The Racializing Work of Cultural Narratives: An Analysis of Colorblind Frames of Puerto Rican Climate Migrants

Abstract

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.

Keywords

institutional racism colorblind racism racialization Puerto Ricans climate migrants narrative analysis Florida

Migrants’ lives are affected by group identity characterizations that circulate about them in their new societies. These characterizations can speak of shared views and emotions about them (Jewell 2016) but also of class and race hierarchies (Almaguer 2008) and racial interactions among groups (Molina 2014) in receiving contexts. Thus, understanding how groups are characterized and symbolically represented in social life allows us to expand our knowledge about migrant groups’ experiences in local communities, particularly with racialization—the process of assigning racial meaning to phenomena that were previously racially unclassified (Omi and Winant 1986). Drawing from narrative theory (Fisher 1984) and narrative analysis methodologies (Loseke 2021), we demonstrate in this article how the observation of formulaic narrative identities that circulate in social communication at various levels of social life helps expand our understanding of the shared views and emotions affecting people’s lives (Blackwell 2021), specifically migrants. We contend that cultural narratives display geopolitically and historically situated collective emotions (Stearns and Stearns 1985) and views of the world (Zerubavel 1997) that both respond to and reproduce a society’s racial order at the symbolic level (Roth 2012), affecting the racialized material conditions of that society’s social structure (Omi and Winant 1986).

The goal of this article is to gain further understanding of the racialization and disenfranchisement of Puerto Ricans and the ways in which U.S. citizenship within a colonial context contributes to forms of symbolic and structural exclusion based on understandings of race. To better understand the racialization of Latinos, we draw from José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin (2015:1), who define it as

the denigration of their alleged physical and cultural characteristics such as phenotype, language, or number of children. Their racialization also entails their incorporation into a white-created and white-imposed racial hierarchy and continuum, now centuries old, with white Americans at the very top and black Americans at the very bottom.

While Puerto Ricans share with all Latinos “a historical relation to US expansionism and a contemporary experience of being racialized,” they are commonly viewed by other Latinos as exceptional due to their birthright U.S. citizenship (Silver 2020:5) and the colonial relationship that defines their identities (Aranda and Rebollo-Gil 2004). As such, Elizabeth Aranda and Guillermo Rebollo-Gil (2004:913) have proposed that for Puerto Ricans, “the social construction of race involves ethnic and global dimensions such as national origin, culture, language, religion, the historical relationship between colonial powers and their political subjects, and race.” They use the term “ethnoracism” to describe the racialization of ethnicity but also Puerto Rico’s status as a U.S. colonial territory to better understand how Puerto Ricans experience racism in the U.S. context.

Thus, our analysis explores racialization processes within a colonial context that Puerto Ricans relocate stateside experience and brings together the theoretical notions that (1) cultural ways of thinking and feeling are shared in social life in the form of broadly shared cultural stories (Loseke 2019) that, when referencing ethnoracial groups, are recirculated historically in the form of racial scripts (Molina 2014); (2) the social racial orders of any given society are both relational (Molina 2014) and symbolically represented and perpetuated in social communication (Roth 2012); and (3) colorblind frames, often structured by the White racial frame rooted in systemic racism (Feagin 2020), can be easily dissociated from racial othering and can make racializing symbolic representations imperceptible or deemed as inconsequential, regardless of their pervasiveness (Bonilla-Silva 2022; Omi and Winant 1986).

Newspapers (Van Dijk 2013) and personal life stories (McAdams 2013) are rich empirical sources of culturally shared ideas about the world. We combined these two types of data sources to observe the relationship between the circulating narratives present in a receiving community and migrants’ perceptions of their social position in their new context. We analyze 54 interviews with Puerto Rican climate migrants who moved to Florida after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, along with 21 newspaper articles about migration assistance and the post-hurricane federal recovery plans. An initial analysis of migrants’ understanding of and responses to what they perceived others thought of them in the host society led us to the question: What is the work that colorblind frames in broadly circulating narratives do in the racialization of migrants? We sought to answer this question by relating the stories collected through the interviews to concurrent newspaper articles and their stories of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico-U.S. relations in the context of the hurricane-related emergency.

Geopolitical Context of Puerto Ricans’ Migration and their Racialization Stateside

Puerto Ricans entered the U.S. ethnoracial stratification system through colonization in 1898, when Puerto Rico was acquired from Spain in a treaty to end the Spanish-American War. In the first half of the twentieth century, Puerto Rican migration was encouraged mostly as a source of temporary labor to offset U.S. labor shortages and to solve island overpopulation (Meléndez 2017). The Puerto Rican diaspora grew, fueled by the Great Migration (1945–1965), which sent workers to various cities throughout the country (Duany 2011; Pérez 2004). Concurrently, Puerto Rico was showcased as the center of U.S. industrial expansion in the Caribbean (Dietz 1986), following a colonial model of economic development known as “Operation Bootstrap” (Santana 1998).

In the 1970s, return migration to Puerto Rico increased (Rivera-Batiz and Santiago 1996) as tax breaks for pharmaceutical companies created jobs in Puerto Rico just as the Rust Belt deindustrialized. When migration increased again in the 1980s through the early 2000s, and migration patterns began to redirect themselves from the Northeast to the South and West (Baker 2002), Florida began to see the growth and expansion of Latino/a/x and Puerto Rican communities, and the state faced demographic shifts in key cities, including parts of Central Florida (Delerme 2020). By the mid- to late 2010s, Florida outpaced the traditional destination of New York, attaining the distinction of having the largest Puerto Rican population stateside. During this period, the Puerto Rican economy underwent a prolonged recession and subsequently collapsed, leading to a peak in migration from 2006 to present times. This peak accelerated after Hurricanes Irma and Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, displacing thousands. Much of this population relocated to Florida.

