Form Submission: Participation Entry

A few days after Hurricane Maria hit landfall, a single mother of two escaped the disaster that left Puerto Rico in crisis and without electricity. Through her informal social networks and with only a three-hour notice, she and her family boarded a humanitarian plane to the US mainland. Relying on ethnographic methodologies, this paper examines the experiences of displaced Puerto Rican women that live in New Haven, Connecticut. I ask: How does the confluence of displacement and gender influence lived experience in the diaspora? How does social and physical mobility shape the urban landscape in New Haven, CT to produce constructions of the ‘new diaspora’? This work centers the narratives of displaced women and explores how the hurricane revealed the vulnerability imposed by hundreds of years of colonialism; a historical legacy of dispossession and the fiscal mismanagement of the Puerto Rican economy. Further, I seek to contextualize how those with limited resources are more vulnerable to the devastation of climate catastrophe. Revealing the instant and delayed effects of climate catastrophe can have profound consequences on socioenvironmental consciousness.