Based on data from 103 surveys of Puerto Rican migrants living in Florida and 54 in-depth interviews with a subgroup of them, we examine how Puerto Ricans who left the archipelago after Hurricane Maria have navigated settlement in their new homes. In this article, we observed and classified our participants’ descriptions of how they managed opportunities and challenges regarding education, employment, and social relations, the traditional benchmarks for the assessment of societal integration. We also observed how our participants described Covid-19’s interaction with these benchmarks. We found that our participants have experienced a series of cascading disasters since 2017—namely, Hurricane Maria, the earthquakes that affected Puerto Rico starting in late 2019, the humanitarian crises that followed both disasters, and now the global pandemic. These disasters, compounded with migration, have resulted in a process of adaptation to Florida in which social and labor-market integration and the ability to nurture social ties have been significantly diminished.
In recent years, the largest population movement from Puerto Rico to the continental United States in over fifty years has occurred following a prolonged economic crisis, exacerbated by the humanitarian disaster that took place after the archipelago was struck by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. Since September 2017, just under 200,000 Puerto Ricans have relocated to the continental United States, the largest number migrating to Florida. Yet not much is known about the adaptation of this population who relocated postdisaster. To contribute to the scholarly literature on Latino integration and based on data from in-depth interviews with 19 Puerto Ricans who moved to Central Florida both before and after the hurricanes of 2017, we focus on the ways in which Puerto Ricans conceptualize home and belonging. We also examine how place-making and belonging are related to emotions, an often-neglected dimension in the study of migrant integration. We engage with literature on space and place and draw from research on emotions and migration to propose five conceptions of home among migrants: home as family, home as identity, home as pleasure, home as community, and home as plausibility.
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