The Landscape of Violence in Venezuela: Women's Everyday Responses to Armed Actors in the Maduro Era
Dr. Verónica Zubillaga, Tulane University
Abstract: In this talk, I will focus, first, on the Maduro government’s security policies and the extreme lethal violence they inflicted on the population of Caracas's working-class neighborhoods. Second, drawing on comparative ethnography in two neighborhoods, I will discuss the coping strategies employed by women and mothers in the presence of armed actors—both state and non-state—in their communities and daily lives. In the mothers’ daily struggles, a repertoire of discursive actions—from more openly oppositional, such as shouting, scolding, and talking, to more hidden ones, such as, both “circulating gossip” and “captive gossip,” to more vulnerable ones, such as whispering—are their main resources in the micropolitics of their neighborhoods.
Bio: Verónica Zubillaga is the Richard E. Greenleaf Scholar-in-Residence at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She is a Venezuelan sociologist and was a professor at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas until 2024. For more than two decades, her ethnographic research has examined the social dynamics of urban violence in Caracas with a particular focus on inequality, structural violence, youth subjectivities, gender practices, state violence, parastate armed actors, and strategies deployed by residents of poor and working-class neighborhoods in Caracas, especially mothers, to navigate the presence of guns and armed actors in their everyday life.