Mapping: Puerto Rico in Lorain, Ohio

For this project I chose to map the Puerto Rican community of Lorain, Ohio located only twelve miles to the north of Oberlin. It was in the late 1940s and during the 1950s that Puerto Ricans began to relocate to Lorain. This migration—I use this term because Puerto Rico is part of the United States—was the result of a national industrialization effort of U.S. Steel to bring over labor to work in their burgeoning factories. The migration at first was relatively small of mostly men, but within a few years the population began to grow in which entire families started to settle as well. As of 2000, the total population of Lorain was 68,652 with the Puerto Rican population amounting to about 25,000. The Puerto Rican community in Lorain is the second largest off of the island in terms of population percentage—after New York City—highlighting the importance of this community within the broader Puerto Rican Diaspora.

For the purposes of mapping I intended to map how an im(migrant) community constructs a home for itself within a space that is not their own, and the forces that these people dealt while settling. I specifically wanted to look at how such a migrant group whose home is in the tropical warmth of the Caribbean relocated to a place that was so drastically different—the industrial Midwest. I focused on the industrial steel landscapes, the large warehouse-type buildings, the forces that dictated life in Lorain and what Puerto Ricans did to make themselves feel at home. The photographs include the Puerto Rican Home (a community center), a mural located along Pearl Avenue (the main street within this community), and the U.S. Steel building.