, Karla’s 10-year-old daughter stands staring out the bars to the patio. Her head leans to the side as she watches motorcycles and neighbors pass by. She walks over to the mirror to stare at the timid face that looks back before absent-mindedly glancing around the room and heading back to her perch. Her favorite class is gym. Favorite sport: volleyball. But affording an extracurricular is out of the question.
Miguel, 11, runs into the room every so often. Phone in his left hand. Tablet in his right. The internet is his escape, says Karla, explaining that with autism, her son’s experience of childhood is different from other kids his age.
“Saving money is really tough,” she says. Every expense chips away. “If I take away the internet, he won’t understand it.”
“I often think that if I had gone to the United States, things would be different today,” she sighs with a smile. Leaving the small apartment for a second, her mind’s eye spins out an alternate reality of a different departure from Venezuela nine years ago. She blinks back to the room. She can’t think like that.
As the heavy air darkens and drops, Miguel walks into the room.
Each time the neighbors’ music pounds through her own walls, Karla’s lips purse tight. It serves as a constant reminder to the long list of reasons she wishes she wasn’t here.
“Alexa, turn it up!” shouts Miguel to their speaker, and Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny. Stacking their beats on top of the house next door, Karla grabs her son into her lap and wraps him up in a swaying hug.
“It’s where they are,” she smiles from behind her son’s shoulders. “That’s where I have to be.”
Karla with her 11-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter.
* * *
As a message leaves Rebeca’s fingertips, a phone buzzes on María’s kitchen table. Karla reaches for her pocket; Gloria glances down.
The Hernandez family WhatsApp chat buzzes endlessly, filling their screens with updates and nostalgia.
It’s been over two decades since their last full family gathering. As the crisis deepened and the years slipped by, birthdays, weddings, and funerals became fewer and farther between.
The simplicity of how it used to be feels almost maddening now. A phone call, a bag of clothes tossed in the car, and there they were— at Grandma’s.
After 23 years, Rebeca still waits on the green card list. She’s never left the US; they wouldn’t let her back in. María can’t imagine being approved for a tourist visa to visit Rebeca—or her own daughter, who has also settled in the US. Karla can’t fathom a vacation, not when finances are still so tight. Gloria, battling health issues and financial strain, constantly plans her next move.
Yet their messages always circle back to “one day”.
One day, they’ll meet in a country somewhere in between and rent a big house. Maybe it’ll be yellow.
Or maybe it really would be Grandma’s house. They’ll kick out the strangers, fill the rooms with the smell of _arepas_ , the sounds of _salsa_ and _merengue_. The adults will dance until dawn, while the kids doze on dinner chairs pushed against walls.
In Massachusetts, Rebeca looks across the dance floor at her oldest holding her youngest. The two girls wear Venezuela’s colors – yellow, blue, red – the space around them alive with movement and the scents of home.
Rebeca’s extended family dressed in Venezuela’s colours for their annual holiday party.
Life continues. Home or not, Venezuelans still know how to throw a damn good party. She grins, downs another drink, and lets out a full-bellied laugh.
“We’ll do this again together,” she smiles. One day.
All photography by Shandra Back.
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Shandra Back
