Caribeños

"Caribeños," a personal project that explores migration, xenophobia, and racism through my history and connections with other people from the Caribbean. This is the first chapter that tells the experiences of Caribbeans in Chile.

Caribeños is a project that explores, based on my personal story, the life experiences of people from the Caribbean intertwined with migration, xenophobia, racism, and inequalities, especially towards Afro Caribbean communities. Through photography, videoart, and soundscapes, my project portrays these communities’ resilience, ancestry, and sorority; values that weave with Native indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant communities still underestimated by the state and society as they move through the Americas.

Caribeños represents a collective search for the ties we share with other people from the Caribbean. The first segment of this project was developed in Chile, where I address my intimate and family experience as a Caribbean migrant woman, along with the stories of Makanaky, Mimy, Martina, and Wiki. Our voices and image expose ways to face racism and xenophobia in this Southern territory that we inhabit. Mimy is Cuban and I am Venezuelan, and alongside Wiki, Martina, and Makanaki, we are part of the almost one-and-a-half million migrants residing in this Chile by December 2021. Insufficient immigration policies have exacerbated racism and xenophobia and in the last years, as a result the term caribeños is now used as a slur in social media. Resignifying to expand the word that we define as ours claims dignity in the diversity of our bodies and memories that centers this project. 

My visual discourse is built around a prompt: For you, what is the Caribbean? For myself, a black Caribbean migrant woman, the Caribbean is my home, a sea with a name. How is it perceived by other Caribbeans? How they inhabit it in crisis, in the distance, and when mourning.

Caribeños recognizes my migrant and black history from my grandmother’s journey, Josefa, a black woman who decades ago abandoned her life in the Dominican Republic to emigrate to Venezuela. Approaching this topic, personally, was only possible because of my own migrant journey. To deepen this project, I expect to travel back home, to La Guaira, Venezuela, so I can examine with different/returned migrant eyes the sea that roots me. This grant will allow me to amplify this investigation and to include the portraits of Caribbean people from La Guaira, where I grew up, on the Venezuelan central coast, seems the next step forward for this project. Ultimately, I expect to conduct interviews to understand how Afro history is rooted, the challenges experienced, and its contrasts and similarities with people like me, migrants who have left Venezuela, and encounter their existence to be still resisting subjugation and structural State failures anywhere they go.