Precarity + excess in the latinopolis : Miami as Erzulie

The latinopolis as oceanic borderlands

Miami is a city where the geographic and allegorical North meets the South—as a city caught in-between the desire of Latin American elites and the imperatives of US foreign policy, as a service economy with a terrain of grave inequality, and as a global model for neoliberalism. The city appears as an emphatic capital of the “Global North,” with its tentacles reaching southward, while exhibiting cultural, economic, and social semblances of the “Global South.” Miami’s place between the so-called Global North and South is further evinced in its unique position within Latin America, culturally and economically. Miami is dually Latin American and LatinX. As a colleague from Cuba once mentioned to me during her first visit to the United States, Miami presents a place where a “Latino” identity can be articulated outside the boundaries of nationalism. For her and many others, Miami reveals itself as a site of Latinities (Milian, 2013: 5–6), a plural and ambiguous manifestation of LatinX that is quite varied across the urban terrain. It is a place where LatinX may be conceived across national and ethnic identifications within a US context, while the city also embodies cultural and physical semblances of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Anzaldúa’s (1987) landmark text Borderlands/La Frontera theorizes border culture—un mestizaje—with a bilingual and queer poetics. Explicit in her explorations is the ontological violence of geography. She describes the US border with Mexico as “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Anzaldúa, 1987: 3). While Miami sits at the very edge of the continental United States, it has become a central node reaching out to the Caribbean and, by extension, Latin America and el mundo entero. It is a place of encounter. Reconstituted swamplands and the original pine ridge sit just above an intersection of fresh and salt waterways, providing an amphibian base to this urban Mecca for tourists, refugees, foreigners, businessmen, residents, and beachgoers. Unlike Anzaldúa’s Southern Texas, where the political and physical demarcation of the border helps define the violence of geography, the borderlands of Miami are more defined by the city’s function as an epicenter. The national border is elsewhere and seemingly undefined, offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Florida Straits. Miami’s built environment—its infrastructure as a tourist destination, transit hub, and site of coastal capitalism—contributes to its conception as a borderland, to it being a place of refuge for both migrants from the Global South and venture capital elsewhere.

The role of mobilities is central to Miami’s place as a borderland and is reflected in its position as a financial capital of Latin America and the cruise ship capital of the world. Building on Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s premise of “oceanic tidalectics,” Mimi Sheller (2015) writes that it “has thus often served as a model or metaphor for the mobilities of Caribbean culture” (p. 190). Sheller engages with tidalectics to reconfigure or uproot a notion of place in relation to cultural production. Miami’s relation to the Caribbean archipelago and the broader Atlantic is implicated in these multivalent tides, in the importance of waterways to mobilities. Both geography and economy determine Miami’s position as a cultural nexus for the Caribbean region, informed by migration and the infrastructures of tourism and transport. Philip Steinberg (2001: 33–34) explores the ocean’s relationship to the discourse of development. Narratives of progress are bound by their attachment to social understandings of space, where the “sea largely has been constructed as a ‘non-territory,’ an untamable space that resists ‘filling’ or ‘development.’” Sheller and Steinberg emphasize the importance of materiality, migration, and property in considering cultural constructions of what I am proposing in this work as oceanic borderlands.

Miami provides a peculiar model as forms of popular media and illicit commerce inform the desire to build high-rises along the bay, river, and ocean, despite the ongoing threat of climate change. The city thrives upon its image as a place of leisure and excess, and as a place where the borderland is visually demarcated by the relation of nature to superfice. As Julio Capó (2017) emphasizes, Miami’s figuration as a “fairyland” dates back to its founding, “designating a space where women and men could transgress social norms, including gender and sexuality” (p. 11). Capó’s research emphasizes queer and transnational models for considering the construction of Miami as a frontier or borderland, revealing how contemporary figurations are rooted in the city’s early history. Today, Miami models a slowly drowning crossroads for considering the global city and its eccentricities, its contradictions, and its maniacal pulse. It is an image-conscious city in denial of its potential apocalyptic demise.

