Latin American Self-Help Radio in Belgium: Analyzing Narratives by Latin American Migrants

In recent years President Trump has made it more difficult for migrants to migrate to the USA and, as dangers involved in crossing Mexico have risen, Latin Americans, and especially Salvadorians and Venezuelans, have started coming -in growing numbers- to Europe, and more particularly, to Belgium (Asielstatistieken 2020, CGVS 2020). Latin American migrants have not been given much attention yet, as the focus in policy, media, and academia has mostly been on the experiences of migrants from Syria, Afghanistan and Palestine. Knowledge on recent migration from Latin America to Belgium and on the integration strategies of these migrants is still very limited. The aim of this paper is to gain insight into the work and impact of the community radio program “Huella Latina”, founded by Douglas Ivan Zuluaga Colmenares, who arrived in Belgium as a refugee five years ago. Our study sets out to answer the following research questions: i) how do Latin American migrants perceive and cover their migration experience on radio and on the corresponding social media?; ii) what linguistic forms and resources do they use to express their desires, aspirations, ideas, values and world views?; and iii) what role does “Huella Latina” -considered as an international community and network-, play in their everyday lives and their process of integration? Our working hypothesis is that this radio programme contributes to dealing positively with uprooting and that the radio hosts make significant efforts with considerable impact in the enhancement of the overall well-being of migrants. In this context, our research will touch upon the notion of ‘liminality'. We will make the case that liminality is a descriptively and theoretically neglected notion in migration studies. Refugees and migrants often find themselves in this place of ambivalence, between past and present, between home and host countries, often called “third space”. We will carry out a systematic, contextualized analysis and categorization of the broadcasted programmes of “Huella Latina” for the period of November 2020 to April 2021, and data will be analysed using standard qualitative data analysis tools, more specifically, content analysis, narrative analysis, discourse analysis and framework analysis.