One of my childhood memories is being in a playground and playing Miss Venezuela. It was not a small thing. We grew up with this pride in our origins, a country where the large range of mixed races resulted in our ‘mestizaje’ and the Miss Venezuela, a night when families would get together to support the representative of their local region, was at the centre of this narrative.
Only after several years did I realise not only the self-inflicted damage on our national psyche, but that other countries would also have this image of ourselves as the country of the beauty pageants. What we did not know was that in times of crisis, this was to become a double-edged sword.
Due to a political, economic and humanitarian crisis, Venezuelans are fleeing and leaving everything behind to reach safety. According to the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, as the number of refugees and migrants from Venezuela tops 4 million, this has become the largest migratory flow in the history of the American region and after Syria it is currently the second largest in the world.
