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Many Puerto Ricans Leaving US Mainland

For identity and art

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For more than 30 years, Isaida Ortiz Rosa and Angel Valentin Concepcion lived on the U.S. mainland. Their story began in 1987, when they met on a bus. He was on his way home after a trip to Miami. She was on her way to university. A few years later, they married and decided to start their lives outside of Puerto Rico.

Ortiz Rosa, retired from a government job on the mainland, is dedicated to poetry, a passion she kept alive during her time away from home.

“I have been writing poetry since I was young,” she said. “I used to write on receipts or napkins and put them in a drawer, but in the U.S. I got my voice back. Working in the government, I used to write and go to poetry venues, but it wasn’t until 2006 that I began to recite what I wrote.”

Her love for the written word began at school, when a drama teacher gave her a poem. But she recalls “there were other priorities.”

“My parents were building houses—we were poor and talking about the arts was something very strange.”

Valentin Concepcion, a photojournalist by profession, agreed that “all art is a luxury that the working class, who struggle day by day, cannot afford.”

“In my case with photography, my parents were government workers, lower middle class, and buying a camera was not something that was in the budget,” he said.

His plan was to spend two years in the U.S., but said, “When 20 years passed, I realized I had lived half my life abroad and that it was time to go back. I was always looking for the opportunity to return to Puerto Rico.”

The couple returned to Puerto Rico from South Florida in the summer of 2021, motivated by the deaths of close relatives and incidents of workplace harassment and racism experienced in the U.S.

“I noticed that co-workers looked at me with disgust,” said Ortiz Rosa. “When I speak in Spanish, I express myself much better.”

Like his wife, Valentin Concepcion says he felt like “a foreigner” once he left the island.

“I went to the U.S. thinking that I was American, and I didn’t have information about the racial history of the U.S., what it meant to be a Latino with American citizenship,” he added. “I always felt like a visitor, like an immigrant in the U.S., I never assimilated as an American.”

Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens by birth since 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones Act into law. The island has been U.S. territory since 1898, when Spain ceded it after the Spanish-American War.

Now, this couple sees a future filled with positivity. They plan to distribute food and supplies in low-income communities as needed. They also intend to spend their time planting fruit and taking photographs.

“I think that I wasted a lot of time in the U.S. without giving Puerto Rico something from me, of what I have learned,” Ortiz Rosa said. That feeling prompted her to start doing community work with youth groups, to teach them through poetry. “Let the youngsters see: ‘She left but she is now here, helping, doing something for the country.’”

“I say goodbye without perfect surrender to oblivion, because my heart already belongs to this my Puerto Rican land,” says one of her poems.

“Although I was pushed north, here on the island I grew up, I lived and now I reside.”