MEMORIES AND SILENCING IN THE MIGRANT EXPERIENCE

Abstract

The study seeks to understand how experiences of loss, absence, and silence permeate the elaboration of social memory in the narratives of Venezuelan migrants. It starts from the understanding that memory is constituted not only by what is narrated, but also by interruptions, fragmentations, and partial impossibilities of elaboration, drawing on Paul Ricoeur, Michael Pollak, Maurice Halbwachs, Joel Candau, and Ecléa Bosi. Adopting a qualitative approach, the research uses the biographical method, understanding life narratives as ways through which subjects elaborate their experiences and attribute meaning to their trajectories. Three narratives of Venezuelan migrants living in Belo Horizonte are analyzed, produced in interviews and interpreted with attention to what is said and how, including pauses, hesitations, and refusals to speak. The categories of loss, absence, and silence emerged from the analysis itself, based on recurrences and significant marks in the accounts. The results show that these dimensions are linked to the rupture of social, affective, and symbolic references that sustained the continuity of experience and of the narrative of the self. Silence emerges not as an absence of memory but as one of its forms of manifestation and, in certain situations, as a gesture of self-preservation. In the field of Information Science, the findings allow these processes to be understood in their informational and symbolic dimension, showing that narrating, sharing, and silencing are socially situated practices. The study proposes the notion of narrative orphanhood to designate situations in which memory remains active but loses collective references that organized experience.