Situating Humanitarian and Migratory Crisis in Cali

Located in the south-west of Colombia, the city of Cali has emerged as an important site of encounters between migrants and humanitarian actions in Colombia. It has become a crossroad and transitory place on migratory journeys towards/from countries like Ecuador or Chile but for many it has also transformed into a place to stay through the various humanitarian and solidarity actions. The orientating sense propelling local humanitarian aid has not been limited to the worlds of transnational humanitarianism. As a matter of fact, when the transnational organisations joined the field of humanitarian aid in Cali. they encountered some actors and local organisations who were already working with the migrants from Venezuela. Some of the initiatives started specifically in response to the perceived needs and vulnerabilities of migrants’ groups. Other organisations have enlarged their scope or included the migrants into their pre-existing structures of helping the poor, displaced, and marginalised in Cali.

In terms of different pre-existing forms of helping and working with migrants, there were very few activities developed in Cali prior to the growing flows of migrants from Venezuela (starting from 2016). Although the Pastoral para los migrantes provided help and assistance to internal and international migrants (from Ecuador or Haiti) transiting through Cali on their journeys towards Global North for the past thirty years, these mobilities were relatively small in terms of numbers. More activities concerning migration focused on working with the internally displaced persons in Cali and in the region. As I show here, these personal but also professional experiences with the internally displaced populations came to be important for humanitarian responses and understandings of Venezuelan migrants’ suffering.

One important dimension of more vernacular forms of humanitarianism is that these operate ‘as a response to an emerging need that cannot be adequately addressed through conventional channels of help’ (Brković 2020: 224). In Colombia, these forms have developed in the context of long-term forms of aid to the needy. Their emergence occurred in relation to the perceived inability of state's apparatus and public institutions’ forms of governing those marginalised and living under the precarious nature of social rights in which struggle for access frequently depend on performances of ‘suffering patients of the state’ (Auyero 2012) and mastery of navigating a bureaucratic system of prolonged waiting. Many vernacular forms of help emerged in situations in which the state was seen as not responding (or, ‘not sufficiently/quickly enough’). This was also the case of working with the migrants from Venezuela during the first years of the migration (2015–2018), which revealed a lack of institutional frameworks, of capacities and of knowledge by the local state employees. Many humanitarian workers often complained about ‘unpreparedness’ of the existing legal frameworks, ‘barriers for integration’ caused by excessive bureaucracy and exclusion of many undocumented migrants without any access, weak responsiveness, and slow reaction to reach out migrants on the side of local state institutions. Many humanitarian workers reasoned that Colombia – as a ‘country of emigration’ – had no previous experiences with larger amount of international migration as a receiving country. They highlighted the insufficient public policy that would orient the actions of the public institutions. For humanitarian workers, their actions were responding more quickly to the needs of migratory crisis. They also hoped that through their work and collaboration the state would become more present and assume more responsibility.

In my fieldwork I followed activities of Pastoral para los Migrantes and some of their partner organisations and networks of volunteers interconnected through the COAMIR centre (Centro de Orientación y Atención para el Migrante, Refugiado y Colombiano Retornado). Most of them lived in Cali and in contrast to international staff of transnational humanitarian organisations had no experience of working with humanitarian issues abroad. By setting up a centre for integral attention in cooperation with other organisations, they provided humanitarian aid in the form of material support, legal counselling, filling forms, and other activities such as workshops and interactive sociocultural classrooms (Zambrano and Botina 2021). Additionally, they offered a socio-psychological counselling run by psychologists and volunteering university students. The Pastoral tried to connect with different foundations and educational institutions to offer trainings (capacitaciones) aimed at helping migrants acquire new skills and knowledge in their search for jobs. Highlighting the importance to work both with migrants and the places of acogida (‘welcome’) they developed a series of educational seminars for host communities called ‘Empathize’ that focused on increasing sensitivity about migration and to prevent xenophobia. Additionally, they worked with community leaders in different neighbourhoods who became volunteers and intermediators between different institutions, aid workers and the networks of migrants. Many of these leaders were migrants from Venezuela, both persons with Venezuelan nationality but also so-called ‘Colombo-Venezuelans’ or retornados (‘the returned’). This latter category included Colombian migrants-citizens (and their descendants) who migrated to Venezuela in the past and returned to Colombia during the last few years in the context of socio-economic crisis in Venezuela.

