https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3759&context=etd

The Viceroyalty of Miami: Colonial Nostalgia and the Making of an Imperial City

Authentic Assertions, Commercial Concessions: Race, Nation, and Popular Culture in Cuban New York City and Miami, 1940-1960.

“Owning the Revolution” explores the role that conversations about race and racism played in defining the 1959 Cuban Revolution both on the island and in South Florida, where over half of the exiles fled. It highlights how revolutionary leaders challenged internal and external opposition movements by publicly labeling dissenters “counterrevolutionaries” and “racists.” Using the label “racist” to attack an opponent was not altogether new in the 1960s, but by linking the term to counterrevolution, national discussions occurring in newspapers, magazines, and on television defined public racism as existing outside of the norms of a new Cuba. Exiles disagreed with this identification and accused the revolution of betraying the nineteenth-century colorblind goals of Jose Marti. Exile leaders in Miami argued that Castro invented racial tensions and claimed that their fight was not with blacks or mulatos but with “red” or communist Cubans. The politics expressed by white exile newspapers, however, did not always fit with the concerns of Afro-Cubans in the United States. Miami Cubans failed to acknowledge the persistence of racism in new exile communities in the same way that the revolutionary government dismissed racism on the island. These parallel silences exemplify the dangers of polarized narratives that imagine the revolution as antiracist and the exile community as racist.

/pdf/owning-the-revolution-race-revolution-and-politics-from-bpvaiahq3p.pdf

Owning the Revolution: Race, Revolution, and Politics from Havana to Miami, 1959–1963

‘Timely innovations’ uses Jim Crow segregation, and the human activity it inspired, to account for Greater Miami's emergence as a city of global importance. It shows how city dwellers in South Florida deployed race and racism as technologies of economic and demographic control. The article also explores how evolving forms of racial segregation worked in tandem with other innovations in human mobility, urban planning and US foreign policy, with each helping Miami's residents maintain a white-over-black social order. Jim Crow, the author argues, never quite disappeared. Rather, it experienced a series of modernizations, leaving even Miami, one of the most culturally diverse American cities, beholden to the mores of bi-racial governance.

Chanelle Nyree Rose

Papers

Neither Southern nor Northern: Miami, Florida and the Black freedom struggle in America's tourist paradise, 1896--1968