#PUERTO RICO HURRICANE AFTERMATH 2017 TV#

#PUERTO RICO HURRICANE AFTERMATH 2017 TV#

His family fled to Peru, where they watched on TV as a coup d’état sent that country into an undemocratic path. He’d been born in Cuba a year after the government there was overthrown. Pegasus Professor of History Luis Martinez-Fernandez recalls freedom. “These are the kinds of memories that connect us as a community,” Rivera says. As a teenager in Barceloneta, UCF Sociology Professor Fernando Rivera remembers sitting in mango trees and letting the tropical breeze sway him. Martinez-Rivera practiced photography outside the family’s home in Toa Baja. Hernandez-Cruz and her mother would take trips to the beaches around Rincon. Before Hurricane MariaĮveryone from Puerto Rico has a vivid memory of life prior to September 2017. And now as Hurricane Fiona has hit the region five years later - with thousands left without electricity again - it is another reminder of the resilience of Puerto Ricans and the importance of community. With Maria’s impact to Puerto Rico estimated to have caused at least $43 billion in damage, the island is still recovering with a fragile power grid. “I ask myself all the time, ‘What if I didn’t have the opportunity to come to UCF when things were so bad in Puerto Rico?’” says Victor Martinez-Rivera ’20, who earned a bachelor’s in advertising/public relations and is currently pursuing a master’s in interdisciplinary studies at UCF. In response to water shortages and power outages that lasted up to a year in Puerto Rico, UCF offered in-state tuition rates to students whose education had been disrupted (About $6,350 per year instead of nearly $22,500 for non-Florida residents).

Hundreds of them probably wouldn’t be at UCF if it weren’t for personal twists of fate after Maria. Since that day, UCF has grown one of the nation’s biggest cohorts of Puerto Rican students. More than 300,000 Puerto Ricans migrated to the mainland U.S. And so is the path that led them here to UCF in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the worst storm in Puerto Rico’s recorded history, which struck the island as a high-end Category 4 storm exactly five years ago on Sept. The students talk about the island beaches and Sunday street foods in Piñones. “It’s just like we do in Puerto Rico,” says health science major Victoria Hernandez-Cruz. 20 a dozen UCF students and faculty came together one of the most iconic gathering spaces on campus: the Student Union.

Puerto rico hurricane aftermath 2017