Contested Meanings and Understandings of Humanitarian Actions

The local understandings of what constitutes humanitarian work and what defines certain actions as humanitarian did not have a singular meaning in the context of Cali. ‘More than humanitarian help, it is about giving advice, orientating, making suggestions about how to make better (informed) decisions. Guiding and helping the migrants in construction of their life projects.’ This is how Laura, a sociologist in her 30s, described the aspirations they had at the Pastoral. It also shows different kinds of help provided to the migrants. On one hand, these included the most pressing matters of survival – ranging from securing food, housing to legal advising with all kinds of paperwork issues necessary in navigating the legal and bureaucratic terrains of Colombia and in accessing the humanitarian help. On the other hand, there were varying degrees and types of help that these organisations aspired to provide. In her comment, Laura differentiated ‘humanitarian’ from other kinds of help. But, at times, these types of ‘help’ were also included in the all-encompassing category of humanitarian aid. Some of the organisations they cooperated with offered different kinds of material kits that were passed onto the migrants. The Pastoral run the activities of Comedor humanitario (food kitchen) and offer temporary shelter – providing food and temporary housing for the most vulnerable. These forms of help were what Laura referred to as ‘humanitarian help.’ At times she differentiated these from the other kinds of assistance that were related to socio-psychological counselling, assessments, and various job-oriented trainings. These differentiations were made in reference to certain emergency temporality that was seen as characteristic for humanitarian actions. This temporality referred to relatively short-term but intensive modes of aid directed towards immediate and urgent needs in the contexts of ‘humanitarian crisis’ and ‘emergency.’ Although most of their daily tasks were dealing with all kinds of emergencies that required more material and immediate assistance or legal counselling, many of the humanitarian workers aspired to move beyond the more material and emergency-related activities and work more on other aspects that would facilitate better incorporation and settlement into host societies. For instance, one of Laura's bosses described their activities as

beyond giving [migrants] food or shelter, it is about giving them the opportunity to get ahead (salir adelante) on their own because they cannot always be receiving and we are not going to be always ready to give because we have other local needs that must also be addressed. Now comes a phase with the cooperation agencies and it means preparing people for employment since the humanitarian assistance should start to pass.

He differentiated between distinct kinds of humanitarian help responding to specific needs with the assumed temporality of humanitarian emergence and crisis. However, his assumption of different phases did not take place as the persisting emergencies worsened due to pandemic conditions. As Laura noted, ‘one would want to go ahead and [move] to do other things (too) but we're still going in circles with the greatest needs still being in the material survival’. Her everyday work illustrates how this ‘going in circles’ felt on a more protracted basis. Although she started to work with specific expectations, ‘in reality, in this job you have be open because you do a bit of everything’. I observed how she organised workshops for migrants and local institutions, participated in meetings with partner organisations, wrote proposals for securing funding, coordinated volunteers but also helped many migrants with their queries and everyday emergencies (from evictions to school problems) in and outside of Pastoral, as well as during and outside of working hours. She felt passionate but also exhausted. Her work required permanent adjustments and navigating uncertainties, precarity and insecurities related to migrants’ struggles but also to her own working conditions. These uncertainties stemmed from mostly short-term projects, dependence on ‘(good) will’ of other institutional actors providing help and spaces for humanitarian activities, intermediation with slow bureaucracy and institutions, and securing funding that would allow continuities of their work. Similarly to the study of temporary shelters for Venezuelan migrants in Colombia by Roth (2021), the everyday conditions of humanitarian work in Cali produced many uncertainties related to waiting, (dis)continuous services, and differentiated inclusions in projects (depending on categories of eligibility). The transforming conditions and series of crisis that made the circumstances and emergencies more ‘protracted’ is akin to Feldman's insightful examination of ‘punctuated’ rhythms characterizing Palestinian camps, which oscillate between various emergencies and chronic needs as well as the question of humanitarian purpose (Feldman 2018).