Though Puerto Ricans have intentionally created community-building spaces stateside in which they feel like they belong, such as in Orlando (Silver 2020), Chicago (Pérez 2004), and Newark (Ramos-Zayas 2012), they and other Latino/a/x migrants are objects of racialization (Aranda and Rebollo-Gil 2004; Cobas et al. 2015), which is partly related to language (Delerme 2020; Rosa, Aranda, and Dotson 2022). Despite this common experience of ethnoracism (Aranda and Rebollo-Gil 2004), Puerto Ricans and other Latinos/as/xs experience sociopolitical divisions that weaken their political power as a group (Aranda, Hughes, and Sabogal 2014), particularly in Central Florida (Silver 2020).

Citizenship could be for Puerto Rican migrants what Jeffrey Guhin (2018) calls a racial hinge—theoretically, it could open doors to social mobility and U.S. societal incorporation associated with assimilation. Yet Puerto Rico’s colonial history keeps its citizens in a racial loophole of daily contradictions because they share with other racial minorities a common experience of institutional discrimination regardless of skin color nuances (Vidal-Ortiz 2004). They have been racialized as an inferior group stateside (Ramos-Zayas 2004), as legal aliens (Duany 2011) and colonial subjects (Grosfoguel 2003), and not just fellow citizens. Their racialization affects notions of deservingness based on stereotypes (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003) and establishes a racialized/colonial citizenship (Valle 2019), for their rights are systematically neglected through the structural violence of a racialized governance (Bonilla 2020). Unclear, however, is how everyday narratives that circulate in social life become colorblind tropes that reinforce Puerto Ricans’ position in the U.S. ethnoracial hierarchy.

Colorblind Frames in the Systemic Racism of Coloniality

Expanding our understanding of the interplay between meaning-making and material life is not the task of a single epistemological paradigm (Calhoun 1995). Thus, while we view race as socially constructed through a relational process (Kim 1999) nested in a system of cultural ideas and symbolic boundary-making work (Roth 2012), we also recognize the power dynamics of racialization (Molina 2014; Ramos-Zayas 2012) and the powerfully violent categorization system that race has historically been in the material stratification of people (Mills 2004; Omi and Winant 1986). Moreover, as a socially constructed status, race is negotiated among groups (Molina 2014). Observing the larger racial landscape of society is thus necessary if one is to understand the shared histories, politics, cultural spaces, conflicts, and competing interests behind the broadly shared racializing meanings and definitions associated with any given group. A first step in this analytical direction is to explore existing types of racial boundary-making, and this is what our analysis is focused on. We are specifically interested in racial boundary-making that does not explicitly reference race.

Our interest references historical power differentials born out of colonial oppression (Mills 2004) that can perpetuate colonial dispossession through taken-for-granted colorblind frames that go unnoticed in daily communication. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2013) identifies four distinctive and commonly used colorblind frames to explain discrimination: cultural racism, abstract liberalism, naturalization, and minimization. Cultural racism explains racially stratified social location as the result of the cultural beliefs and practices of those who are discriminated against, disregarding structural barriers, and blaming people’s choices. Abstract liberalism appeals to the historical liberal-humanist value of individualism. This frame is frequently found in narratives opposing public policies such as affirmative action, which make claims of unfairness, oppressive impositions, and the need for meritocracy. Naturalization explains social stratification as a natural phenomenon resulting from personal choices, as when segregation is attributed to a natural desire of people to be with those who are similar. Finally, minimization depicts racism as overstated and not having a significant impact on a group’s social standing (Bonilla-Silva 2013). Colorblind frames help naturalize the organizing logic of colonial domination (Mignolo 2003) and racialized governance neglect (Bonilla 2020). These frames can especially contribute to hide predatory economic policies and racially unequal laws, and they can also prevent systems of accountability and disempower social mobilization (Purifoy and Seamster 2021), especially when in policy processes, decision-makers racialize groups in need of social assistance as burdens by using colorblind racial cues to associate racial categories with group stereotypes to justify policy outcomes (Ray, Herd, and Moynihan 2022).

Understanding the Lasting Power of Colorblind Cultural Narratives

Racial and ethnic categories are often used in communication as symbolic codes to map expected emotional responses (Kim 1999). But the construction of racializing cognitive and emotional associations can hide in plain sight because they can operate as cultural ideas, things people simply “know” (Eagleton 2013:7). Racial categories may appear in formula stories (Berger 1997), defined as formulaic scenarios used to morally classify the world and create models of social processes or socioemotional reality (White 2010). The narrative paradigm, which is the epistemological understanding of human communication as narrative in its nature (Alexander 1992; Fisher 1984), views storytelling as the primary structure of speech (Herman 2009) and of sensemaking (Bruner 2010). Storytelling allows us to turn unique phenomena into generalizable categories (McCurdy, Spradley, and Shandy 2004) and to co-create and circulate in communication symbolic codes that become the shared beliefs (Alexander 1992) and cultural toolkits (Swidler 1986) of our “thought community” (Zerubavel 1997).

Thus, formula stories are empirical windows into our moral judgments and culturally shared assumptions and emotions (Geertz 2000). But a single formula story can be deployed differently by social actors with different goals (Gubrium and Holstein 1998). To learn about what people try to “do” with their “emotion talk” (White 2010:68), scholars can conduct multilevel narrative analyses to observe how symbolic codes—defined as ways of thinking—and emotion codes—defined as ways of feeling—are differently associated in different contexts (Loseke 2019) and to learn what elements are overlooked or highlighted (Zerubavel 1997).

