...In tracing the social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances that led to Miami’s municipal incorporation in 1896, this chapter unearths the queer origins of the city’s urban frontier. It argues that Miami’s identity and traditions were constantly in flux, imbued by numerous effects from...

...This chapter builds on chapter three in taking seriously boosters’ framing of Miami as a fairyland. It pays particular attention to the ways the city was “staged,” both literally and figuratively, in the American imagination. It notes how theatricality, spectacle, and publicity collided...

...While urban boosters crafted Miami’s fairyland for a white and moneyed clientele, the city’s working-class, transient gender and sexual renegades similarly asserted their own spaces in the developing landscape. This chapter uncovers how queers, primarily those listed in the historical record as men...

... of a new modern woman who was simultaneously white, moneyed, attractive, and available. The modern and scantily clad “Miami mermaid” became a commodity that permitted urban boosters to continue promoting the area as a fairyland for gender and sexual renegades. While sexual liberation became normative...

...The epilogue introduces some of the major changes that came about after World War II and their effects on Miami’s queer individuals and communities. Miami’s liberal policy remained in place—albeit with some post-tourist-season or arbitrary crackdowns and raids—until the late 1940s. The early Cold...

... policy U S Hart Celler Immigration Act 1965 immigration acts Johnson Lyndon B Freedom Flights Chinese Revolution Korean War Cuban Revolution Cuban Children’s Program Operation Pedro Pan Monsignor Bryan Walsh Miami Catholic Welfare Bureau In 1959, Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba...

...TThe chapter considers the role of freedom in football. It discusses the emergence of the growing popularity and stardom of O. J. Simpson and the Miami Dolphins. It looks into the role played by striking in the history of the NFL by focusing on the failed strike of 1974. It discusses various issues...

...This chapter details events in Sidney Poitier's life from 1927–1943. Sidney was born in Miami, Florida, on 20 February 1927. A premature baby of seven months, he weighed less than three pounds and seemed closer to death than life. His father, Reginald Poitier, had come to Miami to sell tomatoes. He...

... exile. Importantly, this chapter uses oral histories to examine how Afro-Cuban exiles struggled to create a safe space for their families in Cuba or southern Florida—a situation that led many of them to relocate to northern U.S. cities instead of Miami. Exile community Miami Herald Peñalver Reynaldo...

...This chapter turns to Miami and discusses the role of Cubans and Cuban popular culture in the city. It examines the social clubs Círculo Cubano and Juventud Cubana, and the nightclubs Tropicana and Barra Guys and Dolls, whose events and activities illustrate the early emergence of “Cuban Miami...

...In the 1980s, Miami became a spectacle of chaos, crime, and corruption. The Mariel Boatlift, which brought more than 125,000 Cuban refugees to the US, coincided with the arrival of large numbers of Haitian refugees to the city. In this context, Afro-Caribbean cultures became an object of renewed...

...Poised on the edge of the United States and at the center of a wider Caribbean world, today’s Miami is marketed as an international tourist hub that embraces gender and sexual difference. As Julio Capó Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami’s transnational connections reveal that the city has...

...Among the nearly 90,000 Cubans who settled in New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s were numerous musicians and entertainers, black and white, who did more than fill dance halls with the rhythms of the rumba, mambo, and cha cha chá. Presenting a history of music and race in midcentury...

... to introduce the spaces of these encounters: Miami as a crossroads for the Americas and medicine as a crossroads for cultural and commercial exchange—both becoming sites of anthropological inquiry and intervention. In the decades after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Cold War geopolitical events brought hundreds...

...This chapter examines an experiment in health care delivery known as the “Culture Broker Project” in 1970s Miami. The project involved mediation of care by so-called culture brokers, which promised to bring about a form of “transcultural” or “culturally appropriate” healthcare. Its history helps...

...This chapter details events in Sidney Poitier's life from 1943–1945. Sidney left his family in the Bahamas in 1943 to go live with his oldest brother Cyril, his wife Alberta, and his six children, in Miami. Unable to connect with Miami and his brother's family, Sidney decided his make his way...

... International Olympic Committee MARTA Miami Boys neoliberalism Olympic Stadium Olympification Police Brutality Red Dogs Urban Renewal War on Drugs The seeds that spawned Atlanta’s Olympic dreams were planted as early as 1975, when an Olympic handball player requested a meeting with Maynard Jackson...

...This chapter traces the lives of some of the queer women and men who helped tailor Miami’s fairyland image as a site of nonconformity that lacked the rigidity ascribed to larger, industrial urban spaces. It unearths the significance of the area’s artists, investors, settlers, and imperial...

... and the South, noting that there was a constant interplay between Havana and St. Augustine in the early days of colonization, then between the island and Tampa, and in the twentieth century, Havana and Miami. The discussion employs works by Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Virgil Suarez, Roberto Fernández, Cristina García...

... to the apparent presence of the mentally ill among migrants. By the late 1980s, controversy had also erupted in Miami regarding the alleged commandeering by security officials of several wards at Cuba’s Hospital Psiquiátrico. There, a growing number of voices contended, officials had tortured political dissidents...