Jim Crow and the Establishing of Black Miami

If you browse Florida tourism websites today, Miami is described as an “international hub of cultural diversity and world-class offerings.”³ A unique tropical paradise of sorts with its beaches frequented by “the beautiful people,” Miami remains a popular tourist destination. But before the 1960s, blacks were not allowed as guests in the hotels that lined Miami’s beaches. African Americans worked as the hotel maids and as cooks and servers in the restaurants. In order to enter these areas reserved for the enjoyment of white tourists, African Americans had to carry identification, and after work they were expected to make their ways back to their homes in the “negro areas” (Connolly 2014; Grenier and Pérez 2003). Since its incorporation in 1896, the region was typically southern not only in its population of mostly blacks and whites but also in its racial politics. Indeed as N. D. B. Connolly asserts, South Florida’s exotic labels have served “to conceal the brutality and racism so often required to create and preserve one of the nation’s most celebrated tourist destinations” (2014, 5). African Americans endured segregationist policies that denied them such simple pleasures as Miami’s beaches and, far worse, subjected them to white brutality in the form or lynchings and police violence.

Like most other southern cities, Miami early on established a political, economic, and social structure that excluded nonwhites and defined white in opposition to black. In its earliest colonial history, Florida was controlled by the Spanish, who brought both free and enslaved blacks with them. From the 1700s to the early 1800s, the area was fought over by the Spanish, French, and the British, all of whom utilized black slave labor in their efforts to settle the region. As the land shifted between European colonial hands, Florida would also be a place where escaped slaves would flee to and often join in alliances with native Seminole Indians. In 1821, the United States gained control of Florida in an effort led by Andrew Jackson, “to rid Florida of foreign domination” (Dunn 2016, 28). After the United States mounted a brutal campaign of clearing the land of Seminoles, Florida was then settled by poor whites mainly from Georgia and South Carolina and of Scots-Irish descent, who brought already entrenched Southern ideals of anti-black brutality with them. They would be joined by wealthy whites from the North seeking to develop the Florida “wilderness” after it became a state in 1845. Whether the settlers were poor whites from the South or rich whites from the North, they saw themselves in opposition to blacks, who served as enslaved laborers. The Haitian revolt of African slaves in 1791, as well as rebellions in the United States, such as that of Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, were recent in the memories of the white population and caused them to be even more fearful of revolt by black slaves in Florida. Thus, whites in Florida enacted, in historian Marvin Dunn’s analysis, some of the most extreme measures to keep “recalcitrant” blacks in line (2016, 41).

The framework of defining white in opposition to black continued to be openly visible into the twentieth century. During the first third of the twentieth century, it was not uncommon for major newspapers in Miami such as the Miami Herald and the Miami Metropolis to refer to blacks as “coons” or similar epithets. Though black labor had originally brought progress to Miami’s economy, blacks were systematically excluded from Miami politics and were segregated into a section of the city known then as “Colored Town” (since renamed Overtown) (Dunn 1997; Dunn and Stepick 1992). Miami had an active Ku Klux Klan (KKK) presence. The KKK was highly visible: it would hold parades during the 1920s, for instance, and terrorized blacks in various ways, including kidnapping black clergymen who preached racial equality to teach them to not disrupt the social order (Dunn 1997).⁴ Later, during World War II, as a part of the war safety efforts, Miami heavily enforced Negro curfews so that blacks could generally be accounted for at all times. These curfews did not have to be enforced by police or officials; any white citizen could enforce them (Connolly 2014).

Although segregationist policies established a strong black/white division, the black population in Miami has always been heterogeneous in terms of their origins. The earliest blacks in the Miami area were migrants from the Bahamas seeking work after the collapse of the Bahamian economy in the 1880s. In Miami, they primarily worked as farm laborers (Dunn 1997).⁵ They were joined by African Americans, descended from slaves from other southern states such as Georgia and South Carolina. The Great Freeze, which struck the southeastern United States in 1894–1895, prompted white planters to move to the Miami area for warmer climates. This agricultural catastrophe also spurred African American blacks to come to the Miami area as they sought field work (Dunn 1997). Despite the actual heterogeneity of the early black population, the binary black/white opposition lumped all blacks together. For example, in the 1930s, real estate appraisers would give neighborhoods ratings to assess residential market values for white buyers. Though areas such as Coconut Grove were settled primarily by Bahamians and Colored Town had a good percentage of West Indians along with native-born African Americans, white property appraisers simply labeled these neighborhoods “100 percent negro.” With the “negro” designation would come a “D” rating, the lowest on the scale. In contrast, appraisers would distinguish whites by being either native or foreign born and have variations of grades (all higher than the D rating) depending on where they lived (Connolly 2014, 95).