Although many interlocutors associated humanitarianism with typical forms of help aimed at emergency relief, some uses of the term included wider range of activities and phases of humanitarian aid. For example, for Padre Alvaro, a grey hair and soft-spoken Catholic priest with a long-standing commitment to migrants’ and excluded populations, noted that ‘the vision must be that of integration’, which should direct the humanitarian help ‘not only to migrant community but also to the whole vulnerable community within which migrants live. . . humanitarian assistance must focus on integration and coexistence on the territory . . . otherwise it's not going to work, as we have already learned from the experiences with (internally) displaced’. While he recognised the importance of a first level of humanitarian aid focusing on the immediate needs, he highlighted that this must be accompanied by working on modes of coexistence with migrants from Venezuela together with other vulnerable groups. Failure to consider these risks can produce ‘separations, ghettoes and tensions’. His thoughts did not only show more encompassing conceptualization of humanitarian work but also highlights another element for understanding the local ideas and dispositions towards migration – that of past personal, social, and professional experiences with displacement and internal migration to/in Cali. Padre Alvaro's perspectives were shaped by growing up in a displaced family in Cali before moving away for his studies. He became a Scalabrinian Catholic priest devoted to help migrant populations in different countries. His return to Cali after many years coincided with the growing numbers of migrants from Venezuela. He became one of the key actors interconnecting and assembling the humanitarian actions in the city while also orientating youth volunteers to the efforts. Working tirelessly with humility, he co-defined orientations of the Pastoral and interacted with multiple institutions (i.e., collaborations between churches, grassroot, international organisations to state and institutions).

Returning the Gift: Moral Debt, Brotherhood and Hospitality

One of the reasons underpinning humanitarian actions that most of my interlocutors emphasized was the distinctive historically constituted relationship (imagined or practical) between Venezuela and Colombia that predisposed certain forms of encounters, of solidarity, and compassion, as well as refashioned inequalities, xenophobia, and racism. Most humanitarian workers saw their own forms of helping entangled in interconnected histories between Colombia and Venezuela. Some highlighted the shared cultural and social closeness and entangled pasts between these two neighbouring countries. One of the strongest themes that emerged related to sentiments of imagined historical moral debt that Colombia accumulated with Venezuela throughout the second half of twentieth century. Many migrated to Venezuela during socio-economic crisis and violence in Colombia throughout the 1980-90s. At that time, Venezuela's social and economic situation allowed many Colombian migrants to reconstruct their livelihoods as they sought better futures (Escobar 2020; Mejía 2022). As one of the humanitarian workers noted, ‘I think that most Cali citizens have someone in the family . . . or know someone whose relatives left for Venezuela.’ The sentiments of hospitality associated with reception of Colombian migrants in Venezuela informed a sense of compassion and solidarity that were framed in terms of moral obligation of reciprocity that propelled many to help. ‘We need to help our Venezuelan brothers as they helped us in the past!’ These expressions became frequent during the first years of migration from Venezuela. At the same time, these acts of helping were also met with ambiguities and criticised by some segments of the population or political actors.

The humanitarian crisis and mobilities reversed the past relations and created affective responses eliciting reciprocity of the past gift. At the same time, the larger geo-political context differs from the past since the recent migration flows implicate not only reverse mobilities between two neighbouring countries but are part of one of the largest humanitarian and migration crisis affecting different parts of Latin America. The compassion-driven actions resonated with the moral discourses of giving back because of what ‘they have done for us’. This framing was echoed not only by those with more direct experiences of migration to Venezuela but also by those without any direct connection. The imagined collective self, feelings of moral debt, and collective responsibility towards ‘the other’ frequently appeared across different contexts. But, similar to an anthropological theorizing of the nature of gift (Bourdieu 1977; Mauss 1990 [1950]; see Bornstein 2012, Redfield and Bornstein 2011 for discussions regarding humanitarianism), the act of giving and reciprocating is always situated within asymmetrical power relations and particular temporalities reflecting hierarchies. In the case of helping migrants from Venezuela, many discourses were inscribed regarding the idea of humanitarian emergency and urgent crisis that was initially seen by many as a relatively short-term issue expected to lead to rapid political change in Venezuela. The Colombian government with President Duque and its international political alliances, forged in support of opposition to President Nicolás Maduro, hoped for a fast political transformation. However, as it became clear that the situation and presence of migrants is not just a short-term emergency situation but more long-term prospect, many Colombians started to question the duration and forms of this reciprocal gift-giving. The question of helping Venezuelan migrants became a contentious issue of discord and contestation, which highlights how political uses of ‘indeterminacy of meanings’ allows ’the simultaneous co-existence of contradictory possibilities’ (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2017: 140) present in the figure of the migrant. This became clearly manifested in some of the political debates local governance embodied, such as mayors’ criticisms of the central government not assuming sufficient (co-)responsibility. Some mayors offered help but also started to stigmatise migrants as straining the fragile system of aid to the poor, threatening public health or as increasing insecurity. For example, with the unfolding of pandemic crisis in the spring 2020 the mayor of Cali suggested that they ‘have helped as much as they could’ but that they ‘can't cope with the continuing demands and costs all alone’. He called for government to assume more financial and organisational responsibility by supporting more local municipalities and their costs with migration-related issues. He highlighted the priority for attending to the poor in Colombia affected by the pandemic. In this transformation and realization of more protracted nature of humanitarian temporality, many started to show signs of what Fassin (2012: 3) and Ticktin (2016) describe as signs of ‘compassion fatigue’ in which moral sentiments wear down and shift towards more indifference.

