Photo by Sofía Pérez | The Puerto Rican flag is a source of pride for the people of this unincorporated U.S. territory.
By Amanda LaRiviere
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Twelve miles south of the vibrantly colored homes and storefronts that define San Juan’s historic district, 71-year-old Yousef Yassin poured coffee into a few small gold-rimmed glasses from a dallah—a traditional Arabic coffee pot. As he stood in the carpeted prayer room of Masjid Montehiedra, an unadorned mosque situated in the mountainous barrio of Caimito, he said the matching coffee set was from a local shop around the corner that sells Palestinian merchandise.
For Yassin, a Palestinian immigrant who has lived in Puerto Rico for more than 40 years, shops like these are a way to reconnect with Ein Yabrud, a village in the West Bank 6,000 miles away that he considers his first home. Yassin moved to Puerto Rico in 1981 to help his brother with a drugstore business. That same year, the first mosque on the island was built in the heavily populated Rio Piedras neighborhood.
“We usually carry whatever we learned from the old country to here. We have drugstore businesses and gas station businesses,” said Yassin, who has since retired. He lives with his wife nearly 10 miles from the mosque in Caguas, a city referred to as the heart of Puerto Rico. They met in the West Bank while Yassin was visiting his family and together brought their tradition of making sweet and syrupy Palestinian desserts to Puerto Rico after getting married in 1983.
Yassin’s efforts now focus on supporting Palestinian businesses and welcoming new immigrants to Puerto Rico. “We do help people to stand up on their feet when they come, because some don’t have family here,” he said, noting that he regularly travels to his village in Palestine.
In fact, many Palestinians in Puerto Rico engage in a similar pattern of travel between the island and their homeland, known as circular migration. Comprising somewhere between 65 and 80 percent of the island’s estimated 3,500 Muslims, this tight-knit community is built upon a fundamental reality: that since 1946, their displacement has pushed them to seek business opportunities abroad and rebuild their lives in an environment they are comfortable with. For many Palestinians seeking to move west, that meant relocating to Puerto Rico was a better alternative to living on the U.S. mainland because they found that the Commonwealth offered attractive business incentives for immigrants and had welcoming locals.
Photo by Amanda LaRiviere | Palestinian immigrant Yousef Yassin sits in Masjid Montehiedra, a mosque in Caimito.
“Maybe Palestinians wanted to come to Puerto Rico to be in the United States and to avoid, perhaps, the potential racism they feared they would feel in the mainland,” said Ken Chitwood, a religion scholar whose academic work has focused on Puerto Rico’s Muslims.
But Chitwood said business opportunities were the primary motivation for most first-generation Palestinians who settled on the island. Laws already in place offered tax breaks to the island’s businesses and investors. The incentives enabled mainland franchise owners to open chain locations, benefitting immigrants looking to start their own businesses. “There are businesses that have Palestinian owners or investors,” Chitwood added. “One Palestinian claims he was the first iHop franchisee in Puerto Rico.”
In time, the number of Palestinians moving to Puerto Rico grew, and so did the need for mosques to serve them. Today, there are nine on an island that is only 110 miles long and 35 miles wide. While some of the mosques are embellished with traditional minarets or domes, Masjid Montehiedra sits as a simple, one-story, rectangular, lime green stucco building with no distinct adornments or even a sign. Regardless of how grandiose they are, the mosques function as a place for the Palestinian community to gather, discuss their connections back home and maintain their cultural identities.
“[Palestinians] were involved in founding the mosques, financing and building them,” said Chitwood, who is a fellow at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He visited each of the nine mosques in Puerto Rico at least once since his fieldwork began in 2014. Each time, he noticed Palestinians dominated the demographic. He also noted that regardless of how long they lived on the island, many continued to self-identify as Palestinian.
“They live transnational lives—transnational in a literal and ironic sense because these are two people without a nation as well,” said Chitwood. “These are people who don’t have nations but identify with a nationality and live between these places.”
Photo by Amanda LaRiviere | Surrounded by palm trees in the mountainous barrio of Caimito, the unassuming Masjid Montehiedra, is the second largest mosque in Puerto Rico.
Over 5 million Palestinians, according to statistical reports from the United Nations, have been displaced and left nationless since Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in 1946. The political, economic and social conditions in Palestine differ drastically from those of Puerto Rico. But because the Caribbean island is an unincorporated territory of the United States, its people are similarly “nationless” and not adequately represented or heard when it comes to communicating their needs. This, scholars say, creates a sort of kinship between Palestinians and Puerto Ricans, connecting them in ways that are not possible in mainland U.S.