The formulaic plot of the “American Dream,” for instance, has traditionally been a symbolic code for well-being based on a capitalist ideal of equal opportunity and upward class mobility (Samuel 2012). This plot, however, is made up of colorblind frames and omits the systemic racial exclusions that stratify the U.S. population by individualizing class and ignoring colonial dispossession. The religious mandate for White supremacy and colonialism is represented by another symbolic code in U.S. identity: “Manifest Destiny.” This second narrative, which dates to the early development of the nation, has represented the United States’ political, social, and economic structure and its people’s racial and moral standing as superior by God’s design. Manifest Destiny is a cultural narrative that features the United States as the world’s role model in democratic principles, with liberty and justice at the forefront of its moral authority (Dahl 2018). This narrative encapsulated the country’s ideological mandate that drove nineteenth-century expansionism and governed the restrictive laws and policies that excluded those who were not of White, European background from landownership (Frymer 2017). Its historical and continuing circulation in social life makes it part of the repertoire of stories that people draw from to make “logical” inferences of their experiences (Steinman 2016) and, most importantly for our analysis, the racial identities (Korver-Glenn 2019) that affect material life (Burr 2015).

Methods

To gain further understanding of Puerto Ricans’ experiences with racialization in the continental United States, we combined data sets in a multilevel narrative analysis (Blackwell 2021). We analyzed 54 in-depth interviews with Puerto Rican climate migrants to the Tampa Bay region in Florida after Hurricane Maria and 21 newspaper articles from the Tampa Bay Times between the months of September 2017 (when Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico) and July 2021 (when we began our qualitative data analysis). The Tampa Bay Times is the daily newspaper with the largest circulation in Florida (FullIntel 2019).

Setting

Approximately 22 percent of the nearly 56,000 Puerto Rican climate migrants who migrated to Florida after Hurricane Maria settled in the Tampa Bay area (Gamarra 2018). Tampa is in Hillsborough County—home to 118,467 Puerto Ricans (8.3 percent of the county)—the county with the second largest Puerto Rican population (and the fourth largest proportion of the population that is Puerto Rican; Social Explorer, n.d.). After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, then-Governor Rick Scott set up welcome centers in Florida airports in cities with large Puerto Rican populations; however, Tampa was not one of these cities. Nonetheless, there are several nonprofit organizations that are ethnically based and serve the interests and needs of Puerto Ricans (Rivera 2022), as well as ethnic businesses throughout the city. That said, many of our participants commented that they had to travel to the Orlando area to see friends and family and that Tampa was a place where they felt isolated from other Puerto Ricans.

Participants and Interview Data

Our interview participants were a subset of 146 Puerto Ricans whom we previously surveyed by partnering with a faith-based local nonprofit organization that established a one-stop hub to provide emergency disaster relief services to climate migrants. Our interviews lasted between two and three hours. They were all conducted in Spanish by native Spanish speakers, two of them from Puerto Rico and the other from another Latin American country. The interviews took place through video calls, predominantly through WhatsApp, between March 2020 and February 2021. Interviews contain life stories and reflections about thoughts and emotions prompted by questions about biography, identity, politics, the experience of the hurricane, migration decisions, and outcomes of the adaptation process after relocation. The transcribed interviews in Spanish were coded in MAXQDA, a qualitative data analysis software. We focused the analysis in this article on stories describing scenes of social exclusion and how participants thought Puerto Ricans were perceived in the U.S. context, to understand the perceived role of race in these experiences. Emerging patterns were classified, and the most representative samples of each pattern were translated into English by the authors, to be included in the findings. Among the 54 participants, 39 were women, most had children, most identified as White, most were not fluent in English, and all of them had moved stateside within the first few months after the hurricane. At least one-fifth of all participants required disability services for themselves or family members, and about half had at least some postsecondary education. Ten of our interviewees had returned to live in Puerto Rico at the time of our interview.

Newspaper Data

We collected an initial total of 37 Tampa Bay Times articles published between September 2017 and July 2021. The articles were drawn from the database LexisNexis through a search that combined the acronym “FEMA” (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and the terms “Puerto Rico,” “Puerto Ricans,” “refugees,” “migrants,” and “Hurricane Maria.” We discarded the articles and reader letters that did not directly address the events of the hurricane in relation to Puerto Rico or its migrants, reducing this data set to 21 articles. We found different categories of articles, some that critique the responses of political actors and governmental institutions, some that describe the hardship of mobility, and reports of civic actions and charity work to help victims of the hurricane.

Data Analysis

We build this article on our analysis of patterns in the symbolic representations in our participants’ narratives about their lived experiences of racialization, including experiences with discriminatory language and a sense of exclusion. We also explored how the newspaper stories characterized people, places, events, changes, and continuities. We found patterns of ideas in the stories and identified broadly circulating cultural stories from the national folklore and history of the United States and Puerto Rico. By analyzing the plots, we teased out moral representations and descriptions of emotions in the sequence of events, characterizations of places and times, and characterizations of people’s identities, actions, and interactions, at the individual, collective, and institutional levels. We found appeals to emotions for the moral evaluation of people’s and places’ legitimacy and characterizations of their deservingness and virtue.