Anzaldúa (1987: 66–67) explores art’s role as intertwining the spiritual and the secular, and as collapsing the object with an event, what becomes a performance. Images, for Anzaldúa (1987) contain a directness, communicating the unconscious in a manner that precedes cognition, what she calls “thinking in words” (p. 69). The image of the ocean, the bay, rivers, and canals—of intersecting and besieging waterways—is fundamental to understanding Miami and its supranational relations. When artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude famously wrapped (or surrounded) islands in Biscayne Bay with pink polypropylene fabric for their 1983 installation Surrounded Islands, they brought attention to the bay’s allure and its seduction (Figure 1). The plastic-like material also referenced an erasure of the past, mimicking the nearby inhabited islands’ artificiality, dredged from the formerly shallow, murky bay. Journalist T.D. Allman (1987) claimed that the installation became a source of local and civic pride amid the city’s crisis: “It was as though Monet’s pink water lilies had been fed radioactive isotopes, grown to the size of circus tents, then floated across the Atlantic Ocean and gently, happily taken root in Biscayne Bay” (pp. 46–47). Following a period of race riots, drug wars, and economic calamity in the early 1980s, the artificial pink islands represented the truly American dream of the latinopolis. The installation brought Miami to the attention of an ever-expanding art world. Christo and Jeanne-Claude provided an esthetic spectacle where superficial materiality corroborated with the fragile and excessive tropics.

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Figure 1.

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Surrounded Islands, 1983. Photograph by Wolfgang Volz. Credit: Wolfgang Volz/laif/Redux.

Aqueous borders and the fickle mistress

At the mouth of the Miami River stands a large Janus, a double-headed sculpture recalling the Haitian Vodou lwa, or deity, Erzulie Dantor, created by artist Edouard Duval-Carrié (Figure 2). The piece, titled Our Lady of Miami, is located at the very edge of Downtown Miami’s Riverwalk, and the behemoth head appears to welcome incoming ships. Our Lady, a brilliant blue sculpture, is a symbol of the city, its aspirations, and its tensions. Her westward facing visage seems to smile toward the city, while her other face jeers at the ocean. At night Duval-Carrié’s resin sculpture is lit from within. Her blueness captures Miami’s serenity and its proximity to the ocean. Her iridescence is reminiscent of the city lights, from the futuristic neon lights of the 1930s South Beach deco to the digital billboards nearby. As visually stunning and flashy as Our Lady may appear, her facial expressions reveal the frenetic and contradictory nature of Miami beneath its superficial façade. Referencing both Caribbean religious traditions and Miami’s own geopolitical positioning, Our Lady of Miami is illustrative in the way in which urban art is revelatory of the urban condition and a collective understanding of place.

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Figure 2.

Edouard Duval-Carrié, Our Lady of Miami, 2005. Miami Riverwalk, photograph by author.

Standing amid economic engines of power—the Miami River, Biscayne Bay, and the nearby sea port, as well as among the impressive skyscrapers of Downtown and Brickell Key—Our Lady stands out as an ethereal monument to our urban identity. For his 2000 installation Endless Flight at the Miami Art Museum, Duval Carrié brought the Vodou pantheon into the gallery space, with many lwa inhabiting wooden boats that seemed to float above the gallery floor. They hovered like momentary islands indeterminately over grassy shadows. Their power and audacity were counteracted by their constant state of flux, their intricate position of exile. The Vodou religion is brought at the riverfront to everyday life by a seemingly translucent monument. Our Lady has a rather fixed place in Miami.

Erzulie—while possessing a double nature in the context of Our Lady—is actually a pantheon unto herself. She is most comparable to the Virgin, as a female origin prototype (Rigaud 1985: 45). Nonetheless, various apparitions of Erzulie exist, such as Erzulie Dantor, a darker skinned, more elderly protector of women and children. One popular iteration, and most relevant in the context of Miami, is the figure of Erzulie Freda, a blingy sea goddess whose artificiality seems to divorce her from her oceanic origins (Métraux, 1972: 110). Zora Neale Hurston’s (1981: 145) ethnographic travelog Tell My Horse describes Erzulie Freda as a rich, beautiful mulatto woman. The analogy of precarity and excess can arguably be made in her gendered politics, as Joan Dayan (1994) writes: “Though a woman, Erzulie vacillates between her attraction for the two sexes. She holds her servitors in between two irreconcilables: in between the supposedly antithetical constructions of masculinity and femininity” (p. 6). Ever conscious of her feminine wiles, Erzulie likewise vacillates between elite dreamworlds and her many devotees’ everyday lives.

