A new approach to exploring agency in migration research: The case of south-to-south migration among Venezuelan youth

Abstract

Migration is a complex phenomenon shaping population dynamics and global development, driven by interconnected economic, political, and environmental factors. The Venezuelan migration crisis has overwhelmed South America's social and health services, with many migrants lacking legal status and facing increased risks, especially among children, who confront barriers in education, limited healthcare access, and heightened vulnerability to exploitation and violence. Despite this, research often overlooks the agency and perspectives of young migrants, who are frequently excluded from decision-making processes. This article aims to address this gap by exploring the migration experiences of Venezuelan youth in Colombia, with a focus on their involvement in migration decisions, the emotional challenges they face, and their integration into a new society. Grounded in a constructivist approach, the study employed a multi-method technique based on the I-poem method to analyze 32 interviews with Venezuelan youth aged 12 to 17, who arrived in Colombia between 2019 and 2020 and currently reside in Bogotá or Medellín. As a result, the findings convey two poems—A New Life (Una Nueva Vida) and When Decided to Migrate (La Decisión de Migrar). Such poems were crafted from interview fragments, reflecting the young migrants' personal and collective narratives. The study's findings call for a shift toward a child-centered perspective in migration research, recognizing young migrants as active agents who navigate complex emotional, social, and cultural challenges. We advocate for incorporating youth voices in policy development to address their needs and recommend participatory methodologies for future research and policymaking to better protect and empower young migrants.

Migration is a complex process that significantly impacts the social, economic, and political landscapes of both origin and destination countries, while driving changes in population and global development. In 2020, 281 million people lived outside their country of birth, accounting for about 3.6% of the global population (UN DESA, 2020). This number is more than one hundred million greater than in 1990 and over three times higher than the estimated number in 1970 (International Organization for Migration [IOM], 2024), indicating a significant increase in migration flows over the last five decades.

In this context, a broad range of scholars have noted that the drivers of international migration are diverse and often intersect (King, 2013; IOM, 2009; Luthra et al., 2016; UNHCR, 2018; Yayboke & Garcia Gallego, 2019). The most common reasons for migration addressed in the literature are economic, political, and climatic. Regarding the economic reasons for migration, these are typically linked to earning a better income or securing a new job abroad. Nevertheless, economic reasons for migrating can also be linked to a level of scarcity and precarity of living that pushes people to leave the country. Further, the so-called political migration may occur when the country of origin's political context leads to resource scarcity and inflation, making it impossible for its citizens to maintain basic well-being conditions. Political migration can also refer to being forced to leave the country of origin due to political persecution, death threats, or war. Regarding climatic migration, there has been an increase in migration due to climate change in recent years. This forced migration is caused by unsustainable economic growth, which has led to resource depletion and biodiversity collapse linked to extreme global heating, especially in the world's southern regions.

It is worth noting that, even when these three reasons for migrating have been defined separately for academic purposes, in practice, they are deeply intertwined. For example, a person forced to migrate primarily due to climate change or politically-based resource scarcity will invariably look for better income opportunities in the host country or might have already found a job abroad. To add complexity to this phenomenon, each of these three reasons can also have a sub-category, including legal or illegal migration, forced or voluntary, and temporary or long-term (Mejia-Trujillo et al., 2023; Pacifico et al., 2022).

A concrete example of the intersection of reasons for migration is the case of Venezuelan citizens who have migrated in large numbers to Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador. The Venezuelan diaspora represents one of the most significant population movements, as nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015 (R4V, 2023). This massive forced migration of refugees and migrants from Venezuela is the largest displacement crisis in the world, a number that is even greater than the displacement of Syrians or Ukrainians in Europe (Muñoz et al., 2023). Specifically, forced migration is characterized by the sudden displacement of children and families from their homes due to reasons of safety or survival (Salas-Wright et al., 2024). An essential aspect of forced migration is the pressing contextual factors that compel individuals and families to flee their homes. Traditionally, this has been limited to refugees and asylum seekers. However, we understand forced migrations to include individuals who may not fit refugee/asylum criteria, such as climate migrants, those fleeing gang violence, and individuals escaping despotic or unstable governments, as is the case with the Venezuelan diaspora. Venezuelan out-migration is not driven by a single cause, but rather by a convergence of multiple factors—including economic instability, hyperinflation, political repression, and widespread violence—that have rendered life increasingly unlivable for many (Salas-Wright et al., 2022).

Although the Venezuelan situation has received significant attention in recent years due to the massive South-to-South migratory flow, the humanitarian challenges many Venezuelans face persist in various contexts across the Americas. Below, we review the literature on South-to-South migration and make a case for agency-driven research among youth in these contexts to inform policy and practices.

Challenges, Risks, and Policy Implications of South-to-South Migration

The unprecedented number of Venezuelan migrants and refugees fleeing their home country has led to a humanitarian crisis, forcing South American governments to enact more detailed migratory policies and develop strategies to expand the reach of social and health services. Despite these governmental efforts, it is estimated that two in five Venezuelan migrants still do not have legal migratory status in their host country (R4V, 2023), which increases their risk of being victims of abuses like human trafficking, forced recruitment, sexual and gender-based violence, robbery, extortion, and kidnapping (IOM, 2023).

As an array of studies have explored, there are many risks, challenges, and political implications of Venezuelan South-to-South migration, including the urban policy changes, health access issues, and educational barriers migrants face (Clauss-Ehlers, 2019; Correa-Salazar et al., 2023; Doocy et al., 2019; Hawkins Rada, 2022; Mejia-Trujillo et al., 2023; Mendoza & Miranda, 2019; Pacifico et al., 2022; Ruiz-Santacruz et al., 2023; Summers et al., 2022; Swanson, 2013). As detailed by Summers et al. (2022), a significant number of Venezuelan migrant children and youth¹ have been the most affected as they have faced specific barriers, such as school enrollment due to a lack of documentation, or high levels of xenophobia coming from their peers and adults. Moreover, the precarious conditions that underlie the forced migration flow have exposed Venezuelan children and youth to significant vulnerabilities, including malnutrition and a lack of protection services (Clauss-Ehlers, 2019; Pereira et al., 2022).

