The Hurricane Refugees of Amish Country
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is taking in hundreds of evacuees from Puerto Rico. For many, the transition has been a challenge.
LANCASTER, Pennsylvania—When Hurricane Maria came for Carlos Rodríguez, he locked himself, his wife, and his two children in a small bathroom in his house in Gobernador Piñero, southwest of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The wind whistled through the cracks of the door and threatened to blast through the window; on the other side of his street, the roof of his neighbors’ home was torn off.
“Maria has been the strongest storm I’ve ever experienced,” says Rodríguez. “It just wiped out everything.”
The immediate aftermath was even worse. The power was out, water was scarce, supermarkets closed or empty. Their food rotted in the freezer. For the next six weeks, Rodríguez and his family ate sausages, spaghetti, or crackers only once a day. Lines of hundreds of people waited eight hours to get gasoline. Amid the devastation and chaos, some residents started to go crazy. “We wanted to leave when we saw that they were assaulting our neighbors,” he says. “I could not stay in a situation where there was no power, there was no water, there was no gasoline, there was no work. There was nothing.”
Rodriguez sold his guagua—his old car he had bought a few years ago—for $2,000 and contacted his son, Luis, one of the children from his first marriage; Luis has been living in in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for the past four years. And on Thanksgiving Day, he and his family headed to Luis Muñoz Marín airport, east of old San Juan, and boarded a flight for Baltimore, Maryland.
“We are starting from scratch,” Rodriguez told his wife.
The Lancaster connection
Lancaster, Pennsylvania is a small city of 60,000 in southeastern Pennsylvania. It may not seem like the first place that comes to mind when considering where Puerto Ricans might resettle. But Lancaster has been welcoming immigrants for centuries: Most famously, the Amish community that lives in the nearby farms of Lancaster County began settling here in the 1720s, after escaping religious persecution in Europe.
Most Maria refugees have migrated to Florida: An estimated 200,000 former residents of the island chose to move to the metropolitan areas of Miami and Orlando. Many others have gone to New York City and New Jersey. But Pennsylvania, which has the fourth-largest population of Puerto Ricans living in the continental U.S., has also received thousands of families. They’ve come not only to Philadelphia, where 8 percent of the city’s population is Puerto Rican, according to the 2010 Census, but to smaller towns—Lebanon, Allentown, Reading, and Lancaster. Almost 30 percent of Lancaster’s residents are Puerto Rican or boricua (Americans of Puerto Rican descent), according to data from the 2016 American Community Survey.