Bypassing the Brokers of Modernity: Cartographic Extensions and Nomadic Power Among Venezuelans in the US

Since the approval of Temporary Protected Status in 2021, low-income and racialised Venezuelan migrants have entered the US, a space previously perceived as reserved for Venezuela’s upper and middle classes. Rather than vouching for the integration of their new-coming compatriots, most wealthier Venezuelans have actively campaigned for their exclusion. Back home, modernising agendas justified the spatial containment of those deemed culturally and morally unprepared to participate in Venezuela’s modern life. Contrastingly, cultural and political elites positioned themselves as brokers of national modernity. Building on Loren Landau’s ‘chronotope of containment’, this article introduces the concept of ‘cartographic extensions’ to analyse intra-diasporic divisions among the Venezuelan community in the US. We argue that upper-class Venezuelans reterritorialise long-standing socio-spatial and temporal forms of exclusion from back home onto the US to reposition themselves as gatekeepers of modernity and assert respectability in a context of rising anti-immigration. Yet, newcoming Venezuelans bypass the elite’s exclusionary narratives by engaging in nomadic forms of imagination that remap the moral and temporal coordinates that sustain containment. These theoretical reflections frame our analysis of thirty-six multi-sited interviews with Venezuelans in Florida and New York, and Venezuelan digital culture. This interdisciplinary article illuminates how existing hierarchies of class and race, cultural narratives around modernity and respectability, and even migration policy changes in host countries can foreclose intra-diasporic solidarity.