UCF aims to fill research gap on Puerto Rican migrants
Before last year’s hurricane that forced thousands of Puerto Ricans to flee their homes and come to the state, University of Central Florida professor Fernando Rivera had already spent over a decade thinking about Puerto Ricans in Central Florida.
Topics he had long found compelling took on a new urgency: Boricua movement tendencies, their access to health care, how they prepare for natural disasters and how they build new lives away from their homes on the island.
“We saw the patterns of that migration or movement of Puerto Ricans to Central Florida and I kept just hammering the same issue: When are we going to look at this?” said Rivera, sitting in his UCF office, an array of stacked papers, clay figurines with Puerto Rican symbols and a collection of baseballs filling several bookcase shelves.
So when Hurricane Maria hit the island almost a year ago, Rivera realized the Puerto Rico Research Hub, a new research institute at UCF, could not wait any longer.
“It’s kind of ironic that of all
those things, that a major hurricane … was the glue that put everything together,” he said. “Now the work begins.”
Rivera was named the founding director of the hub, which will be formally inaugurated on the eve of Maria’s one-year anniversary, Sept. 19. The center seeks to document the experiences of the latest Puerto Rican diaspora. he’s also an associate professor in the Sociology Department and was recently named as the Interim Assistant Vice Provost for Faculty Excellence.
In the long term, the hub is part of an effort to make UCF the authority on all things Puerto Rico in Florida. Without such a resource, Rivera said, it could become difficult for nonprofits and lawmakers to identify reliable data about a growing population in need of services.
Over 320,000 of the approximately 1 million Puerto Ricans in the state were estimated to already live in Central Florida before Maria, according to U.S. Census data.
Precise numbers on Puerto Ricans who moved here after the hurricane are still uncertain. Some experts have estimated it could range anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000.
“Right now, the research concern should be ... what are we going to do from this point on? If the economic situation on the island doesn’t get better, is it going to be a realistic path for Puerto Ricans to return to Puerto Rico? And if not, what’s going to happen to the ones that stay here?” Rivera said.
A native of the island, Rivera worked at the University of Puerto Rico’s Mayagüez campus for two years before moving to Florida in 2005.
“I’ve seen the decay … When I saw professors that were there for 10, 15 years leaving the ranks, coming to the continental United States, I could see the pattern,” he said.
Creating a resource to profile the diaspora of which he is a part is a very personal mission for Rivera, he said.
“I’ve had those personal issues … Like, ‘what am I doing here, I should be in Puerto Rico, I should be helping out.’ But I wish it was that simple. At the end of the day, you have to look out for your family,” he said.
The purpose of the hub is intentionally broad, he said. “I want to make something useful for the community,” he said, adding that he wants to get input from his colleagues and the community about what they want the hub to focus on.
To begin, Rivera wants to explore four topics: housing segregation, health access, disaster preparedness and professional mobility.
“When you have a lot of people that show the same characteristics in the same place, usually it’s not a good thing. … There was a movement in the 1940s with the Puerto Ricans going to the Northeast. And we still see the consequences of that,” he said. “I don’t want to create another permanent underclass of people.”
Forty-five years ago, Puerto Rican scholars in New York saw the same need Orlando has now. A group of academics, students and community leaders came together to form Centro at Hunter College in 1973, then the only research institute solely dedicated to the study of the Puerto Rican diaspora outside the island.
“There was no material to understand the community 45 years ago,” said Centro’s current director, professor Edwin Melendez. “Most of the literature was based in Puerto Rico. Obviously the conditions of the departments and challenges … were completely different stateside than they were on the island.”
He said Centro then focused on documenting the history of the diaspora throughout the U.S., collecting data on professional achievements and digging up newspaper clippings.
Beyond a research institute, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College is now a think tank with academic journals, podcasts, television series and magazines. The team there trains future scholars, collaborates with Latino programs nationwide and holds regular conferences.
“You need scholarship to affect the way people think and understand the values of an ethnic community,” Melendez said.
Far from competing with the hub at UCF, he’s excited about its formation.
“The more, the merrier,” he said.
The creation of the hub also coincides with UCF’s recent designation as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, a status for higher education institutions that serve at least 25 percent full-time Hispanic students.
It allows the university to apply for federal grants, as the university looks for opportunities to expand relationships with Latin America, said Cyndia Muñiz, assistant director of UCF’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
Muñiz, who is also Puerto Rican, said UCF’s goal is to be a model for HispanicServing Institutions nationwide.
She said that, according to a voluntary survey, out of 1,347 new Latino students for the fall 2017 term, about 30 percent were Puerto Rican. The survey was before Maria — after the hurricane, UCF received one of the largest number of Puerto Rican transfer students in Florida.
“As the hometown university, we’ll be leading the way in researching this community, the impact of this community, the experiences of this community,” she said. “We are heavily involved because ... it’s who we are.”
Rivera also hopes the hub can be a place to celebrate Puerto Rican heritage and culture.
“I think there’s a vibrant, hopeful community that wants to make a change,” he said. “… There’s been too much of a negative rhetoric of what we do and I think we bring a lot of contributions. We don’t have to be ashamed of it. I think we need to celebrate who we are.”