Patricia Quiñónez understands persecution.
She was a journalist in Venezuela when dictator Nicolás Maduro rose to power in the 2010s, imprisoning critics and attacking the free press. After she took to the streets to protest, the National Guard raided her apartment building. Her newspaper began to fail after a century of operation. In 2016, Quiñónez, her husband and their infant son fled for Utah and were granted political asylum.
Neither spoke English; they had no car or bed. They needed practical assistance: “How to get medical insurance, what tourist sites to visit, how to get your driver’s license — so many everyday questions and there was no one to answer them,” Quiñónez said in an interview conducted in Spanish. “So we opened Utahzolanos.”
Quiñónez, 47, now runs Utahzolanos, an Instagram account with a quarter-million followers that caters to Utah’s rapidly growing Venezuelan community. Its mission is simply to help newcomers, but recently, it’s attracted hateful messages, even death threats.
“(In Venezuela) we felt persecuted for our political thoughts,” she said. Now, she feels attacked for her nationality.
Anti-immigration sentiment has risen sharply in the U.S. since 2020. And Venezuelans — whose numbers have more than tripled in the U.S. since 2010, with nearly 40,000 arriving in September 2023 alone — are a particular target. In a tense election year, spurred by negativity-boosting algorithms, Venezuelans are blamed for crime and unchecked migration on social media, in political speeches and in the news. Quiñónez, like other Venezuelan content creators and media figures, now finds herself fighting xenophobia in her new home. On Utahzolanos, she regularly posts local Venezuelans’ achievements — entrepreneurs opening arepa restaurants, teenagers earning college scholarships — but she wonders if it’s enough to balance out the rampant negativity.
“It hurts us a lot every time people say that anything bad that happens in the United States is because of us,” she said.
ONE-FIFTH OF Venezuela’s population has fled the country in the last decade. Venezuela’s political and economic crisis — its GDP has shrunk by 75% — has sparked a mass exodus unprecedented in recent Latin America history. In the Spanish-speaking world, Venezuelans are widely regarded as dangerous and prone to crime — a stereotype exacerbated by an outbreak of violence and crime in the country amid critical food and medicine shortages. Quiñónez is used to getting nasty messages in Spanish, accusing her of encouraging violent Venezuelans to migrate, with most of the negativity coming from the Latino community itself. In Latin America, this xenophobia only pushes Venezuelans to move again, including to the United States.
But data shows that Venezuelans living abroad are significantly underrepresented in prisons and indictments, indicating that the viral Venezuelan crime stories are not representative of the wider population. Utah’s migrant population has ballooned since 2021, for example, yet Salt Lake City has seen crime drop. Nonetheless, as the number of Venezuelans in the U.S. approaches 1 million — with Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and Denver among their top destinations — that dark, erroneous image of Venezuelans is reaching English speakers in Quiñónez’s new home.
“It hurts us a lot every time people say that anything bad that happens in the United States is because of us.”
In February, the highly publicized killing of Laken Riley in Georgia was attributed to — in President Joe Biden’s words — “an illegal” from Venezuela. Fox News headlines and Elon Musk’s posts warned of “bloodthirsty” and “violent” Venezuelans crossing our border. In March, a Venezuelan TikToker living in Ohio garnered nearly 4 million views for a video in which he encouraged other migrants to squat in unoccupied homes. After another murder, allegedly by two Venezuelan migrants in Houston in June, Donald Trump said the killers “came across our border, claiming they feared for their lives in Venezuela,” but that crime was actually down in Venezuela because they’d sent their “criminals, drug dealers, and most of the people in their jails” to the United States.
“It’s been a tactic of anti-immigrant groups to single out isolated events (and) to portray the entire group as something negative,” said Germán Cadenas, who is Venezuelan himself and an associate professor who researches immigrant psychology at Rutgers University.
Xenophobia spreads easily online, according to Steven L. Johnson, who studies social media at the University of Virginia. The major platforms boost “content that people are going to be really excited about, really angry about, really concerned or fearful (over).” So videos of immigrants, whether they’re accused of wrongdoing or simply sharing their experience, will get offered to people likely to comment on them, however hatefully.