In the practices and discourses of the humanitarian workers, this shift and realization that the migration crisis is not a matter of relatively short-term ‘crisis temporality’ implied asking questions for the purpose (see Feldman 2018) of their works. It was manifested, for instance, in discussing other forms of support that would avoid the trap of creating so-called asistencialismo (referring to passive dependency generated through the acts of giving and helping) in their interactions with migrants.

If discourses of moral obligation and of historical debt traced to imagined past relations informed many humanitarian actions of helping, these were also present in the understandings and strategies deployed by the migrants from Venezuela. They frequently referred to the past diversity of Venezuela, experienced as a welcoming place for migrants (and for Colombians in particular). Some migrants foregrounded their ‘Venezuela-ness’ with the purpose of differentiating themselves from other needy subjects with whom they shared the conditions of structural vulnerability. This was clearly manifested in the presence of Venezuelan migrants on the traffic lights. Offering candies and washing car windows alongside other busking poor, many migrants wore caps and bags with Venezuelan flag's colour or displaying a banner eliciting form of compassion. Many messages addressed the passing drivers as hermanos (‘brothers’) while also including self-identifying Venezuelans before appealing for help. These performative acts differentiated them – through evocations of national category – from others in need and operated as a moral yardstick. Deploying these signs and symbols helped in performing figure of suffering subject, especially at the beginning of the migratory crisis. At the same time, these symbolic markers of compassion and solidarity eventually transformed into more ambiguous and potentially stigmatising symbols. At the beginning of the migratory crisis these acts moved many to give on the grounds of compassion but over time they came to be seen with more ambiguities and fed different xenophobic and racist imaginaries. This was connected partly to compassion fatigue (Fassin 2012) but also to the stigmatising trope articulated in the expression ‘they want everything for free’ (quieren todo regalado). This negative representation was connected to what some conceived as a legacy of living in socialist Venezuela. Some humanitarian workers blamed Hugo Chávez or Maduro for these ‘harms’ and conditions that were portrayed as cultivating an attitude of claiming from the state without ‘sufficiently’ striving and working in more autonomous fashion. The humanitarian workers fought against xenophobia and refused essentialising the logic of deservingness alongside citizen vs non-citizen lines that left many migrants without any aid or access. At the same time, some also reproduced other logic of deservingness, in their encounters with migrants, reminiscent of a neoliberal logic of personal responsibility and of demonstrating active strivings and endurance.

To illustrate this point, I describe an encounter with Alejandra, one of the two persons cooking in the Comedor (one of my ethnographic fieldsites as I helped with serving food and interacted with migrants and the staff). Alejandra, a short and stocky woman in her fifties with imposing authority in her voice, organised the daily rhythms of the Comedor. She moved swiftly in between the kitchen and the dining hall where food was served to the migrants. Alejandra arrived in Cali a few years before from a rural zone as a displaced victim of the internal violent conflict. Being granted an official state recognition as an internally displaced person (IDP), she recreated the sense of being at home in Cali. Alejandra's embodied experience marked by displacement and remaking of her life in Cali made her feel ‘more empathetic and understanding with the fate of Venezuelan migrants’.

Exhausted after finishing a shift in the Comedor that fed more than one hundred twenty persons with only two chefs, one deacon and several volunteers we sat drinking sweet coffee. Alejandra packed some extra food for a family who was ‘passing through really bad moments’ after they left Cali and returned back from the border with Ecuador even more impoverished. After recounting their story and praising the great willingness of the husband to work, after helping to clean the Comedor, Alejandra noted: ‘I like to help those who are looking (and working) towards future’ [and not those who] ‘dwell too much in their harms/sufferings’ [or those] ‘who are just selling candies on the streets’.