An Interplay of the Formula Stories

We demonstrate in this section that some of the same formulaic colorblind and stratifying story plots that appeared in the newspaper articles were also present in our participants’ narratives. We also show that there is a notable absence of an explicit discussion about racial schemas at the structural level even when colorblind frames are directly used to justify decisions in the allotment of resources.

A Paradoxical Plot: The Promised Land That Does Not Welcome You

The group of stories build the plot of a population relocating to a promised homeland paradoxically characterized as a somewhat unwelcoming scenario. Stateside United States is, in some respects, depicted as an inherently superior place, to which people have relocated to escape a humanitarian crisis. Three underlying and taken-for-granted cultural narratives are intertwined in the descriptions of places and people: the “American Dream,” “Manifest Destiny,” and a story that we have titled “los mantenidos” (Spanish for “freeloaders”).

The following quote from our participant Deborah—a 50-year-old migrant who resettled in Puerto Rico—illustrates the stigmatizing view of Puerto Ricans perceived by migrants as a commonly shared view stateside: “At least for me, wherever I went, people treated me very well. In some places, they would tell me to be careful because some people say that we [Puerto Ricans] fight a lot and are problematic.” Repeatedly, our participants said they were cognizant of negative cultural narratives about Puerto Ricans, who were portrayed as lazy and dependent and even confrontational in their quest for benefits without working hard first. A recurring trope of Puerto Ricans as “los mantenidos” continually appeared in the narratives as a well-known historical and cultural representation, one born out of the colonial relationship with the United States (Cortés 2012). In some cases, these narratives seemed to be internalized; on other occasions, participants actively distanced themselves from these depictions, as in the case of Deborah, who denies being treated badly even when she reports having received warnings about the dangers of belonging to her group.

Aurora, a 40-year-old migrant, explained the perception that she feels people have of Puerto Ricans:

Sometimes they have a bad perception of Puerto Ricans, because there are many Puerto Ricans who come to get things and not to work hard for them. They don’t want to do anything other than receive government assistance. There is help here, but you have to work too. . . . Everything here has a higher quality and cost. It’s hard for me to say it because I’m talking about my island, . . . but the resources that are available and the way they use what we have makes the country stay sort of behind, without improving . . . There is no doubt that there are good people, but we are marginalized sometimes. We are called freeloaders . . . We are not all like that.

Aurora bemoans those who would rather live off government aid than work for what they have. And though toward the end she insists that there are “good people” and that sometimes Puerto Ricans are “marginalized,” she also legitimizes this freeloader narrative by stating that there are always those who do fit this profile. The freeloader narrative is a common racial script. Natalia Molina (2014:21) emphasizes the importance of racial scripts because they are “the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another, even when they do not directly cross paths.” Thus, a racial script that is applied to one group has likely been used to describe another group in the past, thus connecting their experiences.

As Aurora explains the “freeloader mentality,” she also points out the virtues of living in the United States compared to living in a place that “stays behind” because of its people’s mismanagement of resources. Her narrative invokes the idea of the United States as an exceptional land where one can achieve the American Dream. Moreover, the racializing narrative of “los mantenidos” that our participants describe matches tendencies in the newspaper articles about the hurricane’s aftermath that brought Puerto Ricans to Florida. Consider this narrative in an article from 2019:

After Trump flew into Panama City Beach on a massive helicopter, Marine One, several thousand sign-waving, red-capped fans filled an outdoor amphitheater. Before he took the stage Wednesday in the fading evening light, the crowd chanted, “Four more years!”

Trump immediately started talking about disaster funding when he took the stage, announcing $448 million in additional federal money from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for Michael recovery, as well as 90 percent federal cost share for hurricane costs.

“No games, no gimmicks, no delays, we’re just doing it,” Trump said of the funding, before complaining that Democrats were stalling the disaster funding over Puerto Rico’s insatiable needs for more and more money. “We’re not going to let anybody hold it up . . . With Florida you drive on. With Puerto Rico it’s a little tougher.” (Mahoney 2019)

Here we see a description of a land—the continental United States—with a solvent and administratively efficient structure, where crises are swiftly solved and people are proactive. However, we also see Trump’s hesitation to green-light aid to the Puerto Rican people when he says, “With Puerto Rico it’s a little tougher,” portraying Puerto Ricans as dependent and problematic. Environmental racism and the historical racialized governance and neglect of Puerto Rico (Bonilla 2020) are ignored, even when the story clearly shows a political actor openly expressing a preference for helping one group (Hurricane Michael victims in Panama City, FL) over another (Hurricane Maria victims in Puerto Rico). Characterizing Puerto Ricans as a group who incessantly asks for help is a colorblind mechanism to portray them as needy and problematic, emphasizing the racial script of Puerto Ricans as dependent and reinforcing institutional practices of racial discrimination through the exercise of power, which is used to save and care for some lives (i.e., Floridians in Panama City) over others (i.e., Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico).

As seen with Aurora’s quote above, she believes that things run smoother in the United States, that it is easier to make a life here, and that the quality of life is simply better given the lack of resources or misuse of them in Puerto Rico. What remains unsaid, however, is that recent austerity measures in Puerto Rico have closed hundreds of schools, laid off teachers and other public workers, and cut social services in the name of servicing Puerto Rico’s debt (LeBrón 2016). U.S. colonial policies do not allow Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy (Lubben 2014), thus furthering its economic dispossession. Given these conditions, migrants seek to be included in U.S. society and to improve their chances of sustaining their livelihoods there, as U.S. citizens. What they find, though, are efforts to delegitimize their membership in the body politic.

