PLACE-MAKING AND TRANSCULTURATION IN LITTLE HAVANA, MIAMI A Thesis presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by TAYLOR ELISE FOX Dr. Mark Palmer, Thesis Supervisor MAY 2020 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled: PLACE-MAKING AND TRANSCULTURATION IN LITTLE HAVANA, MIAMI presented by Taylor Fox, a candidate for the degree of Master of Arts in Geography, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. _______________________________ Professor Mark Palmer _______________________________ Professor Soren Larsen _______________________________ Professor Adriana Mendez Acknowledgements To my Mamina and Papa, thank you for your courage, your resiliency, and your wisdom. This project would not exist without your guidance and example. Te amare por siempre, tu Manzanita. To Mom, to Chloe, to Josh, and Austin, who inspired and listened to facets of this project more times than they could count. To Zach, thank you for always enduring the rants and the brainstorms. Thank you to Dr. Mark Palmer, Dr. Soren Larsen, Dr. Adriana Mendez, Dr. Clayton Blodgett, Thomas Vought, and Sydney Bailey. Thank you to all the people who shared their stories of life in exile and to all who made their necessary journeys. To all refugees, exiles, displaced people. To those across the globe who do not have a choice, yet still make something beautiful out of their experiences. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii List of Figures vi Abstract 1 Introduction 2 Chapters: One: Review of Literature 7 Defining Place and Place-Making 7 The Importance of Place-Making Within Groups of Displaced People 10 Transculturation 13 Among Assimilation Theories 15 Transculturation in Ethnic Enclaves 17 Two: Methodology 19 Semi-Structured Interviews 20 Participatory Mapping 25 Three: A Brief History of Migration to Little Havana 30 The Golden Exiles 31 Freedom Flights 33 The Mariel Boatlift 34 The Balseros 36 iii Four: Little Havana as a Transcultural Place 38 Place-Making in Little Havana 38 Migration Waves to Little Havana 45 Little Havana’s Core: Calle Ocho 48 Transculturation on Calle Ocho 55 Gentrification of Calle Ocho 66 Five: Discussion 72 Conclusion 75 Works Cited 78 Appendices Appendix 1: Interview Questions 83 Appendix 2: Initial Interview Codes 83 Appendix 3: Timeline of Research 84 iv List of Figures Figure 1: Word Cloud of Key Words found in Interviews. 22 Figure 2: Codes resulting from semi-structured interviews and resulting axial 24 codes. Figure 3: Initial Instruction Screen on Participatory Mapping Module. 26 Figure 4: Mural painted in Little Havana, honoring Latins, photo by the author. 41 Figure 5: Mi Tierras Las Americas Restaurant on Calle Ocho, photo by the author. 42 Figure 6: Individual Sketch Mapping Responses. 49-50 Figure 7: Overlay Map. 51 Figure 8: Coded Calle Ocho 56 Figure 9: Welcome Sign to Little Havana's "Latin Quarter," photo by the author. 59 Figure 10: Mexican/Peruvian Fusion Restaurant in Little Havana, photo by the author.60 Figure 11: Street Art Listing National Representation in Little Havana, photo by 61 the author. Figure 12: Taqueria on Calle Ocho, photo by the author. 62 Figure 13: U.S. Counties by Hispanic Origin Group, Miami-Dade highlighted. 63 Figure 14: Latin Peruvian Fusion Restaurant in Little Havana, photo by the author. 64 Figure 15: Street Art in Little Havana representing a variety of Latin Cultures, 65 photo by the author. Figure 16: InTown Apartments Advertisement, graphic from Entrata, Inc. 67 Figure 17: InTown Apartments Cost, photo and graphic by the author. 68 Figure 18: Community Ice Cream Parlor, Azucar, photo by the author. 69 v Abstract Beginning in the 1960s, Miami has transformed into a Latin city. One in which it is possible to buy groceries, get a job, and even go to school without necessarily having to utilize the English language. As time has progressed, Miami itself has come to be known as a Latin place; but when this transformation began, Spanish-speakers, primarily Cubans, clustered together in what is now known as Little Havana. At the time, the place between 37th street and highway 95 was full of low-income, multi-family homes, creating a perfect space for the incoming Cuban refugees to make their home. Due to their initial place-making of the community, Little Havana is now a thriving place known around the world as a Cuban cultural center. However, the mass exodus of Cubans entering Little Havana has slowed and more and more Latin people have settled into the area changing the demographics and, inevitably, the culture of the place. Today, one can walk down the infamous Calle Ocho (8th Street) and enjoy Cuban culture with a side of Mexican, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, and other additions. I argue that this change in