Creative Labour of The Venezuelan Diaspora: Entrepreneurship, Imagination, and Precarity in Spain

Venezuela's current economic crisis has resulted in the world's second-largest displaced population, with over seven million people leaving since 2014. Owing to cultural, linguistic, and historic affinities, Spain has become a popular migration pathway. This project will examine how Venezuelan migrants in Spain construct opportunities and identities in the context of transnational migration, economic crisis, and a global shift towards informal employment. This will be achieved through an ethnographic study of informal labour among the Venezuelan diaspora - many of whom are employed in the so-called gig economy, undertaking taxi driving, nannying, language tuition, working off the books in cafés and restaurants, as well as online economic practices such as selling content and goods through platforms like Twitch, YouTube and TikTok. Whilst existing research on migrants and precarious labour focuses on economic necessity, this project aims to examine how creative and informal work, integral to so-called platform migration (Collins 2021), encompasses an array of complex and diverse experiences for transnational migrants.
The project will be organised around two key thematic threads: 1) creative labour; 2) imagination and hope. Rather than dwelling on crises or victimhood, these lines of inquiry are deployed to enable a greater foregrounding of agency by considering the socioeconomic context, history, needs, and diversity within the diaspora.
This ethnographic approach enables a ground-level view of how global structures of power and hierarchies of inequality are constituted through everyday lived experiences, rather than abstract categorisations (Ehrkamp 2019). Attending to creative labour illustrates the reciprocal relationships between migrants and host nations and complicates enduring narratives about immigration. By paying attention to everyday activities, I intend to understand how migrant lives and labours are realised in conditions that are simultaneously creative and constrained.

Research questions
This project asks the following:
1. How does migration enable and necessitate new forms of creativity?
2. How do new forms and ideas of entrepreneurialism amongst Venezuelan migrants complicate existing understandings of labour and creativity?
3. How do concepts of gender, race, class, and nationality shift upon migration to underpin entrepreneurial strategy?

Methodology
This project connects physical and digital fieldsites to highlight the importance of creativity within spaces of diaspora. Working ethnographically and through a beyond-the-screen reading of digital activities illustrates how a range of physical and social media-based practices refract lived experiences and identities (Rodgers and Lloyd-Evans 2021), highlighting the power of interlocutors to shape, develop, and strengthen research.
Conducted over 12 months in Madrid and accompanying digital spaces, where much of the diaspora is physically and virtually located, the ethnographic fieldwork will trace networks of labour. Snowball sampling within existing research networks in Spain will develop a diverse sample consisting of business owners, gig-economy workers, and side-hustlers, conducted through a combination of qualitative methods including:
Participant observation in private and public spaces
Semi-structured interviews and oral histories
Digital ethnography of social-media spaces where the diaspora is active
Co-creation of a digital archive
This content will form a digital archive of visual, audio, and textual materials, facilitating sustained engagement from those who enabled research (Gill 2019). It will also highlight underlying biographies and skillsets, connect the project larger contexts of migration, labour, and identity, and enable creative afterlives (Johnson et al. 2021).