How Venezuelan artists are processing the world's largest diaspora
In a black-and-white music video filmed in the margins of Brooklyn, New York, a Venezuelan folk melody drifts over a video that opens with a woman walking down train tracks in a decrepit industrial neighborhood. The voice belongs to Pía Páez, a Venezuelan singer, songwriter and producer based in New York City, whose song "Tonada del Caminante" narrates the story of an anonymous migrant who walked hundreds of miles to reach another country. The sound is unmistakably from Los Llanos — the vast Venezuelan flatlands associated with rural life and cowboy culture — yet the landscape onscreen is decidedly urban, deteriorated, and far from home. This tension between sound and image is not accidental. It is, according to researcher Diego Maggi, a precise artistic expression of a fractured national identity.
Maggi, a scholar of literature and audiovisual arts whose scholarship spans Venezuela and Colombia, has spent nearly a decade studying how novelists, filmmakers, and musicians represent the emotional and cultural experience of Venezuelan migrants. His work-in-progress book examines six works produced between 2010 and 2020. The three novels, two music videos, and a film ask a deceptively simple question — what does nostalgia mean when you can no longer go home?
Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences News.
Spotlight Recipient
Diego Maggi
Assistant professor of Spanish