Captain America and Simon Bolivar: Symbolic boundaries and political subjectivity in Venezuelan young adult interviews

Contemporary media and scholarly coverage of Venezuela often focuses on how or whether Venezuelans support or oppose Chávez and if the president merits this support.  This paper asks a different set of questions about young adults, symbolic resources and political subjectivity in a polarized society.  I interpret Venezuelan politics from the point of view of a demographic whose political experience is exclusively within the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela: the country’s young adults. Like many nations outside of Europe and North America, Venezuela is a demographically young country, with almost half the population under thirty.  Young adults, children or adolescents when President Hugo Chávez Frias was first elected, crystalized their worldviews through the symbols and experiences presented to them in a highly politicized, polarized society.

Young adults are almost never considered as complex political subjects.  This paper turns focus to how young adults use the symbolic resources of culture to interpret and act in the Venezuelan political field. Through talk about their emergent experience with the social and economic changes instigated by the Chávez administration, young adults craft nuanced understandings that defy easy categorizations.  In interviews about their political participation, creative activities, consumption practices, and relationship issues, the young adult participants in this research interpret themselves as citizens seeking respect and belonging.  Furthermore, they describe and enact their ideas about legitimate, moral participation in Venezuelan society. Young adults made conceptual distinctions in their comparison of appropriate and inappropriate political action.  Drawing from symbolic resources, their narratives offer worldviews that maintain or contest institutionalized social differences, particularly around questions of who legitimately belonged to the nation.  The paper uses data from 60 qualitative interviews conducted in 2008-2012 in Mérida and Maracaibo, Venezuela.