A Promised Membership

Another factor in the plot constructed by the narratives in our data is the perception of migrants’ belonging to the land. Our participants discussed frequently needing to educate other U.S. citizens on Puerto Ricans’ birthright citizenship. Catiria, a 60-year-old woman and one of the few who did name and speak of discrimination, described a situation when she felt that she needed to inform others about her U.S. sociolegal membership:

I have felt it [discrimination] myself too, though I don’t let it affect me. If sometimes I have to explain that we are Americans just like anyone else, I do it calmly, without fighting, right? Just like giving a person a lesson?

Catiria minimizes discrimination by stating that she does not let it affect her. Almost anticipating the stigma of Puerto Ricans as problematic, she volunteers that she explains her citizenship “without fighting.”

Our participants claimed that other U.S. citizens do not recognize them as fellow Americans but also that other migrants critique Puerto Ricans for their citizen privilege. Puerto Ricans are thus conceptualized as a type of “other” by all groups. Misty, a 31-year-old woman, recounted,

Sometimes they [other migrants] [say] that because we have the privilege of being American citizens that we come to have that, that privilege. It’s true that many people do come to be dependent on the government, but not all of us.

Full membership to U.S. society through the right to citizenship is problematized, not just by Whites who interrogate the legitimacy of Puerto Ricans’ U.S. citizenship but also by other Latinos/as/xs who claim that Puerto Ricans have it “easy” because they have citizenship privilege, suggesting that they can rely on government aid if they wish, reinforcing the stigma and racial script of the freeloader. Yet membership to the category of migrants through the experience of social exclusion and discrimination is not recognized in such judgments about the meaning and utility of Puerto Ricans’ citizenship. Also omitted is the notion that this citizenship did not protect them from the aftermath of a natural disaster that turned Puerto Rico’s social, economic, and public health situations into a full-scale social disaster, with government aid lacking when it was needed, leading to people’s mobility decisions. Puerto Ricans are left to account for their legal status to some and to defend their rights to others, racialized by both through the interpretations and negative stereotypes associated with their group. And worse is that Puerto Ricans such as Misty validate the “mantenidos” narrative when she says, “it’s true that many people come to be dependent on the government.” By stating, “but not all of us,” Misty deploys a discursive strategy to deflect this racial script, one that has been used to characterize other racial minority groups historically.

Heroes, Villains, Victims, and Fools

The stories in our data construct the roles of heroes, villains, victims, and fools through moral judgments of characters and their actions, which are featured in multiple interpretations of similar scenes. The villain in one story becomes a fool in another, tricked by a villain. For example, this quote from a newspaper story, about an upcoming Florida political race, characterizes former President Trump as a villain lacking empathy toward Puerto Rican victims: “He appeared insensitive or clumsy in his response to people’s suffering. During a visit to hurricane damaged Puerto Rico, for instance, Trump tossed rolls of paper towels into a crowd of residents” (Associated Press 2021). Pictures of this incident were seen around the world, illustrating, to some, Trump as an insensitive villain who insulted Puerto Ricans by belittling their suffering. Dora, a 32-year-old migrant, shared her perception of the federal government’s management of the crisis after the hurricane by recounting and making sense of the same story: “I base my answer [about my perception of the federal response to the hurricane] on the memory of when Trump went to Puerto Rico to throw toilet paper at people. They treated us like garbage.” Likewise, Anuar, a 61-year-old man, described his emotional reaction to this event:

It was a bit offensive. This guy may have come there to see how he was going to manage the situation, but this business of throwing toilet paper like that, that’s not right. That is disrespectful. They treated us as if we were nothing.

However, while this worldwide shared event, covered by all the major national and international newspapers, was described by several of our participants with a similar villainizing characterization, we also found a parallel effort in the stories to rid the U.S. political actor of responsibility, characterizing Trump as a fool who was misguided by the true villains: local officials. Wanda described feeling worthless witnessing Trump’s actions, which she saw as contempt toward Puerto Ricans, though she excused his behavior, claiming he was only taken to privileged neighborhoods and not to the most devastated ones:

What [he] said was awful, but they only took him to the metropolitan area, Guaynabo, where he started throwing toilet paper at them. And then when he said, “That’s what they deserve. That’s how they must be treated.” Hello! We are not animals. We are going through a situation, and of course he was upset because he did not want to let go of the money. But we later understood him in part, when all the [Puerto Rican government] corruption came to light, that they were stealing all the money, and all the FEMA supplies that they let get wasted, water, all kinds of things.

Racialization reinforces institutional inequalities. The recurrent shift of the blame for the humanitarian crisis toward Puerto Rican officials for the mismanagement of assistance or toward individuals from the communities makes invisible the imbalances of the colonial relationship. Hector, a 63-year-old migrant, characterized some claimants of FEMA help as fraudulently seeking assistance:

Look, there was a situation here with FEMA. It was five minutes away from my house, where they were giving help. There were so many people! And I told the young man from FEMA, “Listen, I’m going to recommend to you that you ask them for ID because that help is supposed to be for us in this area.” You see? More than half of the people that were there were not from this area!

