Classed Experiences of Exclusion and Uncertainty Among Displaced Women from Venezuela

This article examines how university-educated women displaced from Venezuela navigate exclusion and uncertainty, employing a transnational and intersectional lens. Amid the ongoing mass displacement from Venezuela, research has shown that Venezuelan migrant women in Peru experience various forms of discrimination, including racialization, sexualization, and xenophobia. However, the role of social class in shaping these exclusionary processes has been underexplored.

Drawing from 25 biographical interviews with university-educated Venezuelan and Peruvian-Venezuelan women who arrived in Peru after 2015, this article analyzes how class-based resources from the (upper) middle classes are reconfigured as these women move across different social stratification systems and privilege regimes. By focusing on educated women moving from the South, the study sheds light on an understudied group in migration research. It challenges the assumption that all displaced people are poor or class-less, emphasizing the effects of class-based resources on mobility trajectories.

The findings reveal that, while these women's habitus locates them in (upper) middle-class repertoires, rooted in their prior social status, educational level, and consumption habits, they are often limited to low-skilled, informal jobs, leading to downward social mobility. This paper conceptualizes class not only as a socioeconomic position but also as an internalized identity and subjective positioning. It shows how these women resist their loss of status by deploying distinction discourses based on embodied cultural capital (e.g., savoir être, ability to navigate the bureaucracy), even as their institutionalized cultural capital is unrecognized or devalued in the Peruvian labor market. They also engage in "Othering" by contrasting themselves with less-educated Peruvians to affirm their own status.

Finally, the article argues that the systemic degradation of living conditions in Peru, coupled with rising xenophobia and aporophobia, exacerbates these women's uncertainty and hinders their ability to plan for the future.