Endless Crossings: mapping border-crossing journeys from Venezuela through Brazilian Acolhida operation’s boundaries
2020
This research paper is an exploration of the borders and boundaries put in place by the
Brazilian Acolhida operation as mapped out by those who have traversed them coming from
Venezuela. Hegemonic narratives put forth by the media and governmental vehicles have
praised the government’s initiative, yet, fairly little work has taken into consideration the ways
in which it affects Venezuelan migrants and refugees attempting and managing to make their
way into the country. This paper dissects the places where these frontiers were encountered
and the ways in which they were experienced by theoretically grounding the discussions on
critical cartography, immigration governmentality and migration and border studies. To
achieve this, this research’s collaborators and I make use of autoethnographic mapping,
through which stories are drawn onto paper and narrated through words, going over paths
taken from various parts of Venezuela all the way to Recife, Pernambuco. Mapping brings
to the forefront how border-crossing is a highly heterogenous experience, greatly based on
where one is positioned within power structures, allowing refugees to either traverse or be
held back at the operation’s frontiers. Acolhida’s institutional arrangement, multidimensional
background, and bordering practices have generated a framework that this research’s cartographers
have experienced at diversely located borders and boundaries. These definitions are
found to eventually conflate, accounting for their entanglement within the operation’s workings.
Finally, mapping also sheds light on their shapeshifting qualities, and the dynamic and
agentic ways through which refugees perform, adapt or contest them.
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