About us

Every Puerto Rican family in the US has a story about what led them to leave the islands. While many families maintain strong connections and relationships with their culture back home, others lose their sense of nationhood with each passing generation.

There are currently 8-10 million Puerto Ricans worldwide; the majority, 5.8 million, now live in the United States (1.1 million in New York State alone), with only 3.2 million remaining on the islands of Puerto Rico. This is a dramatic decrease from just twenty years ago.

Between 2005 and 2019, Puerto Rico saw a massive outmigration due to economic difficulty and climate change, primarily responsible for the island’s population decrease of 620,000—a staggering loss of 16.4% of its total population. This exodus represents one of the most significant movements of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. in the islands’ history, both in terms of volume and duration. However, this flight cannot be understood outside Puerto Rico's long history as the world's oldest colony, which has motivated various waves of outmigrations.

Having experience in government, electoral campaigns, labor organizing, and transnational solidarity work, we understood that this violent political cleavage of the Puerto Rican nation harmed both communities in the diaspora and on the islands. The forced economic migration and climate displacement of Puerto Ricans are instruments of settler-colonialism meant to disperse and dissolve the Puerto Rican Nation and its political power. These outmigrations deprive Puerto Rico of the people power it needs to transform itself into a Nation that can confront and overcome the crises imposed on it.

Our mission

Repatriotas was created to empower Puerto Rican communities by (re)connecting diaspora communities with communities on the islands. Our mission is to reconnect the Puerto Rican diaspora community to their national heritage. It was conceived in 2021 by socialist Puerto Rican political organizers from the diaspora, incorporated as a New York non-profit in 2022, and is currently applying as a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt social welfare organization.

Initially, we intend to accomplish this through subsidized tours of important cultural centers and sites in Puerto Rico. We also hope to spur economic exchange alongside this cultural exchange to support local entrepreneurs on the islands. Repatriotas’s tours will be designed to support Puerto Rican community organizations and small businesses.

Our goal is to work with partners both in the diaspora and in Puerto Rico to develop and subsidize cultural exchange and development programs starting with young people who have never been to Puerto Rico. We aim to provide them with cultural competency before the visit, including political education around Puerto Rico’s colonial history and Spanish Language tutoring. The tours will function to not only expose young people to important historical or landmark locations but puts them in direct contact with active and vibrant communities and social groups, and serve as a bulwark against the disintegrating forces of settler-colonialism.

In the future we hope to expand our services to include:

  • Relocation Help Services: Employment and Housing

  • Spanish Language Education

  • Investments in Food and Electrical sovereignty sectors

  • Working-class retiree program to fund returns to Puerto Rico for diaspora community members

The time is now to bridge these experiences through exchange, development, and communication.