Juliana Bruno

Here’s pretty much how it always goes:

• “So, where are you from?”

• “Puerto Rico.”

• “Oh that’s so cool! But, where are you from? ...”

• “…Puerto Rico…”

• “Yes, but where are you from? Like, do you live in Miami?”

• “No, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and I still live there.”

• Every. Single. Time. Aghhhhh.  

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      Let me explain. I am a nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican, studying Hospitality Management & Tourism and Italian at the Florida State University (FSU). Throughout my time here, like most Puerto Ricans studying in the United States, I have constantly faced ignorant comments, dumb questions, and confused looks. The previous dialogue represents my typical first encounter with an American. Why, you ask? Well, many of them simply look at Puerto Rico (PR) as a foreign and faraway place. There might be a defense saying that this doubt simply arises because I am an out-of-state student, which is not common in a state school as FSU is. Nonetheless, I have been with friends that are from Illinois and Alabama when first encountering people from Florida together, yet no one ever assumes that they moved to/live in Florida because they go to FSU. It is always me that ends up answering the same questions and getting the same puzzled looks.

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      Despite having been to the United States (US) numerous times growing up, coming here for college has been a very different experience for me and my friends from home. Being here a prolonged time period has (obviously) also meant prolonged exposure to North Americans. It continually amazes us how people in the U.S. barely know about PR, their neighboring island and longtime territory. Though this ignorance starts with simple encounters such as the one mentioned above, it gets a lot uglier than that.

Around late August-early September, Hurricane Irma was forming and on the process of deciding a path. Though, of course, everyone knows that. Since the beginning of the hurricane, the amount of media, economic, and political attention it was given was out of this world. I literally could not get rid of it; The Weather Channel and CBS News were even covering it 24/7. (Evans) Soon afterwards, another hurricane came about: María. The difference? Everything. According to MIT Media Lab’s Media Cloud project, 19,214 stories were published online about Harvey, 17,338 about Irma, and only 6,591 about María. (Shah et al.) Consequently, many people did not know about it, what it did, where it went, and so on. Many others found out about it two weeks later, when President Donald Trump, finally decided to include us in his schedule and visit PR on October 3rd.

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      After being spared by Irma, knowing that our neighbors in the Virgin Islands were in trouble, Puerto Ricans set out to help in any way they could. Regular citizens, my friends, collected and delivered supplies donated on their personal boats, which came back to PR full of refugees, because out of no other reason than kindness. Little did we know that two weeks later we would need those supplies and as few people in the island as possible. We were threatened by another, much worse, hurricane.

The storm hit PR as a category 5, and essentially destroyed it. The electrical system, which is old and run down, suffered massive damage and the entire island was left without electrical power. This also ruined basically any type of communications network internally and/or externally. Likewise, everyone lost access to water in their households, businesses, etc. Some municipalities had to survive off of creeks and tapped springs. Clean water, food, cash, gasoline, and diesel all started to run low within a few days.

Not surprisingly, my friends and family, along with everyone else, began to grow uneasy and restless. Meanwhile, President Trump was restlessly tweeting and ranting about how NFL players kneeled, instead of standing, for the national anthem and flag: “If NFL fans refuse to go to games until players stop disrespecting our Flag & Country, you will see change take place fast. Fire or suspend!” (@realDonaldTrump). This was just 4 days after María destroyed my home. Nonetheless, he did not deem it important enough to mention PR until one day after the NFL tweets, when people had started to attack him for precisely this.  From my viewpoint, the situation was so ridiculous that it almost appeared an attempt to keep Americans distracted from the crisis happening back home, and it worked. Puerto Ricans could not exactly get the word out without power, Wi-Fi, or signal. Thus, it has been mainly up to the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States to spread the word about the devastation going on in our homeland, and to get recovery efforts and money donations going. I, along with other Puerto Ricans studying in 80+ US institutions, formed a donations page called “Students with Puerto Rico” and have made it our mission to spread the word. In addition, there have been those that have demonstrated attentiveness and sympathy with the cause back home. Puerto Rican artists like Marc Anthony, Daddy Yankee, and JLo all posted videos on social media asking for support and donations for the island’s recovery. Governor Rick Scott visited the island on September 28th (days before the president), opened up the Florida ports to us, and even made colleges and universities give Puerto Ricans in-state tuition. He says: “Even as Florida works to fully recover from Hurricane Irma, our state still has the capability to support our neighbors and friends in their time of need,” (qtd. in Clark) Finally, the Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio quickly recognized our situation, sent people emergency helpers, and said: “We cannot do enough for Puerto Rico.” (qtd. in Rojas)

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      Being away from home, the situation was frustrating. Thankfully, I was able to speak with my immediate family just a couple of hours after the hurricane hit. For most of my friends in the mainland, however, it was a different story. The lack of information from USA did not help. Our best news source was essentially Facebook. The diaspora and the people on the island created a “network”, in the sense that we were all looking out for each other. The people that had achieved contact would help the ones that could not, the few who knew something (anything) about an isolated region would post it so that people who had relatives there could know what was going on. The diaspora basically offered every stranger that had Wi-Fi, but not signal, to let us know so we could contact their family/friends and tell them they were okay because calls were coming in if they were made from the USA, but not within the island itself.

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     My next door neighbor has a generator and he always passes my family an extension cord for the fridge, and in this case, for charging phones. Being from the metropolitan area, the signal was a better than in most regions, and I was able to speak with my parents every once in a while. Half of my extended family, however, were not as lucky. They live in the west coast of the island, two hours from San Juan, in a municipality called Mayagüez, where no communications were coming in or out of there for at least a week, and that was one of the better off. One of my cousins had to drive to San Juan through destroyed roads and unrecognizable paths just to get reception and let us know that he, and everyone else, were alright.

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     My family keeps telling me I’m lucky I’m not there, yet my story is one of the best ones out there. Most Puerto Ricans suffered in extreme ways I did not witness. Sadly, the long time it has taken my home to recover is in part due to the lack of action from the United States government. Why didn’t we receive the aid and attention Florida and Texas did? It seems we will always be second-class citizens.