Missing Miami: Anti-Blackness and the Making of the South Florida Myth by Tatiana Danielle McInnis Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August 11, 2017 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Vera Kutzinski, Ph.D. Michael Kreyling, Ph.D. Candice Amich, Ph.D. Alex Stepick, Ph.D. Copyright © 2017 by Tatiana McInnis All Rights Reserved I write to and for colleagues and committees, and, for the family, the friends, and the city that made me. May this project help those whose labor, experiences of violence, and continued degradation are addressed herein. May it further our work to make and remake Miami into the haven tour guides describe. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Jokingly, thank you to all those who have annoyed, enraged, and hurt me during this grueling five-year process of acquiring a PhD. I run on rage, and your contributions have been indispensable—but I still probably do not like you very much. Thank you also to the people who doubted the usefulness and importance of a place-based literary project and laughed when I said I was watching Miami Vice episodes as part of my research. Your doubt has propelled this project into existence and made me even more headstrong about why my work, its attention to the material world, popular culture, and to Miami, matters—you did this to yourselves. Seriously, I am indebted in every imaginable way to my father, my mother, and my sister who may not entirely understand what I do, but are steadfast in their support. To every member of the McInnis tribe: to Grandma Ann, Aunt Mattie, Grandpa, Aunt Yvette, Uncle Jon, Nathan, Aunt Tanya, thank you deeply for encouraging my voracious reading habits and pushing me to be the best at whatever project I undertake. We are #BlackExcellence embodied and for that I am incredibly grateful. To the Guevaras and Mendozas: it has not been easy to learn this lesson, but anti-blackness within Latinx communities is an ugly thing that made a mess out of me. I am working on loving us through it and this project is as much a meditation on our lives and interactions as it is an analysis of representations of people who we have never met. To D.J.: my god, can you believe that I survived it? Thank you for feeding me during comps, for loving me through this crazy-making process, for allowing me to read entire chapters aloud to you, for encouraging me to rest, for listening well enough to describe my research better than I can. For everything, even the hard lessons that hurt. Love you, or whatever. To my colleagues: Annie, you are a master of self-care, a brilliant mind, and the one person whose encouraging words make all the difference. Thank you for helping me grow. P.S. I iv have forgiven you for leaving me during my final year for your fancy postdoc. Rosalee, who knew during recruitment that ours would be the friendship to endure? Thank you for reading, for encouraging, for dancing, for celebrating. I wish you were here, but I am glad for your sake that you are not. You are the grounding that I need. Thank you. To members of Dr. Kutzinski’s reading group: I mean this, without you, I could not have finished this dissertation. Thank you for your kindness, attention, and close reading and for putting up with my headstrong defense of my work. Thank you, Vera, for opening your home to us and for the various baked goods. To the many interlocutors and mentors I have encountered during my tenure as a graduate student at Vanderbilt: thank you—when you were right, I learned volumes, when you were wrong, I learned how to argue. To my fellow fellows at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, your attention to detail and suggestions have made this project the interdisciplinary cultural study that it is. I am immensely grateful to you, Kanetha, Scotti, Allison, Lance, Michael, Tim, Shelby, and to Mona Frederick and Terry Tripp whose guidance and company helped me survive this final year. Mona, during the most stressful times, I cling to your words of empowerment and reminders that as a humanist, I protect our stories. Thank you forever for putting my purpose into words. Emma, thanks for your support, humor, and company at the RPW, and thank you and Sean immensely for loving Hurston as much as you do. Apparently, it takes a village to raise dogs, too. To folks at the Center for Teaching, to Brielle, Vivian, Dani, Richard, Ben, thank you for teaching me how to teach this material, you reminded me that what I am doing matters and so do you and your work. To Donna Caplan, Janis May: thank you for everything you have done to make this experience run as smoothly as possible. To my loves in the Queer People of Color Affinity Group at the K.C. Potter Center at Vanderbilt, to