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Background: Peru hosts the second-largest population of Venezuelan migrants, many of whom face settlement and integration challenges, such as labor precarity and xenophobia. For some women, sex work is a crucial economic resource that can also heighten exploitation and violence. Moving beyond damage-centered approaches, this study centers community-developed counter narratives that affirm migrants sex workers’ agency, knowledge, and strength.

Objective: To explore how migrant sex workers enact agency and autonomy during settlement, and to co-create counter narratives emphasizing the power of embodied knowledge.

Methods: Between May and June 2025, ten migrant women sex workers participated in five creative laboratories (6 hours each), conducted in partnership with a community artists’ collective. Guided by Creative-Relational Inquiry and Victoria Santa Cruz’s theory of rhythm as an embodied organizer of experience, we employed community-driven, performance-based methods including play, theater-based prompts, writing, and group dialogue to facilitate embodied and collective meaning-making.

Results: Participants described the laboratories as fostering interpersonal connection, emotional peace, love, and personal empowerment through rhythmic, embodied, and performance-based practices. Our approach emphasized play, experimentation, and collective decision-making, supporting relational attunement and shared meaning-making. Activities enabled participants to stage migration journeys from Venezuela to Peru, explore intersecting identities, collectively process trauma and stigma, and affirm sex work as legitimate labor.

Conclusion: Community-developed counter narratives, led by women through arts-based, embodied inquiry, enabled the integration of mind and body in transforming migration experiences into shared meaning. Incorporating community-driven, arts-based approaches is critical for centering women’s knowledge, well-being, and agency in migration and health research.