This was written for The Seedling, the newsletter of The Uproot Project. It was published on July 28, 2026. Lee la versión en español aquí.
While I write this newsletter, Tropical Storm Bertha is heading to Texas after making landfall in Louisiana. I’m writing to you from my family’s house in Juana Díaz, Puerto Rico, where we know a great deal about hurricanes. The word is Native to our islands: “Jurakán”, the winds and wrath of the goddess Guabancex. The earliest memory I have of experiencing the heavy rains of a hurricane, its turbulent winds, and the fear when you think you might lose your home was in 1998, when Category 3 Hurricane Georges crossed Puerto Rico. The phrase “desastre natural” (natural disaster) has become ever present in my vocabulary since then. That phrase shaped how I understood hurricanes to be: something natural that causes destruction, something out of our control or even of divine conception. The winds of Georges did not blow the roof off of the house I grew up in, but almost twenty years after, those of Category 4 Hurricane Maria did.
There was a minimizing sense when I entered our ravaged house weeks after Maria’s landfall. A smallness; a strange viscous sadness spread through my body while I walked through the smelly wood and debris.
“Por lo menos estamos vivos, gracias a Dios”, “at least we are alive, thank God”, my grandma said, after stating that this was also of divine making.
The rains and winds of Jurakáns have been present in the Caribbean since before the Spanish colonization and violent conquest. Today, hurricanes are stronger because of climate change. And their damages are exacerbated due to the structural vulnerabilities of a place, of a people. The 2,975 deaths from Hurricane Maria in 2017, as officially reported, were not directly caused by the storm, but by lack of access to healthcare, poverty and public health disparities, and other structural root causes. Disasters are not natural.
Hurricane Maria made visible those underlying vulnerabilities, those characteristics that make people vulnerable to the impacts of natural hazards. Not everyone has access to resources or capacity to prepare for, withstand, cope, and recover from such impacts. Still, it is common to name these situations today as “natural disasters”. It is easy to picture, to describe and to understand the extent of damage and suffering when we name them as “natural disasters”. We have done it for centuries. But sometimes I think that we shouldn’t be using that phrase. As journalists and writers, as people who use language to make sense of things, to inform the public, what can we do to not support the narratives that neglect those structural causes? How do you see language’s role in how we understand what happens after the impact of a hurricane?
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