Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria Provides Ethnic Studies Lesson

From Oregon Quarterly, Summer 2019
https://around.uoregon.edu/oq/puerto-rico-s-hurricane-maria-provides-ethnic-studies-lesson

When UO ethnic studies associate professor Alaí Reyes-Santos flipped on the late-night news on September 19, 2017, she saw something she’d been dreading since childhood: a category four hurricane was barreling toward Puerto Rico from the southeast.

“My mother always warned me that if a hurricane started in the southeast and curved up, it would wipe out the entire island,” remembers Reyes-Santos, a native Puerto Rican who hails from a small town in the Cordillera Central mountain range.

Reyes-Santos stared in horror at the screen, transfixed by the arc of Maria’s storm graphics spiraling from sea to the country’s southeastern shore.

“There was nothing I could do from thousands of miles away, I felt powerless,” she recalled recently from her small office on the outskirts of the UO campus.

For the rest of this article, go to: https://around.uoregon.edu/oq/puerto-rico-s-hurricane-maria-provides-ethnic-studies-lesson

Tags: Alaí Reyes-Santos, Puerto Rico, UO