Duval-Carríe’s Our Lady draws upon the analogy of Erzulie amid Miami’s luxurious towers and tropical landscaping—a tropical urbanity that like Erzulie Freda seduces men. This urban seduction also distracts the consumer from the city’s ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural inequities. At the same time the sculpture visually recalls Erzulie Dantor, with its use of dark blue resin providing a dark contrast to the nearby waterways. While Erzulie Freda’s coquettish, seemingly artificial nature reflects on stereotypes regarding Miami’s vanity and allure, Erzulie Dantor highlights the protective, mothering role of the frontier city. The sculpture’s darker blue color also recalls Yemaya, the Santería orisha of the ocean, waterways, and voyages. Yemaya’s relationship with the ocean reflects on migration, and furthermore, the birth of Afro-Caribbean culture within a New World setting. Our Lady and its surrounding environs may recall other apparitions of Erzulie—those less poised in make-up, kaftans, and the plastic surgery of a Miamian Erzulie Freda.

Our Lady’s duality is an apt analogy for Greater Miami, a US city whose inequality is overshadowed by its monolithic image. Miami’s important position as a center for cultural production in the Global South is overlooked by academics theorizing this vital conceptual geography. Miami is generally portrayed as a model for neoliberalism in the Americas. New condos, museums, and public arts projects make visible confluence of Latin American and global wealth in Miami. Real-estate advertising and neighborhood development authorities or agencies contribute to the visual projection of the built environment as an object of desire. The fantasy of Miami, however, does not conceal its cultural complexities and intrepid poverty. Miami remains diversely Latin American and Caribbean, and its local residents have formed social networks and organizations in response to the forces of tourism, gentrification, and hyperdevelopment, for example, in the case of the Umoja village.

Urban geographer Jan Nijman’s (2011) Miami: Mistress of the Americas (p. 135) provides a compelling biography of the greater city. It is characterized as a place of transience, with an “urban culture [that] invokes the metaphor of the city as a hotel: people check in, use the facilities, and check out again.” Nijman explores Miami’s ascendance as a global city as related to an “urban growth machine” where elite business interests and illicit funds coalesce. This results in a city of luxurious elements that seduce inhabitants and tourists alike. For example, Our Lady was a jury-commissioned artwork for the Riverwalk, an outdoor permanent gallery organized by the city’s kingpin developer Jorge Pérez. The works appear alongside a duo of high-rise towers by Arquitectonica, featuring accents of green and turquoise echoing the river’s tropical setting. The Riverwalk was intended to be a public-meets-private endeavor, a symbolic space within a dynamic, growing city. The majority of the artists selected for the Riverwalk were of Latin American and Caribbean descent, including successful artists within the city.

Duval-Carrié’s Our Lady, along with the Riverwalk gallery, can be seen as a borderland. A visual marker between the ocean—our origin—and the material city, our superficial aspirations. Such a border visually and symbolically expresses the dreams of the urban growth machine alongside the regions cultural underbelly. This is reverberated throughout the city’s culture. The rap performances of the artist Trina, for example, present a divide between glamor and realness. Trina’s overt sexuality and fierceness recall Erzulie Freda’s mystifying image. Likewise, drag culture in Miami can be overtly sexual, possessing audiences in its humor. Cultural production in Miami is not merely a process of transculturation or hybridity: it can, as well, be a violent, messy, and oversexualized clashing of contradictions. Cultural and artistic expression is also varied and ambiguous, a manifestation of the city’s overlapping Latinities. Art and visual culture reveal a border with which we create New Worlds.

Under the plastic surgeon’s scalpel: Violence, crisis, and reinvention

Writing on Miami likewise reflects the city’s contradictions, recalling both the violence of the borderlands and its cultural brilliance. Joan Didion’s 1987 account of Miami is among the most captivating, as the renowned essayist recounts the danger and edginess of a city emerging from its “Cocaine Cowboys” era. She emphasized its rising prominence during the Cold War. Miami became a central node within US foreign relations, a place where weapons were traded, military juntas conspired, and an immense amount of drugs were trafficked. Didion (1998) described arriving in Miami as “experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere…” (p. 23). The reader encounters both a sense of trepidation and brazenness for the author, as she traverses across the city’s highways and causeways to report on areas gringos, especially females, were suggested to avoid. Her narration underlines the role of violence brimming within the borderlands that is Miami.

