Three years of Pride: Santiago Méndez’s visual archive of queer Venezuela

This post is part of Global Voices’ June 2026 Spotlight series, “Gender Diversity.” This series offers insight into gender diversity and how it is being threatened, protected, and preserved around the world. You can support this coverage by donating here.
For the past three years, photographer and visual artist Santiago Méndez Arvelaez has been documenting Pride celebrations in Venezuela’s capital city, creating a powerful visual record of queer life, visibility, and resistance.
Born in Caracas in 1998, Méndez explores identity through photography, research, and multimedia visual practices rooted in Venezuelan popular culture. Méndez’s work stands out for its sustained attention to the country’s cultural and social complexities. As part of a vibrant tradition of documentary photography in Venezuela, he is establishing himself as one of the artists creating some of the most compelling archives of communities that remain largely underreported in mainstream narratives.
His work approaches documentary photography with an anthropological perspective, capturing a country shaped by fashion, urban style, Afro-descendant traditions, and popular art, while tracing the connections between contemporary expression and long-standing cultural histories.
Gabriela Mesones Rojo (GMR): Why do you think documenting queer experiences in Venezuela is so important right now?
Santiago Méndez (SM): Venezuela is often explained through politics, migration, collapse. I grew up inside that and I have never experienced my country beyond Chavismo. When everything is reduced to crisis, other stories disappear, but the ability to be yourself in public, love openly, and be recognized says a lot about the country you live in.
Venezuela still has no marriage equality, no recognition for same sex couples, and trans legal gender recognition remains blocked in practice. The Venezuelan Observatory of LGBTIQ+ Violence recorded 461 cases of violence and discrimination in 2023, affecting 394 people, and five deaths.
Queer archives prove that people were here. It leaves evidence of our existence.
GMR: The last three years have shown deep political changes in the country. What changes have you noticed in Caracas’ Pride over the years, whether in participation, visibility, emotions, or political atmosphere?
SM: In 2023 I felt a huge energy in the street. Pride felt crowded, loud, almost unreal. There was joy everywhere, and I believe in that joy. Still, I kept thinking about the pain carried under the music. Existing together in the street is political, even when people do not name it that way.
2024 feels important because it was a hinge year. I went with my mom and friends. The march happened three weeks before the presidential election, and the slogan was ‘Our existence is not public indecency.’ It came after 33 people were detained during a 2023 police raid at a Valencia LGBTIQ+ venue. They were charged with public indecency, criminal association and noise pollution, in a case organizations denounced as discriminatory criminalization in a private queer space.
By 2025 the mood felt different. Smaller. More careful. Less formally accompanied. Some organizations reportedly participated discreetly. The landscape was marked by arrests and exile after the 2024 presidential election.
Pride Month 2026 began with reports that at least 30 men were held in a police operation at a Barquisimeto LGBTIQ+ venue, after officers allegedly accused them of ‘committing the crime of homosexuality.’
Homosexuality is not illegal in Venezuela, but police still behave as if it should be. For many LGBTIQ+ Venezuelans, one of the biggest fears is an encounter with the authorities.
I cannot describe these years as progress. There’s visibility, but also fear. My photos live in that tension.
GMR: As a queer photographer and visual artist, how do you think about representation and ethics when photographing queer experiences? What responsibilities come with creating queer visual archives?
SM: Being queer changes how I photograph these spaces. I recognize parts of myself in the people I photograph. That closeness does not give me ownership over their stories.
In Venezuela, a published image can expose someone to family, work, or police. Public space does not erase risk. So I work with doubt. Some photographs stay unpublished. Some faces stay out of the archive.
I am skeptical of ‘photographer heroism.’ Photography can preserve, inform, and make people pay attention, but it does not replace action, context, or material change. Without research, there is misunderstanding. Without relationship, there is extraction.
Representation is not about making the community look perfect. The Venezuelan queer community carries the same prejudices, desires and contradictions as the rest of the country.
I am part of that reality too, so I approach it with honesty instead of judgment.
GMR: Why is photography fundamental to preserving queer cultural memory? What does photography preserve that other forms of storytelling cannot?
SM: Queer photography matters because much of our history was hidden, mocked, or told by people who did not love us.
In Venezuela, the archive is full of gaps. Many queer lives were photographed only through shame, scandal, police language, medical language and meme language. The Venezuelan Observatory of LGBTIQ+ Violence reported that at least 93 trans people were murdered in Venezuela between 2008 and 2023, all of them trans women. That number changes the meaning of celebration.
I want someone in the future to see these photographs and understand that queer Venezuelans existed in public before the country recognized them. We love here. We make style here. We make noise here.
We belong here, even when belonging was denied.
GMR: What has photographing queer life taught you about Venezuela?
SM: What I keep seeing is that visibility and safety are not the same thing. For many queer Venezuelans, showing up publicly still carries risk. Photography made me look at who feels free, who is supported, who is exposed, who arrives alone.
Pride in Caracas is intense, but it has a strange quietness. It gives you time to read signs and stay with people’s faces. The Pride I photograph is people trying to be public where publicness has a cost. Queer life in Caracas is pushed into rooms, parties, clubs, coded friendships.
The march puts bodies in daylight, but still, it has taught me that visibility is never distributed equally.