Imagining Miami

Imagining Miami
Author: Sheila L. Croucher
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813917054

Miami has long captured the world's attention in provocative ways. During the 1980s, a series of violent racial disturbances focused national and international attention there as analysts and observers scrambled to explain the demise of the "Magic City." What has emerged is a popular image of Miami as an urban area in which three distinct ethnic groups- Hispanics, Blacks, and Anglos- are pitted against one another in a battle for limited political, economic, and social resources. Sheila L. Croucher uses Miami as a laboratory in which to explore the social and political construction of ethnic identities and ethnic group conflict. Incorporating interviews with community leaders, politicians, journalists, and business people, as well as periodical and popular literature on Miami, this book examines how social constructs emerge and become accepted, as well as how these definitions reflect the pull of vested interests locally, nationally, and even internationally.

Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene

Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene
Author: Earl T. Harper
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000453502

Bringing together scholars from English literature, geography, politics, the arts, environmental humanities and sociology, Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene contributes to the emerging debate between bodies of thought first incepted by scholars such as Mouffe, Whyte, Kaplan, Hunt, Swyngedouw and Malm about how apocalyptic events, narratives and imaginaries interact with societal and individual agency historically and in the current political moment. Exploring their own empirical and philosophical contexts, the authors examine the forms of political acting found in apocalyptic imaginaries and reflect on what this means for contemporary society. By framing their arguments around either pre-apocalyptic, peri-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic narratives and events, a timeline emerges throughout the volume which shows the different opportunities for political agency the anthropocenic subject can enact at the various stages of apocalyptic moments. Featuring a number of creative interventions exclusively produced for the work from artists and fiction writers who engage with the themes of apocalypse, decline, catastrophe and disaster, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the politics of climate change, the environmental humanities, literary criticism and eco-criticism.

Miami

Miami
Author: Anthony P. Maingot
Publisher: Interlink Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2014-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1623710618

Sociologist and Miami resident Anthony P. Maingot has written a cultural history of this vibrant city, which boasts the highest percentage of foreign-born residents in the US. Miami, or “Sweet Water” in the Creek Indian language, is one of the newest cities in the United States. While northern Florida was fought over by European powers and finally taken by the Americans as part of the slave-worked plantation South, Miami lay largely ignored and populated by more alligators than humans until its incorporation as a city in 1896. The driving force was Henry Flagler, who brought his railroad down to Miami and from there to Key West—and trade with Cuba. Once settled, “Tin Can” tourists from the North, Midwest and South rode their Model-T Fords down to Florida and Miami and the boom in land sales began. After the Prohibition period and the heyday of the bootleggers, a new but still segregated Miami emerged from the Second World War. Miami Beach became a tourist mecca and once Disney World opened in Orlando, millions passed through Miami to reach it and Florida and Miami entered a new era of growth and development. It was Fidel Castro, however, who created present-day Miami by exiling over a million of Cuba's middle class. Showing enormous entrepreneurial skill and an exuberant taste for life, Cubans and more recently, Brazilians, Venezuelans and Colombians created the first Latin and “tropical” city in the US. Anthony P. Maingot explores the momentous history and vibrant culture of this most cosmopolitan city. With the highest percentage of foreign-born residents in the US, Miami is a melting-pot of music, dance, visual arts, cuisine sports and political argument. Maingot reveals how this unique cultural mix keeps the new city humming and ensures the perpetuation of its tropical joie de vivre. * City of migrants and tourists: “capital of Latin America and the Caribbean”; Little Havana and Little Haiti; exiles and entrepreneurs; the world's biggest cruise ship hub. * • City of crime: the Prohibition boom; Al Capone, Meyer Lansky and the mob; Miami Vice and modern-day drug crime. * City of culture: art deco architecture; the Latin recording industry; writers of the Caribbean Diaspora; center of performing arts.

Miami

Miami
Author: Jan Nijman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2011-11-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812207025

As a subtropical city and the southernmost metropolitan area in the United States, Miami has always lured both visitors and migrants from throughout the Americas. During its first half-century they came primarily from the American North, then from the Latin South, and eventually from across the hemisphere and beyond. But if Miami's seductive appeal is one half of the story, the other half is that few people have ever ended up staying there. Today, by many measures, Miami is one of the most transient of all major metropolitan areas in America. Miami: Mistress of the Americas tells the story of an urban transformation, perfectly timed to coincide with the surging forces of globalization. Author Jan Nijman connects different historical episodes and geographical regions to illustrate how transience has shaped the city to the present day, from the migrant labor camps in south Miami-Dade to the affluent gated communities along Biscayne Bay. Transience offers opportunities, connecting business flows and creating an ethnically hybrid workforce, and also poses challenges: high mobility and population turnover impede identification of Miami as home. According to Nijman, Miami is "mistress of the Americas" because of its cultural influence and economic dominance at the nexus of north and south. Nijman likens the city itself to a hotel; people check in, go about their business or pleasure, then check out. Locals, born and raised in the area, make up only one-fifth of the population. Exiles, those who have come to Miami as a temporary haven due to political or economic necessity, are typically yearning to return to their homeland. Mobiles, the affluent and well educated, who reside in Miami's most prized neighborhoods, are constantly on the move. As a social laboratory in urban change and human relationships in a high-speed, high-mobility era, Miami raises important questions about identity, citizenship, place-attachment, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. As such, it offers an intriguing window onto our global urban future.