Educational policy gaps in host Latin American countries have exacerbated these challenges, leading to lower educational attainment and higher school dropout rates. As UNICEF (2023) has noted, in addition to the educational policy gaps in host countries, it is estimated that more than 30,000 Venezuelan refugee and migrant children and youth are not attending school in Colombia alone. Instead, they support their families with informal and underpaid jobs to make ends meet. This situation is leading to lower educational attainment and increased rates of school dropout among Venezuelan migrants of school age, while limiting their opportunities for a successful transition into new communities.

Based on these issues, it is now vital to look into migrant children’s and youth’s experiences, especially considering the migration patterns and family dynamics of the Venezuelan diaspora, which have been characterized by a predominance of family-oriented migration patterns with significant participation of children of school age (Ruiz-Santacruz et al., 2023). Nevertheless, despite the fact that much scholarly literature has focused on the challenges and risks that Venezuelan children and youth face during migration processes, few studies have explored their migratory experiences, centered on their voices, and highlighted their agency in the process.

Agency in Migratory Processes

As mentioned, a handful of studies have portrayed the complex emotional landscape surrounding child and youth migration worldwide, focusing on their own experiences and narratives. Overall, these studies have highlighted the interplay between hope and challenges, decision-making dynamics, and the effects of transnational movements on the mental health of children and youth.

As highlighted by Collins (2018), who studied the realities of young migrants (aged 20 to 29) studying or working in New Zealand, the youth migration pathways are complex and fraught with disruption, exploitation, and marginalization. By focusing on the concept of hope, Collins highlights the dual nature of this concept in youth migration. On the one side, hope is a driving force that motivates young individuals to pursue better futures. This hope is often rooted in aspirations for independence, education, and self-development. Despite the hopeful narrative, youth migration frequently arises from adverse home conditions, leading to experiences of estrangement and exploitation in new environments, including poor housing, lack of education, and precarious labor. Thus, while a powerful motivator, hope is not always a positive force; it can also exacerbate anxiety, frustration, and doubt as youth face uncertain futures and substandard conditions in education and labor markets.

Meanwhile, DeBrabander & Venta (2022), who provide insights into the experiences of 64 Central American youths aged 15 to 25 who migrated to the U.S., indicate that 88.3% of the participants expressed a desire to migrate and reported having significant control over their decision. This article notes that while many young people choose to migrate to the U.S., anticipating better life conditions, the reality often includes unforeseen challenges such as racism and language barriers, leading to a mix of outcomes that include both positive experiences (e.g., educational opportunities) and negative ones (e.g., social challenges).

For its part, Moskal and Tyrell (2016) focused on children’s migration decision-making and experiences of separation from parents during the process of intra-European family migration. Their findings show that coping with family separation during migration presents challenges with varying emotional impacts on children. Even when they seemed to keep doing well despite family separation, the emotional impact of migration became evident in struggles to form friendships and having to develop coping mechanisms to compensate for the absence of their parents or siblings. The authors stress that although children's involvement in migration decision-making has often been overlooked, they play significant roles in migration processes by maintaining emotional connections within families, even when they are apart. The role of children in family emotional connections also helps reunite families, even when it may not be cost-effective, i.e., when migration does not involve a better economic situation for the family.

In the case of the Venezuelan diaspora, Salas-Wright and his team (2020, 2021) addressed the experiences of Venezuelan migrant youth (average age 14) who moved to the U.S. The authors note that youth experience various stressors while arriving in this new country, including cultural stress, discrimination, and adaptation challenges. All of these factors can lead to increased substance use risk and mental health issues (Salas-Wright et al., 2020). However, Venezuelan youth who pushed to maintain regular communication with peers both in Venezuela and the U.S. showed lower levels of depression and less substance use risk than those who did not (Salas-Wright et al., 2021).

Finally, Aliaga and collaborators (2024) have focused on the social integration of Venezuelan youth (8 to 16 years old), addressing their voices in describing the process of becoming part of Colombian society and culture. From there, the authors point out, through fragments of interviews, the high levels of discrimination that Venezuelan youth—especially girls and young women—experience daily. As the study participants express, these discriminatory experiences limit their chances of integration, for example, in scholarly settings. Yet, amid this everyday experience of exclusion, the participants declare they have chosen to counter such discrimination by being willing to “keep going,” meaning trying to keep attending school and creating connections and friendships with other Colombian and migrant people there.

The connection between these articles lies in their aim to consider children and youth as active agents who can influence migration choices and decision-making, cope with migration and family separation, and navigate cultural stress or discrimination. Hearing and recognizing the voices, experiences, and perspectives of children and youth in their migratory process is now a central task if we want to develop more effective support systems for them and care for their specific needs. In the words of Aitken and Herman (2009), we must set aside frameworks that understand migrant children and youth’s problems from an adult-centric point of view—i.e., considering that we, as adults, know what they need better than themselves. As these authors mention, denying or suppressing children’s and youth’s agency will lead to imminent failure in protecting their rights.

There is no doubt that the studies presented in this section offer an interesting overview of what migrant children and youth think, feel, and experience upon arriving in the host country and its culture, highlighting the inherent hardships of this process. However, when focusing on children’s and youth agency, they have some gaps that are worth addressing. On the one hand, these studies fail to grasp how the beginning of the migration process unfolds (i.e., what happens when children and youth first realize they will have to leave their country), thus overlooking the experiences of children and youth as they face the decision to migrate, what are they (re)actions, and how they managed (sometimes alone) the migration itself.

On the other hand, the studies presented so far view the mechanisms or strategies developed by children and youth to cope with difficult experiences as mere responses. This means the findings describe these mechanisms or strategies as a coherent action, not focusing on the ongoing negotiations children and youth have to navigate or the subjective tensions they constantly face in responding to racism, exclusion, or marginalization in their environments.

