The Venezuelan diaspora and a compass for narrative in transit

How do we narrate uprooting ? What place does migration occupy in contemporary writing? Can literature become a cartography of exile? Salvar la frontera (Equidistancias, 2024) proposes a collective response: thirty Venezuelan narrators , spread across four continents, transform the migratory experience into aesthetic material. The result is an anthology that functions as a compass for a narrative in transit, where nostalgia becomes a tool of reinvention.

Edited by Gustavo Valle and Carlos Sandoval , the volume brings together stories shaped by the Venezuelan exodus, a phenomenon of historic scale: more than eight million people have left their country in the last decade . Far from attempting a canon, the compilers caution that this is merely a generational snapshot, but useful for detecting how migration affects syntax, themes, and sensibilities.

"Equidistancias is a publishing house specializing in publishing authors who live outside their country of origin and write in Spanish. We are the only publishing house in Latin America that focuses exclusively on migrant or trans-territorial literature," notes Andrés Tacsir of the publishing house.

Thus, migrant voices are organized into three collections (fiction, poetry, essay), and in addition to the authors, Equidistancias works on the anthology format. " It's often seen as a minor genre , but it manages to give a more or less complete idea of ​​how certain immigrant groups write in certain places," Tacsir points out.

Thus, an anthology of Latin American poets in the United Kingdom, one of Latin American poets in Germany, and one of Jewish Latin American writers who left their countries appeared. " Salir la frontera is the latest of the anthologies, and we think it's a wonderful opportunity for the Argentine public to become familiar with Venezuelan literature, a very little-known aspect ," he invites.

The index of Salvar la Frontera functions as a map of names and geographies : from Alberto Barrera Tyszka to Karina Sainz Borgo, from Fedosy Santaella to Keila Vall de la Ville. The narrative scenes cross physical and symbolic borders: from Buenos Aires asphalt to the Aponwao River, from the Caribbean to a Caracas video store in 1996.

“I arrived in Buenos Aires in 2007, and at first, all I write is lamentable prose ,” Ricardo Añez admits in conversation with Viva from his home in Buenos Aires. His story "La locura arltian" (The Arltian Madness) narrates the drift of a Maracaibo native who loses his accent, but not his perplexity. The city returns the gesture: people stop him on the street to ask him impossible questions.

Añez acknowledges that it took him more than a decade to find the right tone : “It takes time for fiction to crack the anecdote,” he says, invoking Roberto Arlt. That process led to SML, his book on foreignness, from which the story originates. For him, nostalgia isn't a burden, but a key: “Mass migration instilled the idea that Venezuela is unlivable, but there are still people working, sustaining projects there.”

Among the thirty voices in the anthology, Liliana Lara brings an urgent perspective: the female experience of exodus . A Caracas-born storyteller who has lived in Haifa, Israel, since 2016, her story "Cabo Codera" reconstructs a real-life shipwreck off that spot—a mythical landmark for Venezuelan sailors—from the perspective of a nanny who survives while caring for two children.

“The shipwreck is merely the trigger; what obsesses me is how far a mother's love goes,” Lara explains. The story, woven from an audio message forwarded via WhatsApp, is sustained by a poetic use of objects : expired compotes, an inflatable pineapple, an empty perfume bottle, gel nails with rhinestones. “The objects say more than the characters: they are their social X-ray,” she asserts, citing Marcelo Cohen as a key influence.

The plot also draws on her biography: her father, an amateur sailor, viewed the crossing of the Cape as a trial by fire. Thus, domestic myth merges with public tragedy . Lara, who investigates the narrative of displacement, distrusts "testimonial prose" and prefers elliptical allusions: "Impure identity is our true freedom."

The result is a story that oscillates between horror and kitsch , where frivolity—the perfect nails, the plastic pineapple—bursts into the turmoil like a diamond in a shipwreck. Or, in the author's words, "a story of hunger on the high seas that reveals hunger on land."

While Añez talks with Arlt, Hensli Rahn chooses a VHS tape recorder. His short story "Video Club" goes back to Caracas in 1996—the era of cassette players and Trainspotting posters—to narrate a teenager's early career amidst tapes and palindromes. "I wrote it when I was still living in Caracas, and everything was very difficult; that's why it's imbued with a sweet and sad melancholy ," Rahn recalls from Berlin, a few stations from the former Berlin Wall.

The author emigrated in 2015 "due to the stampede" and titled his personal chronicle "Blossoming Far from Home," appropriating a botanical metaphor: in biology, "diaspora" is the journey of seeds. With two children born in Germany, Rahn has not yet been able to return to Venezuela. He maintains his connection to his city through video calls and stories that explore estrangement. In his story, palindromic poet Darío Lanzini appears as a regular customer at the video store: a pop nod that articulates popular culture and literary tradition. "I write in my personal cave, and if I'm lucky, an interview like this happens," he jokes.

In her story "January is the Longest Month," Keila Vall de la Ville transforms January into an emotional territory: a white and eternal month, a metaphor for the alienation produced by both grief and migration. "Snow is a blank page," says the author, alluding to that feeling of loss that opens the door to a new beginning.

Recently separated and newly arrived in another country, the story's protagonist doesn't understand the language, the climate, or the units of measurement. Being abroad becomes an endless season. In the midst of this foreign landscape, she falls and fractures her ribs.

“Ribs aren't just any collection of bones; they're the perfect framework that protects vital organs. That's what they're there for. Part of the diaphragm, the muscle that allows us to breathe, is inserted into the ribs. Breathing, circulation, and, if you will, feeling, are protected by this subtle armor,” explains Vall de la Ville, who uses the body as a metaphor for emotional devastation.

In Salvar la frontera , writing then becomes a second skin, a way of translating displacement without fully naming it. It's not about writing "as an immigrant," but rather about writing from a body marked by transit, from a perspective honed by estrangement. Each page, like each border, leaves a mark. And perhaps therein lies the power of this literature in motion: in its way of making exile a way of being in the world.

Saving the Border (Equidistances, 2024)