ABSTRACT
In this paper, a self-reflexive qualitative approach is employed to examine challenges encountered while collecting data on Venezuelan migration in the Southern Caribbean. These included limited access to potential interviewees and other research participants for projects undertaken in Aruba, Curaçao, and Trinidad and Tobago. With hardened borders, Venezuelan migrants have increasingly engaged in irregular movement via boat journeys to Caribbean islands. To further complicate this matter, these migration flows are occurring in highly politicized environments, as small island developing states seek to respond to these inflows. Thus, compounded by the clandestine nature of these migrant journeys, and Caribbean governments reticence to publicly comment on the issue to outsiders, researchers are faced with multiple data silences and silencers during data collection. Acknowledging that these silences are fraught and powerful, we are, however, able to harness and reappropriate them, through, for example, reading these silences within the larger sociopolitical contexts, and allowing these silences to direct us to supplementary data sources. We therefore interrogate the concept of silence in qualitative research, which has typically been applied to the interview process. We argue that data silencers can be used as productive methodological instruments toward understanding unfolding migration phenomenon. While our scholarship is grounded in migration studies, our research will appeal to demographers, anthropologists, and sociologists. In addition, our case study is applicable to the wider discourse on data collection on sensitive topics, and specific issues, such as interviewing, gatekeeping, and insider status.
