The Global Edge

Miami in the Twenty-First Century

Prof. Alejandro Portes, Ariel C. Armony

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780520297104
• eBook ISBN: 9780520969612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last quarter century, no other city like Miami has rapidly transformed into a global city. The Global Edge charts the social tensions and unexpected consequences of this remarkable process of change. Acting as a follow-up to the highly successful City on the Edge, The Global Edge examines Miami in the context of globalization and scrutinizes its newfound place as a major international city. Written by two well-known scholars in the field, the book examines Miami’s rise as a finance and banking center and the simultaneous emergence of a highly diverse but contentious ethnic mosaic. The Global Edge serves as a case study of Miami’s present cultural, economic, and political transformation, and describes how its future course can provide key lessons for other metropolitan areas throughout the world. 

1

Introduction

A CITY IN FLUX

The 1960s movie classic Midnight Cowboy features a pair of New York hustlers at their wits’ end. As winter sets in and one of them becomes increasingly ill, they set their hopes on escaping south. The healthy one robs an incautious businessman and, with the proceeds, buys a pair of bus tickets to Miami. The movie ends as the very sick member of the pair, played unforgettably by Dustin Hoffman, dies in the bus as it is about to reach its destination. In 1980 and again 1994, the Cuban government opened its ports, allowing anyone wishing to leave the island to do so. Tens of thousands of desperate people promptly took to the waters of the Strait of Florida in anything that could float.

Northerners wishing to escape freezing temperatures and southerners fleeing political oppression have nothing in common in terms of their ethnic origins or their history. Their only commonality is their destination, at the tip of Florida. These convergencies created a social and economic dynamic unseen anywhere else in the nation and, for that matter, in the world. The city in which they came together and which occupies us in this book is a strategic site for the study of urban change, less because of being representative or emblematic of other cities in the United States than because of the opposite, its radical uniqueness.

In the past, Miami has had its crop of serious and distinguished historians, but by focusing on how the city emerged and grew during the early twentieth century, they have been inexorably bypassed by the march of events. That fate was also that of the book published by the senior author in the early 1990s.¹ It attempted to trace the transformation of the city up to and including the crucial year, 1980, and its sequels. The diagnosis of that earlier study—that Miami was perched on a precarious “edge”—was valid at the time, but it has been superseded by events since then. Our focus in this new book is change during the last quarter of a century, not only as a logical continuation of the earlier study, but because this is the period that led decisively to the present social, economic, and political character of the city. The confluence of diverse populations in this single geographic spot continues to produce change without a blueprint, leading to surprising outcomes. Tracing them is the object of our investigation. Before launching into it, it is convenient to outline a set of conceptual guidelines framing our analysis.

THE STUDY OF CITIES

Since their emergence in ancient history, cities have been at the center of the evolution of humankind. This is because they are loci, vehicles, and reflections of what takes place in the broader society. From their very beginnings, they have served as administrative centers and places of refuge in dangerous times. To these functions was added their key role as a marketplace. That is why so prominent a figure as Max Weber defined the city as a market. The central place of commerce for the existence and growth of cities is no better reflected than in their shriveling to near-extinction in the Europe of the eighth and ninth centuries. As the French historian Henri Pirenne tells the story, the Islamic conquest of the Mediterranean deprived the continent of vital imports and key outlets for its exports; the urban system put in place since Roman times imploded as a result, and civilization had to take refuge in the countryside—in manorial demesnes and in feudal subsistence production.² Only the reconquest of the Mediterranean by the Crusaders two centuries later reversed the trend, setting the stage for the emergence of the great Italian commercial cities—Venice, Pisa, and Genoa—and farther north, the cities of the Hanseatic League.³

Thereafter, cities never lost their central role as marketplaces and as centers of administration in the West, these functions preceding and being more universal than their subsequent role as sites of mass production. The latter came into full force only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. Thereafter, cities became primarily defined by the industrial goods they produced—cloth and apparel in Manchester and Birmingham; machinery in London; steel in Pittsburgh; ships in Philadelphia; and eventually automobiles in Detroit. But before that industrial turn, cities in ancient, medieval, and even modern times did not produce much of anything, serving primarily as markets and as sites for administrative coordination. In that capacity, they were the loci and the vehicle of the course of major events in human history, and their physical appearance stood as the reflection of such trends. The historical role of cities as sites of commerce and administration, rather than productive entities, must be kept in mind as we approach the city that is the subject of this book.

There are two additional features of urban life to be noted before going back to that story. First, urban phenomena are essentially political. They involve the interaction, conflict, and cooperation among interests backed by different amounts of power. This is not to say that such events do not take place elsewhere; but it is in the cities, by virtue of the concentration of large numbers of people in limited space, that the political interplay and struggles of interests and power become more visible and poignant. Contests for hegemony always culminate in cities, even if their origins lie elsewhere. Revolutionary armies can never claim victory until they have conquered the capitals of their respective realms; it is also in cities where political leaders claim office or are removed from it.⁴

Within cities, the competition for space inevitably triggers political confrontation. The wealthy always seek to influence politics in order to reserve for themselves privileged access to urban amenities and services. Everyday citizens, on the other hand, must band together in movements or parties in order to make their voices heard. Indeed, their claims do not become visible as “urban” issues until they enter the political arena. Above all, the most common political confrontation is spawned by the conflicting functions of cities as sites for human habitation and as centers for wealth accumulation. Competition among economic interests and their common wish to turn cities into profit-making entities inevitably clash with the desire of the working population for livable space. Industrial pollution, traffic congestion, ghetto areas right next to wealthy gated communities, inflationary “bubbles” in land and real estate are among the myriad problems issuing from this confrontation.