This article draws on the ontological turn in childhood and youth studies (Spyrou, 2019) to explore the agency of migrant children and youth, integrating critical childhood studies with new materialist and post-humanist theories of agency. From the perspective of critical childhood theory, children and youth are recognized as having their own thoughts, intentions, and perspectives (Gurdal & Sorbring, 2018), positioning them as active agents in shaping the meaning of their lives. In other words, they are not mere recipients of information, or “in progress” individuals that will be fully named as such when adulthood comes. In contrast, children and youth are creators of the(ir) social world (Kuczynski, 2003) and, thus, have the right to be heard and have a say in all decisions affecting them—either at home, in the community, at school, or in individual legal and administrative contexts (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989). As Willems (2019) notes, this framework reinforces the view of children and youth as individuals who should be treated and considered as active participants in every social setting they are part of, and who have the capacity, entitlement, and responsibility to contribute their ideas and opinions to each of those contexts.

New materialist and post-humanist theories help us think about the agency of children and youth—that is, their ability to take part in and influence social life—as something that develops through their everyday interactions with people and things around them. Following the idea of relational agency (Barad, 2017), we don’t see agency as something children or youth simply have, like the ability to make rational decisions or express opinions. Instead, we understand agency as something that is formed through relationships and connections (Spyrou, 2018). In this view, agency is the ability to affect and be affected, and it comes from the ongoing interactions between people, bodies, and environments in specific situations. These relationships are constantly shaping and reshaping the individuals involved (Barad, 2014). In other words, agency is created within everyday networks of relationships, giving children and youth the ability to feel, respond, and act in ways that influence both themselves and others (Hawley, 2022; Roa-Trejo et al., 2024).

In this context, agency will be visible, for example, when children recognize their feelings and talk to others about them—in what they like or dislike; in saying what they miss or not; or in being aware of deeply missing their extended family but keeping it to themselves to take care of those closest to them. Each of these micro-social moments—of self-recognition, caring for others, or feeling free to feel—are not individually produced but emerges through the interactions between children, youth, and others. The circulation of affect between bodies shapes them, and without these relational dynamics, such responses would not arise.

Since agency is something embedded and produced in the very relationship between (migrant) children and youth and all that surrounds them, there is no other way to find it than by unveiling their lives and migration experiences. Based on this framework, this study aimed to delve deeper into the migration experiences of Venezuelan youths (12 to 17 years old) who moved to Colombia in the context of forced accompanied migration while being children. This paper contributes to the youth migration literature by addressing the voices of migrant youths and narrating their stories of migration from childhood to youth, including fragments of their lives in both Venezuela and Colombia.

While writing this article, based on a constructivist paradigm that values the subjective experiences and perspectives of participants (Charmaz, 2006), we decided to keep children and youth’s experiences as they were, capturing, mostly, their lives in a sensed embodied way. From there, we used the I-poems technique (Gilligan et al., 2006; Gilligan & Eddy, 2021) to analyze 32 interviews that portrayed the personal and collective migration experiences of Venezuelan youths living in Colombia. The findings of this article are composed of two poems: A New Life (Una Nueva Vida) and When Decided to Migrate (La Decision de Migrar). We invite you to read them as fragments of youths’ lives, not merely academically taken fragments of text; we invite you to experience what we experienced while listening to these youths’ stories.

Method

Recruitment and Sample

Participants in this qualitative study were recruited from a larger longitudinal, cross-national study with Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. This study took place in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, at the beginning of 2023. At this time, Colombia was hosting more than 2.5 million Venezuelans, making it the country with the largest population of Venezuelan refugees and migrants. Additionally, in 2023, Colombian President Gustavo Petro continued to prioritize the integration of Venezuelan migrants through policies focused on inclusion and access to public services. Research team members from our community partner agency in Colombia—Corporación Nuevos Rumbos—collected the data in person. The study was funded by a government agency that funds public health and health equity research.

Participants in the larger study were recruited using a referral system where initial seed participants are referred through community partners, and participants refer others to the study in exchange for additional compensation (Heckathorn, 2002). Youth in the larger study were then invited to participate in interviews lasting between 40 and 60 minutes. Participants were compensated for completing the interview, with adolescents receiving 40,000 Colombian Pesos (CP; approximately 10 US dollars [USD]). Participants were eligible to refer up to five additional participants and could receive 20,000 CP (approximately USD 4) for each successful referral (referred participant who joined the study). All youth participants in this study migrated with their parents or primary caregivers, and no cases of unaccompanied migration or family separation during the migration process were reported.

A total of 32 youths agreed to participate in the qualitative interviews. Participants were Venezuelan youth ages 12–17, mostly boys (21 out of 32). Most arrived in Colombia in 2019 (10), seven arrived before 2018, and 14 arrived in 2020 or later. The sample was split between those residing in Bogotá (16) and Medellín (16). Lastly, most of the sample was enrolled in school at the time of the interview (25 out of 32).

Procedures

Interview data was collected between April and May 2023. Participants were recruited in partnership with our community partner organizations in Bogotá and Medellín. Research team members and assessors distributed flyers and recruited eligible participants to enroll in the study. Venezuelan migrant youth between 12 and 17 years of age living in Bogotá or Medellín, who arrived after 2015, were eligible to take part in the study. All data were collected in person, using office spaces managed by the Colombia partner organization. Those who agreed to participate had parental consent and assented to be enrolled in the study. Interviews were conducted in person and in a private room with the project staff. All participants completed the interview in Spanish and were recorded with the participant’s consent. The interview included questions about their life in Venezuela (“To start, could you share a bit about your life in Venezuela before moving to Colombia?”), questions about their and their families decision to migrate (“Tell me about how you and your family decided to leave?” and “Tell me what it was like to leave Venezuela?”), and their overall adjustment to life in Colombia (“Since moving to Colombia, how has your life changed?” and “What have been some of the challenges, and what have been some of the benefits?”. Interviews were then transcribed, eliminating any identifiable information.

