Miami
MIAMI
MIAMI, founded in 1896, anchors a sprawling, four-county, South Florida metropolis of over 5 million people. The city has evolved through a series of quick character changes, including raw tropical frontier, vast real estate speculation, tourist playground for the rich and famous, retirement destination for the middle class, safe haven for Caribbean and Latin American exiles and refugees, and multicultural boiling pot. Few American cities have experienced such dramatic change so quickly. Few places captured the American imagination so completely and so consistently over the course of the twentieth century.
South Florida's forbidding distances and water-logged environment prevented the region from moving beyond the frontier stage until the early twentieth century. The railroad and hotel baron Henry Flagler made Miami the destination of his Florida East Coast Railway in 1896. In succeeding decades Flagler became the city's chief builder and promoter. Emphasizing Miami's seashore location and subtropical amenities, Flagler successfully cultivated the image of a "Magic City" in the Florida sunshine. With in two decades other fabulous promoters were grabbing national attention for their own Miami-area speculations. Carl Fischer created Miami Beach, George Merrick built suburban Coral Gables on city beautiful principles, and dozens of smaller real estate speculators subdivided Miami and nearby communities. Even before the great Florida boom of the mid-1920s, tourists flocked to Miami and Miami Beach, some 150,000 a year by 1920.
The collapse of the Florida real estate boom in the late 1920s and the coming of the Great Depression in the 1930s only temporarily slowed Miami's growth. The glamorous vacation and resort image of Miami and Miami Beach kept the tropical twin cities in the national spotlight. Between 1920 and 1940 the Miami area grew in permanent population from 43,000 to 268,000, an increase of over 520 percent that placed Miami among the nation's fastest-growing metropolitan areas.
Metropolitan Miami's population growth slowed after 1940 but not by much, rising to 495,000 in 1950 and to 935,000 in 1960, a growth rate of 250 percent over two decades. Miami's upward growth spiral during the mid-century decades was sustained by powerful new forces for change. As in the rest of the emerging Sun Belt, the impact of World War II was far-reaching. The federal government established numerous military bases and training facilities in the Miami area. Defense spending and military payrolls provided a major boost to the local economy, attracted large numbers of civilian workers, and facilitated economic diversification. After the war thousands of service people who had trained in Miami returned to live out their Florida dreams.
New technologies also brought growth and change to Miami. Rail transportation supported South Florida's tourist economy until the 1930s, when automobiles and then commercial air travel increasingly filled that role. The newly developed DC-3 airliner, introduced in 1935, set Miami on a new course as one of the nation's aviation centers and a major gateway to Latin American cities. By the 1980s Miami had one of the busiest airports in the world, and the aviation industry (airport, airlines, suppliers) had become the city's largest employer.
Other powerful forces for change emerged by the 1950s. The introduction of home air conditioning in 1955 revolutionized Miami home construction and made year round living in South Florida appealing to larger numbers of people. Postwar demographic changes also altered Miami's population base considerably. Before the war Miami's population consisted primarily of southern whites and blacks as well as a large contingent of immigrant blacks from the Bahamas. After the war internal migration of Jews, Italians, and social-security retirees from the Northeast and Midwest brought new levels of ethnic diversity to the city. The Miami area's Jewish population rose from about 8,000 in 1940 to about 140,000 in 1960, a dramatic migration that rippled through Miami's politics and culture. Jews concentrated in Miami Beach, facing anti-Semitism but eventually coming to dominate that city's political structure. Liberal northern Jews, unaccustomed to racial segregation, worked with black activists in voter registration campaigns and lunch-counter sit-ins to achieve major civil rights breakthroughs by 1960. Miami's demographic transformation also underlay major governmental reforms, such as the introduction of a powerful county wide metropolitan government in 1957.
The decade of the 1960s brought still further change to Miami. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 toppled an unpopular dictatorship, but it also unleashed the first of many successive migration waves of Cuban exiles to South Florida. Over the next forty years, arriving by airlift, boat-lift, and make-shift rafts, almost 1 million Cubans found a new home in the Miami area. The subsequent arrival of hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Nicaraguans, Colombians, and others from Latin America and the Caribbean quickly altered the city's ethnic composition. As the Latin population grew, the practice of exile politics resulted in Hispanic domination of Miami and Miami-Dade County. After 1972 Hispanic mayors predominated in Miami. Unsettled by the new immigration and its consequences, non-Hispanic whites began an exodus of their own from the Miami area by the 1980s. Most migrating northerners began to choose other Florida retirement destinations. However, international trade and finance boomed along with the local real estate market, as Miamians took advantage of the city's new Latin ambiance. By the 1980s Latin American and European tourists in Miami and Miami Beach outnumbered American vacationers.
Miami's new ethnic and racial diversity led to turmoil and conflict. Black Miamians suffered from job competition with Cuban arrivals in the 1960s and resented the special treatment and financial support the newcomers received from the federal government. Haitians complained about a double standard in American immigration policy that favored the mostly white exiles from communist Cuba but excluded black immigrants from Haiti. Four major race riots in Miami between 1980 and 1992 reflected these underlying tensions. The polarizing debate over Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy rescued from an overturned raft in 1999 and reunited with his father in
Cuba in 2000, unleashed new tensions. Urban problems, such as high crime rates, a flourishing illegal drug trade, attacks on tourists, political corruption, and damage to an environmentally sensitive ecosystem, contributed to Miami's newest image as a lost paradise.
The 2000 census demonstrated the powerful impact of forty years of immigration on Miami and confirmed widely held perceptions of its boiling-pot cultural mix. Hispanics comprised 66 percent of the city of Miami's population of 362,470. Metro Miami's population of 2.2 million included 1.3 people of Hispanic background, or 57 percent of the total. About 650,000 of the Hispanics are of Cuban descent. Almost 60 percent of metro Miami residents speak Spanish at home, another testament to the power of Latin immigration. Transformed by twentieth century technologies and shaped by economic and demographic changes, Miami nevertheless retains its tropical allure and cultural vitality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunn, Marvin. Black Miami in the Twentieth Century. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
García, María Cristina. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Grenier, Guillermo J., and Alex Stepick III, eds. Miami Now! Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Change. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992.
Mohl, Raymond A. "Miami: The Ethnic Cauldron." In Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth since World War II. Edited by Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.
Portes, Alejandro, and Alex Stepick. City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Raymond A.Mohl