Editors note: This is our final entry in our theme month on The Latinx City. You can see all other entries for the theme month here. Additionally, readers interested in more on Miami can see other posts on the city published at The Metropole here.
By Daniel Richter
In 1987, Joan Didion published her book Miami, which remains an indelible commentary on the contemporary politics of the South Florida metropolis and its historic art deco hotels and modernist downtown skyline.[1] As one of the foremost practitioners of New Journalism, Didion embedded herself in Miami to write a series of articles for the New York Review of Books. Didion brought a critical eye to the contributions of Cuban exiles to Miami’s urban fabric and analyzed larger questions around the city’s place in Cold War political constellations in Reagan’s America. She explained how former Cuban presidents like Gerardo Machado and Carlos Prío Socarrás became exiled in Miami and were later interred at Woodlawn Park Cemetery in Miami after their deaths. Their bodies would later be joined in the same cemetery by the body of former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle after his assassination in Paraguay in 1980, after the Carter administration curtailed his attempt at exile in a beachfront mansion on Sunny Isles in Miami.[2]
In 1987, Miami was continuing its fragmented evolution as a racially divided American city following riots in the African American neighborhood of Liberty City in 1979 and then in Overtown in 1982. The 1982 riots were caused by the death of a young African American man named Neville Johnson after being tragically shot by Cuban-born Miami Police Department officer Luis Alvarez after Johnson appeared to be pulling out a gun in an arcade.[3] These race riots illustrated Miami’s struggles to live up to the earlier boosterism of the city’s mayor, Everest George “E. G.” Sewell.
E.G. Sewell was among Miami’s leaders who called it the “Magic City” in the early 20th century to try and promote tourism.[4] In the 1920s, Miami sought to recruit conventions of America’s postal workers, Shriners, Elks Club members, and other visitors from around the country.[5] Sewell would have likely struggled to imagine that the Magic City would become known in an international context as the “Capital of Latin America,” as proclaimed by Time magazine in 1992, and how this nickname could encapsulate conflicting meanings about the city’s place in transnational imaginaries and political cultures.[6]
The metropolitan history of Miami during the 20th and 21st centuries is arguably best told as a hemispheric history of multiple migrations to its urban neighborhoods and also increasingly populated suburbs. Miami is unique from other cities with larger Latin American populations in the United States because Cuban Americans increasingly gained lasting political and economic power that persists to the present day. Miami’s suburbs have also become prominent localities for Latino politicians including Cuban American and Venezuelan American politicians seeking to shape political agendas that connect their local communities with forms of political contestation in Havana and Caracas. Since the 1960s, Miami has taken its own path towards becoming a global city. Spanish is the language one is most likely to hear and the city has also become associated with Latin American movements in art, fashion, music, and cuisine. While most historians justifiably emphasize the significance of Cuban migration to Miami, there are multiple other elements to the city’s 20th century population growth.
Migration patterns to Miami within the United States included widespread Jewish migration to the postwar city, resulting in the Jewish community exceeding 100,000 residents by the mid-1950s. and reaching 250,000 by the 1970s.[7] The Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer spent his later years in Miami Beach, where he interacted with other Jewish emigres from New York.[8] This included communing with Holocaust survivors marked by their tattooed arms soaking in the fierce sun and playing pinochle outdoors year-round.
The subsequent and substantial migration from Cuban exiles transformed Miami immeasurably with the arrival of over 500,000 Cubans from 1959 into the early 1970s. Miami was thus recast from a city of “light tourism” into a sprawling metropolitan region populated by diverse Jewish and Cuban ethnoscapes. Jewish delis dotted Miami Beach and nearby communities. Around Calle Ocho in Miami, Little Havana became a bustling neighborhood for the Cuban community to congregate around establishments such as Versailles and El Rey de Las Fritas.[9] Miami’s emergence as a Latin American metropolis further evolved in the late 20th and early 21st century to include multiple transnational frames with its growing communities of Haitian, Dominican, Venezuelan, Colombian, Argentine, and Brazilian immigrants. The neighborhood of Little Haiti was first widely recognized with that name beginning in the mid-1970s. As the distinguished Cuban-American sociologist Alejandro Portes has explored in various studies going back to the 1980s, Miami was transformed into a global city due to its unique relationship with Latin American immigrants and Latin American economies.[10] Miami’s international airport and ports became major conduits to international travel and shipping in the Americas, with cruise passengers accounting for major traffic into the airport and the city’s hotels.