Didion chronicled a divided city with a Latin American semblance, writing of security installations akin to those in Bogotá and San Salvador. She writes: “Decorative grilles on doors and windows turned out to have a defensive intent. Break-ins were referred to by the Metro-Dade Police Department as ‘home invasions,’ a locution which tended to suggest a city under systematic siege” (Didion, 1998: 25). Didion’s Miami relates to the city’s past as the “American Riviera” of the early 20th century, a segregated extension of the US South built on corruption and wealth from the Midwest and Northeast. Miami’s transformation into a “Capital of the Caribbean,” however, was marked by rapid and notable changes in the city’s cultural tapestry. The arrival of Cubans following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, and future influxes of Haitians, Nicaraguans, Colombians, and other Latinx migrants forever transformed the city. The sleek high-rise condos and luxury cars of the 1970s and 1980s era came at a time of White flight north to Broward and other Florida counties, and the need to house, and sometimes incarcerate, hordes of new migrants. Miami had transformed into an economic and cultural capital of the Americas and an undeniably LatinX city, despite resistance from local White populations. By 1973 the city would elect its first Latino mayor, Puerto Rican-born Maurice A. Ferré. And the television series ¿Que Pasa U.S.A.? debuted in 1977 as the first bilingual sitcom in the United States. The show comically portrayed the intergenerational life of the Peña family and their pursuit of the American dream. At the height of the Cold War, Miami became a hybrid, multilingual borderland.

1980 was a turning point for the city—a precipice for the aquatic borderlands. Racial tensions had been brewing in the city for decades, and the 1970s was a period marked by “thirteen outbursts of racial violence” (Porter and Dunn, 1984: 18). This culminated in the McDuffie riots in May 1980, a response to the acquittal of four police officers responsible for the death of respected salesman Arthur McDuffie. The 1970s also saw small terrorist attacks by Cuban exiles against anyone perceived to be in collusion with the Castro government (Croucher, 1997: 39). By April 1980, Fidel Castro permitted the migration of a large exodus of undesirable citizens—criminals, the mentally handicapped, and homosexuals. Over 125,000 migrants made their way to Miami’s shores, as temporary refugee camps were created throughout Florida—including major tent cities at the Orange Bowl Stadium and under the I-95 highway. This public presence of refuge throughout the city was matched with the growing cocaine trade and a continued influx of Haitian migrants, who took to the sea to escape the Duvalier regime’s political and economic turmoil. Miami seemed like a powder keg ready to explode. The city would shortly become recognized as the murder capital of the world, or as the cover of Time magazine proclaimed in November 1981: “Paradise Lost?” (Corben, 2006).

Miami’s violent undertones made it ripe for reinvention. The drug trade resulted in a luxury high-rise boom and made the city an international banking center for the Americas. City, state, and federal officials sought to clean up Miami and eliminated its perceived violence, disarming the drug trade to other locales (e.g. Mexico and Puerto Rico), and promoting the city as a paradise reborn. Dilapidated Art Deco buildings throughout South Beach were painted in pastel colors, first by artist Leonard Horowitz and then by the producers of the NBC television series Miami Vice and private developers. By the 1990s, mainstream films like The Bird Cage marked Miami as a city of a more visual vice, rather than its more violent variety. Queer, coquettish, liberated, and flashy, Erzulie Freda had emerged from her violent birth across the Caribbean waterways. She began to dress herself up, in bikinis and pearls, lounging alongside condo pools and sipping mojitos in Art Deco hotel lobbies. Miami became reimagined as a global destination, or as a beguiling mistress for a global elite.