In the political and popular discourses, the imagined relations were often framed in terms of kinship relations of brotherhood. The Venezuelan migrants were referred to as ‘suffering brothers’ by the president and other political actors dealing with migratory policies. At times, the idiom of brotherhood was also extended to imagined national selves by referring to Colombia and Venezuela as ‘two fraternal countries’ (Escobar 2020: 17). In political discourses, phrasing the aid in terms of ‘helping brothers’ was reiterated and frequently accompanied by evidence of the efforts made in comparison to other countries’ responses. The Colombian government officially embraced the rhetoric of ‘humanitarian help’ but also of seeing migration ‘as an opportunity’ through its insistence on ‘integration’, collaborations across different scales and organisations.¹ Unlike other Latin American countries, Colombia has not officially ‘closed’ its borders for most of the humanitarian crisis. The political deployment of ‘humanitarian reasoning’ with its evocation and mobilisation of moral sentiments, compassion and ‘suffering brothers’ discourse concerning the Venezuelan crisis in Colombian national and international contexts and relations exemplifies what Fassin described as ‘humanitarian government’ (2012: 1–2). Political discourses and actions taken in the name of ‘compassion’ and ‘hospitality’ with all those suffering during the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and in the region transformed by the migratory flows became a mobilising force and accumulated political capital in the fields of domestic (regional and national) and international global politics. The intensified humanitarian affects and emotions with its historically constituted specificity related to entangled histories of two neighbouring nations’ ‘affective states’ (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2017) were key in understanding political struggles in which Colombian government positioned itself as the ‘most hospitable nation’, as well as for solidarity practices of more vernacular humanitarianism.

The expressions of the historically constituted discourse of ‘brotherhood’ and interwoven histories between two nation states with past transnational migration between them was not the only context in which it was developed and deployed. In addition to these historical entanglements between Colombia and Venezuela, imagined pasts and its political uses to govern through humanitarian sentiments, recalling the category of brotherhood was embedded within Christian ethical traditions. In the context of Cali, many of the humanitarian workers’ actions emerged out of certain religious discourses of brotherhood referred to fellow humans capacity for compassion and solidarity. Similarly to what Fassin described in his discussion of humanitarian reason, the concept of ‘humanity’ encompasses ‘the generality of human beings who share a similar condition (mankind)’ and ‘an affective movement drawing humans toward their fellows (humaneness)’ (2012: 2). Padre Alvaro touched upon these points in one of our conversations. For him, the encounters with migrants and their migration dramas highlighted shared universal ‘human fragility’ under ‘dehumanising conditions’. Such conditions and the forced migration produces ‘migratory grief’ (duelo migratorio) experienced by migrants. He described this grief as a part of ‘human pain/affliction’ (dolor humano) and called for developing forms of aid and solidarity in relation to these forms of suffering. In Alvaro's view, ‘every person in their human condition has these capacities for compassion and solidarity . . . But what you need to know is how to accompany them so that they manifest and practice these.’ For him, one must first dispel many myths and prejudices surrounding these issues that ‘do not allow everyone to express these (values)’. It is here that religions play a crucial role, according to Padre Alvaro, in transmitting and making visible the value of

not only religious but humanitarian spirituality. One finds very committed people [in the humanitarian help], and sometimes they are not religious. They have their spirituality of being humanitarian and that is where one also encounters . . . how to remind different religions that their obligation is to create ties of solidarity, to raise awareness . . . to remind them of these fundamental values in religious spirituality. Hospitality is a sacred value. All the religions of the world have it. It is only (a question of) reminding them, and when people of faith are reminded, they practise it.

His views resonated with what many other humanitarian workers identified as a need for more ‘integral vision of accompanying’ migrants in the city of Cali that consists not only of material aid but also of ‘psycho-social’ forms of support. These forms were translated into working with local communities and institutions through awareness-raising training and through making visible the needs of migrants to the state (and non-state) institutions that were seen as too slow to react and without any knowledge of migration. Being oriented by religious or by humanitarian spirituality, these daily practices in humanitarian actions became constitutive of particular ethical, professional, and socially connected persons and selves (Malkki 2015).