Positionality Statement

Data collection was conducted by a not-for-profit research organization in Colombia and its team of qualitative researchers. The data collection team comprised two women with clinical psychology training and one man with training in social work, all of whom had experience working with youth and young people. To fully appreciate the perspectives shared by the youth, it is important to consider the context in which the interviews were conducted. The participants were Venezuelan youth who had migrated with their families to Colombia within the past five years, many of whom were attending school at the time of the interviews. Interviews were conducted in a youth-friendly office space, without the presence of their parents, which helped foster trust and openness during the interview. Since the interviewees were under 18 years old, their parents signed an informed consent form that approved and supported their participation in the study. The interviewers used participatory and narrative-based techniques to encourage the youth to reflect on their experiences in their own words. This methodological approach was crucial in capturing the emotional complexity and nuanced perspectives that emerged, particularly around themes such as migration, uncertainty, and adaptation.

The three analysts conducted data analysis. All three analysts are Latin American women and native-born Spanish speakers with training in qualitative methods. The lead analyst is a middle-class, hetero-cis woman from Chile who migrated to the U.S. during adulthood and has a PhD in psychology. Her work has focused on analyzing child welfare workers' subjectivity. The second analyst is a middle-class, hetero-cis woman from Ecuador who migrated to the U.S. during early adolescence and has a PhD in community psychology. Her work has focused on the mental health disparities of immigrant youth and their families. The third analyst is a qualitative PhD sociologist and poet living in Chile, who is fluent in Spanish and English. Her research has focused on creating a new relationship between art and sciences, addressing contemporary philosophical thinking to articulate these disciplines and repairing the risk of intellectual work to separate life itself. Her main work involved translating poems from Spanish to English.

Political Context

In Colombia, the legal distinction between migrants and refugees is shaped by both international and national frameworks. Refugees are protected under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration, which Colombia has adopted to expand the refugee definition to include individuals fleeing generalized violence, internal conflict, or massive human rights violations—conditions applicable to many Venezuelans (ACNUR, 2021) Refugees in Colombia have access to healthcare, education, employment, and social security, provided they are formally recognized through the asylum process.

Colombia has implemented a progressive policy to support Venezuelan migrants. On February 8, 2021, the Colombian government announced the creation of the Estatuto Temporal de Protección para Migrantes Venezolanos (ETPV), also known as Temporary Protection Status for Venezuelan Migrants, which took effect on June 1, 2021 (Migración Colombia, 2021; Human Rights Watch, 2021). This ten-year legal framework allows eligible Venezuelans to regularize their status and access formal employment, healthcare, education, and financial services. It also provides a pathway to permanent residency and is designed to complement the international refugee protection regime by addressing the unique scale and nature of Venezuelan displacement in Colombia (Migración Colombia, 2021).

Data Analysis

Rooted in a constructivist paradigm (Charmaz, 2006) that values the subjective experiences and perspectives of participants, we implemented a qualitative approach that acknowledges the importance of methodological flexibility, multi-method approaches, and the integration of various epistemological stances, such as objectivism, constructivism, and deconstructionism, to understand the complexities of social phenomena better.

Rather than categorizing participants’ narratives through the lens of pre-existing theories, we adopted a methodological stance that foregrounds the lived, always-changing experience of others. This approach, inspired by grounded theory but not limited to it, seeks to expand the definition of agency by attending to how individuals articulate their own positions, decisions, and resistances within the context of forced migration. The methodology is not only inductive but also dialogical, allowing for the emergence of theory from the data while remaining attentive to the complex, affective, and embodied dimensions of agency in children and youth migratory processes.

We conducted data analysis in three interrelated phases. First, we conducted open-coding of the 32 interview transcripts through in vivo coding technique using the exact words or phrases spoken by participants as codes (Charmaz, 2006). From these codes, we grouped them into eight overarching categories that describe the migratory experience of the participants in this study.

In the second analysis phase, guided by the codes mentioned above, the two senior analysts jointly triangulated the previous codification. Through a process of constant comparison, the two coders developed more robust and nuanced categories. As a result, five codes were selected based on the criterion that they specifically addressed the research question guiding this study – i.e., how young Venezuelans have experienced the forced migration process from their country of origin to Colombia.

Then, guided by the “I-Poems” technique (Gilligan et al., 2006; Gilligan & Eddy, 2021), the research team selected, for each code, all the affirmative phrases that started with a personal affirmation or opinion of the participants. By paying attention to the personal pronoun (“I”), the I-poems technique highlights the diverse subjective experiences of each participant, portraying both personal histories and a collective experience of youth forced to migrate (Edwards and Weller, 2012). By using poetry as an analytical technique, we recognize the importance of people as multiple storytellers, thus allowing us to inquire into the (migrant) children and youth's experience openly and ambiguously, in a way that cannot be closed off to only one interpretation, category or result (Maillard, 1998). From there, each poem is an open and complex system that has its own criteria of truth outside of formal logic, displacing rational and dualistic forms of portraying experience (Eagleton, 2010; Maillard, 1998; Montalbetti, 2019).

Due to the data being in Spanish, we had to make some changes to the original technique for selecting the fragments of phrases. As Gilligan and Eddy (2012) mention, we should carefully listen and pick all the sentences starting with “I” deployed in the participants' narratives. Nevertheless, in Spanish, there is no need to implicitly use the personal pronoun “I” when referring to personal experiences, ideas, thoughts, or opinions. From there, we expanded the selection and also considered phrases starting with: we or us (nosotros), my (mío), or to me (para mi).

In the third phase, we individually selected the phrases that we thought were more representative of each code. The representativeness was related to the content of the code and the discussions we had in the second phase while triangulating the in vivo coding. Regarding this, we selected the phrases looking for the “data that glow” (Gherardi et al., 2018). This expression has been used by Gherardi and colleagues (2018) to refer to the affective dimension that emerges when the data encounters the researchers. The “glowing” of the data points out the researchers’ experience with the data: a relationship that provokes an evocative feeling of all that is intangible, exceeds meaning, and has a decidedly embodied aspect that resonates with/in bodies.

