NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2005
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
BACK IN THE MID-1960S, WHEN I WAS APPLY-
ing to colleges, the University of Miami
had a reputation for majors in basket
weaving and volleyball. Miami itself was known
for its retirement communities, spring break
beach parties and bargain vacationing. Back then
if there was something definitely not associated
with Miami, it was “culture.” The city was per-
ceived as lacking culture in three senses: the
institutional one of museums, concert halls and
the like; the more everyday sense of community
cultures (ethnic cultures, cuisines, festivals, etc.);
and the culture and creative industries (music
recording, television, fashion, design).
This image has changed radically. Miami is
now considered a “Hollywood East” or
“Hollywood Latin America,” due in large part to
the media and entertainment industries dedicat-
ed to Latin American and U.S. Latino markets.
These provide the visuals and the soundtrack to
the city’s more economically and demographical-
ly based slogan: “Gateway of the Americas.” To
be sure, the change is much more than cosmet-
ic; Miami is a “world city” in the mid-level com-
pany of cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona,
Berlin, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Geneva, Montreal,
Shanghai, Taipei and Washington. Its inclusion
in this category is due to the concentration of
command-and-control headquarters for banks
and transnational corporations and the concomi-
tant critical mass of complementary advanced
producer services—particularly accounting, advertising, banking and law.
1 Although these services are
found in all cities, sociologist Saskia Sassen notes that only
in advanced “postindustrial production sites” do we find
the innovations in services that play “a specific role in the
current phase of the world economy.”2
Its standing as a world city is also borne out by Miami-
Dade’s ranking as fifth in the world among telecommuni-
cations centers, which enables it to be the gateway for 60%
of all U.S. trade with Central America, 46% with the
Caribbean and 27% with South America. In fact, Miami’s
Free Trade Zone is the world’s largest privately owned and
operated foreign trade zone, reflecting the increasing cen-
trality of cities vis-à-vis nation-states in setting the terms of
global trade.
3 Much of this economic activity takes place
in the services sector, but it is important to recognize that
this is a bifurcated sector, with the highly educated and
well-paid professionals at one end and the miserably paid,
working poor at the other end. The demographic transfor-
mation of Miami, particularly since the late 1980s, tends
to be portrayed in this confusing image of the city. It is pro-
jected either as a city of successful Latin(o) American
entrepreneurs, professionals and celebrities (e.g. Ricky
Martin, Shakira, Julio Iglesias), or as a city of destitute
immigrants, frequently bearing a Haitian face. Indeed,
diaspora in Miami can be inflected in either direction,
depending on the ideological aim of the projection. On the
one hand it is celebrated as a successful multicultural
Latino-infused culture that presumably wields power. On
the other hand, the emphasis is on a critique of the power
relations that relegate the majority to dire living and work-
ing conditions. (According to the 2000 U.S. Census,
Miami was the poorest large U.S. city, with almost 28% of
residents below the poverty line.)4
The confusion or contradiction implicit in the image of
a city comprised of either affluent or destitute diasporic
groups has material consequences as cities attempt to
attract tourists and advanced producer industries. As in
Bilbao, Spain, cities are boosting their image and seeking
international recognition by commissioning remarkable
iconic buildings and cultural/entertainment centers, and
linking them to their business and natural amenities.
5
According to the World Trade Organization (WTO),
tourism is the world’s largest employer and now accounts
for 35% of global services exports.
It takes both ends of the spectrum—service profession-
als and workers—to support the image and tourism indus-
tries, yet projections of city life and ethno-racial belonging
tend to be drawn exclusively from the upper level of serv-
ice professionals. Absent from these glossy projected offi-
cial representations are those who do the drab domestic
work, office maintenance or the intensive labor involved in
restaurants and bars that nevertheless give urban life in
prosperous areas their luster. In contrast to this luster,
most academic writers on urban development and immi-
gration in Miami chronicle ethno-racial strife among
whites, Cubans, African-Americans and, more recently,
Haitians. But whether we look to the image-spinning
boosters of so-called creative cities or the academics and
critical journalists who write about urban poverty, Miami’s
diasporic communities remain the central protagonists of
the story.
