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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Miami Futurism, Miami Fusionism

Missing vacation and thinking about a glimpse of the U.S.A.'s Latin American future.
Miami,Beach,,Florida,,Usa,On,Ocean,Drive,At,Sunset.

The ocean water was bathtub warm. That was the first thought, and almost involuntary utterance to my companion, as I jumped into the Atlantic off Miami Beach last weekend. “Come on in; the water’s fine,” echoed somewhere in the back of my mind. Then a man about my age splashed up to us, eager, with something to say through gold teeth grillz: “There are mermaids.” You can summon them, he explained, at the full moon. 

I was ready to laugh, but it seemed he was quite serious. He was here to bless me with this good news. You must believe in the mermaids, he told us, and bring them an offering. They like combs, in particular. He has done this before. You see, there are portals. Nine portals, he said, to nine other worlds. He waded away and became this, a Miami memory.

I’ve seen in Florida a version of what my colleague Helen Andrews calls “Our Latin American Future,” and it’s not too bad. In fact, it’s pretty fun. Warm Miami, I am beginning to suspect, is one of the compromises possible in our chilly cultural civil war. Not quite ideal for anyone in its brash mixing and matching, in the sincerity of its self-parody it has something for everyone. It’s a fleshy, incarnate place, not just markets and ideas. The food is new fusionist and the politics might be, too: anti-communist, pro-corporate, a certain flavor of ethnic traditionalist. 

The Americas have always been the future, the frontier that opens up a cosmic space for the human march through time. But since Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos set forth mestizofilia in his La raza cósmica—an optimistic reply to Iberian colonial casta culture’s strict white supremacy that celebrated the blended new world, old world category of mestizaje—during the first half of the last century, and as the North American WASPs slunk away into self-imposed obscurity over the century’s latter half, the still point of that futurism has moved south, seeming to come to rest somewhere in the chaos of Central America. There the dance is. 

And in the era of Latinos for Trump, we in the United States cannot escape it. As Helen writes: 

The question is not whether a conservative party can win Hispanics. The question is what Hispanics will do to conservatism when they become a significant part of its coalition. Immigrants exert a gravitational pull, in proportion to their numbers, that makes the politics of their host country come to resemble the politics of the places they left. The United States will be one-third Hispanic in 2050. Now is the time to ask what it will mean for our politics to become more Latin American.

So, back to Miami. More so than the past, even, it’s a foreign country. To me, it feels like nowhere quite so much as Izmir, Turkey, and Tel Aviv, Israel, more Mediterranean than Atlantic. But I have not been to Cuba, nor to South America, and have barely been to Mexico. Not Vasconcelos’s post-racial, beige new humanity, the Miamians. Instead, from my brief enjoyment of their company, they are a pre-melting pot society, a strikingly muti-ethnic pile held together by the languor that comes with heat and natural bounty—no anxieties of the Protestant work ethic here. Everything is slow, service haphazard and inefficient, but it is also mostly warm and personal. The place is loud but the rhythms are pleasant. It seems like an okay beach to be a bum. 

But don’t just take it from me. As Vanity Fair reported in a profile of Mayor Francis Suarez, “The tragic building collapse in neighboring Surfside is a reminder of the huge challenges facing South Florida, and Miami itself is often thought of as an ungovernable mix of young and old, Black and white, Cuban and Haitian, and many other groups with competing interests.” Not unlike New York City, juggling that sort of multiculturalism seems to require a supremely talented (strong? caudillo?) performer at the top who is also working with a big enough pie to give everyone their bits and slices. Suarez is the son of former Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez—for a supposed democracy we’ve never really gotten away from dynastic politics—and while “Xavier was known as a ‘pothole’ mayor focused on constituent services,” writes Ken Stern, “Suarez has staked his reputation on reinventing Miami as an entrepreneurial hub to rival Silicon Valley.”

That last bit is what drew me to Miami in the first place. First off, there’s no tension between being a “pothole” executive focused on meeting constituent needs and nurturing a pro-growth business environment; you need a revenue base to draw from, after all. This was the arrangement that used to make cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles work; the trouble is now normal constituents aren’t being served, just the megarich, como em Brazil (not everyone speaks Spanish). Second, for a certain kind of too online politico like myself, Miami really has become a meme city. Meme magic, we were told in 2015—and events seemed to bear this out—is real. While there are plenty of California exiles in Texas, the in-your-face vaporwave aesthetics are coming from South Beach. The shorts are short, the shirts are printed, the sunglasses are big, and you can pay for it all with crypto. 

I don’t know if that’s the future. But I have it on good authority that there are nine other worlds, and that there are portals. Miami seems like one of those doors to one of those realms. I didn’t see mermaids, but I had fun, and it seems to work, if slowly, haphazardly, as a kind of middle way.

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