Empathy and Solidarity through Past Displacement, Violence and ‘Uprooting’

Cali – culturally – lives differently from other cities . . . there are more marked levels of solidarity. This follows its own history . . . Cali is a city of em-im-migrants and displaced and this in some way has created solidarity, especially in certain more marginalised areas. How did the neighbourhoods in Cali emerge? With colonies of internal migrants, colonies of displaced people, so this has made Caleño to be solidary! (Padre Alvaro)

The words of Padre Alvaro draw on direct experiences with migrants but also reveal a collective imagination that shaped his self-understanding and predisposed him to the specific vision of the migrants. It echoes other ethnographies documenting emergence of solidarity ties and hospitality practices for migrants in places marked by histories of violence, precarity, and vulnerability. Examining a transitory town in north-coast of Colombia marked by histories of violence and marginality, Velanzuela Amaya (2019) shows how the local residents developed a category of chilangos to refer to persons who were passing through and encountered different practices of hospitability on migratory journeys. Similarly, most of my interlocutors working in the field of humanitarianism considered Cali and its inhabitants as having dispositions for empathy, compassion, and solidarity thanks to the past histories of precarity, displacement, and other forms of migration that shaped the present-day social and cultural composition of the city. These experiences of being a (forced) migrant were frequently directly connected to personal or family-related trajectories and migration waves. But they were also imagined by those without any previous direct migratory trajectories. For instance, Laura came to Cali after traumatic experience of one of the most devastating earthquakes destroying her home in the city of Armenia in 1999. Two other collaborators were Colombianos retornados (‘returned Colombians’) who grew up and lived in Venezuela in families of Colombian migrants before the worsening conditions forced them to move to Colombia. Not all humanitarian workers’ lives were directly marked by experiences of forced migration. But even those humanitarian workers without any direct trajectory or experiences of migration had a clear consciousness and imagination of Cali as a city composed of diverse migrants which throughout its history allowed many migrants to recreate their futures. Some groups escaped internal violence of different armed groups. Others were forced to move, due to economic precarity and poverty, in search of better lives in Cali. In their historical reconstruction of the socio-demographic development of the city, Urrea-Giraldo and Candelo Álvarez (2017) highlight how an ethnically and racially differentiated population and its labour in the (often forced) intensive migration flows shaped the socio-economic development of Cali. These patterns of migration transformed the city, as Alves and Vergara-Figueroa (2018) argue, into sedimented order of uneven distribution of opportunities, spatial marginalisation, and social suffering alongside classed, raced and gendered hierarchies that disproportionally impacted poor, displaced Afro-Colombians and Indigenous groupings. While most poor migrants from Venezuela occupied spaces of marginality alongside other racialised and socially vulnerable citizens, they were not able to claim any social rights that accompanied many struggles of marginalised groups in Colombia since the state's multicultural turn in 1990s.²

Many of the Cali residents highlight that despite the multiple inequalities, economic precarity, racialisation, and xenophobia encountered by migrants on their journeys, the city of Cali with its socio-cultural diversity has been a space described as acogedor – an expression referring to a space which embraces welcome (lugar de acogida), of receiving and offering a sense of homely space and hospitability. A reference to Cali as a space of acogida was frequently made, meaning that the city relationally connects and compares to elsewhere, that is to other places, cities and regions described as having ‘less experiences with migrations’ but also less culturally or ethno-racially diverse and more xenophobic than Cali. Many migrants mentioned they felt greater degree of familiarity and also a sense of welcome in contrast to other experiences and encounters on their migratory journeys. Most of my interlocutors in the humanitarian field of Cali believed that past multiple displacements, and endured suffering and violence, shaped the dispositions of workers toward greater empathy and compassion, ‘of putting oneself into someone's else shoes’ as Laura noted. Padre Alvaro not only foregrounded the significance of this past experience to understand and to have more empathy but also as something one must actively work with/towards during their humanitarian actions with migrants but also with the receiving societies:

‘Historical memory of migration’ when you work on this, integration can be achieved . . . when you remember that Colombians, we are a community of emigrants, that many are abroad . . . in an irregular situation, suffering discrimination, when the memory is touched, certain relationships of solidarity are achieved . . . And it views Venezuelan immigrants with a different vision.

However, it was not just personal experiences, memories and traces of displacement, violence, and internal migration that shaped the dispositions of humanitarian workers. Many had professional and educational trajectories that entailed working with internally displaced or with migrants that allowed them to produce particular diagnostics and understandings. These experiences of working with internally displaced subjects in Colombia consisted of social and psychological counselling, institutional routes of attention and support. They acquired practical and (some of them also) theoretical knowledge and different explanatory models that allowed them to understand the ‘suffering subject’ in particular ways and forge distinct modes of interventions.

