a woman and her son look out the window at dusk in Peru

Fleeing violence in Venezuela, women migrants face callous indifference

Photos document the lives of migrant women in Lima, Peru as they strive to create safe spaces while longing for home.

Yenifer, 22, stands with her 2-year-old son by the window of the room where she lives in Lima, Peru. The writing below the image says “A birth and a suffering.” Yenifer arrived in Peru in November 2019 from Valencia, Venezuela. While she was pregnant, she says, one day her boss, “came up to me and told me having a baby would ruin my life.” She ultimately quit and fled her homeland. Yenifer prefers not to share her last name or her son's name due to safety concerns.

From her apartment’s rooftop just as the sun sets, Rosa Marín curves her left index and thumb to form a circle in the air. Her two fingertips meet and create a little tunnel that seems to erase the rest of the landscape before her. With the improvised peephole, she frames a couple of distant tin-roofed shanties. For this brief moment she is no longer in Santa Anita, a working-class neighborhood east of downtown Lima, but rather back in her homeland some 2,600 miles away.

“My little Caracas,” says the Venezuelan migrant from her rooftop in Peru. “Whenever I go out of the room at night, I see this little spot that reminds me of home.”

Marín, 27, fled Venezuela in 2018 with

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