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PREFACE

Once viewed from the North as a peripheral place or a city on the edge, Miami has in past decades moved to the center of a bigger, hemispheric stage. Its story is of a remarkable urban transformation, timed to perfection to coincide with the surging forces of globalization. Miami is the “mistress of the Americas” in terms of her cultural influence and economic dominance at the nexus of north and south. The city has unparalleled hemispheric connections, a strong hold on transnational communities, unique hybrid qualities, and a powerful, if subtle, role in the shaping of inter-American perceptions.

At the same time, Miami has developed an intriguing urban persona through the years. This subtropical city, so congenitally adept at stirring the imaginations of strangers, has always lured visitors and migrants. During its first half-century they came primarily from the American north, then from the Latin south, and eventually its magnetic pull extended across the hemisphere and beyond. If the city’s seductive appeal is one half of that story, the other half is that few ever ended up staying permanently. Home was, and is, usually somewhere else. In that sense, too, the city invokes the mistress metaphor. By many measures, this is the most transient of all major metropolitan areas in America.

Transience, one might say, is Miami’s genius loci. It has been the city’s defining characteristic from the beginning to the present day. Transience is the underlying current in different historical episodes and geographical parts: from the real estate bonanza of the 1920s to the cocaine cowboys of the 1980s; or from the migrant labor camps in south Miami-Dade to the affluent gated communities along Biscayne Bay.

Understanding Miami requires an integrated perspective of the ways in which economic, political, and cultural developments have combined against an unusual historical and geographical backdrop. Miami’s location, inside the United States but protruding deeply into the South, always seemed to destine the city for a special future. Miami was in the right place, at the right time, to emerge as a leading “world city” in the Americas in the early 1980s, a sort of a hyper-node, or massive urban router, connecting business flows between north and south. Its rise owed much to the cross-cultural affinities of Miami’s ethnically hybrid workforce, many of whom originated elsewhere.

South Florida has always been the décor to population shifts yet there are major differences in the identity of its residents. Locals, born and raised in the area, make up only one-fifth of the population. This may be “their” city but many are struggling to get by and seem frozen in place in a city that is permanently in flux. Exiles are those who have come to Miami of political or economic necessity. To them, Miami is a temporary haven and their mind-set is expressly focused on a return (real or illusory) to the homeland. Mobiles are the kinetic elite who reside in Miami by choice. They are generally affluent, well educated, and live in the city’s most prized neighborhoods. The duration of their stay is usually unpredictable.

This biography of Miami is about the city’s international position but also about its local character, each shaping the other. It engages matters of political economy but also probes the city’s social fabric and argues why the city feels the way it does. Over the years, Miami has assumed an ever closer resemblance to a social laboratory, raising critical questions about identity, attachment to place, citizenship, transnationalism, rights to the city, and cosmopolitanism. The book neither chastises nor celebrates Miami—it provides a careful and revealing dissection of one of the most intriguing cities of our time, one that offers a window into the global urban future.

I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed me to embark on this project; to Alvah Chapman (who died in 2009) and Maurice Ferré for graciously allowing me interviews about some crucial moments in the city’s history; to Chris Hanson for creating the maps and graphics; to Robin Bachin, Harm de Blij, Mazen el-Labban, Richard Grant, Miguel Kanai, Jean-Francois Lejeune, Peter Muller, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Alejandro Portes, and Allan Shulman for interesting discussions and helpful comments along the way; to Daniel Pals, Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Programs in the College of Arts & Sciences of the University of Miami, for financial support; to the publishers of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, the Journal for Economic and Social Geography, and Urban Geography for permission to use some ideas that originally appeared in the pages of those journals; to AP/Wide World Photos, the State of Florida Archives, the Miami Herald Media Company, the University of Miami Libraries, the U.S. Coast Guard, Robert Kloosterman, Dewi Nijman, and Soraya Nijman for permission to reproduce photographs; and, for editorial support, to Judith Martin and Robert Lockhart of the University of Pennsylvania Press.