“The longer history here shows the very real nationalist sentiments both communities have,” said Sara Awartani, a half-Puerto Rican, half-Palestinian U.S. social movement historian who recently finished a postdoctoral fellowship on Global American Studies at Harvard University. According to Awartani, both communities are known for proudly displaying their flags wherever they can. “I read it as symbols of the persistence of national identity even in the face of some sort of occupying power,” said Awartani, who has three Puerto Rican flags hanging in her own Massachusetts workspace.
But for many Palestinians, maintaining their first identity requires more than simply relocating to a community of people who share the same background. Even cooking traditional food and shopping at Palestinian businesses on the island are not enough to make them feel connected. Rather, they need to physically exist in two places.
“They believe it’s very hard to keep their traditions and fear they will become too Puerto Rican or will lose their Palestinian identity,” said Sumayah Soler, the 49-year-old founder of the Interreligious Women’s Collective of Puerto Rico, an organization that brings women of various religions together for community work and advocacy. Soler grew up in Puerto but converted to Islam about 25 years ago and has since become a Muslim leader and activist. “It’s something that really weighs heavy in their decision making. So, they try to stay in contact with their country of origin and keep going back and forth.”
Photo by Crystal Herrera | Muslim leader and activist Sumayah Soler, founder of the Interreligious Women’s Collective of Puerto Rico, waits outside of a school near San Juan.
Chitwood said physical spaces, like mosques, act as part of the cultural landscape for Palestinians in the diaspora. “That’s a place where they can feel comfortable celebrating their identity and culture,” he said, noting that attending events and gatherings hosted at mosques on the island helps to maintain their transnational identity.
But circular migration has led to an unstable number of worshippers attending mosque services, jeopardizing this interrelatedness.
Yassin recalled praying at Masjid Rio Piedras, the first mosque built on the island, after moving to Puerto Rico in 1981. “It’s in a very rough neighborhood,” Yassin said. “So we decided to find a more peaceful and quiet place to pray, and this was the option,” referencing Masjid Montehiedra, which sits behind white metal gates and has a robust playground for children who visit.
Built in 2007, the mosque in Caimito where Yassin now prays holds about 450 worshippers, making it the second largest on the island. To emphasize the tranquil ambiance of the space, Yassin walked across the prayer room and opened the back door, letting in a warm breeze and a view of palm trees that grow around the property.
While the physical spaces they have created are important to building a community, the social and psychological space Palestinians share with Puerto Ricans is what clinches their connection, scholars say.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in the wake of hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, the combination of which devastated the island, resulting in offers of humanitarian aid from around the world. Awartani noticed this solidarity from Palestinians in the immediate aftermath of the storms.
“Palestinians were writing online to Puerto Ricans on the island saying, ‘We know what it’s like to not have electricity and running water,’” said Awartani. “These are failures of the colonial occupier and manmade, not natural, disasters.”
Nevertheless, like many native Puerto Ricans, a number of Palestinians fled the island after these natural disasters for more stable shores, said Chitwood.
“Some Palestinians who were living these transnational lives stopped doing so and no longer live in Puerto Rico,” Chitwood said, calling the political and economic situations of Palestinian lives on the island “unique.” “They moved there for business opportunities, but they deal with the stark realities of what it means to live in a U.S. colony alongside others who live in Puerto Rico.”
Photo by Amanda LaRiviere | A collection of books and Qurans, some from Palestine, line a small cabinet in Masjid Montehiedra.
Yet, the cycle is in play again, bringing some who left back to their second home. For Yassin, who was in Palestine when Maria hit, he watched from afar as delays in aid and catastrophic flooding created a humanitarian crisis that left most of the island’s residents without running water and electricity for close to a year. He decided he could not stay in Palestine.
“In Maria, the island changed color from green to brown,” said Yassin, as he drank his coffee while sitting on a plastic folding chair. “The mosque was wrecked. It was sad seeing people with no electricity. I came back here because the drugstores needed support.”
But for every Yassin, there are others who choose to stay away. As a result, the instability in mosques puts the community-based support for Palestinians at risk. Leaders like Soler are pushing for new approaches to build the Palestinian-Puerto Rican community in ways that are inclusive and encourage historically underrepresented groups to participate, such as converts, or Muslims who are also LGBT+.
For now, Yassin continues to draw in his mind’s eye a divided picture of home. “I wish a world without borders,” he said, filling the silent, empty mosque with his voice. “Sometimes I envy the birds. They fly and they find any tree and settle in it with no questions.”