Few Americans can readily distinguish between a Venezuelan and another person of Latin American descent. Online, however, some connect media horror stories to people like the Venezuelans that Utahzolanos features. On a post profiling Alexander Muñoz, a recent arrival who’s taken up skiing and works as a bus driver, one comment in English stated: “Go back to your country. … We don’t like you here.”
Such comments threaten more than Muñoz’s feelings: His three kids, still in Venezuela, excitedly watch all his videos, and he worries the rising anti-immigrant sentiment could “close some doors” for them to join him.
In May, after a Venezuelan family went to a rural Montana sheriff’s office when the local homeless shelter was full, local Republican officials called for their deportation. If Trump is elected this November, Republicans plan to use military force to “seal” the border and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” Recently, the Biden administration toughened its own asylum process and urged Mexico to prevent migrants from reaching America’s Southern border. The number of Venezuelans reaching the U.S. and encountering Border Patrol agents in the first six months of 2024 is less than half of what it was during the last six months of 2023.
LAURA CRISTINA DIB, Venezuela program director at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that simple facts can help counter xenophobic tropes. One such fact is that immigrants are extraordinarily entrepreneurial, starting new businesses in the U.S. at twice the rate of naturalized citizens in 2023.
Quiñónez and her husband have built Utahzolanos into their “full-time passion and job,” generating enough advertising revenue to buy a home and car. Despite the negativity, she believes passionately in the American Dream.
“This country continues to be the great country of opportunities,” she said.
Much like Quiñónez, Yordana Bolaños, a 34-year-old Venezuelan who lived in Mexico before moving to Phoenix in 2022, started her Instagram account, “Venezolanas en Arizona,” to share her culture, and celebrate and promote projects started by her community.
Last year, she organized a Mercadito Venezolano in Phoenix with 30 Venezuelan vendors — arepas and tequeño vendors, traditional musicians, real estate agents and dentists. She wants to show locals in Arizona that Venezuelans are “people working hard,” who “want to support the economy of the state.” She hopes they realize: “These people are different from what I had in my mind.”
Like Quiñónez, however, Bolaños also gets negative feedback. On a recent post about classic Venezuelan singers, someone commented in Spanish that she shouldn’t compare modern Venezuelans to those of the past; today’s migrants, they said, “only come to do evil.”’
“I don’t delete them,” she said of the bad comments. “Sometimes I respond. Sometimes I am sarcastic and put a heart on it. It depends. I’m a human, you know. I have feelings, and sometimes they touch your fiber.”
“It’s been a tactic of anti-immigrant groups to single out isolated events (and) to portray the entire group as something negative.”
WHEN FANNY GRANDE first came to the U.S. as a teenager almost 30 years ago, people found her interesting and “exotic” when she told them she was Venezuelan. But now, there’s a hint of suspicion: “People always have a comment to make,” she said.
Grande, an actress and movie producer in Los Angeles, is working to “humanize the struggle” of Venezuelans. She wrote and starred in Homebound, an English-language film about Venezuelan migrants in Texas that explores “what it means for a woman and a son to have to leave everything behind, come to a strange world and build everything.”
Bolaños, Grande and Quiñónez put a lot of pressure on themselves. According to Rigel Salazar, another Venezuelan content creator who’s lived in Utah and Nevada, they — and the whole Venezuelan diaspora — “have double responsibilities.” They must behave admirably themselves and also change negative perceptions about the rest of their community. Salazar’s Instagram account — “Los Buenos Somos Más” or “the good outnumber the bad” — highlights people like Grande who have gone on to do incredible things in their new home.
Grande, who recently launched A+, a streaming platform featuring content in English made by and for the Latino community, wants audiences to understand that many Venezuelans are simply looking for a place they can survive.
“Everything is so political now. But at the end of the day, these are people, human beings, who just need help,” she said.
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This article appeared in the September 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Immigrant influencers.”
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