From there, based on the previous analysis and the “data that glow” onto-epistemological framework, each researcher, on her own, selected the phrases that would later be discussed in a team meeting. During this team meeting, we selected phrases that we all considered important during our individual work. Then, based on the Poetic Transcription proposed by Leary (2015) and guided by the criteria for poetic inquiry suggested by Faulkner (2005) – i.e., artistic concentration, embodied experience, discovering/surprise, conditionality, meaning of the phrase regarding the whole narrative, and social transformation – we collectively created one poem per code. When reading the five respective poems, we noticed that either some of them talked about the same topics or there were noticeable differences in their extension (some of them were too short or too long). In this context, we decided to merge some of them, ending up with the two poems you will see in the next section.

Trustworthiness

The study’s rigor was evaluated in accordance with Shenton’s (2004) recommendations. The research team established coding methods in line with Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2006) and followed the “I-Poems” technique guide (Gilligan et al., 2006; Gilligan & Eddy, 2021) to ensure credibility. Transferability was addressed through a thorough description of the sample, sampling methods, and data analysis process. A systematic analytic process enhanced dependability. Confirmability was ensured by building trust with participants throughout the data collection process. Triangulation and reflexive memoing further increased confirmability, aligning findings with participant experiences (Denzin, 1999).

Results

A New Life	Cambio de Vida
My life in Venezuela was normal	Mi vida en Venezuela era normal
	Allá éramos más unidos, me imagino que por la situación
There, we were closer, I thought so because of the situation	Iba donde mis tías que me daban comida
	La economía no era muy buena:
I went to my aunts who gave me food	la comida se puso escasa
The economy was not very good:	a veces no teníamos que comer
food became scarce	o comíamos poquito
sometimes we didn't have anything to eat	para sobrevivir
or we ate a little
to survive	Mi vida en Venezuela era muy buena.
	Me acostumbré a estar allá
My life in Venezuela was very good	era un ambiente muy libre
I got used to being there	yo tumbaba mango2
It was a very free place	eso era lo que más me gustaba a mí
I ate the mangoes I harvested from the trees
that was what I liked the most	Nos tocó duro
	de tenerlo todo a no tener nada
It was hard for us	Cuando mi familia tenía pa’ comer
from having everything to having nothing	nada más me daban a mí.
When my family had something to eat	Yo siempre trataba de disimular,
They gave food to me	nunca pasar hambre como tal.
I always tried to fake it,	Yo siempre decía que no,
not showing that I was hungry	porque no había dinero para lo que yo quería
I always said no,	Vivíamos con mi abuela,
because there was no money for what I wanted	toda la familia vivíamos en una casa.
We lived with my grandmother,	No era nada peligroso, estábamos con seguridad
The whole family lived in one house.	Con mis amigos salíamos a jugar todos los días.
It was not dangerous, we were safe
With my friends, we went out to play every day.	En Colombia cambiaron un montón las cosas:
	nos reencontramos con amigas
In Colombia things changed a lot:	nos brindaron ayuda.
we meet again with friends	Me gusta vivir aquí
They gave us help.	Tenemos la posibilidad de comprar nuestras cosas
I like living here	Cuando vi los precios de la chuchería fue lo que más me
We have the chance to buy our things	emocionó
When I saw the prices of the candy, that was what
excited me the most.	Yo acá maduré mucho
	Empecé a ver las cosas como en realidad son
I grew up a lot here	Aquí he aprendido mil veces más
I started to see things as they really are
Here I have learned a thousand times more	En Colombia me deprimí y no quise estudiar más
In Colombia I became depressed and did not want to	No saber tanto de Colombia me afectó
study anymore	Me enseñaron pocas cosas allá
Not knowing so much about Colombia affected me	Sentía: yo no voy a salir adelante en un país que no es mío
They taught me a few things there	Digo: ¡Ay! Un venezolano logrando algo aquí en
I felt: I'm not going to get ahead in a country that is not mine.	Colombia
I say: Ay! A Venezuelan achieving something here in	¡Eso sería algo!
Colombia	Todo me pegó al principio
That would be something!	Yo era más un niño
	Decían cosas que yo no entendía
Everything hit me at the beginning	Yo tenía mucho acento venezolano
I was a child	Nadie me entendía como yo hablaba
They said things that I didn't understand	Los tres primeros meses todo era difícil
I had a strong Venezuelan accent	En Bogotá sí se me hizo difícil el transporte
No one understood how I spoke	Lo de la familia, estamos lejos todos
	El clima
The first three months everything was difficult	(Acá todo es muy frío)
In Bogotá, yes, transport was difficult for me	la ciudad tan grande
The family thing, we are all far away	el transporte público
The weather	la gente
(Everything is very cold here)	cómo relacionarse con otros
the city so big	Adaptarme a la comida
the public transport	(me adapté, pero no mucho)
the people	En Colombia me siento feliz, me siento cómoda
how to relate to others	En Colombia he comido más
adapt to the food	Ahora sí que comemos
(I adapted, but not much)	Hice amigos muy rápido
	Me gustan las clases
In Colombia I feel happy, I feel comfortable	Me ha gustado el básquet
In Colombia I have eaten more	las cosas que yo no podía hacer en Venezuela
Now we really eat	En Venezuela yo tenía familia, tenía como distraerme
I made friends very quickly	Acá no.
I like the classes	Extraño a mis amigos
I have liked basketball	jugar con ellos
the things I couldn't do in Venezuela	Extraño a mi familia
	Extraño a mis abuelos
In Venezuela I had a family, I had a way to distract	Es lo que más extraño
myself	[extraño el] patio
I don't	la seguridad
I miss my friends
play with them	Estamos mucho mejor aquí:
I miss my family	hemos sabido confrontar [las dificultades]
I miss my grandparents	hemos sabido hablar en familia los problemas.
That is what I miss the most	Nos vinimos para tener una mejor vida
[I miss the] backyard	Tenemos, pero también nos falta
the safety	Estamos sin ropa
	No tenemos ni para comer,
We are much better off here:	pero nos las arreglamos.
we have known how to confront [the difficulties]
We have known how to talk about problems as a	Mi vida, sí, cambió bastante.
family.	estamos bien
We came here to have a better life	no nos falta nada
We have somethings, but we also lack others
We do not have clothes
We don't even have enough to eat,
but we manage.
My life, yes, has changed a lot.
we're ok
we are missing nothing

