I have lived in Orlando for almost nine years now, long enough that the city has settled into my bones, long enough for the streets to feel familiar, for the summer winds that remind me of home, and for the everyday rhythm to feel like something I helped stitch together.
Orlando has given me more than I ever expected, more than I ever dared to imagine when I first moved here. It gave me community, friendships that have become a chosen family, and a sense of belonging that I absolutely treasure. And yet, even surrounded by all that love and welcome, I sometimes feel like an immigrant.
Not in the legal, technical way that immigration is defined in this country. I was born a citizen of the United States, in Puerto Rico, on an island that has shaped me at every level. But being technically American has never canceled out the fact that I am also distinctly from the Caribbean. I grew up under a different sky, in a different life rhythm, with a different cultural heartbeat. That identity does not shed itself the moment you board a plane. It travels with you, even when the geography changes.
So when I left Puerto Rico, first to DC, then to Mexico City, I became something new: a migrant, a person in motion. And each place I lived after that, whether back on the island or here in Orlando, added another layer to that feeling. Every move invited me to adapt, translate, reshape, learn a new social language, and figure out where my accent, my history and my face fit into the new landscape.
That is why, even after years of living here, with a life I love, with the love of my life, and communities that embrace me, I still carry that subtle vibration of the immigrant experience.
The intensity of that feeling became clearer to me last year, during the presidential campaign season. At one event, someone stood on stage and said, without hesitation, that Puerto Rico was an island full of trash. And the crowd cheered. No pushback. No correction.
For anyone who has ever loved a place, hearing it reduced to an insult is painful. But when it is your birthplace, your first home, the soil your grandparents walked on, the place where your identity was formed, it’s more than painful. It’s a dismissal of your existence. It’s a reminder that you can be a citizen on paper and still be treated like a foreigner in spirit.
Moments like that make it impossible not to feel aligned with immigrants and migrants who face this sort of hostility every day. Because I know, in my body, what it feels like to be seen as an outsider before you ever say a word. I know what it’s like to be looked at first, and understood second. I know the subtle weight of being watched, even when you’re doing nothing wrong at all.
And I’m not alone. Millions of immigrants, documented or not, wake up every day in a country that benefits from their work, their culture, their contributions, and still treats them as suspicious by default. It’s unfair. It’s cruel. And it needs to stop.
People forget that immigration is not an easy choice. It is not whimsical. It is not careless. It is an act of courage, often born from sacrifice. To uproot yourself, your children, your parents, your routines, your sense of stability, and to replant all of that in unfamiliar soil takes guts. It takes hope. It takes a resilience that most people will never know how to summon.
For me, identifying with the immigrant experience is not about claiming a struggle that isn’t mine. It’s about acknowledging that my own identity, my own journey, intersects with theirs in meaningful ways. I may not have crossed a national border to move to Orlando, but I did cross a cultural one. I did rebuild my sense of home. I did reshape myself to fit a place that was not mine from the beginning.
And many Puerto Ricans feel this way. We are citizens, yes, but we also come from a place the mainland regularly misunderstands, belittles, or politicizes without context. Our belonging here is technically unquestioned, but emotionally complicated. There’s a duality that never quite resolves.
What I wish for — what I deeply, earnestly wish — is that people in this country would meet immigrants with more compassion. More curiosity. More humility. To recognize the bravery it takes to start over in a place where everything is foreign, and to build a life anyway. To see beyond the headlines and the rhetoric, and to understand the humanity behind every migrant story.
Because immigrants are not the threat. They are the embodiment of hope. They are dreamers and workers and rebuilders. They add richness, color, talent, innovation, depth and flavor to this country. They survive, adapt, contribute and thrive, often carrying burdens they never speak of.
If this country is ever going to live up to the ideals it loves to claim, then the least it can do is honor the courage of these people.
As for me, I will keep calling Orlando home, because it is. But I will also honor the truth that my identity lives in more than one place. I will always be Puerto Rican first and foremost. I will always be shaped by the moves I’ve made. And I will always feel a quiet kinship with immigrants, because even in my citizenship, I know what it’s like to be a little outside, a little in between, a little bit of one world and another still.
That in between space is not a weakness. It’s a story. It’s mine. And I cannot see it as anything but a strength.
Jerick Mediavilla is a former journalist from Mexico City, an educator in Central Florida and a human rights activist for the LGBTQ+ community.
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