NORTHAMPTON — One of the first things Gesmarie Pérez Santiago, a Hurricane Maria refugee, points to in her apartment at Hampshire Heights is a large Puerto Rican flag spread across her kitchen’s wall. On a recent trip to the island, her first since leaving after the hurricane, she was determined to find one.
“I was basically looking everywhere for a flag to bring here,” she said.
The room’s centerpiece reminds her of Puerto Rican friends and family and all the beautiful places on the island. Santiago and her two sons, Jesús, 19, and Esteban, 11, were one of the families who lived at the Quality Inn and Suites on Conz Street in Northampton on aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) before finding a new home in the city.
When the Gazette interviewed Santiago last spring, she was in the middle of moving furniture and mattresses into her home with the help of some community members. It’s been about six months since Santiago’s family moved into that apartment in Northampton, and she says now it feels like home.
“I like everything … it’s a beautiful place,” she said speaking through Jesús as a translator. “We’ve been really happy here.”
Settling in has not been easy, though. “The worst is we left our home and our family … We left our country and started over again,” she said, her eyes tearing up.
Learning English has also been hard for Santiago, as well as enduring the cold winter.
A year ago on Sept. 20, Hurricane Maria made landfall and devastated Puerto Rico. The first Category 4 storm to hit the island in 85 years, Maria and its aftermath claimed an estimated 2,975 lives, according to the official death toll determined by George Washington University. It also caused the largest blackout in U.S. history; power wasn’t fully restored until mid-August, nearly 11 months after the hurricane touched down.
Massachusetts saw some of the largest numbers of Maria evacuees. The state ranked second in the number of people receiving transitional shelter assistance from FEMA, according to FEMA spokesperson Dasha Castillo. At the height of the program, 602 Massachusetts families were receiving transitional sheltering assistance to live in 51 hotels, according to Castillo. The organization was unable to say cumulatively how many people in the state received FEMA assistance throughout the program.
Kelly Thibodeau, assistant program manager of the Bridge Family Resource Center in Amherst, a group that has worked with Hurricane Maria refugees, said the group was in contact with about 30 families at the Northampton hotel.
The vast majority of families coming to the area went to Springfield and Holyoke, she said, and even some who were initially in Northampton appear to have moved elsewhere. Northampton Public Schools Registrar Jennifer Towler said that of the 24 displaced children who enrolled in school last academic year, only four are still residents and enrolled in the school district this year. The others have moved and are in school elsewhere, mostly around the Valley, according to Towler.
Puerto Rican people make up almost 45 percent of Holyoke’s total population, according to the most recent census data.
Santiago chose western Massachusetts to be close to her sister who moved to Northampton two years before the hurricane.
Now, Santiago’s son Esteban is in sixth grade at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Northampton, and her older son, Jesús, is in his third year of college studying television production at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has been learning English over the past year and is currently taking classes at the Center for New Americans in Northampton, she says, as she pulls open her class binder with a blue exam book peeking out.
She’s friendly with her neighbors, and her father visited from Puerto Rico over the summer. “We already have established here,” she said.
“I basically don’t want to go back to Puerto Rico because it’s unstable economically,” she said.
For example, if she were to go back to her job as a teacher at a public school, she said she wouldn’t make enough money to support her family. She added that the power has gone out a lot, and a lot of schools have closed.
Santiago says she got the most support from the community, mentioning that Montessori School of Northampton helped collect furniture for them, and Northampton public school social worker Kelley Knight helped them move into their current home.
Despite waning federal support that FEMA itself admitted to, community support sprang up all across the Valley.
Western Massachusetts United for Puerto Rico, a group based in Springfield and Holyoke, collected items such as batteries and canned goods to send to the island, and raised $200,000 for Puerto Ricans here and on the island.
And when displaced Puerto Ricans felt like their voices weren’t being heard, the Pioneer Valley Project helped them mobilize and send 100 people to Washington to meet with their senators to ask them to support those displaced by the storm.
The group spoke at UMass recently, and project director Tara Parrish commented on the families’ efforts.
“The narrative they built isn’t, ‘Oh, those poor people who lost their homes,’ ” she said, “but, ‘We’re Americans, we want a future, we want what every other person wants: We want our family to be safe and secure and we want to move forward.’ ”
And there are groups working to make that new future possible.
“I hope that the community understands that there is still a lot of need,” said Waleska Lugo-DeJesús, an organizer at Western Massachusetts United for Puerto Rico. “Both in Puerto Rico and also for the families who are trying to make a living here in western Massachusetts.
“I’d encourage people to be curious and continue to identify what those needs might be. To call legislators and continue to advocate and keep Puerto Rico in the conversation as they rebuild,” she added.
Parrish said that in the Holyoke and Springfield area where the project works, over half of families who were living in hotels have found permanent housing. Though the FEMA deadline for assistance passed in mid-September, Parrish said with the families’ pressure on legislators, the state government allocated funding through Massachusetts Evacuee Transitional Assistance Reserve to continue to assist those who are displaced to find housing. All the families with whom Bridge Family Resource Center worked directly, mostly people in the Northampton hotel, have found stable housing, according to Thibodeau.
Although Santiago likes her home in Northampton, challenges remain.
In Puerto Rico, she was a Montessori teacher, working with children ages 3 to 6, but because her English isn’t strong enough, she can’t teach here.
She misses her school, the beach, old San Juan and mofongo relleno de mariscos, a Puerto Rican dish with fried plantains and seafood.
“We miss our family, a lot,” she said.
“I definitely understand the sadness it is to leave your home, leave everything you’ve built in your life … how hard it is to leave your family and your homeland,” she said. “The saddest part is nothing will be able to be the same.”
Sept. 20, the one-year anniversary of the day Maria made landfall and changed Santiago’s life, was painful for her.
Scrolling through Facebook that day, she saw that some people had posted photos in remembrance of the storm. She took out her phone and showed an example, a Facebook album with photos of destruction from the storm, like downed trees.
“It’s really hard for me to see that,” she said.
But she’s doing her best to put down roots here. A year after the hurricane, she has a personal goal for the coming year: “I hope to learn English the fastest way possible,” she said.
But most of all, her son Jesús said, translating her words, “She wants my brother and me to be happy and stable.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com