The reconstitution of Miami as a model global city, however, does not erase its darker underbelly—its Erzulie-like duality. The 1990s saw various refugee crises, including the Guantanamo Naval Base’s transformation into a refugee camp to keep Cuban and Haitian asylum-seekers at bay. While hotels were opening throughout Miami Beach, facilities such as the notorious 1980 Krome Detention Center began to be built throughout the state, as more refugees reached Miami’s shores. By 1997 the city seemed to be at a precipice once again. Famed fashion designer Gianni Versace was murdered at his front steps by a serial killer, as the city was embroiled in a massive fiscal crisis. Nonetheless, Miami would reemerge from these chaotic waters at the turn of the century, with the largest housing boom in the United States in the following decade. A cycle of boom and bust perpetually prevails, but the superficial, silicone-injected Erzulie Freda always awakes from her operation-induced coma. The city reinvents herself, appearing ever more sumptuous as a multitude of ethnic and socioeconomic tensions brew beneath the surface.

Port of entry: Sea vessels, detention, and hotels

Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s 1993 installation Bonjour Securité, completed for the Center for the Fine Arts in downtown Miami, features two striking artworks comprising photo boxes. One work, entitled Crossing, bifurcates a darkened gallery space. The long horizontal photo box depicts Haitians holding identification cards along what seems to be a wooden fence. It leads to the other installation, a set of two photo boxes—one of elusive images of the ocean along the gallery floor, and another of partially disguised faces of migrants along the wall. These boxes illuminate an encounter, as viewers find themselves walking between images of the ocean and migrants, along an imaginary border. This border seems to implicate the viewer’s privilege, and present both the physical and human dimensions of migration.

In this installation, Jaar represents Haitian refugees’ plight following Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s September 1991 coup d’etat. When an estimated 1500 Haitians arrived in the United States in November 1991, the country decided to start relocating this population to camps at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The camps became a site of chaos: presenting new borders within a treacherous voyage. Many migrants were living in tents and other makeshift shelters, and rumors of physical abuse and arbitrary detention were rampant (Farmer, 2003: 222). The migrants in Jaar’s installation appear at eye level, directly looking at the viewer. Their facial expressions form a sort of plea, and help humanize subjects who were subjected to various negative stereotypes, something heightened by the era’s ongoing AIDS crisis. As Jaar (1998) observes: “Haitians are marginalized twice”: both in their harrowing migration and their reception into the mainland (p. 244). In the privileged gallery space of Miami’s fledging public arts museum, Jaar presented the plight of the border—its violence and its human faces—directly implicating a transforming and contradictory Miami.

Nearly a decade later, in October 2002, a spectacle occurred on the Rickenbacker Causeway connecting mainland Miami to Key Biscayne. A wooden boat with 212 Haitian migrants landed nearby, and in an attempt to escape the Coast Guard many migrants scrambled to make it onto the causeway (Canedy, 2002). Captured live on camera by local media and transmitted internationally, the plight of the Haitians appeared much more immediate to Miami than it was a decade prior. The desperation of the migrants attempting to evade Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) highlighted the decades-long disparity between Haitian “boat people” and Cuban rafters, the latter of whom would have been immediately granted admission to the United States given the wet foot-dry foot policy. Haitians, on the other hand, were detained upon stepping foot onto the terra firma.

In their scramble for freedom some 212 Haitians were rounded up, with even children being handcuffed. Families were split, as men were sent to Krome Detention Center while mothers and their children were sent to a local hotel and confined to their rooms indefinitely. Just 8 months prior, upon the arrival of another 167 refugees, INS had “adopted a secret policy directed solely at Haitians, which resulted in the prolonged detention of virtually all Haitian asylum seekers in South Florida, regardless of whether they arrived by boat or plane, and despite the fact that all but two of the 167 had convinced U.S. Asylum Officers they had a ‘credible fear’ of persecution upon return to Haiti” (Little and al-Sahli, 2004). A politics of fear and control defined the violent borderlands, a consequence of enhanced fears of terror in a post 9/11 world. As INS dissolved into Homeland Security, Haitians became the litmus test for new forms of criminalization for innocent refugees.

Miami was also experiencing a new, incredible growth at that moment, at the onset of a real-estate bubble. While the winter 2001 inaugural Art Basel Miami Beach was canceled in the wake of the events of 11 September, the art fair would make its debut in December 2002—while Haitian mothers and children were still locked inside a hotel-turned-prison. The politics of arrival were notably different for the schmoozers of the art world, as they moved freely in the cruise ship capital of the world, from makeshift gallery to makeshift gallery in a massive, beachside convention center. In the backdrop were Haitian service workers—hotel maids and taxi drivers—aware of the situation of their compatriots. Economic and cultural capital played a key distinction in the disparity with which precarity and excess became experienced in the latinopolis.

