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<\/a><\/p>\nA good place to start is journalist and writer Raquel Reichard\u2019s “16 Reasons Why Being Puerto Rican Is the Best\u201d article for Cosmo<\/a>, which delves into the uniqueness of Puerto Rican families. \u201cSpeaking of family: Yours is a huge, close one.\u00a0And it’s very likely that you’re meeting cool new\u00a0primos<\/em>\u00a0annually,\u201d she writes. \u201cThe diversity just within your family is beautiful.\u00a0You find joy in looking at astonished faces every time you explain that your black\/brown\/white siblings are 100 percent related to you even though your skin and hair texture are completely different from theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n Family is also an aspect touched on in a multifaceted definition by one man, Alex Garcia, when asked in 2002 by The Morning Call<\/em> on what it means to be Puerto Rican<\/a> (that also included food, music, and religion). \u201cWhen I sit at the table with my family having a delicious Puerto Rican dinner including white rice, red beans, fried-chicken and a Malta (a typical malt drink from the island),<\/p>\n I am known for often saying I am so glad to be Puerto Rican because we eat \u2018good!\u2019\u201d he told the Pennsylvania newspaper. \u201cOf course being Puerto Rican means much more to me than food. It means that I am part of a culture of people that love deeply, are family centric, believe in a higher being and at heart are, idiomatically speaking, \u2018buena-gent\u2019 [good people]. We love our music, food, families and religion! To me being Puerto Rican means I love deeply, eat richly, worship weekly.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, the specter of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in the fall of 2017, looms over any current conversation. But Puerto Rico is rebuilding \u2013 including its tourism<\/a> \u2013 and, according to rising musical star iLE, so is part of the the Puerto Rican identity. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be negative or anything but, sometimes we learn the most when we are uncomfortable,\u201d she said to PBS<\/a> almost a full two years after Maria. \u201cI think Hurricane Maria taught us that. We obviously, because of our colonial situation, we\u2019re always expecting someone else to do the job for us…But in Hurricane Maria, we had to do it all by ourselves. And we had to help out people on our own. The weird thing about it is that we did it so naturally because it\u2019s in our blood, it\u2019s in our way of living. We are humble people and we work in Puerto Rico as a big family and we actually care about each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Because there are many people of Puerto Rican descent living in the U.S. who identify closely with their Puerto Rican identity, a major part of the Puerto Rican experience is the duality with the United States. It\u2019s most notably explored in the work of award-winning author Esmerelda Santiago \u201cThere were two kinds of Puerto Ricans in school: the newly arrived like myself, and the ones born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parents,\u201d she explained<\/a>. \u201cThe two types didn\u2019t mix\u2026 To them, Puerto Rico was the place where their grandparents lived, a place they visited on school and summer vacations, a place which they complained was backward and mosquito-ridden. Those of us for whom Puerto Rico was a recent memory were also spilt in two groups: the ones who longed for the island and the ones who wanted to forget it as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n