Sociologist Manuel Castells has argued that creative
cities are those in which there are “life-giving” activities,
adding that “alongside technological innovation, extraor-
dinary levels of urban activity have mushroomed … forti-
fying the social fabric of bars, restaurants, chance encoun-
ters on the street, etc. that give life to a place.” Enhancing
the quality of life in this way enables a city to attract and
retain the innovators indispensable to the new “creative
economy.”6 Talk of Latinos “giving life” to Miami is part of
the multicultural rhetoric emanating from the press and
image industries. The following excerpt about Miami from
the July/August 2003 issue of Hispanic Magazine is
emblematic:
This multicultural metropolis has got it all. A thriv-
ing Latino community, a strong job market, good
schools, striking streetscapes, and a voice that’s loud
and clear across the country…. More than 150 U.S. and
multinational companies have their Latin American
headquarters there…. There are also the posh beach
sections nearby which have become home to movie
stars, bikini models, and fashionistas. And, a group of
chefs known as the Mango Gang started Miami’s New
World Cuisine and a style of cooking filled with sultry
sabor…. There are countless Hispanic heritage festivals,
film series where you can catch the work of the most
recent Latin immigrants, museums, dance clubs, social
events, Carnaval in March, and enjoy other nights out.
Whatever you want to call it—the new New York, the
American Casablanca—it’s simply a city bursting
with flavor.
The entertainment and tourism industries have become
major players in Miami, and they are at the heart of these
“life-giving” activities. Charles Landry, a leading authority
on urban development and culture, writes: “Culture pro-
vides insight, and so [it] has many impacts; it is the prism
through which urban development should be seen. The
cultural industries, hotbeds of creativity, are significant
economic sectors in their own right and employ between
3-5 percent of the workforce in world cities such as
London and New York or Milan and Berlin.”7
Miami’s cultural policies—both official and de facto—
can be considered indicative of current writing on creative
economies programs: culture breeds innovation, which, in
turn, produces economic growth. This scenario was pre-
cisely the one sought by the city government of Miami
Beach, which created a “Liaison for the Entertainment
Industry” in its Economic Development Division, thus
bridging culture and economics.
8 This office considers the
arts, media and entertainment industries—especially
music, television, Internet portals, fashion photography
and arts institutions—as the major economic engines of
Miami. Initially located in the city to take advantage of
both Latin American and U.S. Latino markets, these
industries have also amassed cohorts of cultural workers
who have taken an interest in Miami itself and have
begun to transform the city. This transformation is part of
an internationalization rendering Miami a post-Cuban,
post-Caribbean city. But this internationalization is prob-
lematic, because the enthusiastic fusion of U.S. multicul-
turalism with Latin American mestizaje, while more
encompassing than the traditional U.S. racial order, never-
theless intensifies historical inequalities, especially of black
immigrants.
The most enthusiastic advocate for urban revitalization
on the basis of diversity is Richard Florida, who claims, in
his book The Rise of the Creative Class, that diversity, like
other natural and cultural amenities, attracts innovators
who contribute to the production of intellectual property
rights, improving the dynamism of these cities in the so-
called new information, knowledge and experience
economies. “You cannot get a techno-
logically innovative place unless it’s
open to weirdness, eccentricity and
difference,” writes Florida.
9 Workers
presumably settle in cities that offer
the highest-paying jobs in their fields,
but according to Florida, creative-
class workers look for more tolerant
places and diverse populations in
addition to well-paying jobs.
Diversity—the code word for racial
and cultural differences—plays a
central role in this analysis. Florida
notes the presence of large numbers
of gays and bohemians in the so-
called creative cities, a point frequent-
ly made about Miami. Their presence,
Florida argues, suggests that open-minded and diverse
communities are attractive to software engineers and
entrepreneurs. Of course, while discerning a supposedly
new class, Florida seems to neglect the class position of the
“diverse” populations, who tend to get displaced as the
“creative class” gentrifies areas that were historically lower-
class communities.
10 This is a recurring, serious tension in
the dynamics between creative cities and racialized minor-
ity populations.