In her performance installation for Art Basel Miami Beach in 2005, artist Vanessa Beecroft visually captured Miami’s marked disparity. The fair had grown well beyond the original convention centers, spilling into makeshift venues across the bay as well as shipping crates dispersed across Miami Beach. Known for her sleek, sexy, and alienating photo shoots, often of model-like, sexualized nude women, Beecroft went for a spectacle with a notably more political tone in Miami Beach. Converting a shipping crate into an open, outdoor hotel room on Collins Park, Beecroft hired 15 young Haitian women to occupy the space while donning black-and-white maid uniforms. They posed awkwardly as models of disguised labor, standing and sitting among the bright red comforter placed upon the bed. As one critic made known: “The young women looked uncertain and perhaps embarrassed—working as a maid is one thing, being made a spectacle is another” (Robinson, 2005). These models’ vulnerability created a fascinating controversy, one akin to the refugees’ plight running across the causeway. It provided a counterpoint—where the excess of a city’s self-fashioning encountered the Black labor force it depended on—with the labor force presented by the artist in a precarious economic and subjected condition.

Rising waters and concrete pilotis: A glamorous metropolis on stilts

Architecture and infrastructure present a material embodiment of the borderlands and its urban condition—both in the physical boundaries they create and the dreamworlds they envision. When Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron proposed their new edifice for the Miami Art Museum, they envisioned a museum of floating boxes (Figure 3). The museum moved from its former abode in the 1983 Miami-Dade Cultural Center by architect Phillip Johnson, an elevated plaza complex of a Mediterranean Revival postmodern pastiche style in the interior of Downtown, to the bay front Bicentennial Park. The move arrived with controversy, given a lack of park space throughout the city. The later decision to name the public museum after real-estate developer Jorge Pérez raised concerns regarding the role of private investment in public infrastructure. Nonetheless the museum would become a new symbol of the global city and its aspirations, with its curatorial and educational initiatives connected to Miami’s place as a cultural epicenter of the Americas.

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Figure 3.

Caption: Peréz Art Museum Miami and the “Biscayne Wall,” or luxury condo high rises along Biscayne Boulevard. Photograph by author.

The architects’ proposal considered the public setting of this massive endeavor, which included a new neighboring science museum. Drawing inspiration from the unpopulated municipality of Stiltsville—a community of abandoned homes raised on stilts off the coast of southern Miami-Dade county—they made the museum a spectacle of the tropics. The project’s site was described as follows: “The building will sit within a flood plain and storm surge area; no art should be placed below the 18-foot storm surge level set by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Consequently, the two museums will be set on a raised platform and will share a common plaza. This platform design will extend the park into the museums’ fold, while enhancing the park’s potential as a sustainable, outdoor, civic space” (Miami Art Museum, 2007). The design attempted to mitigate the fragility of Miami’s ecology, while the building opens up to the tropical setting. Hanging from a wooden and concrete canopy were truncated columns with tropical botany by French designer Patrick Blanc. The vertical gardens displayed an intricate profusion of flora, a world where an exterior of tropical abundance framed the cubic boxes of galleries.

Today, artists and architects consider Miami’s fragile ecology amid intrepid hyperdevelopment, where new architecture serves as a visual border or wall in relation to encroaching waterways. Local architect Rene Gonzalez built a personal home on Belle Isle that is likewise inspired by Stiltsville, a glass and concrete façade raised on stilts, facing the bay (Figure 4). As Beth Dunlop (2017) writes:

Gonzalez conceived the house as a sequence of solids and voids. Enclosed volumes, open terraces, and partially covered interstitial spaces are stacked using a complex geometry, making the most of the opportunities for an open-air living offered by both site and climate through a seamless connection between indoors and outdoors; he terms it as a kind of “ambiguity” between where one ends and the other begins. (pp. 136, 138)

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Figure 4.

Caption: Rene Gonzalez, The Farrey Lane House, Belle Isle, Miami Beach. Rendering by DBOX / Courtesy Rene Gonzalez Architects.

Gonzalez built himself a home that presents an elevated form of living, responding to Miami’s precarious ecology while corresponding to a tropical esthetic of luxury. The local architect provides an esthetic rooted in the region’s historic and environmental contexts, yet corresponding to tropicalized visions of luxury.

