When The Return to One's Homeland Becomes a Myth

Guaynabo, Puerto Rico (Source: Flickr)

I'm from Guaynabo, one of the seven municipalities that form the San Juan metropolitan area, and it’s considered the wealthiest and most educated in Puerto Rico. In Guaynabo, 49.3% of people aged 25 and over hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. Yet, like in the rest of Puerto Rico, the economic structure doesn’t reward academic preparation with dignified salaries. That contradiction explains why, despite high educational attainment, 20.5% of Guaynabo’s residents live below the federal poverty line.

I look at Google images (2024) of the municipality and realize that Puerto Rico is no longer home for me, no matter how much I imagine going back. I say it with disbelief and sorrow, but I release a weight in admitting it. The matter extends beyond living almost two decades outside the island.

Each short visit I made—2009, 2013, and 2018—confirmed this reality. I never had a family bed to stay in, and I was always the one who initiated calls until I gave up. The people who could have anchored me emotionally are either scattered across the United States or dead. That’s not arrogance or betrayal of my roots, but a painful truth I struggle to accept.

The Puerto Rico I read about in the media entertains itself excessively with sports, artists, festivals, and identity symbols designed to avoid confronting the island’s endless crisis. I feel proud of all of it, but I also see it as a form of escapism. And I don’t blame the people, because everyone needs to breathe under economic suffocation.

Public education quality has always been uneven, but today the Department of Education seems to exist primarily to siphon federal funds and share the spoils among its allies.

Even the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), once a promise of social mobility and intellectual critique, constantly faces the threat of losing U.S. accreditation and lacks the funding to sustain excellence. And if UPR’s standards remain that vulnerable, so too does the aptitude of the graduates it produces—and even the analytical capacity of voters.

A nation’s prosperity depends on its educational achievements. Even within the United States, the wealthiest states are those with the highest educational bar. The stark differences between states—in health, wages, cost of living, politics, infrastructure, services, and other areas—stem from education.

Going back to a Puerto Rico that is fragile in all those aspects would feel like returning to a classroom where I have already passed every subject. Nothing there would make me grow. And if ties with friends and family are weak or nonexistent, the return makes no sense. Puerto Rico isn’t waiting for me.

Accepting that I can’t go back means accepting exile, and that recognition weighs heavily. Exile isn’t just a one-way trip, but a wound in memory and in how others look at you. It’s not that I refuse to return, but that I can’t do so without losing what I fought so hard to secure on the mainland.

That impossibility creates chronic grief. Some days nostalgia turns into anger—anger at the island that expelled me or at myself for leaving—and other days it sinks into mute sadness.

Massachusetts feels cold in social relations, yet it sustains me in other ways. After nearly 14 years, I have adapted. I’ll not trade the stability I have here for Puerto Rico’s warmth, and I recognize that as an irreparable loss.

Still, I speak with the calm of someone who has released a burden. Not going back to Puerto Rico is not a defeat, but the consequence of choosing the life that best fits my concrete realities.

Puerto Rico lives in me as memory, language, and wound. It’s not my residence, but it remains a part of my essence. My writing has become my portable home. No one leaves their homeland except when circumstances force them to. I don’t believe Puerto Rico’s political parties want the diaspora to return. And, in that case, for many of us, going back turns into a myth that continues to hurt, but also teaches us where we can truly stand.

Part II: When the Host City Sustain You More Than the Country of Origin