WAVES OF GENTRIFICATION ARE WASHING OVER MIAMI’S
poorest neighborhoods, precisely those where the service
workers of “life giving” activities reside. According to a real
estate newsletter, the midtown area, where these neighbor-
hoods are clustered, began changing “as creative types in
search of inexpensive space and a culturally rich environ-
ment began relocating to there from the trendy Design
District over the last five years…. The area is becoming an
enclave for independent film, video and post-production
facilities as well as modeling agencies.”11 As it currently
stands, median family income in these neighborhoods—
Allapattah, East Little Havana, Liberty City, Little Haiti,
Overtown and Wynwood—is not even high enough to
afford a zero-bedroom apartment.
12
The redevelopment plan for Overtown, for example,
claims the neighborhood’s decay will be transformed with
attractive areas for reinvestment—a change that should be
lauded. But planners cite rents that will require an income
significantly higher than the median income of neighbor-
hood residents. One report states that “workforce housing”
projects “aimed at working-class people” will require an
annual income of $36,000, when the median yearly
income in Overtown is $14,161.
13 Given the difficulty of current residents in Overtown and elsewhere to generate
the income for the cheapest apartments, it seems unlikely
that they will be able to remain in an upgraded real estate
market like the one depicted in the artistic renderings of
developers.
The centerpiece of the Overtown Redevelopment Plan
is the Promenade, where a bustling after-hours club
scene has already taken root. The Plan describes the
Promenade as a “24-hour environment where people can
be entertained, work, and reside—a place that celebrates
Miami’s diverse popular culture and music scene.”
Similar to the already mentioned academic boosters of
cultural revitalization, the Plan seeks to transform the
area into a “‘celebrated place’ of street culture, ethnicity,
and artistic diversity. This vibrant street life is what
makes city living attractive, exciting and decidedly differ-
ent from a passive suburban lifestyle.”14 The developers’
rendering of the Promenade makes quite evident the
middle-class, largely white, albeit multiculturally deco-
rated space. What it not clear is how people from
Overtown, Little Haiti or Little Havana will be able to
inhabit these spaces.
WHAT WE SEE IN MIAMI’S REDEVELOPMENT PLANS IS A
physical, urban replication of the telenovela, the most cher-
ished of TV genres among Latin Americans and Latinos.
Although once the exclusive product of capital cities in
Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina, for the past five
years telenovelas have been produced prolifically in
Miami. As Daniel Mato convincingly argues, Miami has
become a crucial site for the construction of a transnation-
al Hispanicness, an almost necessary function as its media
industries mediate between U.S. Latinos and Latin
Americans.
15 Perhaps this is because of all the U.S.
cities—indeed, of all the cities in the Americas—Miami is
the only one from which a generalized international Latin
identity is possible.
The internationalization of Latin identity is even taking
place in the music industry, despite the fact that in many
respects two music worlds continue to exist side by side,
especially in their administrative aspects. On one side is
the U.S. Latino (and the aspired-to crossover) market,
characterized mostly by Latin pop and
salsa—Gloria Estefan, Jon Secada,
Albita and a host of other Latino
singers from elsewhere produced in
Miami. On the other side is the Latin
American market, which is largely
managed out of Miami. But these two
worlds do communicate and thus cre-
ate an important source of hybridiza-
tion between the North and the South,
between Latinos and Latin Americans.
And together they are producing a
range of international megastars like
Ricky Martin, Shakira and Enrique
Iglesias, in addition to mainstays like
Julio Iglesias. Even the space and
physical attributes of Miami have a
role in this transformation: its skyline, upscale areas, and
beaches have become settings, just as they were for
“Miami Vice” and the fashion photography industry.
Analagous to the redevelopment plans of Miami’s
poorer areas is the entertainment industry’s representa-
tions of “the good life” for Latin(o) Americans living in
Miami: the expensive homes and cars, the shops, the
nightlife and the glitz of it all. Viewers of talk shows like
“Cristina” can see a parade of celebrities who live in
Miami or spend time filming or recording in the city’s
studios. Curiously, the poor on Spanish-language TV are
elsewhere, in Peru, as in the talk show “Laura,” a Jerry
Springer-esque carnival of hardship, tears and bad taste.
But the humdrum world of work in Miami is absent on
the TV screen and in the salsa hits or pop ballads. There
is no trace of the everyday life of busing tables, sweeping
floors, emptying bed pans, taking care of the middle
class’ kids or delivering meals; no one is shown having to
travel further and further to work each year as families
get displaced from downtown to cheaper northern neigh-
borhoods like North Miami and North Miami Beach.
