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.

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.