One example illustrating the production and circulation of knowledge about displaced persons of forced migration was the emergence and use of encompassing notion of ‘uprooting’ (desarraigo). Many of the humanitarian workers deployed this category when explaining the issues and sufferings experienced by migrants from Venezuela. Once I accompanied a group of psychology students who volunteered to run series of activities for migrants’ families and youth under the supervision of Florencia, a young and energetic psychologist and sociologist in her thirties involved in the socio-psychological and art interventions and teaching at a University. During a visit to one neighborhood with a high number of migrants, the students I was with first explained the collective participatory exercise and asked the participating families with children to paint their homes in Venezuela on one half of the paper before continuing with depicting their new homes and experiences of Colombia. This was followed by descriptions of their paintings and narrations of their migratory experiences. For Florencia and students, this participatory activity allowed capturing and alleviating effects of uprooting such as rupture, separation, disorientation, or pain. These activities aimed not only at identification of these issues connected to uprooting but, through a process of psychosocial accompanying, to foster sociocultural and pedagogical tools to strengthen their capacities of resilience and adaptation to the new contexts in Cali (see also Zambrano and Botina 2021).

Laura explained how, together with some of her co-workers, they were initially observing varied responses and actions of migrants that they found difficult to understand. They were worried because ‘even after we tried to talk very clearly and simply’, many migrants appeared disoriented, seemingly getting lost when following instructions but also in navigating the new urban space, and repeatedly acted erratically as if they misunderstood them. When they shared these impressions with two psychology colleagues who worked with displaced groups, they told them that these are some of the symptoms of uprooting that ‘consist in losing that ability to concentrate and to understand, to pay attention to be concentrated, to listen and to understand, to begin to have great difficulty in making decisions . . . decisions with criteria’. One afternoon, in the open space office of Pastoral, I observed how Laura assessed one man in his 40s who was struggling with bureaucracy while exploring how to register for work-related opportunities and trainings. I noticed how Laura readjusted her pace of speaking and slowly responded to the man's confused ways of asking. After he left, Laura told me that there are many migrants like him ‘struggling to understand and to adapt’ because of the ‘uprooting’. For her, this sense of disorientation, of directionlessness, and of getting lost were also manifested in bodily symptoms. In order to respond to the symptoms of uprooting, the Pastoral followed a model developed by one international US-organisation for dealing with IDPs in Colombia, introduced to them by several psychologists focusing on the re-construction of ‘life plan’ or ‘life project’. In the words of one of Laura's colleagues, ‘psychosocial and spiritual accompanying’ of migrants helped them, to reconstruct ‘an ethical life plan so that they can continue look at their future with hope’. This example shows how some vernacular ideas were also interconnected to international spaces and knowledge circulation by appropriating some of the global discourse of psychologists.

As much as lived experiences, collective imaginations, and professional trajectories of working with the internally displaced were identified by the humanitarian workers as shaping their augmented dispositional empathy and their propensities to act, it also became a source of several conflicting issues related to divisive politics of aid distribution and ambiguities of deservingness. For Pablo, a young psychologist from Cali working with one of the NGOs, there were both ‘benefits and challenges’, or similarities and differences between working with these two different populations. He indicated that their experiences working with the internally displaced and victims of armed conflict allowed them not only to have knowledge of certain problems stemming from forced migration and violence (e.g. assisting with mental health issues) but also to be more efficient. At the same time, in contrast to the domestic victims of violent conflict with existing legal framework and a network of different ‘helping’ institutions in place, the case of migrants from Venezuela were found to be without any existence of such legal frameworks and series of institutions.