The artwork of Cuban born and Miami-based artist Glexis Novoa imagines a different, more speculative vision for the latinopolis. In his 2005 installation N.E.O. (New Economic Order), also part of the Miami Riverwalk outdoor gallery (near Duval-Carrié’s Our Lady), he created submarine windows that frame monochromatic renderings of a crowded, Jetsons-like city waterfront (Figure 5). Novoa’s Hieronymus Bosch-inspired urbanscapes portray a dystopic yet dynamic future. Many architectonic structures stand on stilts, like robotic installations from a science fiction novel. These apparitions speak of a political economy reoriented around the unavoidable threat of environmental degradation and climate change. The city of Miami Beach presently continues to install water pumps and raise sidewalks to mitigate the rising oceans. Stephanie Wakefield (2017) refers to such adaptations to a changing ecology as examples of resilience, wherein Miami attempts to maintain a static yet ever-receding “pastel and neon art deco fantasy while the oceans rise around the city…” Wakefield is concerned with the relation between futurity and the exigencies of modern infrastructure—something visualized within Novoa’s work, where the esthetic of Miami’s contemporary condo high-rises remain in place.

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Figure 5.

Glexis Novoa, N.E.O. (New Economic Order), 2005. Miami Riverwalk, photograph by author.

Many other artists have represented the relationship between ongoing speculation and ecological precarity. In Domingo Castillo’s outdoor video installation Tropical Malaise: Prologue (2017), the artist manipulates imagery from real-estate agencies using the latest architectural visualization technologies (Figure 6). Castillo’s work highlights the visual dreamworlds of Miami’s luxury condos. His work aims to unsettle such dreamworlds and consider them in relation to ongoing ecological and economic concerns. Castillo’s video installations provide mediatic reflections on the global city’s ideological prowess, in particular, Miami’s Erzulie-like seduction. Like the Vodou deity, the images possess the viewer, in this case into a dreamworld of economic leisure. Such artworks reveal the urban imaginary’s power, what Andrea Huyssen (2008) suggests as a “cultural engineering” that cities depend on “more than ever to attract capital, business, and power” (p. 9). A myriad of other artists have responded to Miami’s ever-changing built environment: from agencies such as Fringe Projects to workshops, seminars, and exhibitions hosted at prominent local museums. They seem to harken back to Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s Surrounded Islands and engage with the visuality of a watery place defined by speculation and superfice.

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Figure 6.

Domingo Castillo, Tropical Malaise: Prologue, 2017. HD Video, New World Symphony WallCast, Miami Beach. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Causeway to home, or the soaked latinopolis

As highlighted in the many examples above, art and architecture provide a means to explicate conceptions of place and being. Miami, identified as an urban, aquatic borderland between precarity and excess, provides an illustrative model for thinking about LatinX issues and the global city in our age of global climate change. Like many of their counterparts based in coastal cities of the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, local artists are creating new visualizations for coping with our current ecological condition. They are creating work about finding home or refuge amid rising oceans.

Miami-based artist Laurencia Strauss has explored multiple solutions for coping with contemporary conditions, from proposals for floating islands to miniaturized recreations of famous examples of land art (such as Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s Surrounded Islands) through compost. In her 2017 interactive project The Bubble Pops, Strauss created snow globe popsicles featuring the Miami skyline (Figure 7). The popsicles were offered via a portable freezer cart, and participants were asked to share an experience about adaption in exchange for the thirst-quenching and refreshing treat. Their responses would be printed on future popsicle sticks in both English and Spanish. Upon melting, they themselves would discover a statement about adaption. In one iteration one would discover statements such as “it’s like you throw yourself in the sea without knowing how to swim/es como se tira en el mar sin saber nadar” or “stay creative/mantente creativo.” The work provided a social engagement that responds to migration and climate change. Likewise, the reference to the bubble is visually figured within the snow cone, and engages directly with the construction of condo living spaces. Will the bubble burst, or will our conception of place slowly melt like the distant glaciers? The desire of hyperdevelopment appears fleeting, much like the pleasure derived from a popsicle.

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Figure 7.