My interest in studying the urban history of metropolitan Miami derives from seeking to understand how an array of transnational constructions of Latin American identities and political cultures came to flow through the city. Used and new bookstores in Miami feature large Spanish-language sections, which are an ideal vantage point to consider how the city is understood from various Latin American contexts as an emigrant destination and a haven for right-wing Latin American political movements. There are histories of different Cuban exiled groups that sought to depose Fidel Castro and curtail the Cuban Revolution from the late 1950s onwards. There are books about how Miami became a privileged site for opposition to the Sandinista Revolution among the community of 65,000 exiled Nicaraguans in Miami during the 1980s. Since the early 2000s, Miami and its growing suburbs, such as Doral and Weston, have become the home of large communities of Venezuelan exiles. Additionally, Argentinean and Brazilian immigrants have also created their own ethnic enclaves throughout the Miami metropolitan region that reflect socioeconomic migrations, dislocations, and political movements. There are Kosher Argentine restaurants and Spanish-speaking Jewish synagogues. Miami has become a metropolis shaped by various forces of magical urbanism in the formulation of Mike Davis, but it has also become a city populated by many Latin American migrants and their children that could be described as “Exiled Urbanisms.”[11]
In November 2012, the residents of Doral, Florida elected Venezuelan-American Luigi Boria as the mayor of the small city located in Miami-Dade County. Doral had grown in the early 21st century, with its population doubling from 22,000 in 2000 to over 45,000 by the 2010 census.[12] In the 2010 census, over 70 percent of the city’s inhabitants had Latin American origins, and the city’s population climbed to 75,874 residents in the 2020 census. In this census, Doral was also calculated as having 35 percent of its population born in Venezuela. During his mayoralty, Boria sought to remake Doral’s downtown and the area has been transformed in the past decade by two of Miami’s most prominent real estate firms, Related Group and Codina Partners. Related Group is owned by the Cuban-American tycoon Jorge Perez, who also built the Perez Art Museum in Miami with its acclaimed collection of Latin American art and has been a major donor to Republican political campaigns. Codina Partners was founded by the successful Cuban-American developer Armando Codina who has been on the board of Home Depot and the principal partner in former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s business career in the 1980s and 1990s.[13] The spatial transformation of Doral is oriented towards the presence of its South American residents and the new downtown area includes an array of Latin American eateries offering inventive Venezuelan and Peruvian cuisine. Doral is also the home of the production studios of the international Spanish-language network Univision and the site of Donald Trump’s golf club, where he hosted the Miss Universe competitions which had strong ties to Doral’s political leadership and the Venezuelan community.[14]
Boria’s mayoral term coincided with the death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez in March 2013 and international media coverage of the news highlighted the widespread and joyous celebrations by Venezuelans in Doral, Weston, and the Miami area.[15] The death of Fidel Castro in 2016 was also a widespread cause for celebration in South Florida, but the demise of both leaders has not resulted in the imminent political earthquakes and democratic transformations that exiled Venezuelans and Cubans in Miami have dreamed about for decades.[16] Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s exile from his country in 2023 has also led him to Miami, where he has worked as a visiting professor and scholar at the city’s Florida International University.[17] Miami has also been a frequent stopping place for other Latin American politicians, such as Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei, who announced his planned conversion to Judaism at an Orthodox synagogue in Bal Harbour in April 2024 during a trip where he interacted with a large number of Argentine immigrants to Florida.[18]
In the 2024 presidential election, the Republican presidential candidate won Miami-Dade County for the first time since 1988. Donald Trump swept to victory in Florida behind the large vote shares from Cuban Americans and sizable support from Nicaraguan Americans, Venezuelan Americans, and other groups of voters with Latin American heritage.[19] The exact breakdowns are still waiting to be analyzed, but young Latino voters in South Florida supported Trump’s messaging on economic opportunities, anti-Communism, and nativism.[20] Arguably, the political and spatial evolution of metropolitan Miami from the 1980s to the present is relevant for more nuanced understandings of 21st century Latino communities across different metropolitan contexts in then United States. Urban narratives about 21st century Miami continue to multiply from urbanists, journalist, and and fiction writers, yet Joan Didion’s book about Miami remains a lasting work to consider the city’s global influence in shaping domestic and hemispheric political and urban imaginaries from the late 20th century to the present.[21]
Daniel Richter teaches global history, Latin American history, and film studies at American University and the University of Maryland. He received his doctorate from the University of Maryland in 2016. He is revising his manuscript “Mirrored Cities: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Mass Urban Culture, 1910-1960” and his new project compares metropolitan transformations in Buenos Aires and Miami in the recent fin de siècle. He has authored articles and chapters about the urban and cultural histories of Argentina and Uruguay in publications including the Journal of Urban History, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, the International Journal of the History of Sport, and the edited volume Uruguay in Transnational Perspective.
