Growing up queer on the road: Venezuelan LGBTQIA+ youth in Northern Brazilian Amazon,Boa Vista,Roraima state

Abstract

This study emerges from the authors’ reflections on their fieldwork and doctoral research analyzing LGBTQIA+ Venezuelan youth displacements in the state of Roraima, in the northern Brazilian Amazon. Through an intersectional analysis, the aim is to understand how generation operates in relation to gender, sexualities, race/ethnicity and social class in the displacement of young LGBTQIA+ Venezuelans in Boa Vista, Roraima. This article focuses on the different transitions in the crucial, still unfinished, stages between adolescence and adulthood of 11 Venezuelan LGBTQIA+ interviewees. Without intending to essentialise these sexual and gender identities, this article uses intersectional approaches to understand the relationship between Venezuelan migration and youth, shedding light on gender and sexualities, racialisation processes, social class, migratory status, among others, in the Amazonian region of Roraima. The findings point out that the experience of “being young” during displacement is constitutive for the construction of the self among the participants. It is observed that some Venezuelan LGBTQIA+ interlocutors travel alone and often separate from their family ties to continue their migration project independently. Their sexual, racial and gender identities are factors that complicate the sense of lack of opportunity and singularise their actions and strategies for coping with the precariousness and challenges of migration.