Venezuelan migrant children and well-being: an approach based on their accounts of ways of life

Abstract

It is important to remember that studies in the field of international migration, as part of the new contemporary dynamics, have focused on an adult-centric perspective that renders invisible the experiences, discourses, and realities that children experience throughout the displacement cycle. This article provides reflections based on the results of research based on a qualitative approach aimed at analyzing the lifestyles of Venezuelan children in the city of Lima, Peru, who arrived in the country during the period 2018 to 2019. This temporality constituted the space-time encompassed by the study. The analysis revealed the meanings and tensions that this group attributes to the migratory experience upon their arrival in the destination country. In particular, through their stories, children give an account of the category of material life, through which they intensify the ways of life that produce and reproduce the daily experiences of well-being around aspects such as health, food, education and housing since their arrival and how, from these relationships, they have been configuring and reworking stories of well-being or discomfort in comparison with their life in the country of origin and the country of destination, which are developed from their own social constructions of childhood.