Featured image (at top): Postcard for Miami Beach from 1926. University of Miami Libraries Special Collections.
[1] Joan Didion, Miami (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987)
[2] Rich Morin and Bill Lazarus, “Florida Estate Is Somoza Refuge,” Washington Post, July 17, 1979; On Miamians surprise at learning about Somoza’s burial site more recently, see Elizabeth Sosa, “Nicaragua’s former ‘dictator’ buried in Miami,” Caplin News Florida International University, February 4, 2019
[3] Raymond A. Mohl, “On the Edge: Blacks and Hispanics in Metropolitan Miami Since 1959,” Florida Historical Quarterly: Vol. 69: No. 1, (1990), 37-56.
[4] On E.G. Sewell’s boosterism, see N.D.B. Connolly, A World More Concrete : Real estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)
[5] The Postal Record, January 1927, 589.
[6] Cathy Booth, “Miami: the Capital of Latin America,” Time, December 2, 1993.
[7] Deborah Dash Moore, “Jewish Migration in Postwar America: The Case of Miami and Los Angeles,” in Peter Y Medding (ed.), A New Jewry? America Since the Second World War (New York, Oxford: 1992), 102-117; Deborah Dash Moore, “Miami Beach: the making of a Jewish resort city,” Jewish Culture and History 24:4 (2023), 453-469
[8] Richard Nagler and Isaac Bashevis Singer, My love affair with Miami Beach (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991)
[9] Guillermo J. Grenier and Corinna Moebius, A History of Little Havana (Mount Pleasant, South Carolina Arcadia Publishing, 2015)
[10] Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Alejandro Portes and Ariel Armony, The Global Edge: Miami in the Twenty-First Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018)
[11] Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City (London: Verso Books, 2000); For a formulation about exile and ethnoscapes in Miami, see Armando Montilla, “‘Unrooting’ the American Dream: Exiling the ethnospace in the urban fractality of Miami,” 99th ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings (1999), 782-790.
[12] Paradise Afshar, “Doral picks Boria as new mayor; first Venezuelan elected to run a city in Florida,” Miami Herald, November 28, 2012; “Meet The New Mayor Of ‘Doralzuela’- The First Venezuelan Born Mayor In Florida,” WRLN Public Media, January 10, 2013,
[13] Ina Paiva Cordle, “Downtown Doral, a Codina Partners development, brings city flair to the suburbs,” Miami Herald, December 16, 2013
[14] Craig Allen, Univision, Telemundo, and the Rise of Spanish-Language Television in the United States (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2023)
[15] Maria Camila Bernal and Lisa Orkin Emmanuel and Gilma Avalo, “South Floridians React to News of Death of Hugo Chavez,” NBC Miami, March 5, 2013; Michael E. Miller, “Venezuelans Celebrate in Doral Following Death of Hugo Chavez,” Miami New Times, March 6, 2013;
Richard Luscombe, “Venezuelans take to Miami streets to celebrate Hugo Chávez’s death,” The Guardian, March 6, 2013.
[16] Peter Kujawinsk, “For Venezuelan Migrants in South Florida, ‘Vision of a Certain Life’ Meets Reality, New York Times, October 11, 2022; Carla Troconis, “Five Weeks in Doral, A Lifetime in Crisis,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, July 18, 2019
[17] Grethel Aguila, “Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó is teaching at FIU. But it’s only for a while,” Miami Herald, September 29, 2023.
[18] Juan Melamed, “Speaking at Miami synagogue, Argentina’s Javier Milei reveals he has Jewish heritage,” Jerusalem Post, April 12, 2024
[19] Miami Herald Editorial Board, “Baffled that Miami’s exile community supports Trump? He showed why at Doral rally,” Miami Herald, July 12, 2024;
[20] Adrian Florida, “Trump calls Venezuelan migrants criminals. Some Venezuelans agree, others fight back,” NPR All Thing Considered, October 21, 2024,
[21] Hernán Iglesias Illa, Miami: turistas, colonos y aventureros en la última frontera de América Latina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta, 2010)
