Philly Puerto Rican community pressures federal officials to act amid ‘humanitarian crisis’

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More than 50 people gathered at Philadelphia City Hall on Thursday night to raise awareness about Puerto Rico’s water crisis and pressure federal officials to allocate resources to support the archipelago’s residents.

“We need water to be able to live. We need water to be able to just have dignity, day-to-day quality of life. And so, those who are experiencing those shortages are suffering, and that is unacceptable,” City Councilmember Quetcy Lozada told WHYY News. “We should not allow U.S. citizens to have to experience any type of humanitarian crisis.”

More than half a million Puerto Ricans are enduring days-long water shutoffs due to drought and infrastructure issues.

A coalition of local and statewide organizations and elected officials sent a letter to the region’s congressional delegation Thursday night, asking them to push for a federal emergency declaration in Puerto Rico to release resources from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The letter also asked federal officials to advocate for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to be deployed to fix Puerto Rico’s aging water infrastructure, which currently leaks 60% of the water it contains, said Rafael Álvarez Febo, co-founder of the Puerto Rican Professionals Network and one of the rally organizers.

“Meteorologists had talked about this for months and months and months, so the government of Puerto Rico did not plan accordingly for an impending drought that they knew would happen,” Álvarez Febo said. “We have a perfect storm of government inefficiency and breakdown and climate change going on.”

The coalition is also asking federal officials to call for a congressional audit of the current plan to modernize Puerto Rico’s water and electrical infrastructure, and push for completion of existing FEMA projects.

“This is not the first type of humanitarian crisis … that the island experiences, and so we’re asking the federal government to act now, fix the infrastructure,” Lozada said. “Respond both, short-term as well as long-term, and figure out how we ensure quality of life for the residents of the island.’”

The coalition also sent a letter to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, requesting that he deploy resources through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact and mobilize the state National Guard and other agencies, including the state Department of Health and PEMA, to provide additional support in Puerto Rico amid the crisis.

Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community ‘can apply the most pressure’

Philadelphia is home to the second-largest Puerto Rican diaspora community of any city on the U.S. mainland. Puerto Ricans on the mainland play an important role in advocating for those living there, said Adamary Sosa, another co-founder of the Puerto Rican Professional Network and one of the rally’s organizers.

“In Puerto Rico, they’re a U.S. territory, but they don’t have … voting rights, right?” Sosa said. “They can’t vote in your Senate representative or your president or anything like that. So here is where we can apply the most pressure that would actually help over there because living on this side, we can vote.”

Andrea Cabot moved to Pennsylvania from Puerto Rico in 2020. They said their aunt and grandmother in San Juan are experiencing water rationing, with shutoffs lasting 48 hours at a time. The water supply also still goes out intermittently, even when it is supposed to be on, Cabot said.

“I just feel very passionately about our position as a diaspora to help our people on the island, and really just calling attention to all of our representatives to say, ‘It’s enough, and we gotta stop just all of the abuse of power that goes on with Puerto Rico,’” they said.

Puerto Ricans are being forced to leave and come to cities like Philadelphia on the U.S. mainland, Cabot said, due to a “cycle of crisis” and overdevelopment. After Hurricane María devastated the island in 2017, tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans moved to Pennsylvania.

“The worse the crises are on the island, we still get an influx of Puerto Ricans coming to Philly, and in Philly we also don’t have the resources that we need, and we are seeing continuous displacement in our own Puerto Rican communities in Philadelphia,” they said.

The Puerto Rican diaspora community in Philadelphia has “a long history of activism and success in winning campaigns for the Puerto Rican people,” Vanessa Maria Graber, co-founder of Philly Boricuas, told the crowd Thursday night. She cited the Sin Colonias March in 1976, emergency aid mobilization to the island after Hurricane Maria and following a series of earthquakes in 2020, as well as the “Ricky Renuncia” campaign that ousted then-Gov. Ricardo Rosselló.

“Don’t forget our history and don’t forget who we are and what we’re capable of achieving,” she said. “So we’re rallying now to demand an immediate response to the water crisis. We have the power to effect change.”