(A New) Life After Migration

Hunger and food scarcity were central topics in the memories of life in Venezuela. Hunger and general shortages emerged as a harsh reality experienced by these young people. However, in Venezuela, the sense of security and community was also fundamental to their life. Whether due to scarcity or because homes were shared with extended family, family members care for one another, with grandmothers and aunts emerging as key figures in sustaining participants’ lives in Venezuela.

Interestingly, the feeling of security is not a reason described by participants for migrating, unlike in other Latin American countries, especially those in Central America, where migration is often motivated by violence. In the case of these children and youth migrants’ experiences, their life in Venezuela was “normal” and “good,” even a place where they felt free. Even when they do not avoid discussing the economic issues their country faced, the participants do not see this as a problem that tainted their entire experience. In contrast, they mention at the beginning of the poem, “My life in Venezuela was normal (…). The economy was not very good: food became scarce, sometimes we didn't have anything to eat, or we ate a little to survive. My life in Venezuela was very good (…) It was a very free place.”

This illustrates how migrant children and youth recognize the complexity of their migratory experiences. Rather than viewing migration as a unidirectional, coherent process with a singular outcome—typically framed as adjustment and coping with the challenges of being an immigrant—they understand it as a multilayered phenomenon. Their perspective resists dichotomous interpretations, embracing instead the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in migration.

Perhaps one of the most unexpected descriptions of their lives in Venezuela is that it was a place where they experienced freedom. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, Venezuela is going through a political-economic crisis that has led to severe scarcity of food and, in many cases, political persecution. In this context, the experiences of children and youth show us a different view of what freedom means. For them, freedom is linked to play, eating fresh, delicious fruit, being with family, and gathering with friends. This embodied conceptualization of freedom certainly diverges from the traditional meaning of the word, typically associated with capitalism (see, e.g., Freeman & Freeman, 1980), in which being free means having the individual capacity to choose what to do with the resources available to make one's life more prosperous. In this poem, freedom is described as doing things one likes, enjoying what one has, and being with others with whom one likes to be, thus focusing on the relational and embodied aspects of freedom, prioritizing collective well-being over individual accumulation (Simbaña, 2011).

Regarding life in Colombia, an important aspect is the happiness or joy of buying items or food that are not part of the family's basic needs, such as sweets. Upon migrating to Colombia, youth can indulge in things they did not have the opportunity to do back in Venezuela. Additionally, young people often report growing up or maturing upon arrival in Colombia. This maturation process is linked to the everyday challenges of arriving in an unfamiliar place with a different culture, such as food, climate, social relationships, education, and dialect – even when the same language is spoken.

Regarding the above, the youth’s awareness of the implications of being a migrant stands out – the limited opportunities for a person in a country where they are not a citizen. Moreover, it is worth noting that they can actually recognize the fact that they were different – “a child” – before the migration process. They also openly acknowledge the depression and its consequences—e.g., “I did not want to study anymore.” In this context, it is worth noting the capacity of children to name such a difficult experience as depression and have the awareness of its consequences as well as its link to migration. This is a plot twist in the traditional narrative of migration studies, where the literature shows that migrant adults usually fail to recognize their feelings in the process of moving from one country to another due to the stigma this carries (Bär et al., 2021; Makowski & von dem Knesebeck, 2017)

Thus, this poem highlights the need to reconsider adult-centric perspectives on migration by foregrounding the lived experiences of a child. Traditional migration narratives often prioritize adult concerns—employment, legal status, or economic mobility—while overlooking how children experience and interpret these transitions. However, the poem reveals that children are not passive observers but active participants in the migration process, negotiating and expressing loss, adaptation, and identity in complex ways. For instance, the line “We came here to have a better life. We have some things, but we also lack others” encapsulates the duality of gain and loss that characterizes the migration experience. This sentiment is echoed in “We do not have clothes / We don't even have enough to eat, / but we manage,” which illustrates how children internalize and articulate economic precarity. These lines challenge the notion of childhood as a protected, carefree phase, instead presenting it as deeply entangled with structural inequalities. The poem powerfully illustrates the theme of trade-offs that characterize the migration experience, particularly for children.

This trade-off is not merely logistical; it is deeply emotional and developmental. The youth’s reflection, “I miss my friends / play with them / I miss my family / I miss my grandparents,” reveals the psychosocial cost of migration, particularly the rupture of intergenerational bonds and the loss of a familiar support system. These losses align with trauma and resilience literature, which emphasizes that forced migration often entails grief for a former way of life (Perreira & Ornelas, 2013; García et al., 2024). The lines “I like living here / We have the chance to buy our things,” and “I have liked basketball / the things I couldn't do in Venezuela,” suggest that children actively negotiate their new environments, finding meaning and joy even in the midst of loss. This suggests that young migrants are not passive victims but active agents who have the capacity to navigate multiple cultural worlds (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001).

