Photo of a flooded area captured by an interviewee from their home. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Elizabeth Aranda)
In her newly awarded fellowship from the Center of Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College and Princeton University, USF College of Arts and Sciences’ Dr. Elizabeth Aranda, professor of sociology and director of the Im/migrant Well-Being Research Center, will focus on the future of Puerto Rico in a post-disaster context.
The Mellon Foundation-funded “Bridging the Divides” fellowship program is yearlong and brings together scholars, artists, journalists and researchers from around the country.
Bridging the Divides is funded by a $1.2 million Mellon grant awarded to CENTRO, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College-CUNY, to support the establishment of collaborative, interdisciplinary study groups composed of artists, scholars, and journalists from across Puerto Rico and its diasporas.
During the fellowship year, each group member will work on an individual project and on the development of a final series of collective products that will include a white paper, print publication, and multimodal digital platform. All the materials produced through these collaborative and interdisciplinary research groups (including books, a media hub, multimedia products, etc.) will be produced in both English and Spanish.
Elizabeth Aranda, PhD. (Photo courtesy of USF)
“It’s a huge honor to be part a group of scholars to be awarded this fellowship to work on a project that envisions the future of a post-disaster Puerto Rico,” she said. “I get to be part of an interdisciplinary group of amazing scholars and artists that have done incredible work in the area of Puerto Rican studies and Puerto Rican art; and to engage in intellectual discussions and their practical applications with these leading public intellectuals and artists in their fields is a privilege and the opportunity of a lifetime.”
Aranda has two main goals for her project: to complete her book manuscript on Puerto Rican climate migrants to the continental U.S. and to work with her fellowship cohort to “imagine the future of Puerto Rico.”
“Having a study group and talking about issues that we all work on, but from different perspectives, only enhances the work we all do,” she said. “Plus, coming together on a common project that envisions the post-disaster future of Puerto Rico gives us the space and opportunity to imagine a Puerto Rico in which we can put forth innovative solutions to some of its most challenging problems.”
Aranda has a personal connection to the experiences of post-disaster Puerto Rico.
Her parents were living there when Hurricane Maria struck the archipelago, and she went days without being able to make contact with them.
“It took weeks to get them out of there, when there was no electricity or water, and there were food and gas shortages. Those weeks were agonizing. But, just as hard was knowing that thousands of Puerto Ricans were experiencing those same feelings,” she said. “This motivated me to study those who left Puerto Rico and had to rebuild their lives in Florida and the challenges they faced as they recreated their homes abroad. And for those who eventually went back, I wanted to understand if they were able to re-incorporate back into Puerto Rican society, or if the challenges that led them to leave were still present in their lives.”
Photo of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria captured by interviewee. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Elizabeth Aranda)
Aranda is gathering information for her book on this issue through a National Science Foundation grant. She worked with a team to collect survey data and conduct in-depth interviews with Puerto Ricans who arrived in Florida and utilized services from non-profit organizations to connect with services in Tampa. This research was collected in collaboration with Mujeres Restauradas por Dios, an organization led by Nancy Hernandez.
She has analyzed much of the data and is beginning to write her book, which she hopes to complete by the end of next summer.
She hopes that readers will take from her book, “An understanding of the lived experience of displacement after a natural hazard—often followed by disasters that are socially constructed due to inadequate government responses to the original hazard. I hope that readers can come away understanding the challenges that Puerto Ricans faced not only In Puerto Rico as the storm passed, but when moving to Tampa as they adapted to a society that was not theirs—to the language, the cultural differences; to life as a race/ethnic minority, and to being away from what they had considered home for much of their lives,” Aranda said. “I want readers to see what people go through, both practically and at an emotional level, when one finds oneself outside of one’s homeland, and how they manage despite all the challenges, to recreate home in foreign places.”
She said she also hopes readers can come away from the book with a greater understanding of the consequences of climate change in the form of migration and how it can impact lives.
Photo of the destruction to the home of one of the study’s interviewees. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Elizabeth Aranda)
“Climate change is real, it is here, and it is affecting us now,” she said. “We are feeling it in Florida, but in the case of Puerto Rico, the vulnerability is much higher given that the relationship between the archipelago and the U.S. is a colonial relationship in which Puerto Rico is subject to U.S.’ financial and political interests.”
Aranda said she’s thankful to members of the research team, which consisted of Alessandra Rosa, who was a post-doctoral researcher on the project at the time, and Rebecca Blackwell and Melanie Escue, who were graduate research assistants on the project at the time.
She also notes Maritza Novoa-Hadley was a consultant that played a helpful role in the process of collecting data.
The research team has published several articles based on the project data, appearing in journals that include Latino Studies, Emotion, Space and Society, and two forthcoming articles in Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, and Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences.