KISSIMMEE, Fla. — When Manuel Hernandez, a teacher in Puerto Rico, looked at the reasons to stay home or to take a chance on joining the ever-growing Puerto Rican diaspora in Central Florida, it was not a hard call.

“I was fed up,” Mr. Hernandez said of his life in San Juan, “and my wife was fed up; frustrations were building.”

So last October, Mr. Hernandez got off a plane and arrived here, a place best known for hosting Mickey Mouse and rodeos, but also increasingly seen as a faraway suburb of Puerto Rico, a trend that has quickened with the island’s deepening economic morass.

Florida is now poised to elbow out New York as the state with the most Puerto Ricans — close to one million, according to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York. Nearly 400,000 Puerto Ricans have settled in the Orlando area, and by some estimates, thousands continue to arrive monthly, a marked increase from a decade ago.