Angelo Navarro is hunched deep in a waiting room chair at Philadelphia International Airport, his eyes red and puffy.
In a few minutes, the skinny, freckled teenager will board a plane to go live in Puerto Rico - for the second time in six months.
A week ago he had smiled at the prospect. This morning he cried and pleaded with his parents to stay in Philadelphia.
On Navarro's final day at school, his teacher, Cynthia Alvarez, had tried to console him and then offered a prediction:
"I know I'm going to see you again."
She is probably right.
Angelo Navarro can catch an afternoon flight and reach Puerto Rico in time for supper. For him and for thousands of Philadelphia Puerto Ricans, easy travel has stretched loyalties and the meaning of home.
Is home Puerto Rico, where he was born and where his grandmother still lives in the town of Caguas? Or is it the gritty Howard Street neighborhood in North Philadelphia where he grew up?
Unlike others who migrated here and cannot easily return to their homeland, many Puerto Ricans shift between two cultures, two languages, two lives.
They are stretched between competing forces - the pull of the U.S. mainland, offering hope of wealth, and the tug of a tropical island that offers the comfort of family and home.
For many Puerto Ricans, the tug is also one between the life of a rural island community and the pressures of life in a big city.
The result is a people who have had to learn, quickly, to cope with two different worlds, but who are not completely at home in either.
"Back and forth. Back and forth," is how Lillian Escobar-Haskins describes it. Escobar-Haskins, executive director of the Governor's Advisory
Commission on Latino Affairs, said that impermanence "plays havoc with schoolchildren."
It plays havoc with life. Health suffers. Pre-schoolers aren't vaccinated and sick people don't seek treatment because they are intimidated by a medical-care system here that is foreign to them. Political power is lost. Political identification is with Puerto Rico, not city hall; low voter turnout results in no clout.
But the movement of many Puerto Ricans to the mainland has not been all negative. It has led to a blossoming of Latino business and culture here, and the emergence of a resilient middle class.
For Angelo Navarro, 15, the draw of the island meant that this school year he spent two months here, two months there, and another two months here.