Second, urban phenomena are spatial. The attraction that the city has always had for generations of scholars is based on how clearly facts of social life are reflected in its physical configuration. It is often possible to “read” parts of the history of a nation, its present class structure, and its distinct culture by taking a leisurely stroll or a slow drive around its built environment. It is true that all social events tend to be projected into space. The unique feature of cities, however, is that the spatial reflection of social, economic, and political processes occur in a physically circumscribed perimeter. That makes them all the more visible and easier to understand.

Space in the city is more than land and the built environment. It is also a resource put to multiple uses by different actors. The result of the confrontation between private economic interests and the citizenry is often reflected in how much “free space” there is, how easily and cheaply one can travel from one place to another, and to what extent home dwellings in single plots are crowded out by land demands for multistory office and apartment buildings. Space can be used as a resource by upper-class families to escape the crowdedness and insecurity of central cities by moving into suburbs. In other instances, certain groups may deliberately choose to cluster in certain patches of urban space. Ethnic and minority groups frequently do so, albeit for different reasons: for some, the only way to maintain a precarious foothold in the city is by settling in its least desirable places; for others, it is the means to foster business growth by drawing on the in situ coethnic community as a market, a source of credit, and a labor supply.⁵

A view of cities as loci, vehicles, and reflection of broader societal processes and of urban phenomena as simultaneously political and spatial gives us the conceptual tools to approach the analysis of our topic systematically. With this theoretical spadework done, it is now possible to approach and understand better what has taken place in the city at the tip of the Florida peninsula.

THE EARLY NINETIES

It is appropriate to begin the story in 1992. The hurricane that practically wiped out the southeastern quadrant of Miami-Dade County took place that year, marking another decisive moment in the turbulent history of the city. Andrew, the “Big Wind,” was not only a natural catastrophe; in then unrecognized ways, it marked the beginning of a new era. More than anything, it accelerated trends that were already in place and that moved the city away from the “edge” in which it had been precariously perched. City on the Edge, a book by the senior author with Alex Stepick, published one year after the catastrophe, summarized the social and economic conditions of Miami at that time as follows:

1. There is no mainstream. The hegemony of the old “upper uppers” has given way to parallel social structures, each complete with its status hierarchy, civic institutions, and cultural life. As a result, economic mobility and social standing have ceased to depend on full acculturation or on pleasing the elites of the old class order.

2. While the business class does exercise indisputable control in governing the city, it is increasingly composed of recent immigrants, rather than exclusively of “old” families or corporate branch executives.

3. The overlap of parallel social systems in the same physical space has given rise to “acculturation in reverse”—a process by which foreign customs, institutions, and language are diffused within the native population. As a consequence, biculturalism has emerged as an alternative adaptive project to full assimilation to American culture. Opponents of biculturalism must either withdraw into their own diminished circles or exit the community.⁶

These were extraordinary developments unique in the American urban landscape. Miami became loci, vehicle, and reflection of a clash of forces not seen anywhere else. The first chapter of the earlier book concluded by asking: How did it happen? How could a large American city be transformed so quickly that its natives often chose to migrate north in search of more familiar cultural settings? How could an immigrant group reproduce its institutions so thoroughly that a parallel social structure was established? And, perhaps most important, where would this process of change without a blueprint lead?⁷

The postscript about Hurricane Andrew and its aftermath, reproduced as a prescript to this book, adumbrated some of the answers by pointing to incipient trends that would consolidate over time. In the ensuing years, the process of convergence tentatively announced in those earlier lines accelerated, leading to a more solid and more transparent social order. That trend was not the result of a social “pact” between the warring ethnic communities of the past in order to cope with effects of the hurricane’s destructive force. Instead, the demographic trends anticipated in that 1993 postscript did materialize: native whites continued to leave Dade County in droves, and Latins,⁸ particularly Cubans, consolidated their hold, translating it into growing political and economic power.

The institutions of the old Miami establishment gradually gave way. The Non-group, an appropriately named entity, made up of local white brahmins who decided the course of the city behind closed doors, disappeared. Establishment leaders like that perennial figure, Alvah Chapman, publisher of the Miami Herald, faded from view, as did local politicians ...

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Prescript: In the Eye of the Storm, 1992
• 1. Introduction: A City in Flux
• 2. The Demography and Ecology of the City
• 3. Between Transience and Attachment
• 4. The Economic Surge
• 5. Crime and Victimization in Miami
• 6. A Bifurcated Enclave
• 7. Miami through Latin American Eyes
• 8. The Ethnic Mosaic and the Power Elite
• 9. Driving into the Flood
• Postscript
• Notes
• References
• Index