Musical ImagiNation

Musical ImagiNation
Author: Maria Elena Cepeda
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814772250

Long associated with the pejorative clichés of the drug-trafficking trade and political violence, contemporary Colombia has been unfairly stigmatized. In this pioneering study of the Miami music industry and Miami’s growing Colombian community, María Elena Cepeda boldly asserts that popular music provides an alternative common space for imagining and enacting Colombian identity. Using an interdisciplinary analysis of popular media, music, and music video, Cepeda teases out issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and transnational identity in the Latino/a music industry and among its most renowned rock en español, pop, and vallenato stars. Musical ImagiNation provides an overview of the ongoing Colombian political and economic crisis and the dynamics of Colombian immigration to metropolitan Miami. More notably, placed in this context, the book discusses the creative work and media personas of talented Colombian artists Shakira, Andrea Echeverri of Aterciopelados, and Carlos Vives. In her examination of the transnational figures and music that illuminate the recent shifts in the meanings attached to Colombian identity both in the United States and Latin America, Cepeda argues that music is a powerful arbitrator of memory and transnational identity.

Spanish in Miami

Spanish in Miami
Author: Andrew Lynch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2022-05-03
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0429796811

Spanish in Miami reveals the multifaceted ways in which the language is ideologically rescaled and sociolinguistically reconfigured in this global city. This book approaches Miami’s sociolinguistic situation from language ideological and critical cultural perspectives, combining extensive survey data with two decades of observations, interviews, and conversations with Spanish speakers from all sectors of the city. Tracing the advent of postmodernity in sociolinguistic terms, separate chapters analyze the changing ideological representation of Spanish in mass media during the late 20th century, its paradoxical (dis)continuity in the city’s social life, the political and economic dimensions of the Miami/Havana divide, the boundaries of language through the perceptual lens of Anglicisms, and the potential of South Florida—as part of the Caribbean—to inform our understanding of the highly complex present and future of Spanish in the United States. Spanish in Miami will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of Spanish, Sociolinguistics, and Latino Studies.

The Vigilant Citizen

The Vigilant Citizen
Author: Thijs Jeursen
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2023-01-10
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1479816558

How the problematic behavior of private citizens—and not just the police force itself—contributes to the perpetuation of police brutality and institutional racism “Warning: Neighborhood Watch Program in Force. If I don’t call the police, my neighbor will!” Signs like this can be found affixed to telephone poles on streets throughout the US, warning trespassers that the community is an active participant in its own policing efforts. Thijs Jeursen calls this phenomenon, in which individuals take on the responsibility of defending themselves and share with the police the duty to mitigate everyday insecurity, “vigilant citizenship.” Drawing on eleven months of fieldwork in Miami and sharing the stories and experiences of police officers, private security guards, neighborhood watch groups, civil society organizations, and a broad range of residents and activists, Jeursen uses the lens of vigilant citizenship to extend the analysis of police brutality beyond police encounters, focusing on the often blurred boundaries between policing actors and policed citizens and highlighting the many ways in which policing produces and perpetuates inequality and injustice. As a central premise in everyday policing, vigilant citizenship frames racist and violent policing as matters of personal blame and individual guilt, ultimately downplaying the realities of how systemically race operates in policing and US society more broadly. The Vigilant Citizen illustrates how a focus on individualized responsibility for security exacerbates and legitimizes existing inequalities, a situation that must be addressed to end institutionalized racism in politics and the justice system.

Operation Pedro Pan

Operation Pedro Pan
Author: John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2022-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1640125213

John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco tells the history of the Unaccompanied Cuban Children’s Program, known as Operation Pedro Pan, which brought more than fourteen thousand children from Castro’s Cuba to the United States between 1960 and 1962.

Civil Rights and Beyond

Civil Rights and Beyond
Author: Brian D. Behnken
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 082034916X

Civil Rights and Beyond examines the dynamic relationships between African American and Latino/a activists in the United States from the 1930s to the present day. Building on recent scholarship, this book pushes the timeframe for the study of interactions between blacks and a variety of Latino/a groups beyond the standard chronology of the civil rights era. As such, the book merges a host of community histories--each with their own distinct historical experiences and activisms--to explore group dynamics, differing strategies and activist moments, and the broader quests of these communities for rights and social justice. The collection is framed around the concept of "activism," which most fully encompasses the relationships that blacks and Latinos have enjoyed throughout the twentieth century. Wide ranging and pioneering, Civil Rights and Beyond explores black and Latino/a activism from California to Florida, Chicago to Bakersfield--and a host of other communities and cities--to demonstrate the complicated nature of African American-Latino/a activism in the twentieth-century United States. Contributors: Brian D. Behnken, Dan Berger, Hannah Gill, Laurie Lahey, Kevin Allen Leonard, Mark Malisa, Gordon Mantler, Alyssa Ribeiro, Oliver A. Rosales, Chanelle Nyree Rose, and Jakobi Williams

Good Night Miami

Good Night Miami
Author: Lisa Bolivar
Publisher: Good Night books
Total Pages: 20
Release: 2011-12-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1602191514

The great city of Miami is artfully celebrated in this board book, designed to soothe children before bedtime while instilling an appreciation for Miami's natural and cultural wonders. These colorful pages feature a multicultural group of people visiting Miami's attractions as rhythmic language guides readers through the passage of both a single day and the four seasons. Celebrating the people and places that make Miami unique, this book features iconic aspects of the city from art deco architecture and its Latin community to its sparkling beaches and the nearby Everglades.