Additionally, re-orientating their focus on Venezuelan migrants did not necessarily lead to greater understanding and created ambiguities within the humanitarian works. For instance, when one of the locally staffed international NGOs, with a history of working with internally displaced victims of violent conflict, started to work with migrants from Venezuela many of its workers found the shift challenging. Patricia, one of the retornados Colombians who moved to Venezuela with her parents and recently returned to Colombia with her young family, was employed to strengthen the NGO's focus on the new target population. Her humanitarian interventions as a volunteer and a community leader were informed by her Catholic faith and her social locatedness within the networks of migrants. She accompanied migrants in their daily struggles and volunteered to organise activities for migrants by different humanitarian organisations. She relentlessly visited families and became a contact point for many migrants in one neighbourhood as they struggled with housing uncertainties, insecurities, evictions, economic precarity, violence, or school-related issues. She remarked that most of her NGOs colleagues had difficulties ‘to get closer to the population’ and ‘did not understand the migrants’ (from Venezuela). She explained this lack of understanding as due to social and cultural differences combined with their professional focus on internally displaced migrants in Colombia but also different legal frameworks, rights and entitlements, and routes of attention. For many humanitarian workers who were previously focusing on the internally displaced, this shift entailed a need for acquiring further knowledge about the migrants but at times also increased their workload. Like that of other contexts, the encounters between these humanitarian workers in Cali and migrants from Venezuela was shaped by the pre-existing configurations of the biopolitics and hierarchies of suffering (Fassin 2001; Rozakou 2012; Willen 2019). Some humanitarian workers felt ambiguities and tensions around navigating the scarce resources, attention and care that their organisations had to give when starting to work with Venezuelan migrants in addition to the internally displaced victims of violence in Colombia and others on a partially shared continuum of precarity already being assisted (see Cabot 2019). Despite the imagined common understanding and dispositions shaped by past social and professional trajectories and commitment to fight xenophobia, the humanitarian workers and volunteers were themselves no exceptions in differentiating and in making sense of a new group of ‘others.’ Especially, since they were arriving to pre-existing hierarchies of ‘suffering others’ (mostly IDP) in domestic humanitarianism and their struggles for state's recognition of their rights and entitlements (at least since 1990s shifts with new forms of state recognition of victims and suffering subjects). Comparable to what Heath Cabot (2019) documented for crisis-laden conditions in Greece, humanitarian logics and sentiments (frequently based on particular performative acts of ‘victimhood’ or ‘suffering subjects’) led to subsume citizens and non-citizens’ struggles for rights and entitlements in the context of long-term precarious forms of care in neoliberal Colombian state.

Conclusions

In her ethnography of Finnish Red Cross humanitarian workers, Lisa Malkki (2015) shifts analytical attention to the aid workers in order to situate one particular group with their needs, motivations and affects. Rather than deploying a lens of a generic cosmopolitan humanitarian worker, she dissects the interconnected forces that make and transform the Finnish aid workers into particularly situated actors with specific sets of feeling, ethical and experiential obligations, and dispositions. Most Finnish aid workers were propelled to act through solidarities of good national citizens that also implied being good global citizens of the world with strong professional ethics. Her account highlights how socio-political circumstances, national, professional trajectories, and regional histories shape the lifeworlds of the humanitarian workers, their conceptualisations of needs, and imaginations of help and of self. In contrast to the Finnish workers of Red Cross, the humanitarian subjects in Cali did not engage in an imagination of traveling abroad or in contrasting the habitus of humanitarian workers abroad with their national, domestic habitus, and sociabilities at home. They did not share this global outlook nor the sense of ethical obligation derived from being a citizen of a country from the Global North. Instead, most Cali humanitarian workers’ aid was related to three aspects of their locatedness and vernacular forms of humanitarianism. First, their actions were informed by belonging to the imagined collective self with a distinct past and present, and imagined fraternal relations that propelled them towards reciprocal gift-returning logic of hospitality with migrants from Venezuela. The second dimension was connected to specific geographic and social locatedness and temporalities reflecting particular histories marked by internal displacement and violence that has been a constitutive yet contentious element of Colombian society in general and of Cali's urban fabric especially. I argue that to make sense of Colombia's recent responses to mass migration, it is crucial to consider how the Colombia state and Cali's humanitarian workers construct, imagine, and treat not only recent migrants’ others (from Venezuela) but also other categories of ‘domestic’ mobile-displaced others and ‘suffering subjects’ (predominantly racialised and classed forced migrants). Finally, the vernacular forms of humanitarianism are shaped by Christian ethics and embedded within internationally circulating categories of psychologists that are appropriated by the local humanitarian workers. Many of them first acquired these categories in the context of working with internally displaced persons before re-adjusting these to the migrants from Venezuela. When grounding, ethnographically, these different responses to help through different forms of humanitarianism in Cali, I tried to analytically situate how these were historically constituted through particular kinds of relationships and encounters but also how these histories and pasts live differently in the present – both by those who are helping and those who are being helped.