As a first generation American born and raised in the states, Puerto Rico is both familiar and foreign. At once my ancestral homeland and a place I return to with fond memories of childhood family visits, the archipelago is a compass of my cultural identity. With generations of land workers and country men, also known as jibaros, I’ve inherited agricultural wisdom passed down through kitchen table conversations and backyard chats. Over the past ten years I’ve returned to Puerto Rico to visit and photograph my extended family, each trip revealing more of our history, and our powerful relationship to our land.

My grandfather built a life deep in the bush, one of the first to settle in the area after returning from war, he was a man who knew how to read the land. He wasn’t a farmer by title, but he was a jíbaro through and through. He grew coffee, gandules, mangoes, and pineapple in the backyard to feed his family. When the season allowed, he’d cut sugarcane as a field hand, or take odd jobs to make ends meet. What guided his work wasn’t textbooks or weather apps, it was the rhythm of the land, and the dichos he learned from his father and through hard earned experience. These proverbs, passed down to me through my father, aunts, and uncles, were how he taught his children to live in sync with the land - to read the clouds, listen to the birds’ signals, and track the rain’s patterns. Though simple, dichos hold deep ecological knowledge—reminders to stay in step with the land. This photo essay follows those echoes. It’s a way to honor jíbaro culture not just as memory, but as a living archive that holds essential wisdom for surviving, and thriving, in a climate-changed world.

According to research, Puerto Rico imports 85% of it’s food, even though the land is quite fertile, a combination of limited agricultural investment, loss of local farms, and trade policies that favor imports over local production has nearly stripped the archipelago of it’s once boasting exports.

Many families on the island have gardens, yet the research rarely counts what grows quietly in backyards, patios, or mountain plots passed down through generations. These hidden harvests—plantains, yuca, gandules—don’t show up in the data, yet they feed families, preserve culture, and root people to the land. 

Our food story is bigger than the numbers, it lives in our hands, our  memories, and our oral histories.

Hurricane Maria made climate change impossible to ignore. It exposed how fragile life on the archipelago had become, especially for those already stretched thin by economic instability. As I learned more about climate change, I started to see the value of the quiet, powerful wisdom my family carried—knowledge rooted in the land, in planting, harvesting, and making do with what nature gives.

Those practices and backyard harvests are exactly the knowledge we need to survive a climate-altered future. This project is an ongoing attempt to learn and preserve not just to prepare for climate disaster, but to connect more deeply with my own heritage and share essential knowledge to those beyond our jibaro culture.

This photo project bears witness to the hands that still grow food by any means necessary, even as many are forced to leave the island to make a living. It’s a search for what it means to stay, to tend to the land, and to carry ancestral knowledge into an uncertain future.