A Freirean understanding of the Venezuelan crisis in Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract

The Venezuelan crisis, which has seen around 50,000 Venezuelan migrants flee to Trinidad and Tobago, is a continuing humanitarian crisis. While the Venezuelan crisis and its impacts on Venezuela has received considerable scholarly attention, little importance has been giving to the crisis impacts on Venezuela’s neighbours of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) and the displaced Venezuelans that now reside there. Therefore, this paper explores the demographic change to T&T through the investigation of two separate community initiatives, using Paolo Freire’s ideas of critical consciousness as a theoretical lens. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, the paper examines how the community initiatives have acted as a humanitarian buffer to support the Venezuelan migrants, to the displeasure of some native Afro-centric individuals across Trinidad and Tobago. More specifically, this paper deconstructs the Venezuelan crisis, which was initially lauded as a socialist revolution but quickly became a catastrophic emergency both nationally and internationally, thereby leaving the neighbouring sovereign states to pick up the pieces.