How Many Puerto Ricans Will Leave Home After Hurricane Maria?

By Jon Lee Anderson
1:22 P.M.


Carlos J. Soto Lopez and his daughter Alejandra stand amid what remains of their home in Utuado, Puerto Rico.Photograph by Christopher Gregory for The New Yorker

Small, rugged green mountains make up the central spine of the island of Puerto Rico, and the small towns situated along the range were hit especially hard by Hurricane Maria. The municipality of Utuado, nestled in the hills above a large, picturesque lake called Caonillas, has become a byword for the island’s devastation, an equivalent to New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina. Around Utuado, the trees are ripped and torn and many are shorn of leaves; the rivers are swollen and their waters run mud-brown. Bridges here and there have been knocked out, and the narrow roads that wind through the hills have been smothered by mudslides, fallen trees, and broken utility poles. Where a road is passable, it is mostly thanks to local people, who have used shovels, or tractors, if they have them, to clear the debris. As of this weekend, when I visited the area, the U.S. government’s relief effort—consisting of ever-expanding units from the National Guard, fema, and the U.S. military—was still mostly limited to the main roads and larger towns.

Several dozen deaths have been attributed to Maria so far, and a number of them have occurred in the region around Utuado, including a sad case I heard about of one man who was trapped alone in his ruined home with his elderly mother, who then died, and whom he had to bury by himself in their yard. Afterward, he is said to have hanged himself in despair.

Puerto Rico’s government is cash-strapped and grappling with an impossible-to-pay-off seventy-four-billion-dollar debt; the island’s poverty rate is over forty per cent; and the number of people relocating to the mainland United States has been rising for a decade. Against this backdrop, many of Puerto Rico’s mountain people live an existence not unlike the people of Appalachia, with a rural life style and economic level somewhere between working poor and lower middle class. Like their mainland counterparts, they cling to a tenuous Second World status. Most of them own cars, though it is rare to see a new one. Their homes are small, flat-roofed, cinderblock structures with grillwork on the windows and little fences around the yards—their owners are house-proud, and paint these homes in a variety of bright colors. Many also keep chickens, and some have horses.

On Saturday afternoon, on the road leading out of Utuado above Lake Caonillas, a string of homes clung to a steep hillside below a fragile-looking slideway of mud and thinned-out vegetation. Along the road, the bamboo groves were tangles of twisted and snapped stalks. At one bend, where the road had been overwhelmed by mud and rock, a gooey narrow passageway had been carved out for vehicles.


The two-story cinderblock home of Carlos J. Soto Lopez, in Utuado, was destroyed by mudslides brought on by Hurricane Maria.Photograph by Christopher Gregory for The New Yorker

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