City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami

Winner, 1995 American Sociological Association Robert E. Park Award​

Projecting fantasies of wealth and excess, Miami, "America's Riviera," occupies a unique place in our national imagination. Uncovering the hidden story of this dreamlike place, Portes and Stepick explore the transformations of Miami from a light-hearted tourist resort to a troubled, complex city.

Challenging a classical economic theory that the development of a city is governed by commercial and geographic imperatives, sociology professors Portes (Johns Hopkins) and Stepick (Florida International) show that Miami is the creation of "chance and individual wills." Having nothing in particular to offer except sun and sea, Miami seemed destined to be a tourist and retirement haven until Carribean politics turned it into a dynamic international city and what the authors call the "nation's first full-fledged experiment in bicultural living in the contemporary era." They present an unusually rich history of the city from Ponce de Leon to the present, but the focus is squarely on the migrations of Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in the 1970s and 1980s, and on the effects of their ascendancy on the established population of Anglos, Native Americans and African Americans. Much of the authors' highly readable material is drawn from studies funded by the Ford Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A perceptive appreciation of Miami and what makes it tick, from a pair of sociologists who understand that anecdotal evidence can be as illuminating as statistical abstracts. Drawing on demographic data, personal observations, interviews, newspaper articles, and allied sources, Portes (Johns Hopkins Univ.) and Stepick (Florida International Univ.) profile a city in which cultural diversity is a convulsive reality. Noting that Miami has become the Caribbean's de facto capital in the more than three decades since Castro seized Cuba, the authors point out that political events, rather than economic or geographic advantages, have made Miami a world-class entrep“t--a reversal of the way in which America's urban centers usually develop. After providing a brief history of the Sunshine State and its settlement, Portes and Stepick offer detailed human-scale accounts of the immigrant groups that changed a sleepy winter resort into a teeming year-round metropolis with a Hispanic cast. Bourgeois Cubans bent on escaping Castro's Communism were the first to arrive in force. While restructuring their adoptive city's socioeconomic and political institutions, these exiles were joined by less favored compatriots (the so-called Marielitos), Haitians, and Nicaraguans fleeing the Sandinistas. By 1990, 49.2% of greater Miami's population was Latino, up from 4.0% in 1950; by contrast, Anglos (the local name for whites) represented but 30.3% of the total, with blacks (native-born or otherwise) at 19.5%. As the authors make clear, the shift in the ethnic balance of power has not been without serious frictions--but they conclude that, once Castro leaves the stage, assimilation pressures could prove stronger than the ties that now bind and divide Miami's disparate communities. A municipal report that offers clues to what could be in store for other of America's border towns. A fine complement to David Rieff's The Exile (p. 773). (Illustrations) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.