LANCASTER -- Debra Martinez was born and raised in Puerto Rico, in the southern port city of Ponce.

She went to school on the island, gave birth to one of her children there and worked as a financial aid director at a top-notch Puerto Rican university.

Then, in October of last year, she left under a worsening debt crisis that threatens to spiral out-of-control and derail the island's already fragile economy.

With two sons, a daughter-in-law, grandson and her husband, Martinez moved to Lancaster, a Latino stronghold located more than 1,600 miles to the north in Pennsylvania's southern farm belt.

Her family is among the tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans who came to the mainland in the last year, following 90,000 in 2014 - a record-setting and historic pace.

As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans are able to move about the country and enter it freely.

And with unemployment nearing 12 percent there and the debt cloud darkening, as many as 200 Puerto Ricans are now leaving the island for the mainland each day. It is the continuation of an historic population loss seen there over the past decade.

The Pew Research Center says most have settled in Florida, but many are also coming to Pennsylvania, where cities such as Lancaster, Allentown and Reading maintain large Latino populations and deep ties to the island.

When she arrived here last year, Martinez would have found a state and region forever changed by more than a century of Latino migration and immigration -- much of it in the last 60 years -- and on the cusp of even greater changes.

In Lancaster, where she continues to live with her family, Latinos make up nearly half of the city's 50,000-person population. Puerto Rican flags are proudly flown alongside American ones outside of Latino-owned shops and restaurants, and in some parts of the city Spanish has become the primary language spoken in public.

"I miss my homeland, but being back [here] feels like coming back home again," Martinez said of Pennsylvania.

She worries, though, about family members still in Puerto Rico, and watches helplessly from afar as the island braces for disaster.

Mass exodus

The current mass exodus away from Puerto Rico is of a level not seen since the 1940s and 1950s, when a similar mass movement -- spurred by the post-War boom and growth of commercial air travel -- served as the narrative backdrop for Arthur Laurents' West Side Story.

At its peak, The Great Puerto Rican Migration of the '40s and '50s brought 69,000 Puerto Ricans to the mainland in a year.

Currently, the number is closer to 100,000 and rising.

The majority continue to settle in Florida, but more are being drawn inland to states like Pennsylvania, where the Latino population has grown over decades and irrevocably changed the composition of large and mid-sized cities alike.

In 2013, Pennsylvania itself saw nearly 9,000 new arrivals from Puerto Rico, a 33 percent increase from 2005, and second only to Florida in terms of volume. New York State was ranked third.

Pennsylvania's share is likely to increase, though, and cities like Lancaster, Allentown and Reading -- all dramatically shaped by Latino migration already -- are expected to change even further.

According to U.S. Census Data, Allentown was the fastest-growing Pennsylvania city in 2010, much of it due to increasing numbers of Latino residents. Latinos increased from 24.4 percent of the city's population (26,058 residents) in 2000, to 43 percent of its population (50,461 residents) in 2010, Census data show.

In that same time, whites became a minority in Allentown, dropping from 64.4 percent of the population to 48.4 percent.

Reading saw a similar rise in Hispanic residents, now roughly 58 percent of that city's population, leading to dramatic cultural changes in the historically white community of English and German descent.

In 2011, USA Today described Reading as a place where "downtown centers brim with signs in Spanish pointing to corner bodegas [grocery stores], travel agencies and money-wire services," and where "passing cars reverberate with the modern salsa beats of cumbia music or hip-hop-influenced reggaeton blasting from a 24-hour, FM Spanish-language radio station."

Other Pennsylvania counties have reported major changes in their Hispanic populations as well, as Latinos, many drawn by affordable housing, job opportunities and good schools, moved in, often from more mainstay cities like Philadelphia and New York.

Overall, the number of Latinos in Pennsylvania grew by 83 percent between 2000 and 2012, or by an additional 325,572 people, the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire reports.

In Lancaster, Wilfredo Seda of WLCH, a bilingual radio station with listeners in Lancaster and York, said Latinos have become integral parts of these communities as taxpayers, homeowners and business owners. Some have even been credited with breathing new life into cities abandoned by white flight or amid suburban sprawl.

This is particularly true of Hazleton, where Congressman Lou Barletta, then mayor of the city, proposed a crackdown on landlords and businesses engaged in the "hiring or harboring of illegal aliens" in 2006.

At the time, supporters of the measure sought to link an influx of undocumented immigrants with the city's lagging tax base and an uptick in violent crime and drug dealing.

Barletta's proposal quickly became a lightning-rod, plunging the city into controversy, conflict and issues of constitutionality, all until an appeals court later invalidated the law following a legal challenge by the ACLU.

Barletta's office did not return a call seeking comment for this article.

The entire episode did little to slow the growth of Hazleton's Latino community, however, and since the court ruling the city's Latino population has thrived, becoming roughly 40 percent of its overall total. This growth has also been credited with resurrecting commercial and residential neighborhoods once blighted and boarded-up following the death of coal production and the loss of Hazleton's manufacturing base.