Malik, Stanley, Charles, Antonio, v Arielle, Arianna, Carlin: you may not know this, but you were often the joy and push I needed to finish. I love you all so much, and so deeply. You are going to change the world. To the staff at the Florida State Archives, the Black Archives of South Florida, University of Miami Cuban Heritage Collection, and Florida International University Special Collections: thank you for your curiosity about my project. For wanting to talk to me and listen to me, and for using our conversations to guide me to resources I had not even thought of. To Drs. Vera Kutzinski, Michael Kreyling, Candice Amich, and Alex Stepick: you oversaw this project because it is your job as professors to teach the next generation of scholars, but how you oversaw, guided, and nurtured me through this process can only be described as a labor of love. Thank you endlessly for supporting this project, for never doubting its stakes and importance, for envisioning the stakes long before I could. Thank you for asking questions (even when I really just wanted answers) that pushed my thinking, for your editing skills, for your “big-picture” questions, for encouragement and patience, and for never, not once, forcing me to make changes that I did not want to. Thank you for not holding it against me when I took some suggestions and left out some others, and for encouraging, rather than stifling, the independent thinking that has shaped the kind of scholar I am, and am striving to become. Thank you for expressing your excitement for this work—this meant everything. Thank you, truly, for not batting an eye when I said I would write about Scarface and Miami Vice. Thank you, Michael, in particular, for rewatching Scarface…I know how much you hate it. Thank you all, especially, for reading multiple drafts—in my mind, those one-sentence additions made all the difference. Thank you, thank you, thank you. vi Finally, to folks across the African Diaspora— I relish in our complexity. I love us. To folks I have forgotten, I am sorry-not-sorry that you will be forever haunted by the question of whether or not I actually liked you. Just kidding—thank you to anyone and everyone who made this work possible. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION.......................................................................................................................................…...iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………….………………………………iv LIST OF FIGURES…………….…………………………………………………………………………..x Chapter I. Introduction………………...…………………………………………………………………………..1 II. Overtown Going Under: Black Miami, Civil Rights, and the Caribbean Collision in Freedom in the Family…….......…………………………...…………………………..……………………... 24 Rewriting Miami in the Civil Rights Movement…………………………………………………....35 Black Spaces in Miami: Sites of Restricted Liberation…………………………………….……….42 Black Women’s Leadership, Strategy, and Erasure in the Early 1960s…………………….………57 Expanding the Civil Rights Movement: Afro-Diasporic Solidarity in Miami……………………...64 Defamation and Police Brutality in Miami…………………………………………………………68 Civil Rights Afterlives: The Gathering in Miami…………………………………………………..79 Conclusion & Reflection……………………………………………………………………………84 III. The Anti-Haitian Hydra: Remapping Haitian Spaces in Miami………………….….……...……….89 Overture…………………………………………………………………………………………….90 Geography of a Non-Place: Unmappable Miami in “Children of the Sea”………………………...96 The Immigrant in Public Space: Mapping Krome Detention Center in Brother, I’m Dying……………………………………..…………………………………………..…….106 Where’s Little Haiti?: The Cultural Enclave within and beyond Brother, I’m Dying…………………………….……………………………….…………119 The Destruction of an Enclave: Gentrification, Reproduction, and Space in MJ Fievre’s “Sinkhole”…………………………………………………………………………...125 Conclusion……...…………………………………………………………………………………133 IV. Becoming Whiteness, Rejecting Blackness: Genre, Castro, and Transnational Identity in Carlos Moore’s Pichón and Carlos Eire’s Learning to Die in Miami……………...……………135 Some Questions for & Statements to the Afro-Latinx in Miami………………………………….136 Context…………………………………………………………………………….........................142 Entering the U.S. Canon: Moore and the Form of the U.S. Slave Narrative……………………...145 Race and Revolution in Carlos Moore’s Cuban America…………………………………………151 Ní de Aqui, Ní de Alla: The Luxury of Postmodern Play in Learning to Die in Miami.............................................................................................................165 Slavery, Segregation, and White Cubanidad in Eire’s Miami…………………………………….171 Conclusion...……………………………………………………………………………….………181 V. Who Speaks for Miami?: The White Lens in the Tropical Metropole………………………………………………………………………………………..…..186 Scarface