As shown by the redevelopment plans and the enter-
tainment industries, Miami claims to incorporate its het-
erogeneous populations, but there are considerable ethnic
conflicts over access to jobs and bias in immigra-
tion policy. The tendency of culture—particularly,
Latin culture—and economy to merge, embodied
in the entertainment industry itself, provides the
bicultural and bilingual professional class in Miami
immense opportunities. But this transformation is
likely to exacerbate the subordination of certain
immigrant populations, such as Haitians and other
non-Spanish speaking groups, particularly if they
are black. Moreover, of the Cubans and Haitians
who survive the harrowing journey to Miami’s
shores, only the former get to stay. The Elián
González affair only heightened this difference,
leading Haitians and many other observers to sus-
pect racism at work.
THE MULTICULTURALISM BEING SHOWCASED IS NOT THAT
OF the poor and working classes, but of the profession-
als and middle classes that get to enjoy the gentrifica-
tion of the city. Some argue that Miami is adopting a
typical Latin American discourse of “racial democracy,”
whereby Latinness is inclusive of all races and classes
except for blacks.
16 Contrary to denials by Cubans and
Cuban-Americans that they harbor any racism or color
prejudice, many scholars of race relations readily point
to the fact that dark-skinned Cubans continue to occu-
py the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder in both
Cuba and Miami.
17
An article published a few years ago
on two immigrant friends from Cuba, one black and
one white, detailed how they were each incorporated
into separate communities based on their color. The
story brought home the point that racial differentiation
is greater in Miami than in Cuba, perhaps because of
accommodation to the U.S. model of ethnic competi-
tion and identity politics.
18 Their story also belies the
claims to color-blindness that abound among Latin
Americans.
Latin American claims to color-blindness are found-
ed on the myth of the racial “melting pot” or mestizaje.
National identity in many Latin American countries
since the late 1920s and early 1940s was premised on a
cultural citizenship identified with a racially hybrid
subject. Fernando Ortiz, Cuba’s best-known scholar of
Afro-Cuban culture, advocated the abandonment of the
concept of race in favor of the notion of “transcultura-
tion.”19
In countries where this transculturated, mestizo
identity was accepted by whites and most racially mixed
people, blacks found it difficult to make claims for
equal treatment on the basis of race and were often
accused of racism for even raising the issue. A Latin
American equivalent of U.S. normative whiteness, mes-
tizaje presumably included everyone as a member of the
nation, but not necessarily as a beneficiary of the privi-
leges of citizenship. It is for this reason that in the case
of Miami, claims to citizenship based on culture, which
have been prevalent in cultural studies, should be
reconsidered. It is clear that the entertainment, tourism
and redevelopment industries have absorbed and prof-
ited from this discourse of cultural citizenship. Despite
all the developments in this latter area, it seems obvious
that a more classic understanding of citizenship is need-
ed, one that avoids the easy incorporation of multicul-
tural celebration into exploitative labor practices and
redevelopment schemes for the wealthy.
Many immigrants are willing to work for lower
wages, even below the minimum wage, thus undermin-
ing the work of unions, like the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU), which has been waging an
indefatigable campaign to strengthen the rights of
condo workers in Miami. Ninety percent of these work-
ers are Hispanic, with some Haitian and African-
Americans.
20 These are the workers who will no longer
be able to live in the neighborhoods they moved to
when they arrived to Miami. It may seem like a stretch,
but if the Ricky Martins of Miami could go off to
Thailand to visit and comfort tsunami victims, he and
his multicultural celebrity compatriots should be able to
extend their solidarity to their nearby neighbors and fel-
low migrants who are suffering under the crudest forms
of exploitation. They owe it to them—for as Castells,
Florida and other promoters of creative cities explain,
they provide the life of the party.
George Yúdice is
professor of
American Studies
and of Spanish and
Portuguese
at New York
University, where he
is also director of the
Center for Latin
American and
Caribbean Studies.
His most recent book
is The Expediency
of Culture: Uses of
Culture in the
Global Era (Duke,
2003).
Miami:
Images of a Latinopolis
by George Yúdice
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