Yareliz Diaz. Photo: Megan Jones

Health Law, Policy & Management

PhD Student Presents Research at Puerto Rican Conference on Public Health

Yareliz Diaz, a PhD student in health services and policy research, joined Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz, chair and professor of community health sciences, on a special panel and Diaz presented work related to her dissertation on the mental health of Puerto Rican migrants to the mainland US after Hurricane Maria.

Growing up, Yareliz Diaz always spoke Spanish at home and English at school. Her mother, who immigrated to Boston from Puerto Rico as a teenager, banned Diaz and her sister from speaking English in her house—a rule she enforces to this day, Diaz says. It was not until her undergrad at Tufts that Diaz discovered her mother even speaks English.

“I was appalled,” she jokes. When she was younger, her mother sometimes asked her to make phone calls on her behalf, claiming she could not speak English. Diaz consequently became adept at translating between the two languages.

Today, as a PhD student at the School of Public Health researching the mental health of Puerto Rican migrants, Diaz forgives her mother for her deception. Her bilingual upbringing empowered her to embrace her Puerto Rican heritage, she says. “Even though I was not raised on the island, my mom has tried to make sure that we have kept in close touch with our culture and because of that I have always felt a deep connection to Puerto Rico.”

Diaz enjoys eating traditional Puerto Rican dishes on holidays, listening to Puerto Rican music, and following Puerto Rican media. “I have always tried to stay in touch with what is happening so that I can call myself Puerto Rican and actually know what that means,” she says.

However, Diaz still felt nervous when Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz, professor and chair of community health sciences, invited her to serve on a special panel and present her ongoing research at the Puerto Rican Conference on Public Health in San Juan in early May.

“All my academic training has been in English, [and] I obviously speak Spanish, but academic Spanish and regular Spanish you speak day-to-day are very different, so that was intimidating,” Diaz says. But Rodriguez-Diaz insisted, lending her his full support and sponsoring her attendance.

According to Rodriguez-Diaz, who conducts community-based participatory research in Puerto Rico and was born and raised there, the annual conference is the most important of its kind held on the island. He moderated the panel titled “Hacia una salud pública decolonizada en Puerto Rico: Perspectivas desde la diáspora” or “A Decolonized Perspective for Public Health in Puerto Rico: Perspectives from the Diaspora,” on which Diaz served, both a member of the Puerto Rican diaspora and a scholar researching it.

Following nearly four centuries under Spanish rule after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1493, Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States when it was acquired during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The island’s territorial status means that while Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, they do not have congressional representation and cannot vote in presidential elections. Rodriguez-Diaz is interested in the ways this historical and ongoing colonization drives health inequities between Puerto Ricans and the mainland US population. Since coming to SPH last year, he has joined Sarah Lipson in mentoring Diaz as she has pursued related research on the effects of cascading disasters and residential instability on the mental health of Puerto Ricans who migrated to Florida in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Using survey data collected from focus groups conducted in 2018, Diaz hopes to better understand how the actions and policies of U.S. government agencies responding to the disaster have affected the experiences and, ultimately, the mental health of Puerto Rican migrants and their families. Coincidentally, it was Diaz herself who transcribed and translated the data from Spanish to English back in 2018, well before she had decided on a dissertation topic, before she had even enrolled at SPH. The research team recruited the recent Tufts graduate with degrees in anthropology and community health to ensure the translations were accurate based on her familiarity with Puerto Rican Spanish.

It was this work as a translator that solidified Diaz’s intent to pursue advanced studies in public health, she says. “I was hearing directly from the mouths of these people, who had experienced such a horrible, horrific thing, just how hard it was to migrate. And they are technically American, but what does that actually mean? And what is the impact of being American, but not having access to the same resources and not being treated as such when they got here,” says Diaz, who wrote about her intent to study these questions in her application to SPH.

Having the opportunity to now analyze the data and sit on the advisory board for the Adelante Boricua (Onward Puerto Rico) Project, the larger study of Hurricane Maria survivors that her dissertation work will contribute to, Diaz feels as though she has come full circle.

“It’s almost like it was meant to be,” she says. “There are folks who participated in the study, who are local leaders in the Orlando and Miami areas, and I will have the opportunity to present the work that I am doing and what my findings are to these folks, get feedback from them, and then work with them to craft policy recommendations that will actually be meaningful and not just someone from the tower of academia saying, ‘This is what you should do.’”

If her presentation in Puerto Rico was any indication, it is likely Diaz’s work will be well-received.

“This was her first professional presentation in Spanish, and she did it flawlessly! [She] did a phenomenal job and had a great discussion with the audience,” says Rodriguez-Diaz. After returning from the conference, Diaz says she is so grateful for his encouragement and support.

“It was one of those moments where I felt really validated as a scholar, like all my work is actually really important,” says Diaz of the experience. “I do not always feel that way. There is a lot of imposter syndrome. Academia is not a place for a person like me, because of the stuff that I want to study, being first gen—all these things. But being in that space around other Puerto Rican scholars who care about Puerto Rico as much as I do, who cared about my work, who thought my work was amazing—it was really cool.”