Negotiating mobility and constructing aspirations: the case of young Venezuelan migrants “in Transit” in Chile

Since the mid-2010s, the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis has shaped international migration discourses both within the Latin American region and globally. For many Venezuelans, how-ever, migration is not a straight line from point A to point B; instead, it involves a series of transit locations where migrants renegotiate the journey and reconstruct their aspirations. With this in mind, this study attempts to uncover how and why Venezuelan migrants’ mobility and aspirations change along their transit migration journeys through Chile. Through a series of participant interviews and qualitative coding analysis, this research investigates how the com-bination of different factors such as socioeconomic status, gender, sexuality, trauma, and health along with country-specific factors affect the construction of aspirations and notions of fulfilment.