demographic representation is leading to a change in the community that now does not solely identify as Cuban, but as the more inclusive term Latin, and attempt to discover how this change is affecting the overall cultural landscape of Little Havana. vi Introduction The question begins with forged documents in hand and jewelry sewn into the hem of clothing. A woman stood beside her husband as soldiers patted him down, searching thoroughly so no gusano could bring more than $5 a piece out of the country. The soldier stopped, reached into the man’s jacket pocket and pulled out a cardstock passport, the woman couldn’t believe he had left it in such an obvious place. Within the book, the name read Rogelio Pablo Perez, the photo of the second passport also matched the man who stood before him. The soldier looked down at the two children standing slightly behind their parents and looked back up at Rogelio handing him both documents, “keep going.” Her heart began to beat again. In 1962, Rogelio; his wife, Consuelito; and their two kids landed in Miami with exactly five dollars. They exited the plane with dozens of other Cubans and walked onto the tarmac. In the days before globalization and shoe bombs, there were no customs and security clearances to pass. Bus after bus drove onto the runway to take the Cuban arrivals to a makeshift refugee center. Rogelio was separated from his family and questioned while Consuelito and the kids were housed with other women and children. They slept in a large warehouse filled with rows and rows of cots separated by sheets to allow for privacy. It was cold and it was quiet. Her kids each had a cot of their own, but she preferred to hold them close. She finally had to tell her children that they were going to have a little brother or sister — my mother — it’s much harder to hide a growing belly while sharing a single cot. For three days Consuelito wondered where her husband was and what could be happening to him. Would they all be sent back to Cuba? Was it all for nothing? 1 Finally, the family was reunited and released into Miami. What Rogelio said, what was done, we will never know. What we do know is that they entered Miami on August 15, 1962. The family lived with Consuelito’s sister and her family in a small apartment with four other families, they occupied the living room while curtains hung around their cots — an illusion of privacy. This was their Miami, low income housing whose rent could be split five or six ways. A community developed out of need and shared trauma. This was the Miami that made Little Havana. Beginning with the Golden Exiles of 1959-1964, the space now known as Little Havana was converted from a dominantly white, Jewish neighborhood of affordable, government housing to a Cuban place made within the United States (Duany 2017, 4). The liminal space of Little Havana continues to be a community conflicted; it’s Cuban, but not in Cuba, it’s in America, but certainly not American, thus there is room to introduce new cultural factors. As new waves of Cubans enter Miami, the cultural climate of Little Havana transforms to include the new exiles, but also to allow for the first wave of immigrants to move out of their created place and into the suburbs, making room for the new wave. In maintaining their Cuban identity, the Historic Exiles and those who followed did not only begin an act of place-making, but they created a place utilizing transculturation, “a two- or more way exchange of cultural influences, layering upon each other in complex processes of power, loss, and production” (Arroyo 2016: 133). The focus of this study is the ever-changing ethnic enclave of Little Havana, Miami as an exploratory case study, using the observational and analyzing techniques presented in grounded theory in order to study place and place-making. I argue that this community is now advancing into a new act of transcultural place-making, one that is inclusive of all 2 Latin immigrants entering the community who can benefit from the environment created by the early Cuban immigrants without giving up their own cultural identity, but rather infusing it into the overall feel of the environment. Historically, Cuban immigrants have stuck together in enclaves, like many other groups of immigrants, not only for the comforts of community, but because of the shared identity crisis created by the divide between exiled Cubans and Cubans who remained on the island. This struggle is similar within immigrant groups from all over Latin America, and the sharing of such feelings has allowed for Little Havana to shift in recent years from a firmly Cuban enclave, to a multi-ethnic Latin enclave as people from various Latin-American countries have fled to Miami, “the ‘Latinization’ of Miami was an unintended result of U.S.