Other colorblind frames, such as naturalization and minimization frames, are also represented in the stories through appeals to emotions such as frustration with unfair analyses. In the following newspaper story, structural disadvantages are naturalized as cultural deficiencies and inevitable environmental conditions. They are also minimized through accusations of media manipulation:

The liberal media take any opportunity to dump on President Donald Trump. While they find little to fault in his handling of the hurricane problems in Florida and Houston, they are quick to harp on Puerto Rico. The comparisons are unreasonable. It wasn’t Trump who put Puerto Rico into the financial mess they have. Trump was not responsible for the breakdown of an antiquated electrical grid and decimated infrastructure. He did not make it an island, making logistics almost impossible. I see only unreasonable criticism without any explanation of what could have been done better. While I empathize with the problem of a devastated Puerto Rico, stop the blame and congratulate the super-human effort made by FEMA and the military to get the job done. (Tampa Bay Times 2017)

The character evaluations in the story above, where FEMA is the hero, Trump a victim, and Puerto Ricans fools, reinforce the symbolic code of Manifest Destiny that attributes racial superiority to the colonizer and dictates a mandate for colonial power based on the inferiority of the colonized subjects. Cultural racism frames can also exclude Puerto Ricans from the American Dream. If Puerto Ricans have allowed themselves to fall into a “financial mess” and are responsible for their “antiquated electrical grid and decimated infrastructure,” they would probably be incapable of attaining the “super-human efforts” of FEMA and “the military to get the job done.” The latter are the heroes, and their hardworking disposition is the key characteristic to attain the American Dream. The ideological tenet that colonized people need saving by civilizing forces feeds into the idea of American exceptionalism that it is necessary to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, an idea that has even been institutionalized as a U.S. policy specifically geared toward Puerto Rico (Santana 1998).

Neglected from these stories is the role of the U.S. government, through those very same Manifest Destiny-based policies, in explaining the colonial conditions in Puerto Rico that set the stage for the substandard infrastructure that did not hold up in the face of Hurricane Maria. Moreover, while Trump “did not make it an island, making logistics almost impossible,” the federal provision of disaster relief to the territory was significantly slower than it was in Florida and Texas after Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, most likely due to a lack of Puerto Rico’s representation in the U.S. Congress, where much time was lost trying to prove the archipelago’s needs, and not due to geographic limitations as argued by the Trump administration (Willison et al. 2019).

While claims about fraudulent victims in the communities and corrupt villains among Puerto Rican political actors who abused FEMA feed the cultural story of “los mantenidos,” we also found stories in which FEMA was the villain. Laura, a 49-year-old migrant, discussed being denied needed help from FEMA:

They distribute the stuff among the . . . beautiful, and the ugly get nothing. In my personal case, when I asked help from FEMA for what I lost, it never arrived. All they did was call me to say that they had gone by my property and had not seen any damages, nothing that required that they give me money, and they closed the case.

For many of our participants, FEMA indeed was a villain, in that aid requests were denied. In our larger survey of 146 participants, 64 percent applied for FEMA aid; of those, 60 percent received some aid, though many who received it described it as inadequate to cover their losses.

A Racialized System of Beliefs

Omissions such as the lack of acknowledgment of dispossessing policies, discussed above, also generate forms of internalization of cultural narratives and deflection of racial scripts that reinforce the conceptualization of grievances as natural, thus preventing social action. Nina, a 36-year-old migrant, embraces stereotyping forms of storytelling that are even present in social theories, such as Oscar Lewis’s (1966) theory of the “culture of poverty,” which uses Puerto Ricans as an example of people who are supposedly culturally incapable of advancing socially due to being socialized into practices of poverty. Nina explained her emotion management of the neglect that is embedded in the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the continental United States. She reflected on how a FEMA worker changed her understanding of the situation in the archipelago:

She explained it to me. I was so angry and wondered, “How is it possible that people who have lost their roof and this and that don’t get the reconstruction of their houses approved?” It used to make me so mad. But that is where we fall into illegality, in wanting to do things outside of the law. Whether the system is crap or not, there are procedures that must be followed. You have your house that your grandma gave you, and that house has another house. Your house is okay. But your grandma didn’t even transfer the house to your name, and you don’t even know where the deed for that house is. And it was actually the other house that got destroyed, which is owned by the devil, by no one. That house didn’t even have construction permits, deeds, transfers, or any ownership documents from your grandma, the inheritance, and the person who was actually living there was who knows whose brother. Those people didn’t get any money.

Failure to recognize the effects of colonialism such as this one, which disregards the lack of assistance and of plans to generate adequate regulatory mechanisms to assist communities that are effectively excluded from the social structure, was also present in the newspapers. For example, in this story about a family losing FEMA shelter assistance, Puerto Ricans are portrayed as “mantenidos” and in need of charity, rather than in need of a realistic path by which they can become self-sufficient, which would involve affordable housing and living wages:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will end its Transitional Sheltering Assistance program today. . . . In Florida alone, 589 families were living in hotels as the clock ran down. Checkout is Sunday, Smith said.

Catholic Charities is among those trying to help, making arrangements for 21 families. Kara Walker, a spokeswoman for Hillsborough County, said on Friday that all but two of the 46 families still in hotels had places to go.

The Clarion Inn in Riverview paid the airfare for more than 100 displaced families to come to Florida and offered some jobs at the hotel. Ten families are still living there, said General Manager Noelle Mandish.

Smith said families may be able to qualify for rental assistance or trips home, if their houses are habitable, under other FEMA programs. (Times Staff Writer 2018)

Our participants recurringly use a formulaic narrative about freeloading and how such a mentality has translated into part of their culture—a culture of dependency and deficiency. Concurrently, the newspaper articles reinforce the narrative of Puerto Ricans as welfare dependents and a burden on the country’s taxpayers, parallel to the racial script of the “welfare queen,” which has been used to racialize stateside-born African Americans (Ray et al. 2022).

