Fleeing Puerto Rico, With Guilt in Tow
dents at the Touro Law Center. He choked up as he described the strain of deciding to leave even for a few months — his mother encouraged him, but his father urged against it, not wanting him to leave his mother.
“But you have to do what you have to do,” he said.
Back in Puerto Rico, basic essentials are hard to find and electricity and other utilities are unreliable or inaccessible. Much of the population has been unable to return to jobs or to school and access to health care has been severely limited.
Some hope to return once the situation improves, but many have decided to build new lives wherever they have landed. “There’s no possible way I’m going back to that, to have all those problems and not have all those necessities,” said Bryan Troche, who has a marketing business and who has been staying with relatives near Orlando, Florida, along with his wife and infant daughter. “There’s no back to reality. This is the new normal.”
Francois Franceschini was able to claim a spot on one of the first ships to leave the island after the hurricane, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship being used for humanitarian runs. He described the “survivor’s guilt” he felt as he ate steak and mashed potatoes in an air- conditioned state room.
Mr. Franceschini thought he would join his family in New York City for only a few weeks, gathering generators and supplies, and then head back. But now he and his girlfriend, who have been staying in his aunt’s apartment in the Bronx, are starting to look at colleges. Puerto Rico, he said, has been “taken back to the Dark Ages.”
“It got genuinely scary,” he said. “I can work with not being comfortable for a while. I can’t deal with not being safe.”
Those leaving join an exodus that began well before the storm. In recent years, the Puerto Rican population on the mainland (5.4 million people) has grown far larger than the one on the island itself (3.3 million). The territory’s economy had been crippled by a decade-long recession and a debt cri- sis that pushed the island to declare a form of bankruptcy this year.
“The minute we got into the law school, we knew there was a very minimal amount of jobs we could acquire as lawyers working in a firm there already,” said Lourdes Carreras- Ortiz, a University of Puerto Rico law student.
But before the storm, Ms. Alers- Ortiz said, many Puerto Ricans were able to maintain at least the facade of a middle- class life: They had cellphones, went to the movies, shopped at a sprawling mall. The storm washed that away. “Our firstworld mask has been ripped off,” she said. “Now, we’re third world.”
“The feeling is life stopped,” she added.
Members of the diaspora argue that they can contribute to Puerto Rico’s recovery from afar. They point to a surge of money and supplies, and they said they can push for more aid.
A report published by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York projected that upward of 200,000 people could leave the island in the year after the hur- ricane, and that by 2019, that figure could approach a half-million people, or about 14 percent of the island’s population. Researchers anticipate the demographic shifts will spread beyond Florida and the New York metropolitan area, to communities across America.
When Mr. Franceschini arrived in New York, he began to notice the trivial things he had once taken for granted, like when he had a cool drink. “You’re really excited over ice,” he said.
Touro Law Center is one of many schools across America that have welcomed displaced students. A small group had expected to return to their school next year, but now they realize their time away is likely not enough to restore living conditions to what they were before the storm.
“The Puerto Rican way of life is gone as we know it,” Mr. Camacho-Vazquez said. “This is a fact.”