The people of Puerto Rico have been through a lot in the past four years. Hurricane Maria and Irma packed a double wallop causing widespread destruction that cost more than $90 billion in damages in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The human toll was worse with an excess of 2975 deaths in just Puerto Rico as a result of the storm.
As if these disasters were not shocking enough, Earthquakes continue to rock the island. Damage includes structural damage to homes, schools, and businesses making them uninhabitable. The New York Times reports that thousands of families sleep outside their dwellings for fear that tremors may finish off their homes while they are inside.
Four years since Hurricane Maria, physical and emotional scars are still felt by Puerto Ricans that lived through back-to-back disasters. During these emergencies, recovery aid was painfully slow and some are still waiting for recovery money and assistance.
These events touched Puerto Ricans of every part of the social strata. Even US Representative Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s own grandmother had hardships living in post-Maria Puerto Rico. Many felt the desperation that comes from not being able to find a stable place to work or live, opted to immigrate to the United States mainland.
Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States and its people are US citizens. As such, Puerto Ricans can move in and out of the US mainland at will. In 2017 over 100,000 Puerto Ricans did just that as they fled in droves to places like Florida.
What greeted them there was not that much better. Groups that decided to settle in the area of Tampa, walked into more frustrating circumstances which in turn created deeper more complicated issues. Sociocultural anthropologist Dr. Alessandra Rosa calls this a “cascading disaster.”
“The needs in the migrant community were great,” Dr. Rosa says. “They needed affordable housing,” but instead were met with inflated rent prices in Tampa. According to rentdata.org, “2017 Fair Market Rent prices in Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater are very high.”
In order to afford a place to live, Puerto Rican migrants needed jobs that paid enough to pay the high rent prices they were experiencing. In many instances, they did not find that. Dr. Rosa mentions that some challenges for these displaced families included “the language barrier, lack of affordable or free child care, and racism” just to name a few.
One of the most important reasons why families migrated was their children’s education. They quickly found out that the hurricane had created several issues with that as well. Dr. Rosa says “it was a challenge for parents to enroll their children in school because in many cases their kids’ school electronic and hard records were lost due to the storms.” “In cases where children enrolled in local schools, the language barrier was sometimes an extra obstacle for keeping up with their studies.”
The “cascading disaster” Dr. Rosa speaks about is a result of all of these compounding issues. “The Tampa community especially was ill-prepared for the influx of immigrants from Puerto Rico,” said Rosa.
Many of these Puerto Ricans had no choice but to return to Puerto Rico where they face similar hardships, but at least have family support. Some chose to stay and to confront the new challenges posed at the locations they immigrated to.
Evidently, four years after Hurricane Maria Puerto Ricans continue to feel desperation. They need the government at both the state and federal levels to provide them with the assistance they need to get on their feet. Government organizations and NGOs have still not implemented adequate action plans that will be effective in dealing with the state of emergency created by these compounding disasters.
Dr. Rosa says “it is unfortunate that given what these communities have gone through during two hurricanes, several earthquakes, and now the COVID pandemic, that we do not have better programs in place in case other major disasters happen again in the future.”