This guidebook answers the most important questions about moving to Puerto Rico and removes the mystery so you know what to expect when coming to paradise. You will be taken on a journey, seeing life through the eyes of a family who actually made the move to Puerto Rico. Their adventures will guide you through surfing at world-class beaches, hiking in the breathtaking rainforest, eating at the locals' only spots, and relaxing under palm trees at a deserted beach. In this book you will see all the details you need to make the move successful and fun. You will get the following: List of websites and directories show you how to save thousands and get locals pricing for rental house and cars Top places to see and experience that most tourists will never know about because most guidebooks never get off the beaten path. Real life examples of moving with young kids Checklists how to prepare digitally for the move and what documents to have before you move. Local tips to help you find the best restaurants and hot spots How to buy a car and avoid the nightmare of paperwork, crowds, and frustration. Living expenses and what to expect as a new resident with a language barrier, culture differences, and utility costs. Island secrets to making new friends and the best places to meet people. What to do before you leave and how to ship your car and belongings. About the Author: Written by Spencer and Jennifer Shaw, who moved their family of five to a secluded beach in Isabela, Puerto Rico. They were adopted by the local community as family and surfed with the locals, ate coconuts they cut down from the trees, swung from branches in the rain forest, and snorkeled in crystal clear water. Why this Book: When the Shaw family decided to move to Puerto Rico there was no complete guide. After learning the hard way to living on the island they wanted to share their experience with others to make it a more stress-free, enjoyable moving process.

Puerto Ricans maintain a vibrant identity that bridges two very different places--the island of Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Whether they live on the island, in the States, or divide time between the two, most imagine Puerto Rico as a separate nation and view themselves primarily as Puerto Rican. At the same time, Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, and Puerto Rico has been a U.S. commonwealth since 1952. Jorge Duany uses previously untapped primary sources to bring new insights to questions of Puerto Rican identity, nationalism, and migration. Drawing a distinction between political and cultural nationalism, Duany argues that the Puerto Rican "nation" must be understood as a new kind of translocal entity with deep cultural continuities. He documents a strong sharing of culture between island and mainland, with diasporic communities tightly linked to island life by a steady circular migration. Duany explores the Puerto Rican sense of nationhood by looking at cultural representations produced by Puerto Ricans and considering how others--American anthropologists, photographers, and museum curators, for example--have represented the nation. His sources of information include ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interviews, surveys, censuses, newspaper articles, personal documents, and literary texts.

Fearless necessary reporting . . . Klein exposes the ‘battle of utopias’ that is currently unfolding in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico” (Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) “We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and María unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?” —Carmen Yulín Cruz, Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich “Puertopians” are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation’s radical, resilient vision for a “just recovery.” All royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island. “Klein chronicles the extraordinary grassroots resistance by the Puerto Rican people against neoliberal privatization and Wall Street greed in the aftermath of the island’s financial meltdown, of hurricane devastation, and of Washington’s imposition of an outside control board over the most important U.S. colony.” —Juan González, cohost of Democracy Now! and author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America

In this innovative new book, economists from U.S. and Puerto Rican institutions address a range of major policy issues affecting the islands economic development. To frame the current situation, the contributors begin by assessing Puerto Ricos past experience with various growth policies.

With the release of the census figures in 2000, Latino America wasanointed the future driving force of American culture. The emergence of Spanglish as a form of communication is one of the more influential markers of an America gone Latino. Spanish, present on this continent since the fifteenth century, when Iberian explorers sought to colonize territories in what are now Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and California, has become ubiquitous in the last few decades. The nation's unofficial second language, it is highly visible on several 24-hour TV networks and on more than 200 radio stations across the country. But Spanish north of the Rio Grande has not spread in its pure Iberian form. On the contrary, a signature of the brewing "Latin Fever" that has swept the United States since the mid-1980s is the astonishing creative linguistic amalgam of tongues used by people of Hispanic descent, not only in major cities but in rural areas as well -- neither Spanish nor English, but a hybrid, known only as Spanglish.

A crucial, clear-eyed accounting of Puerto Rico's 122 years as a colony of the US. Since its acquisition by the US in 1898, Puerto Rico has served as a testing ground for the most aggressive and exploitative US economic, political, and social policies. The devastation that ensued finally grew impossible to ignore in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane María, as the physical destruction compounded the infrastructure collapse and trauma inflicted by the debt crisis. In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests. Taking readers from San Juan to New York City and back to his family's home in the Luquillo Mountains, Morales shows us the machinations of financial and political interests in both the US and Puerto Rico, and the resistance efforts of Puerto Rican artists and activists. Through it all, he emphasizes that the only way to stop Puerto Rico from being bled is to let Puerto Ricans take control of their own destiny, going beyond the statehood-commonwealth-independence debate to complete decolonization.

Island Paradox is the first comprehensive, census-based portrait of social and economic life in Puerto Rico. During its nearly fiftyyears as a U.S. commonwealth, the relationship between Puerto Rico's small, developing economy and the vastly larger, more industrialized United States has triggered profound changes in the island's industry and labor force. Puerto Rico has been deeply affected by the constant flow of its people to and from the mainland, and by the influx of immigrant workers from other nations. Distinguished economists Francisco Rivera-Batiz and Carlos Santiago provide the latest data on the socioeconomic status of Puerto Rico today, and examine current conditions within the context of the major trends of the past two decades.sland Paradox describes many improvements in Puerto Rico's standard of living, including rising per-capita income, longer life expectancies, greater educational attainment, and increased job prospects for women. But it also discusses the devastating surge in unemployment. Rapid urbanization and a vanishing agricultural sector have led to severe inequality, as family income has become increasingly dependent on education and geographic location. Although Puerto Rico's close ties to the United States were the major source of the island's economic growth prior to 1970, they have also been at the root of recent hardships. Puerto Rico's trade andbusiness transactions remain predominantly with the United States, but changes in federal tax, social, and budgetary policies, along with international agreements such as NAFTA, now threaten to alter the economic ties between the island and the mainland.

When Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, it left no part of the archipelago unscathed. The hurricane triggered floods and mudslides, washed out roads, destroyed tens of thousands of homes, farms, and businesses, caused the largest blackout in US history, knocked out communications, led to widespread food, drinking water, and gasoline shortages, and caused thousands of deaths. The seventeen oral histories collected in Mi María: Surviving the Storm share stories of surviving the storm and its long aftermath as people waited for relief and aid that rarely arrived. Zaira and her husband floated on a patched air mattress for sixteen hours while floodwaters rose around them. The road washed out in front of Emmanuel as he desperately tried to drive his pregnant wife who had begun labor to the hospital. Luis and his father anxiously counted the days that the dialysis clinic remained closed and lifesaving treatment was unavailable, while Miliana’s mother was sent home from the hospital —undiagnosed— only to fall critically ill in her own home. Weaving together long-form oral histories and shorter testimonios, the book offers a multivocal peoples’ history of disaster that fosters a greater understanding of the failures of governmental disaster response and the correlating perseverance of the people impacted by these failures, highlighting the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. Ultimately, the ways in which these oral histories demonstrate the strength of community response to disaster in Puerto Rico are pertinent to other parts of the world that are being impacted by our current climate emergency.