Melissa Fernandez and Lyvan Verdecia met through social media in the spring of 2015. She was living in Harlem and had been performing for three years with Ballet Hispánico, a contemporary dance company in Manhattan. He was in Miami working as a day laborer, hopping on trucks bound for South Florida fields in need of harvesting. He also worked as a roofer and at an industrial laundromat in Miami.

“I didn’t have anything, anything, anything,” said Mr. Verdecia, 25, a dancer who had left his home in Cuba in search of a new life.

Ms. Fernandez’s family, also from Cuba, had a lot more, but never forgot their own beginnings. “My parents reminded us every day of the struggles and hardships they went through in Cuba,” said Ms. Fernandez, 30, who was born in New Jersey and raised in Miami.