Search for: All records

Prior research has explored the relationship between disasters and the personal well-being of migrants in the United States. The current study retrospectively evaluates the subjective well-being of Puerto Rican post-disaster migrants before migration, after migration (and after the return migration to Puerto Rico of a small subset of the sample), and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing both Wilcoxon Signed Rank and independent samples t-tests, we find that stateside and return migrants experience declines in self-reported mental health after migration and return migration (before the COVID-19 pandemic) and during the pandemic. In addition, we find that return migrants report worse mental health, more negative emotions, and fewer positive emotions than migrants who remained stateside. Our findings have implications for our understanding of Puerto Ricans’ subjective well-being and mental health. Directions for future research on post-disaster climate migration, and particularly the subjective well-being of return migrants, are discussed. 

Using narrative analysis, this article examines the relationship between coloniality and racializing characterizations of Puerto Ricans, on the one hand, and taken-for-granted formula stories about U.S. national identity and morality, on the other. Our analysis draws from two data sets: 21 newspaper articles published in a Florida newspaper in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria about the needs and conditions of climate migrants from Puerto Rico and 54 interviews with Puerto Rican climate migrants who relocated to Florida after the hurricane struck the archipelago in 2017. This multilevel analysis explores prevailing colorblind racism frames that circulate across levels of social life embedded in stories that appeal to cultural ways of thinking and feeling about the world. Our findings show how colorblind frames in broadly shared narratives can reinforce racial scripts and perpetuate ethnoracial inequality. They also show that the broad circulation of such narratives at cultural, institutional, and interpersonal levels renders the racialization process less discernible. 

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.