When Decided to Migrate	La Decisión de Migrar
When things started to get worse, they thought about leaving	Cuando la cosa empezó a empeorar, ellos pensaron en venirse
My mom left	Se fue mi mamá…
I knew we were next	Yo sabía que nosotros íbamos más atrás
I knew she was raising the money to take us	Sabía que ella estaba reuniendo la plata para irnos todos
My father was the first	Mi padre fue el primero
Then my mom	Luego mi mamá
I didn't want to be there anymore	Yo ya no quería estar allá
I wanted to be with my mom	Quería estar con mi mamá
We didn't want to be away from each other	No queríamos estar distanciados
From one moment to the next we decided to leave the country	De un momento a otro decidimos salir del país
I did not know	Yo no sabía
It hit me very hard	Me pegó muy duro
My mom had her suitcase ready, hidden	Mi mamá tenía la maleta lista, escondida
She told me when we were just leaving,	Me dijo cuando ya nos veníamos,
when the car was already outside.	cuando el carro ya estaba afuera.
I didn't say goodbye to anyone	No me despedí de nadie
I knew I was going to cry	Sabía que iba a llorar
[In Venezuela] I felt free	[En Venezuela] Me sentía libre
I didn't want to come here	No me quería venir para acá
They sent someone to pick us up	Nos mandaron a buscar
I was rather happy	Yo venía bien ilusionada
I wanted to know Colombia	Quería conocer Colombia
I wanted to leave the country	Quería salir del país
look for a better life	buscarme otra vida mejor
I thought there was a better future here than there	Pensé que aquí había un futuro mejor que allá
The child will not understand it because he is so young	El niño no lo va a entender porque está pequeño
I didn't talk about those topics with my parents.	Yo no hablaba de esos temas con mis padres
[Leaving was] hard, complicated	[Salir fue] duro, complicado
I was so little	Era pequeño
I didn't want to leave
You leave family, friends, your home
It's hard to leave my family	Yo no me quería ir
	Uno deja familia, amigos, su casa
	Es difícil dejar a mi familia
I never thought I would live here	Nunca pensé vivir acá

About the Decision to Migrate

The decision to migrate is often seen as something nebulous and uncertain for young people. Migration typically occurs in stages, where one family member migrates first, stabilizes in the new country, and then the rest of the family follows. When one person leaves, the others know they will eventually leave too, but for young Venezuelans, there is constant uncertainty about when this will happen. Phrases like “We left from one day to the next” don't refer to a lack of awareness about the decision to migrate but rather to the unpredictability of when it will occur (e.g., “She told me when we were just leaving, when the car was already outside”). This uncertainty creates, and it’s created by a gap in communication, where children might say, “I didn’t talk about these topics with my parents,” reflecting either a lack of specific information (not knowing when they will have the money to move) or intentionally limited information (parents not telling everything to their children). Thus, the decision to migrate is inherently nebulous, capturing the young migrants' experience of having few details or facing rapid changes as they navigate the complex reality of migration.

Two things are worth mentioning here. First, freedom is a concept that reemerges in youths’ narratives when they recall their lives in Venezuela. However, this feeling is now directly linked to the desire not to leave the country. In this context, participants explicitly shared that they felt hit by the experience of migration, and subsequently chose to take small actions to make it more bearable, such as avoiding goodbyes with friends to prevent themselves from breaking down in tears. This way of referring to the experience of living in one's country of origin is not typically depicted when discussing forced migration. Even when there is an illusion of getting to a new place with more basic resources and new things to learn and live, there is also a feeling of leaving behind a life that was not bad but full of people and emotional bonds.

Second, throughout the narrative, there is a sense of certainty about the emotional aspects of migration. These youth, while still children, understood the implications of their family leaving and the things they lacked the strength to do, such as saying goodbye. The latter opens the door to a new way of conceiving children in the migratory process. We might openly ask about their feelings and support their process from there. Children and youth know themselves; they understand their feelings and the process, also knowing that adults often think, “The child is not going to understand.” In this context, it is also interesting to note that the “information cover” adults often use, thinking children will not understand what is going on, is also used by children and youth themselves. As shown in the fragment, “I didn’t talk about those topics with my parents,” children understand that expressing the experiential ambiguity of the process, which involves both sadness and happiness, joy and nostalgia, cannot be fully understood by adults.

Discussions

This study aimed to understand the experiences of Venezuelan youth during their migration process to Colombia. Specifically, we sought to understand how these young people experienced the migration process to Colombia as children, addressing their role in the process of migration from their home country and the feelings and expectations associated with it. We implemented a novel approach to qualitative methods to center the youths' voices. Findings from the present study shed new light on the complex migration experience of Venezuelan migrant youth, as well as the dynamics of adjustment and integration into a new society in the context accompanied by forced migration.

Beyond documenting these experiences, this study contributes to the development of substantive theory by offering a grounded understanding of agency as it emerges from the poetic and methodological dimensions of the research itself. Here, agency is not treated as a fixed or abstract concept, but as something that is anchored in their imaginative capacity to narrate and reframe their lived experiences. The poetic form—both as a method and as a product—becomes a site where the complexity of children and youth agency is enacted, felt, and made visible. This approach challenges adult-centric, traditional, and rational, experience-detached perspectives that often dominate migration research. By foregrounding the voices and narratives of youth, we expand the concept of agency to include the capacity to imagine, articulate, and make sense of one’s own journey, without limitation by age, gender, or restricting it to a concrete act or decision. As shown in these poems, agency is in the small recognitions of one’s feelings, joy and sadness, desires, and expectations. Agency lies in the awareness that others may see us as too young to understand, yet we still articulate the complexity of our lives with striking clarity. Agency means embracing ambiguity, because that is how we feel, and that is how life is.

For these youths, migration was not experienced as all good or all bad. Life in Venezuela was depicted as both filled with scarcity and security around family. On the one hand, the youth discussed the economic hardship and recurring hunger they and their families faced before migrating. On the other hand, they fondly remember life in Venezuela, missing the closeness to extended family and the sense of security that came with knowing the lay of the land. Nonetheless, the youth also recognize the improvements in their quality of life and the access to more opportunities in their new home. In a previous study with adult Puerto Rican Hurricane María migrants, the authors describe the concept of a trade-off, where María migrants exchange the warmth of family and culture for better quality of life in the U.S. (García et al., 2024). Similarly, the youth in this study discuss the trade-off between family closeness and feeling secure in Venezuela, versus pursuing more opportunities and a stable education in Colombia.

