On currency, collapse, and the burden of dual identity through the eyes of a donkey piñata made of Venezuelan bolívares

​​

​​​

There are parts of identity that don’t translate cleanly across borders. The paper trail, birth certificates, passports, currency–may indicate where you’re from, but it doesn’t always reflect where you belong. Especially when the country that shaped you no longer exists in the form you remember.

 

The last time I checked, I couldn’t travel to Venezuela (my country of origin) without a Venezuelan passport, despite holding Canadian citizenship. On paper, it’s a small logistical barrier. But symbolically, it strikes deeply. It feels like an erasure. A severring. As if bureaucracy could overwrite lineage.

 

That tension between paper identity and personal truth forms the basis of this work: a small donkey piñata made entirely of Venezuelan bolívares.

​

Venezuela wasn’t always a country associated with scarcity and struggle. For much of the 20th century, it stood among the wealthiest nations in Latin America, flush with oil reserves and global ambition. In the 1950s and ’60s, Venezuela was seen as a land of opportunity. “Saudi Venezuela,” they used to call it, because of the immense oil wealth flowing through PDVSA, the state-run petroleum company. It attracted immigrants from Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the Middle East with skilled labor, international business, and cultural exchange. Caracas thrived with modernist architecture and a booming cultural scene. Venezuela was a founding member of OPEC and, at its height, boasted one of the highest GDPs per capita in the region. Its currency, the bolívar, was once so strong that people from neighbouring countries crossed borders just to shop.

 

But that same bolívar, once a symbol of sovereignty and strength, has become one of the most haunting artifacts of Venezuela’s collapse. As inflation soared into six digits and the currency plummeted to worthlessness, bolívares turned into raw material. Artists, vendors, and ordinary people began crafting sculptures, bags, and baskets out of the notes to survive. Money, no longer good for food, became a desperate medium. Value was replaced by symbolism. The collapse wasn’t televised–it was felt in the absurdity of paying for bread with bricks of bills.

 

When Hugo Chávez rose to power, he ushered in the Bolivarian revolution, a movement that promised equity, empowerment, and resistance to imperialism. But after his death, and as Nicolás Maduro consolidated power, that promise unraveled into a warning. The 2017 uprisings triggered by the dismantling of the National Assembly and violent crackdowns on protesters, showed what happens when democratic systems give way to authoritarianism. Economic mismanagement was only part of the equation. Sanctions, internal corruption, and oil price volatility collided, creating a perfect storm. And the Venezuelan people pay the price. Yet, even in the rubble, there is art. Gestures of resilience. Beautiful, ironic, painful art. Currency as canvas. Scarcity that breeds symbolism.

 

This piece isn’t just about Venezuela. It’s about all of us who live in the in-between: citizens of countries we can’t always return to, shaped by systems we didn’t vote for, affected by policies we didn’t create. Immigration is both a solution and a fracture. It offers safety, but also distance–a physical and emotional gap where memory, identity, and misinformation blur.

 

For many immigrants, especially those watching their home countries suffer, detachment becomes a coping mechanism. It’s not indifference, it’s self-preservation. When you’re far away and feel powerless to create real change, dissociating or withdrawing is sometimes the only option. You stay informed, and exhausted. You care, just not always out loud.

 

And yet, the connection never fully disappears. It just grows quieter. More complicated. There’s guilt for not knowing every headline, for not sending money home, for missing the nuance. The space between personal identity and national reality keeps expanding. That, too, is part of the immigrant condition: learning to hold space for where you’re from, even when you can’t hold its weight.

 

As a dual national, I live in a strange limbo. I hear the diaspora myths. The secondhand stories. The contrasting versions of Venezuela told by those who left and those who stayed. Often, neither one feels true. The reality is layered, corrupted, heartbreaking–and deeply complex.

​

Above all, it’s a cautionary tale.

​

The piñata is a metaphor. A symbol of festivity, of joy, but also of destruction. You beat it toreveal what’s inside. But what if the inside is hollow? What happens when a national currency becomes more useful as a sculpture than as money? What does that say about the state, about capitalism, about the illusion of value? And the donkey–not just a playful form, but a beast of burden. A symbol of labor, endurance, and the working class. It carries the weight of others’ wealth and movement, often without choice, without pause. This piece is a love letter to diasporic grief. To the feeling of belonging to a place you can’t enter. Of watching your identity become politicized, misunderstood, simplified. It’s about the contradictions of globalization–how foreign policy frames your home as a “failed state,” even as international systems profit from its collapse. It’s about not knowing which version of history to trust, and realizing even your own version is incomplete.

 

But more than anything, it’s about paper.

 

Paper currency.

Paper borders.

Paper passports.

 

Paper donkeys stuffed with the debris of empire and hope.