Where do I belong? Abandoning the Venezuelan Dream.

This is a story about a Portuguese-Venezuelan family and their reversed migration from Venezuela to Portugal. It ́s about a family that is being separated again, starting over in Madeira due to the Venezuelan crisis. With this need of emigrate again they are losing their sense of belonging and identity. They are leaving the Caribbean country in the face of a deep political, economical and humanitarian crisis, but they are also leaving their loved ones, and their love for the country where they were born or lived in for so long. The father and the mother of the family, 64-year-old Carlos Aguiar, and 55-year-old Rita Jardim Aguiar, moved to Venezuela in 1981 to chase their dream, where they had 5 kids. In August 2017, the couple moved back to Madeira Island leaving 3 of their children behind. One of their daughters, 28-year-old Carla Aguiar, born in Venezuela, got pregnant in April 2018 and moved to Portugal in August 2018. Josué Raul was born in January 2019. The son of Venezuelan parents, and grandson of a Portuguese couple (Rita and Carlos), he is the culmination of this family’s reversed diaspora. More than half a million Portuguese and Portuguese-descendants live in Venezuela today, following waves of immigration to the country during its oil-soaked boom of the 1950s and 1990s. Around 300,000 of the Portuguese diaspora in Venezuela are from the island of Madeira, an island with about 250,000 inhabitants today. When Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela in 1999, some Portuguese immigrants began moving back to Madeira, Portugal. But when Nicolás Maduro assumed the presidency in 2013, this phenomenon increased significantly. Since 2017, as the country plunged into an unprecedented economic and social crisis, Maduro steered Venezuela towards dictatorship. Struggling to gain access to food and medicine, between 5,000 and 10,000 Portuguese-Venezuelans moved to Portugal, making the opposite journey to start over once again. Now, they are like refugees in their home.