Aug 15, 2019
In this episode of I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY, our guest Father José Rodríguez talks about growing up in the poverty-stricken neighborhood of Azalea Park in Orlando, and how his temporary job in his old stomping grounds at the Jesús de Nazaret Epsicopal Church became permanent after Hurricane María. As an advocate for his community, he welcomed that: “Post María, I started seeing the gaps. I saw that this was different from when we first arrived here. I immediately saw supply and demand come into play. All these families arrive, and they can’t find apartments and they can’t find work, and we always come here to work. When my family came here in the 80’s there was supply and little demand. And we have been continuously arriving as a diaspora into Orlando, but in a manageable stream. The newly arrived Puerto Ricans did not cause the housing crisis. They exposed something that we had become numb to. They exposed something that we had hidden. They exposed something that we weren’t talking about. And by the way, we aren’t paying a living wage in our community. So these newly arrived Puerto Rican families have been exposing a lot of the systematic injustice.”