Beyond separation and reunification: the ever-shifting trajectories of Venezuelan transnational families in South America

An emerging strand of scholarly research has been looking at how migration regimes’ erratic time scales intersect with families’ reunification plans. This paper advances this literature by arguing that bureaucratic timescales cannot be analysed separately from material conditions. It shows that both legal and economic precarity interact and create contradictory dynamics, which ultimately lead to extremely non-linear family biographies. Through the in-depth analysis of five pairs of interviews conducted with Venezuelan migrants in Chile and Colombia in 2022 and their transnational families, taken from a wider sample of 60 life story interviews, the study shows that families are sometimes forced to be physically together and, at other times, pulled in different directions. The result is the emergence of complex family spatial and temporal trajectories that, far from beginning in separation and ending in reunification, more closely resemble the convoluted plots of Latin American telenovelas. Importantly, the present study looks concomitantly at plans of migration and non-migration, showing that unexpected detours can mean both forced separation and forced unification.