Or: What happens when you’re Puerto Rican, professional, and realizing you chose the hard mode
I keep asking myself the same question lately: Why the hell did I come back to Chicago?
It’s February. It’s cold. I’m wearing three layers just to go for a morning walk. And every morning I wake up to news that makes me want to throw my phone across the room and go back to sleep until 2028.
Meanwhile, Puerto Rico is 82 degrees and sunny. My people are making coffee on the balcony, talking shit with the neighbors, figuring out how to make community work even when the government won’t.
So yeah. Why did I come back to this?
The Professional Calculus (Or: The Lie We Tell Ourselves)
Here’s what I told myself when I return back dfrom xmas vacations: The opportunities are here. The clients are here. You built something in Chicago, you can’t just walk away from it.
And that’s true. I did build something. Over a decade of consulting work, events that brought people together, programs that actually mattered. I created a career here as a Puerto Rican woman in spaces that weren’t designed for me. That counts for something.
But let’s be honest about what’s happening right now.
I’m watching organizations I worked with—organizations that claimed to care about “diversity” and “inclusion” and all those words they loved putting in their mission statements—suddenly go real quiet. DEI initiatives getting cut. “Budget constraints,” they say. “Shifting priorities.”
Meanwhile, the new administration is making it very clear what they think about people who look like me, sound like me, come from where I come from.
And I’m sitting here with my carefully crafted resume and my polished cover letters, trying to convince people to hire me while wondering if they’re even reading past my name.
Génesis Rivera Candelaria.
Yeah, that’s gonna be a “culture fit,” I’m sure.
The Personal Reality (Or: I’m Scared and I’m Tired of Pretending I’m Not)
I’m afraid.
There. I said it.
I’m afraid of what’s coming. I’m afraid of policies that treat my people like problems to be solved instead of human beings. I’m afraid of rhetoric that emboldens the worst people to say the quiet parts out loud. I’m afraid that everything I worked for—the credibility, the relationships, the reputation—can get erased because someone decided that people like me are suddenly “too political” just by existing.
I’m afraid that I made the wrong choice coming back here.
In Puerto Rico, shit’s hard. The government is a disaster. The infrastructure is falling apart. The debt crisis is real. But you know what we have? Each other.
Porque si hay algo que distingue a los boricuas es que aunque no sabemos votar por políticos que sí quieren lo mejor para el país, nosotros los boricuas sabemos hacer comunidad. Sabemos estar ahí para nuestros vecinos. Sabemos que cuando el gobierno nos falla—y siempre nos falla—nos tenemos el uno al otro.
We know how to show up.
And I’m here in Chicago, in the cold, watching community get dismantled from the top down, and wondering if I should’ve just stayed where people understand that survival is a collective effort, not an individual achievement.
The Cultural Truth (Or: What They Don’t Teach You About Being “Professional”)
Here’s what they don’t tell you about being a Latina professional in the United States: you’re always translating.
Not just language—though yeah, I do that too. I mean translating yourself. Your experience. Your value. Your worth.
You learn to code-switch so seamlessly that sometimes you forget which version of yourself is the “real” one. You learn to make your accomplishments sound impressive without sounding “aggressive.” You learn to be warm but not “too emotional.” You learn to have opinions but not be “difficult.”
You learn to be Puerto Rican enough to be “interesting” but not so Puerto Rican that you make people “uncomfortable.”
And the exhausting part? You do all of this while watching the rules change in real time.
Yesterday’s “we value diverse perspectives” is today’s “we’re refocusing on merit-based hiring” (as if we weren’t qualified). Yesterday’s “bring your whole self to work” is today’s “let’s keep politics out of the workplace” (as if our existence isn’t political to them).
It’s whiplash. And it’s by design.
The Question I Can’t Answer (Or: What Do We Do Now?)
So what do I do with all this?
Do I keep applying to jobs that might not want me? Do I keep pitching to clients who might ghost me? Do I keep building in a country that’s actively hostile to people like me?
Or do I go back to Puerto Rico, accept that the money won’t be the same, the opportunities won’t be the same, but at least I won’t be cold and I won’t be alone?
I don’t have the answer yet.
What I do know is this: I’m tired of pretending that “professionalism” means swallowing my reality. I’m tired of performing gratitude for spaces that were never designed to include me in the first place. I’m tired of watching my community get scapegoated while I’m supposed to smile and network and “add value.”
And I know I’m not the only one feeling this way.
The Thing About Community (Or: Why I’m Writing This)
I’m writing this because I know there are other people out there—other Latinx professionals, other immigrants, other people with names that don’t fit neatly on corporate org charts—who are asking themselves the same questions right now.
Why did I come here?
Why did I stay?
What was it all for?
And I want you to know: I don’t have answers, but you’re not alone in asking.
We’re all trying to figure out how to survive this. How to keep our dignity while keeping our rent paid. How to stay true to who we are while navigating systems that want us to be smaller, quieter, more grateful.
Maybe the answer isn’t in Chicago or Puerto Rico. Maybe it’s in remembering what we already know how to do: make community. Show up for each other. Build the tables we want to sit at instead of waiting for invitations that might never come.
Because if there’s one thing I learned from being Puerto Rican, it’s that we don’t wait for systems to save us. We save each other.
Even when it’s cold.
Even when we’re scared.
Even when we don’t know if we made the right choice.
We show up anyway.
So here I am. Still in Chicago. Still cold. Still afraid. Still showing up.
Let’s see what happens next.
Graciasss por leerme.
Besitos
Génesis
Génesis Rivera Candelaria is a freelance logistics and program operations consultant who spends too much time wondering if she should’ve stayed in Puerto Rico and not enough time actually booking a flight back. She’s currently accepting consulting opportunities, existential advice, and recommendations for good coffee that might make the Midwest winter bearable. Reach her at grcandela@gmail.com.