Similar to how means-tested benefits are used to seemingly prevent fraud among welfare recipients, FEMA’s time limits on transitional shelter assistance had the effect of espousing an ethos that climate migrants should be able to quickly recover from displacement and establish themselves in a new community. Initially approved to provide two weeks of shelter, the program was renewed every 30 days for 10 months, when FEMA decided to terminate benefits, leaving 1,800 families displaced throughout the United States and in Puerto Rico (Sanchez 2018). As deadlines approached every month leading up to the summer of 2018, Puerto Ricans were on edge, as many could not return to Puerto Rico given the power outages that lasted up to one year, in addition to not receiving the aid they needed to repair their homes or not having the means to provide first and last months’ rent and a security deposit on an apartment in Florida. Consequently, many families found that these hotel rooms were their only options for housing. Several deadlines passed as these families were on the brink of homelessness and, in some counties, criminalized for being displaced, as the following story shows:

Rep. John Cortes, a Kissimmee Democrat, said that in his Central Florida district the low wages of the hospitality industry make it difficult for people to afford the security deposit to rent an apartment, which he said includes first, last and current month rents and can mean a couple thousand dollars, so many people live paycheck to paycheck in extended-stay hotels.

“If you have to have $5,000 to rent an apartment for a job that pays $8.25, it’s not going to happen,” he said.

Meanwhile, thousands of Puerto Rican evacuees from Hurricane Maria have flocked to the region, also staying in hotels, but they face a March 20 deadline—the day FEMA vouchers will expire, he said.

“They’re going to be homeless,” Cortes said. “My county has an ordinance. If you are homeless, you get locked up and you go to jail. That’s going to be a two-way crisis.” (Klas 2018)

While the state representative in this story acknowledges the economic hardship that people face when they are paid low wages in Orlando’s vast and internationally known entertainment sector, what goes unstated is that this low-wage labor force disproportionately relies on racial and ethnic minorities, particularly Puerto Ricans who have increasingly moved to Kissimmee in recent years and work in the entertainment industry (Silver and Vélez 2017). Moreover, the story does not interrogate the nature of FEMA’s deadline—a seemingly arbitrary date to ensure that aid recipients are not abusing the social safety net. In our sample, families were evicted from hotels and had to spend nights in cars as they searched for housing. The time limits on FEMA’s housing assistance can be linked back to cultural narratives of dependency of Puerto Ricans on the government to take care of their needs. Importantly, it is not just Whites or mainstream publications that espouse these narratives.

Some participants, like Axel, a 34-year-old migrant, believe that time in the United States and greater exposure to the “mantenidos” narrative are connected to internalization. Axel described attitudes that Puerto Ricans residing stateside for longer periods have described to him: “That we, Puerto Ricans, are cheaters, and we are where we are because we want to. . . . And we are also ungrateful, because we get all kinds of help but still complain.” Resisting this narrative, Axel discussed how hard he worked but also critiqued the disempowerment embedded in the help offered to Puerto Rico:

They obviously brought companies from the US to help, which at the same time displaced the economy of the Boricuas [Puerto Ricans] . . . People that were perfectly capable of fixing the electrical system were not even given the option to apply for the jobs. So again, you see how the money that is invested in the island is immediately taken out. I saw many brigades to help, and that’s great, but why wasn’t the option of applying for these jobs given to Puerto Ricans that were so financially desperate?

Though some Puerto Ricans internalized these stories, others, such as Axel, resisted them, though often stopping short of identifying the true culprit in the circulation of these stories: a racialized system of beliefs that privileges Whiteness and denigrates Blackness and other non-White groups, even though much of their racial boundary work revolved around responding to the racializing formula story of “los mantenidos” and other racial scripts ascribed to minority groups historically (Molina 2014).

Discussion

Racializing narratives among climate migrants to the United States have dire consequences, as seen when we examine how disaster aid was managed after Hurricane Maria affected Puerto Rico. The stories analyzed in this article help to sustain and reproduce a systemic racial schema that reinforces racial scripts and racial inequality at individual and institutional levels.

For the ever-increasing number of displaced people relocating from colonized nations of the Global South to nations in the Global North (Neely and Samura 2011), racialization processes will increasingly become structural and systemic aspects of daily life, and the omnipresent nature of these systemic forms of exclusion will continually complicate the empirical observation of the stratification mechanisms. Symbolic communication is one of these mechanisms; therefore, it is important to recognize how its observation can help us understand how migrants’ settlement experiences can be affected by racialization and how cultural narratives that reproduce historical racial scripts (Molina 2014) can foster the injustices and power imbalances of colonialism and institutionalized racial discrimination.

This multilevel analysis of newspaper stories that covered post-disaster migration and federal aid for Puerto Rico’s recovery and climate migrants’ experiential narratives allowed us to observe assessments of a group’s cultural worth within the context of a place’s racial schema (Roth 2012). Tampa, Florida, has become a relatively new destination for Puerto Ricans in the past few decades, and the state now claims the largest number of Puerto Ricans. And although the circumstances of climate migrants are distinct from economic migrants from Puerto Rico prior to the hurricane, Puerto Rican climate migrants’ experiences and their own perceptions of how people stateside perceive them, their needs, and their deservingness reveal two patterns: (1) they themselves have not experienced the full magnitude of the racialization of Puerto Ricans, perhaps illustrating that as climate migrants, they reflect what a “deserving” population resembles to the general public (i.e., need through no fault of their own); and (2) not withstanding this finding, they are fully aware of the racialization of Puerto Ricans as they are intimately familiar with the racist tropes used to describe their group. Regarding the latter, climate migrants’ own experiences aside, we find that similar ethnoracial characterizations play out when it comes to the politics of worthiness and deservingness that have been found in prior studies of Puerto Ricans in other parts of the United States (Pérez 2004; Ramos-Zayas 2004).

