Click to view full size

This was not the Christ­mas that Mariela Gómez would have imag­ined a year ago. Or the one that thou­sands of oth­er Venezue­lan im­mi­grants would have thought. But Don­ald Trump re­turned to the White House in Jan­u­ary and quick­ly end­ed their Amer­i­can dream.

So, Gómez found her­self spend­ing the hol­i­day in north­ern Venezuela for the first time in eight years. She dressed up, cooked, got her son a scoot­er and smiled for her in-laws. Hard as she tried, though, she could not ig­nore the main chal­lenges faced by re­turn­ing mi­grants: un­em­ploy­ment and pover­ty.

“We had a mod­est din­ner, not quite what we’d hoped for, but at least we had food on the ta­ble,” Gómez said of the lasagna-like dish she shared with her part­ner and in-laws in­stead of the tra­di­tion­al Christ­mas dish of stuffed corn dough hal­la­cas. “Mak­ing hal­la­cas here is a bit ex­pen­sive, and since we’re un­em­ployed, we couldn’t af­ford to make them.”