Introduction
Most people when they ask me about Venezuela they want to know about the current socioeconomic crisis going on there. They want to know if my family is still there, how they are doing, if things are truly as bad and dangerous as the media makes it out to be. I then have to shallow the pain that talking about Venezuelan causes me and begin to explain in just a few minutes a topic that I could easily talk about for hours. The problem is that for whoever is asking me, this will forever be the only image of Venezuela they have in their minds, a broken country swallowed by poverty and death, but to me Venezuela is so much more than that. Venezuela is my home, where I grew up dancing and smiling, hearing about the most beautiful places and unbelievable stories. This is the reason why I decided to focus my project on Venezuela, so that at least in the minds of the people in this class the image of Venezuela will be a different one, of beauty, fantasy and joy.
To help you navigate this storybook, this introduction will be a small crash course on several aspects of Venezuelan culture and geography that may be useful when reading the stories I chose. Know that there is much more to know about Venezuela than what I will cover and what is shown in the media, but I hope this will give you a at least a small glimpse into my beautiful country and culture.
These are the Angel Falls, known in Pemon language as Kerepakupai Vená, which means "waterfall of the deepest place." This is the tallest uninterrupted waterfall in the world and it is found in the Bolívar state in Venezuela.
These are the Andes, a mountain range that begins in Colombia and Venezuela in the North, and ends in Argentina in the South. It is the longest uninterrupted range of mountains in the world. This region is home to many native Latin American tribes, including the Timoto-Cuicas in Venezuela.
The Orinoco and Caroní rivers are two of the biggest in Venezuela. Orinoco is the third river by volume of water in the world. They have very different compositions and densities, which prevents them from immediately mixing and creates a line when they meet.
A palafito as a traditional indigenous type of housing in which a wooden house with palm tree roof is placed on stilts over a body of water. These are typical of the Pemón people in Venezuela.
These are macaws, but in Venezuela we call them Guacamaya. That is the word I will be using as it comes from the indigenous Tahíno and it is the traditional name. I thought it was important to clear this term from the beginning.
Tepuy means "house of the gods" in the Pemón language, and they are table-top mountains. I will use the word Tepuy instead of mesetas or other names, so it is an important term. Some of the tepuyes I will mention are Auyán-tepui, Kukenán and Roraima.
The Pemón people are from the southeastern area of Venezuela where the Gran Sabana and Tepuyes are found. They are part of a larger ethnic/language family called the Arawaks.
Waraos are a native tribe from the Orinoco Delta in the Northeastern part of the country. Warao means "boat people" as they have a deep connection to the Orinoco river and tend to travel by curiaras, the traditional boat pictures above.
Timoto-Cuicas are an extinct indigenous tribe that used to inhabit the northwestern area of the country in the Andean mountains. They were the most advanced civilization of pre-columbian Venezuela.
This map shows the distribution of all the current indigenous people of Venezuela, however, it does not include now-extinct groups such as the Timoto-Cuicas. I included this map to help you understand the great diversity of ethnicities and cultures that are part of Venezuela, of which I am only covering a small fraction in this project.