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Using narrative analysis, this article examines the relationship between coloniality and racializing characterizations of Puerto Ricans, on the one hand, and taken-for-granted formula stories about U.S. national identity and morality, on the other. Our analysis draws from two data sets: 21 newspaper articles published in a Florida newspaper in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria about the needs and conditions of climate migrants from Puerto Rico and 54 interviews with Puerto Rican climate migrants who relocated to Florida after the hurricane struck the archipelago in 2017. This multilevel analysis explores prevailing colorblind racism frames that circulate across levels of social life embedded in stories that appeal to cultural ways of thinking and feeling about the world. Our findings show how colorblind frames in broadly shared narratives can reinforce racial scripts and perpetuate ethnoracial inequality. They also show that the broad circulation of such narratives at cultural, institutional, and interpersonal levels renders the racialization process less discernible.

Abstract:In recent years, the largest population movement from Puerto Rico to the continental United States in over fifty years has occurred following a prolonged economic crisis, exacerbated by the humanitarian disaster that took place after the archipelago was struck by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. Since September 2017, just under 200,000 Puerto Ricans have relocated to the continental United States, the largest number migrating to Florida. Yet not much is known about the adaptation of this population who relocated postdisaster. To contribute to the scholarly literature on Latino integration and based on data from in-depth interviews with 19 Puerto Ricans who moved to Central Florida both before and after the hurricanes of 2017, we focus on the ways in which Puerto Ricans conceptualize home and belonging. We also examine how place-making and belonging are related to emotions, an often-neglected dimension in the study of migrant integration. We engage with literature on space and place and draw from research on emotions and migration to propose five conceptions of home among migrants: home as family, home as identity, home as pleasure, home as community, and home as plausibility.

Using data from 53 in-depth interviews with undocumented immigrant young adults in Florida, we argue that undocumented legal status leads to a range of emotional challenges among this group. Lack of ontological security is at the core of emotions they must contend with, from frustration, fear, shame, and depression to anxiety about their future. Positive coping strategies include individually oriented activities such as listening to music, exercising, playing sports, attending church, and turning to close family members or friends for advice or compassion. Negative coping strategies often include behaviors that result in self-harm, including starving themselves, overeating, drinking, smoking, using drugs, and even ideating or attempting suicide. The most positive mechanism to foster well-being draws from social and emotional health generated by membership in immigrant advocacy organizations that provide opportunities for empowerment and belonging. Meaningful social connections result in positive emotional states, which in turn, provide young immigrants with emotional capital to aid in the process of resocialization, leading them to recast negative emotions into positive ones. We conclude with a discussion of conditions most conducive to the emotional well-being of undocumented immigrant young adults and factors that enhance emotional capital and contribute to greater well-being among this population.

The current immigration enforcement regime embodies a colorblind racial project of the state rooted in the racial structure of society and resulting in racism toward immigrants. Approaching racism from structural and social process perspectives, we seek to understand the social consequences of enforcement practices in the lives of undocumented immigrant young adults who moved to the United States as minors. Findings indicate that although legal discourse regarding immigration enforcement theoretically purports colorblindness, racial practices such as profiling subject immigrants to arrest, detention, and deportation and, in effect, criminalize them. Further, enforcement practices produce distress, vulnerability, and anxiety in the lives of young immigrants and their families, often resulting in legitimate fears of detention and deportation since enforcement measures disproportionately affect Latinos and other racialized immigrant groups in U.S. society. We conclude that policies and programs that exclude, segregate, detain, and physically remove immigrants from the country reproduce racial inequalities in other areas of social life through spillover effects that result in dire consequences for these immigrants and their kin. We argue that immigrant enforcement practices reflect the nation’s racial policy of our times.