In this regard, the migration experience is neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but rather, the youth described it as both good and bad. While the youth described the struggles of adjusting to the culture, such as the food, the weather, and leaving their family behind, they also acknowledged the benefits of being able to eat and having more stability. They hold the experience of migration as both being beneficial and posing challenges. Often, the migration experience is depicted as either positive or negative. In the case of youth migration, the literature often describes the negative effects of cultural stress on mental health, including symptoms of depression and anxiety, as well as behavioral problems, such as drug use, among young migrants (Salas-Wright et al. 2021). However, the youth in this study emphasized that their migration experience has two sides, which are simultaneously positive and negative, a mixed feeling.

The poems invite us to rethink childhood not as a universal or static category, but as a socially and politically situated experience. Theoretical frameworks from childhood studies – such as the “new sociology of childhood,” which views children as social actors – can help illuminate how young migrants navigate and make sense of their worlds. These findings challenge our understanding of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and invite us to reconsider these categories in relation to culture, context, history, and individual experiences. As these poems suggest, migration processes and their implications cannot be evaluated in a dichotomous manner (good/bad). Still, they must be placed within the complex web of sociohistorical, socioeconomic, cultural, and familial relationships in which they are embedded.

As we have mentioned, the migration literature is often dominated by an adult-centric perspective of migration, overlooking the experiences and voices of young migrants. This narrow perspective overlooks the complexities of migration, particularly when considering the impact that the decision to migrate has on migrant youth. Even when understanding the reasons for leaving Venezuela, youth in our study experienced nebulous or uncertain feelings while facing their parents' decision to leave the country. Similarly, in a study with Romanian migrant children, Pantea (2011) writes: “The decision to migrate is grounded in a shared understanding of needs. Yet, the decision-making itself is rather parents’ individual choice, taken for children/young people’s best interests.” (p.389). That is to say, the youth are often not involved in deciding to leave.

Youth in our study express that, while they are aware of the decision to migrate, they still experience uncertainty about when it will occur. Parents are often motivated to migrate by benefits such as better education and opportunities for their children. However, the children’s participation in these decisions is generally not encouraged, despite these intentions being focused on them. This paradox of acting 'in the best interest' of children without involving them in discussions can result in the youths’ feeling of uncertainty and confusion regarding the (parents') decision to migrate (Moskal & Tyrrell, 2016).

Shifting our perspective to a more child-centric understanding of migration allows us to better recognize the unique experiences and needs of young migrants. By focusing on the voices and perspectives of immigrant youth, we can gain insight into how migration decisions impact their sense of agency, identity, and belonging upon resettlement. This shift acknowledges that children are not merely passive recipients of the migration process but are active participants who navigate complex emotional, social, and cultural landscapes as they adapt to new environments.

It is worth noting that, depending on the characteristics of certain forced migration contexts, (migrant) children and youth’s agency will not be lost if their opinions or ideas do not alter the final outcome, i.e., leaving their country of origin. Regarding this, the traditional conceptualizations of agency – such as decision-making, autonomy, or participation in family processes – will not be enough to grasp the complexity of the forced migration phenomenon. Since the migration is something inevitable, children and youth’s agency will be understood here as, for example, expressing their opinions on the migration process or asking questions about how everything will work. Additionally, it will involve expressing their emotions regarding migration and deciding how they will leave (e.g., whether they will say goodbye to their family or friends). This leaves a path for studies that can broaden the concept of agency by examining the interstices of interactions and relationships migrant children and youth have in the process of leaving their homes.

Regarding this study's methodology, employing the I-Poems technique as a qualitative approach to capture the experiences of young Venezuelan migrants enabled us to present a more nuanced understanding of the personal and collective narratives of immigrant youth, providing rich, qualitative data that reflects their emotions, thoughts, and lived experiences. However, even when aiming to highlight their narratives, we must recognize that our voice as Latin American academic women is interviewing with theirs. Since we are not portraying the complete extent of the interviews, nor did we ask the participants to collaborate in the creation of the poems, we acknowledge that our subjectivity has influenced these findings. Such an issue is not per se problematic. As feminist theorists have stated (Eddy, 2022; Haraway, 1988; Haynes, 2023), we are always meddling in our research work: there is no such thing as neutrality in scientific research. Regarding this, our task as researchers is to be ethically responsible by being reflexive about our social power position through academic production. Even when we use a step-by-step method, we must acknowledge that our position in this world allowed us to use it and understand it, and even write this article in a language that is not our mother tongue.

The findings from this study have several important policy and intervention implications. First, findings advocate for policies that promote the social, economic, and cultural inclusion of young migrants’ participation in the discussion about promoting and enhancing access to education, healthcare, and social services in their host countries. In this line, the results of this study encourage governments and policymakers to involve migrant youth in developing and implementing the policies and interventions that affect them. This includes youth advisory councils and direct engagement with youth in policy and research. Second, our findings highlight that any psychological or social intervention should be linked to the decision to migrate itself – meaning, to the migration process and its situated aspects. Rethinking this could help solve potential mental health or adaptation problems in the new country of residence. This type of intervention could also be incorporated into various public systems (health, education) without major restructuring.

For future research, we propose to work side-by-side with youth not only in the data collection process but also in its analysis. The use of more participatory methodologies (see, e.g., Springgay, 2022) in youth studies is imperative to promoting children's and youth rights, specifically their right to freely express and have access to information.

As we have mentioned, the findings from our study emphasize the importance of understanding the complete migration experience of Venezuelan youth from their point of view. There are important emotional and psychological impacts of migration on migrant youth that affect how they adjust to their new country of residence. Developing a comprehensive understanding of youth migration beyond the adult-centric perspective is key. Future research should include the voices and experiences of young migrants to ensure that policies and interventions are grounded in their realities. This deeper understanding informs policymakers and practitioners to develop and implement youth-centric policies that protect and empower young migrants.