“We always remember the Island”: Puerto Rican climate migrants’ emotional meanings of home

Abstract

To contribute to the development of a sociology of home, in this article, we integrate migration, emotion, and place and space theories to study how the notion of home interacts with the experience of displacement. Through 54 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Puerto Rican climate migrants who fled Puerto Rico for the continental US after Hurricane Maria struck the archipelago in 2017, we asked this group about their experiences of the disaster and relocation. These interviews collected stories filled with place-making practices, definitions of identity, and descriptions of emotion work. The narrative analysis of these stories allowed us to gain knowledge about our participants’ meaning-making processes and emotions around simultaneously losing their sense of home and striving to (re)constitute it in a new space. The stories also showed the impact of the conditions of displacement on a population that is not commonly associated with forced migration but that is increasingly threatened by the impact of climate change. Our findings showed that the intangible emotional losses of displacement are as important for the adaptation process of climate migrants as material losses can be.