CENTRE for LATIN AMERICAN
RESEARCH and DOCUMENTATION

This workshop aimed to critically assess the theoretical assumptions and research questions that structured the preliminary stages of the research project. Approximately 80 participants, consisting of community leaders, Venezuelan migrants, national and international academics, and local NGO employees participated in this three-day workshop.

The first day consisted of a neighborhood tour guided by community leaders. Residents shared their arrival stories and showed their homes and everyday spaces.

The second day consisted of a panel discussion, in which Venezuelan and Colombian Moravitas shared personal and in-depth experiences of the Venezuelan-Colombian encounter. After a community lunch, we organized a participatory mapping event in a public plaza, where Colombian and Venezuelan passersby were invited to indicate their use of neighborhood space on a 3 meter wide neighborhood map. We used the snowball method to contact people.

 

Participants were asked to indicate:

1) their home;

2) work location;

3) the location of the most prominent leisure activities;

4) their children's school.

 

Different color codes were used for different groups, using gaffer tape. The event was documented by a professional photographer and via drone recordings. As a side event, local initiative Barber Art collaborated in the event, offering a free haircut in exchange for a story. The event generated data about the scope and scale of daily movements within and across urban and neighborhood space among Venezuelans and Colombians in Moravia. We collected stories and movement indicators. The activity allowed us to assess the scale of movements between neighborhood sectors and across the city.
 

The last workshop day consisted of a full-day academic event, in which the participants discussed and problematized key concepts and theoretical assumptions that undergird in this research. Community leaders, academics, and practitioners defined bottom-up notions and concepts, integrating their experiences from the former workshop days. Keywords on Post-Its were grouped into four emic categories: Moravia as a neighborhood, migratory flows, Venezuelan migrants, and symbolic and physical borders. The outcomes helped us to rethink and reformulate our framework.