How can we face the issues the Venezuelan community faces in New York City? Here’s my take.

Doing a whole semester online in the middle of a global pandemic taught me so much. I learned what design thinking is, and how I could look at the problems from a different perspective. I learned how to use tools to better understand the communities I’m working with. I learned some questions that could be forever useful when I try to approach a new subject. I learned what extractive journalism is, a concept I was familiar with (and hated) but didn’t know how to call.

I learned all that by working with my community, Venezuelans in New York City. A community made by immigrants and refugees that, like the rest of the world, is going through a hard time in the pandemic. A community of people that don’t speak the main language of the city, that don’t know anybody and, in many cases, that rather not being there but can’t go back to their country. A community coming from a country in a dictatorship that hides the real numbers, but, according to the estimates, holds more than 10 thousand people. A community so abandoned that doesn’t even have an Embassy in the country. I joined their Facebook groups, follow their Instagram account and had conversations with many of them.

This faced me with a lot of challenges: I was speaking to a community about their problems based on a city I have never set foot in. And, of course, the covid part made the option of me going almost impossible. But I’m also a Venezuelan immigrant and used that as a way in. I went through many of the things they did, only that, living in Chile, I did in Spanish. I also felt scared, alone, and struggled to find a job and friends. I could have a sense of what they were going through.

I did all of this as part of my work as a student and the Social Journalism Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. In my time there my goals have changed: I started with a big dream, wanting to create something that could hold all the information my community would need. But, as the days went by, I realized two things: 1) I couldn’t do that alone 2) I had to prioritize. I could decide to do a big project that was a little bit more than I could single-handedly take care of or I could decide to do a really good project that had an impact on my community. I decided the latter. I was going to prioritize the mental health issues, something that almost all the people I interviewed had in common.

I big turning point for me making this decision was the Weaver Conversation guide, made by The Aspen Institute as a way to strengthen our community’s social fabric. In my case, it definitely worked. I knew that my community had long-standing issues and I knew they always used our interviews as a way to vent off, but when I started talking to people using that guide, something clicked in my brain.

Before the guide, I started all my interviews in more or less the same way and asked similar pre-structured questions. How are you doing? What’s your biggest issue? How you went through the job search? and things like that. When I did this more broad questions, with no expected answer (Do you have a place you call home? How welcome do you feel where you live? What does community mean to you?) I realize that many of the issues came from the same root (or could benefit from the same measures): not having the tools to mentally confront the situation.

And there is a significant amount of barriers to access them, like a lack of understanding in health care information, not prioritizing this, not knowing if they can find info in Spanish (in 2014, most hospitals don’t employ full or part-time medical interpreters) and, in some cases, pure and simple taboo. The Latino community is not very fund of seeking mental health services. According to a 2001 Surgeon General’s report found that only 20% of Latinos with symptoms of a psychological disorder talk to a doctor about their concerns. There’s still something of the “macho” image that doesn’t allow people to seek the health they need.

They also don’t feel like people is going to understand — they have a lot on their minds that is really distant from their new lives. It is even distant to the other members of the Latino community, that can’t really relate to all the struggles they’re facing, like having to send to Venezuela the most basic items or being worried about their family going more than a day without power in their homes. They tend to feel isolated. Many of the people I spoke to say that they can only feel like being understood by Cuban or Colombian, which is just a small part of the community.

In my listening work, I found three main topics all the questions were about:

• How to navigate the bureaucratic system, how to get a driver’s license or rent an apartment.
• How to recreate, what is something cheap I can do to pass the time, how can I make new friends, how can I bond with other people.
• How to connect with other Venezuelans (where can I find Venezuelan food, Venezuelan owned business).

I, of course, can’t resolve all these issues, but I’m sure I can help. Since I already know how this community communicates and I’m part of many of their online groups. I learned that through WhatsApp a message can spread really easily, on Facebook it can get a lot of traction on Instagram a lot of people can watch it and on Twitter, there’s a lot of people willing to help me connect.

And I want to do it by presenting this information in the most simple and digestive way and, of course, getting by with a little help from my friends. In this scenario, my friends are the organizations working on this kind of subject. I spoke with a reporter from Documented NYC, I spoke with the owner of the oldest Venezuelan restaurant in the city as a way to know more people and I’m in contact with many organizations of Venezuelans in NY (and in the US). We have a long way ahead but we took the first step.