In his article, ”La nueva meca boricua,” Dr. Jorge Duany, professor of anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico, writes about the complex trajectories of Puerto Ricans who settled in Central Florida and about an extraordinary exhibition that documents those trajectories. According to Duany, long before Disney World opened in 1971, thousands of Puerto Ricans lived in Central Florida, especially in Orlando and Kissimmee. These included servicemen and their families, university students, families who bought land as an investment, engineers recruited by The Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, and agricultural workers who were hired to pick fruits and vegetables in Orange County and other Florida counties. During the last three decades, the Puerto Rican population has grown exponentially. Now about half of Central Florida’s Hispanic population is Puerto Rican. Between the years 2000 and 2006, about 33,733 moved to Orange County. In 2006, there were 123,367 Puerto Ricans living in Orange County alone and another 60,257 called Osceola County home, according to U.S. Census data.
Anthropologist Patricia Silver and professor of Digital Media and folklorist Natalie Underberg have organized a fascinating exhibition titled “Puerto Ricans in Central Florida from the 1940′s to the 1980′s: A History.” It traces the main migratory routes and the historical trajectory of the second largest “Boricua” enclave in the North American continent, after New York City. The exhibition, free and open to the public, is taking place in the public libraries of Kissimmee and Winter Park.* It includes a wealth of testimonial material, such as videos, photographs, and interviews of Puerto Ricans residing in Orange, Osceola, Volusia, Lake, Seminole and Brevard counties. Sponsored by the Humanities Council of Florida, the University of Central Florida, and the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños of Hunter College, the exhibition “celebrates the diversity and tenacity of the Puerto Rican community in Central Florida.” The project focused on Puerto Ricans because of the substantial impact they have had on Central Florida’s growth – their contributions include businesses, law firms, newspapers and cultural organizations – and because little is known about their early years in the region.
The exhibition provides documentation of the multiple migratory routes Puerto Ricans took to reach the Orlando area, the wide variety of occupational and professional trajectories undertaken, the struggle to construct a cultural home away home (la Isla), and the opportunities, challenges and obstacles the migrants faced through their processes of adaptation. As Duany states, “Puerto Ricans in Central Florida” is an “exemplary project of rescue and dissemination of the collective memory of the Diaspora.”
*February 28- March 31, Kissimmee: Hart Memorial Central Library, 211 E. Dakin Ave.
March 1- April 18, Winter Park: Winter Park Public Library, 460 E. New England Ave.
For full text of “La nueva meca boricua” (in Spanish), see http://www.elnuevodia.com/voces/543716/
For more information in English, see http://news.ucf.edu/UCFnews/index?page=article&id=00240041107d9e72011f8b19d2d4007edd
