What Venezuela Taught Me About Welcome
Venezuela spent generations becoming one of the most genuinely multicultural countries in Latin America, not by design but by welcome. In this piece I write from my own inheritance as a first generation Venezuelan, born to a French Martinican mother and a father with Aymara roots, to explore what a culture of genuine welcome actually looks like, and what Northern Ireland might discover if it chose the same.
Zilka Gerritsen
6/3/20263 min read
There is a version of history that most people outside Latin America have never heard. It does not appear in the headlines about Venezuela that circulate today. It does not feature in the conversations about migration that dominate the news cycle. But it is the history I grew up inside, and it shaped everything I believe about what a community can become when it chooses welcome over fear.
After the Second World War, Venezuela opened its doors.
Venezuela looked at a world in ruins and said: come. Italians fleeing poverty and devastation. Spanish Republicans escaping Franco's regime. Portuguese families seeking a future the old country could not offer. German engineers and craftspeople rebuilding their lives. Lebanese and Jewish communities seeking safety from persecution. They all came, and Venezuela received them.
This was something more organic and more durable than policy. It was a culture that had already been shaped by arrival, by the layering of Indigenous peoples, Spanish colonisers, African communities brought by force, and waves of migration across centuries. Venezuela knew, in its bones, that people in motion are not a threat. They are how civilisations are built.
I grew up in Caracas in the middle of that inheritance. My neighbourhood was full of families whose names told stories: Italian surnames on the bakery, Portuguese names on the fruit stalls at the market, Lebanese families who had been in Venezuela for three generations and were as Venezuelan as anyone. My own family was a small map of the same history. My mother's line is French Martinican. My father carried Bolivian Spanish heritage with Aymara roots. I was born first generation Venezuelan, shaped by cultures that had crossed oceans before they crossed me.
I did not grow up thinking of this as unusual. It was simply the texture of daily life.
It was only when I left, when I arrived in Ireland at 20 on a student visa and began to build a life in a country that was only just beginning to become multicultural, that I understood what a remarkable inheritance I had been given. I had grown up in a place that treated diversity not as a problem to be managed but as a condition of its own identity. A place that had learned, through generations of arrival and belonging, that the person who comes from somewhere else almost always brings something you did not know you were missing.
That lesson is not unique to Venezuela. You can find versions of it everywhere people have been willing to look. In the Huguenot silversmiths who transformed Dublin's craft tradition. In the Windrush generation who built the NHS. In the Italian and Chinese communities who changed the food cultures of cities that would now be unrecognisable without them. Welcome, when it is genuine, does not diminish what was already there. It adds to it. It complicates it in the best possible sense. It makes the culture more itself, not less.
What Venezuela taught me is that welcome is not a passive act. It is not simply the absence of hostility. It is an active choice to remain curious about the person in front of you, to ask what they carry, to allow what they carry to matter. It is the decision, made again and again in small and large ways, to let the community change shape rather than demand that the newcomer does all the changing.
Northern Ireland is at an early stage of that process. The numbers of people seeking asylum here are small. The communities most affected are often the ones with the least resources and the most anxiety. The public conversation is frequently dominated by fear rather than curiosity. I understand that. Fear is not stupid. It is a response to uncertainty, and uncertainty is real.
But I also know what is possible on the other side of that fear, because I grew up on the other side of it.
I founded The Humanitas Initiative because I believe Northern Ireland deserves the chance to discover what Venezuela discovered over generations: that the people who arrive carrying different stories are not a burden. They are, if you are willing to listen, one of the most valuable things that can happen to a place.
After all, we are all humans. And humans, throughout all of history, have always been at their best when they chose to welcome rather than wall out.
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