"In the last 40 years, we went from being invisible, basically, to being very much a fixture of the communities where we live around the state and around the country," Seda said.

"We're becoming the majority of business owners and home owners and paying the freight for a lot of these communities."

He added, "The future of these communities is now definitively linked with the viability of the Latino community."

'Consternation and conflict'

The same interdependency could be argued for America, in which 55 million Hispanics now make up the country's largest ethnic minority group, one expected to reach "majority" status by the middle of the century.

In just five decades, the U.S. Latino population has grown nearly ten-fold, from just 6 million in 1960 to the 55 million here currently.

They are a growing political force, too, one that could prove crucial to the outcome of this presidential election in which issues of immigration and Latino identity have figured heavily, thus far.

In Pennsylvania -- an electoral swing state where immigrants and the children of immigrants account for 5.3 percent of all registered voters, according to the American Immigration Council -- this growing political clout has coincided with the growth of Latino earning power and higher levels of educational attainment.

"When I first came here, the Latino community was basically a working class community, and still is a majority working class community, but then it was rare to find college educated Latinos," Seda said of Lancaster in the 1970s.

That is changing quickly, he added, with third, fourth and maybe even fifth generation Latinos now living here, each with a more ingrained sense of American identity than the last and a more diverse array of options at their fingertips.

These youth are virtually indistinguishable from the vast majority of American youth in their social media use, personal tastes and pop culture savvy. A study by Nielsen found that given the choice between a Spanish-language radio station and an English-language one, Latino youth overwhelmingly choose the latter.

Experts say this proves acculturation is a two-way street: The means by which people change countries and countries change people.

Even just sixty years ago, their ancestors coming to Pennsylvania would have faced "racial and language barriers," a degree of isolation, and resistance from pre-existing ethnic minorities like the Polish, Italians and central Europeans who had themselves been similarly maligned decades earlier.

"Some saw them [Latinos] as racially different, and clearly the language barrier caused consternation and even some conflicts," Dr. Victor Vazquez-Hernandez, Chair of the Social Sciences Department at Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus and an expert on Pennsylvania's Latino history, explained.

At WLCH, Seda, who has himself been in Lancaster "on-and-off" since the '70s, said discrimination was more open, if not more common, then.

"In 1975, the mayor at that time, Richard Scott, had a public meeting and just yelled out every epithet and racial ... Every derogatory thing you could think about Latinos at that time, he said at a public meeting. That won't happen now. Do people still feel the same? That's possible."

'No panacea'

By the time of Mayor Scott's tirade, Latinos had been in Pennsylvania for nearly a century: Vazquez-Hernandez said they were in Philadelphia before the start of The Spanish-American War in 1898.

By the 1920s, Latinos were being recruited to work in Bethlehem's steel plants. And in the 1950s, as Puerto Rico struggled on the bumpy road from agrarian society to industrial one, many were recruited to work on Pennsylvania farms, or within the Northeast's burgeoning manufacturing sector -- today's rust belt.

Often, they did the jobs other Americans weren't willing to do, or for less pay than they were willing to accept.

Generally speaking, it is a much younger generation of Puerto Rican that is coming to the mainland today, many confronting issues of provenance and American identity for the first time.

But while better educated and more skilled than their predecessors, Seda said, "coming here is no panacea."

"This is because things in some areas of the country are also in dire straits," he added, "and so it's worrisome because most of the folks coming over are young and young families and their future is somewhat uncertain, like anyone else in this country."

A study by The Century Foundation and Rutgers Center for Urban Research and Education found 4-of-10 Latinos live in high-poverty neighborhoods in Pennsylvania, the highest rate of its kind in the nation by more than 10 percentage points.

In Lancaster, researchers at Franklin & Marshall College found Latinos in many parts of the city are becoming poorer, with poverty in the places they live more concentrated than before.

Potentially adding to this is the stream of new arrivals now struggling to find work.

Seda said Lancaster's office of Careerlink, the state-run job service resource, is reporting an increasing number of Puerto Ricans being referred to them as the debt crisis there worsens, although exact figures were not immediately available.

"If you're looking for a job on your own, the average is 9 months," he said. "They [Careerlink] cut that down with their programs to an average of 4 months, but still."

'I pray every day'

It is for these reasons that Martinez counts herself among the lucky ones.

Months after returning to Pennsylvania, she is already back at work, this time as a school director at the Consolidated School of Business' York Campus.

She now waits for other family members planning to follow her to the U.S., and keeps a close eye on the island's financial crisis from here.

"Even though I love my island and have my family there and miss them terribly, and even though I used to love my job, to live there with that kind of income, it just doesn't do it," Martinez said, recalling wages held down by the island's economic crisis and paychecks held up.

"It's kind of heartbreaking. I pray every day that God makes something happen and things get better."