My research actions began with a relatively clear intention: to observe how music, migration, and Venezuelan cultural identity intersected in concrete situations.
However, several important learnings did not appear where I expected to find them.
In the DJ set intervention, I thought I was presenting a musical reading of Venezuela through Venezuelan codes: sounds, references, rhythms, and affects connected to an idea of origin. But the event did not function as a gathering of Venezuelans or Latin Americans recognising themselves through music. Almost the opposite happened: there were no Venezuelans in the audience, but rather people from different places listening with openness. This displaced my original intention. The action stopped being only about “representing Venezuela” and began to show me how cultural appreciation can happen in a casual, open, and not necessarily identity-based way. People did not need to share the origin of the music in order to enter into relation with it. This was an error of expectation: I had assumed that reception needed to pass through a Venezuelan community. The learning was that cultural appreciation can also be an act of available listening, even when there is no direct belonging.
In my conversations with Alberto Stangarone and Cardopusher, the focus moved towards the cultural codes present in contemporary Venezuelan music. With Alberto, the idea of continuity became clearer: how certain gestures, rhythms, references, or ways of sounding come from the past, but do not remain intact. They are transformed in order to circulate in the present. Bands such as Rawayana, for example, help certain Venezuelan codes become popular, legible, and exportable. But with Cardopusher, a different tension appeared. For him, explicit Venezuelanness can feel commercial, even cringe. His perspective does not begin from preserving national codes, but from producing through external influences, from an outside that allows the inside to be reworked differently. There I understood that cultural creation does not always want to “represent” an identity. Sometimes it seeks to escape it, contaminate it, or even reject its commercial use.
I also recognise that some of my questions did not fully work. In particular, when I asked about Venezuelan identity too directly, I risked pushing the conversation towards an explanatory or justificatory answer. The question could make the interviewee speak about identity as a concept, instead of showing how identity appears through concrete decisions: what they sample, what they avoid, what embarrasses them, what interests them, what they consider too obvious or too commercial. The methodological learning was that, in order to study cultural identity in music, I should not always ask “what does it mean to be Venezuelan?” Instead, I need to observe where the tension appears: in taste, rejection, rhythm, archive, market, and discomfort.
The visit to Seven Sisters with Jimena also began with an expectation. I wanted to observe migration in relation to the place-based: flags, food, national signs, and visible gestures of belonging. I expected to find a more fixed Latinidad, almost organised through recognisable symbols. And yes, that was present: the food, the flags, the names, the accents, and the commercial codes that call a community into place. But another layer also appeared: contemporary music, fusions, and rhythmic mixtures that were not frozen inside a nationalist idea of culture. The place was not only preserving Colombianness, Venezuelanness, or Latinidad; it was also putting those identities into circulation within London. There, culture functioned as memory, commerce, community, and atmosphere.
What remained outside my research actions, then, was not secondary data. It was a set of framing errors that helped me refine the investigation. I thought I was going to find Venezuelan identity in clear symbols, specific communities, or recognisable musical references. But what I found was more unstable: non-Venezuelan people appreciating the music without claiming it; Venezuelan artists using cultural codes with distance, pride, or discomfort; migrant spaces preserving national identity while mixing it with the urban life of London. These deviations show me that my research should not search for a closed definition of cultural identity, but rather study the moments where identity is activated, negotiated, commercialised, rejected, or transformed.