We were able to empirically observe how narratives that circulate in the public sphere are leveraged to give racializing meanings to events in people’s lives (Bonilla-Silva 2013), even when race is not explicitly referenced. Moreover, we demonstrate how narrative analysis can help gain valuable knowledge that can inform policy processes (Roe 1994) and how it can specifically contribute to our understanding of the institutionalization of racial evaluations of people that result in systemic forms of exclusion (Ray et al. 2022).

By the time we interviewed our participants, most of them had only been stateside for two or three years and seemed to be in the process of trying to incorporate U.S.-based “race schemas,” or symbolic boundaries of race (Roth 2012:66), encountered after mobility to their cognitive constructs of race rooted in Puerto Rico’s place-based schemas. Their responses showed a cognitive organization of individual and group identity that evidenced an interplay between the familiar race schemas that they knew from their places of origin and the new schemas learned in the migration experience, juxtaposing various underlying concepts of race. Our findings show that these newly adopted racial understandings, or racial scripts (Molina 2014), of Puerto Ricans are resisted, yet in other cases, they are internalized and even deflected so as not to be associated with other U.S. racial minority groups that have been characterized historically by similar, if not the same, racial scripts. Patterns of internalization and deflection serve to reinforce how cultural narratives are institutionalized, impeding racial solidarity.

Predominant patterns in the newspaper narratives about migrants’ identities seem to be drawn from formulaic stories that use the colorblind frames of abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism (Bonilla-Silva 2013). Cultural narratives regularly used in communication constitute part of the systemic ways in which values and belief systems are sustained and reproduced (MacIntyre 1977). Moreover, the narrative of “los mantenidos” is built on the stereotype of Puerto Ricans as colonial dependents who burden more than benefit the United States, and its circulation shapes climate migrants’ receiving context.

We argue, however, that the most distinctive feature of the interplay of the various symbolic codes in our data is the colorblind frames to which the stories make appeals. The work of cultural stories in participants’ meaning-making of the racialization experienced in their settlement process, but also in their displacement experiences, seems to contribute to the avoidance of explicitly recognizing institutionalized racism, a common tendency among interviewees. In the story Deborah narrated, for instance, a racializing experience is described, but she does not construct a story about racial discrimination (something very few participants ever did explicitly), even when she and others were characterizing Puerto Ricans as naturally faulty as opposed to as neglected and dispossessed colonial subjects. Such colorblind frames and narrative constructions act as moral evaluations that hide the symbolic structuring of racism.

This research contributes to the literature in numerous ways. First, by expanding our knowledge of Puerto Ricans and how they navigate the terrain of U.S. racialization frames—where they experience a multidirectional racialization process, as seen in the stories about other migrants’ moral evaluations of Puerto Ricans as having things “easy”—we contribute to the racialization literature that addresses the layering of multiple racial schemas and the circulation of racial scripts among migrants (Molina 2014; Roth 2012). Second, our work demonstrates the value of multilevel analysis to uncover how institutional actions, such as colonial dispossession, can permeate into symbolic interaction at all stages of social life. Our method of analysis also shows how the empirical exploration of storytelling in social communication and the study of the reductive capacity of formula stories can reveal interlocking systems of colorblind frames and racializing messages that result in institutional racism. Third, this research also contributes to the investigation of ways in which racialization disempowers migrants’ abilities to establish new homes after being torn from their former lives, not only through a sense of exclusion by others but also by internalization of the colorblind narratives that blame them for the dispossession they have experienced.

Future research is needed on several fronts. Some questions for investigation are as follows: Under what conditions do Puerto Ricans internalize or deflect racialized cultural narratives, and under what conditions do they resist them? How do the cultural narratives about Puerto Ricans and stories about the American Dream and Manifest Destiny interact with the trope of “los mantenidos” in Puerto Rico and among non-migrants? Finally, under what conditions might these narratives and racial scripts be co-opted to resist racialization and reveal the systemic nature of racism in the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico? As climate change worsens and vulnerable populations are displaced, more work is needed on how deservingness is established and how institutional racism works in this process.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Alessandra Rosa, Melanie Escue, Maritza Novoa-Hadley, and Nancy Hernandez for their collaboration on this project. They would also like to acknowledge Andrew Katz for his copyediting assistance and Donileen Loseke for the countless methodological discussions.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant number 1918241).

ORCID iDs

Elizabeth Aranda

Rebecca Blackwell

Author Biographies

Elizabeth Aranda, Ph.D., is a professor of sociology and director of the Im/migrant Well-Being Research Center at the University of South Florida. A native of Puerto Rico, her work documents the lived experience of (im)migrants and the challenges they face due to race and ethnic inequalities. She is author of Emotional Bridges to Puerto Rico: Migration, Return Migration, and the Struggles of Incorporation and Making a Life in Multiethnic Miami: Immigration and the Rise of a Global City. Her research has appeared in various journals such as Social Problems, Social Forces, and Gender & Society, among others.

Rebecca Blackwell, Ph.D., is a social science researcher focused on medical sociology, qualitative methods, collective emotions, place and space, and migration. Her current research uses a narrative and social psychology lens in the study of social problems and social justice in the areas of race, and ethnicity, migration, and health and illness. In previous research, she has addressed issues of human rights and post-conflict restorative justice processes in Latin America. Her research has appeared in journals such as Annals of Anthropological Practice, Emotion, Space & Society, Latino Studies, and Women, Gender, and Families of Color.

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