Laurencia Strauss, The Bubble Pops, 2017. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Relational concerns about rising oceans and the future of our cities are exhibited in the work of artists throughout the region. In her book Planet/Cuba: Art Culture and the Future of the Island, Rachel Price dedicates a chapter to exploring the way Cuban artists and writers engage with rising sea levels. Price provides a myriad of examples to show how artists use speculative images of inundation to propose new, more harrowing futures. Particularly striking is Price’s discussion of Erick Mota’s 2010 science fiction novel Habana underguater, which provides an Afro-futurist rendering of a dramatically new order—akin to the renderings of Glexis Novoa. Price (2015) writes: “In an inversion of balsero or rafter crisis, a character escapes Miami on a raft headed to Havana, evading sharks until she is saved by a patrol that protects the Jehova Witnesses’ petroleum platforms” (p. 82). In considering our relation to natural resources and waterways, Cuban artists and writers can reimagine their connection to Miami, the global city where economic and political relations remain interdependent yet hostile. Other artists have explored affinities of waterways across varied geographies. In her 2018 performance Beneath the river, there are no borders at Miami’s Little Haiti Cultural Center, Miami-based artist Jamilah Sabur collaborated with The International Contemporary Ensemble to explore relations of sound and space across geography. The piece explored the material and sonic terrains of the St. John’s River in Florida and the São Francisco River in Brazil. Bodies of water became reinterpreted through corporeal movement, representing the relation of personal experiences of nature across time and place. In many respects, waterways both defy and define borders, and the question of precarity appears to stand counter to the defiance of capital excess and political control.

Miami’s multiple contradictions contribute to its rise as hemispheric nexus, both as a cultural capital of Latin America and diversely LatinX. Miami’s Latinx population not only consists of a rainbow of nationalities, but also of varied class backgrounds and ethnic or racial identifications. The city’s geography and history long defined attempts to mark it as a modernist, Pan-American capital, and its modernity formed within a “series of paradoxes” like the many highlighted above (Shulman, 2009: 23). Both elite constructions and cultural expression reveal an oceanic borderlands. In their foreword for the catalog Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary, anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Breckenridge (2009: ix) promote the use of “wet theory” to challenge more exacting social scientific and design-based approaches for solving problems facing the global city and resilience. They call for a more fluid understanding of the city’s contradictions and paradoxes. Miami, as a beguiling mistress and as an urban growth machine, presents an unfixed image of what philosopher Édouard Glissant would term mondialité and mondialization (Mignolo, 2012: 77)—of global processes and identifications. It is a spectacular site of contradictions that coexist: of ideologies of development and of brujería, of urban fantasy, and of economic survival.

Anzaldúa (2002) writes in the edited anthology This Bridge We Call Home: “The bridge (boundary between the world you’ve left and the one ahead) is both a barrier and point of transformation. By crossing, you invite a turning point, initiate a change” (p. 557). Living in a city marked by transience, many Miamians have left a world behind and invented a new reality. We have constructed a borderlands that is inherently LatinX. Anzaldúa’s text here is about finding a sense of home—the heimat—within a hostile world. At the same time, the home may be volatile, or marked by economic, climactic, and interpersonal insecurities. The question remains: how do we make this place ours, or redefine the concept of home?

Many Miami residents do so by calling on saints, gods, orisha, and lwa such as Erzulie, Jehovah, and Yemaya, a spirituality that is present, vis-a-vis Mesoamerican indigenous practices in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera . This Anzaldúan bridge stands, too, as an apt analogy for thinking about Miami’s rise as a global LatinX city. A network of highways, a raised MetroRail, and causeways connect a transforming landscape. Philip Steinberg (2001: 55) notes the contemporary highway as analogous for traditional understandings of the ocean within Micronesia. “Micronesians see the world as a web of ocean pathways,” he observes, “connecting places and eventually connecting the whole world, so that distant places are referenced based on their location in this great web.” Forms of mobilities reflect our relation to place. They create points of relation from the local to the global, across bridges and across seas. How we find home within excessive capital and corrupt conditions relies upon physical infrastructure—upon how humans navigate their given terrain. Miami, as a capital and crossroads of the Americas, provides a tropical modernity that is both a global model and a warning for how to find home within radical, uncertain, and aspirational change. The LatinX city is a borderlands of the future.