With discourse analytical tools, this paper addresses emergent discourses related to the massive Venezuelan migration to Peru. We examine a corpus of 64 semistructured interviews carried out in Lima and Arequipa with Peruvian dwellers of both cities. Common discourse patterns and differences are identified, both among interviewees of both cities, and among interviewees that perform basic and non-basic occupations. We focus on two aspects. The first one relates to representations of the migrants’ physical features and personal care, where qualifications such as tall or voluptuous, and references to a beauty culture stand out. The second aspect includes representations of their social behaviour, with adjectives like noisy, arrogant and friendly and cheerful. Our findings suggest the need of enriching sociolinguistic approaches to migration with recent claims about the tight relationship between language and racialization phenomena, as well as with more classic guidelines for analysing identity in interaction, derived from sociocultural linguistics