Despite the racist conditions under which they had to live, blacks carved out spaces for themselves and a sense of connectedness to their Miami home. Ironically, segregation encouraged black-owned businesses because blacks, locked out of the white world, needed their own institutions. They created a black Miami which had a vibrant culture and commercial life (Dunn 1997, 144). As the center of black Miami, Overtown became a thriving business and cultural center between the 1900s and 1950s (Dunn 1997; Dunn and Stepick 1992). Overtown’s streets reflected the Caribbean and native-born black mix that could be seen in the street festivals selling Bahamian foods alongside African American cuisine. Night spots would play host to famous black entertainers and be frequented by both black and white guests. Miami’s black communities put on parades and hosted sporting events and other diversions. Blacks in Miami built businesses, churches, organizations, schools, and a history. In essence, they established cultural practices that tied them to the Miami area and gave them a sense of ownership and identification with the places in which they lived (Connolly 2014; Rose 2015). This was especially true of the African Americans who were the descendants of slaves brought to the continental United States and had centuries-long historical connections to the southern United States.

Still, blacks in Miami were not satisfied to simply leave the racial status quo unchallenged. African Americans in Miami, with their long ties to the southern region, felt connected to the various black challenges to the white power base that were taking place throughout the south. Indeed, Miami’s blacks were active in this fight and had important civil rights fights that even predate those in other areas (Dunn 1997; Rose 2015; Shell-Weiss 2009). By the 1960s, African Americans were beginning to see the signs that their own efforts were bringing about profound changes. Perhaps blacks would gain the right to be treated with human dignity, to evade white brutality—to take a casual stroll on the beach.

Contending Forces: The Birth of Cuban Miami and Shifting Power Relations

As African Americans were mounting their fight for civil rights in Miami, Fidel Castro was establishing the Cuban Revolution in nearby Cuba. The Cuban Revolution, along with U.S. responses to it, would spur the large-scale migration of Cubans to the Miami area and forever change the face of Miami. As Raymond Mohl points out, the Cuban Revolution and the civil rights movement were “two powerful forces for change [that] not only coincided, but they collided with one another” (1990, 39).

After functioning as allies during World War II, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States began to worsen. The United States decided to take a stance of resisting Soviet expansion in the world and entered into an arms race with Russia as both nations sought to bolster its weaponry in case of the need to defend against one another. Meanwhile the United States always had interest in Cuba. From the early 1800s to the mid-1900s, Cuba was dependent on the United States for trade. The United States occupied Cuba between 1898 (after Cuba’s war of independence from Spain) and 1902. Later, while supporting the Batista regime in the mid-twentieth century, it held some political control over Cuba (Boswell and Curtis 1984; Soderlund 2003). In 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew the U.S.-backed rule of Batista and made Cuba the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere. It quickly aligned itself with the Soviet Union and against U.S. imperialist efforts. The United States responded under President Eisenhower with the breaking of all diplomatic ties, establishing the difficult relations that would continue into the twenty-first century (Boswell and Curtis 1984).

Via land reforms, the nationalization of businesses, and other policy changes, Castro stripped rich Cubans of much of their economic and political power (Boswell and Curtis 1984; García 1996). Thus, the first wave of Cuban refugees included landed elites, some of whom had supported the previous Batista regime and whose lives and livelihoods were threatened within the new regime (Pedraza-Bailey 1985). Lisandro Pérez estimates that between 1959 and 1962, a total of 200,000 families with children under eighteen years old arrived from Cuba (2001, 93). The second wave of Cuban immigration began in the fall of 1965 and lasted until 1973: approximately 5,000 people were retrieved by boat lift, and 260,000 were brought to the United States by plane (Grenier and Stepick 1992). This wave consisted mainly of the relatives of those who had arrived in the previous wave. A higher percentage of the second wave represented the “petit bourgeoisie,” or small business owners (Pedraza-Bailey 1985). Those who arrived during the first two waves are commonly thought of as the groups who established the (white) Miami exile community (Grenier and Pérez 2003).⁶ During the second wave, the United States instituted the Cuban Adjustment Act (1966), which stated that all newly arrived Cubans could become naturalized citizens (Pedraza 1996). President Lyndon B. Johnson promised the Cuban people that the United States would serve as a haven for them, beginning a unique relationship between the Cuban people and the United States. Significantly, the United States played a crucial role both in Cuba’s own politics before the rise of Fidel Castro and in creating the conditions encouraging Cubans fleeing the Castro regime to come to the United States.

Though many of the Cubans who first arrived were from the upper classes of Cuba, in the United States they took on jobs dramatically different from what they did before. People who had been teachers, lawyers, and doctors became cab drivers, janitors, and maintenance workers. Women who were not accustomed to being employed entered wage work in the tourism industry and manufacturing (García 1996; Shell-Weiss 2009, 176). The exiles settled southwest of the central business district in the area that became “Little Havana” and in other areas such as Hialeah, then a working-class white city (Aranda et al. 2014; García 1996). They hoped their stay in the United States would be short and that they would be able to help facilitate the overthrow of Castro and go right back (García 1996). However, the exiles also established roots in the United States and thrived in Miami.

The Cuban influx could not be ignored as it was “the single largest mass immigration to the United States in more than half a century, and the largest in Miami’s history” (Shell-Weiss 2009, 172). As the Cubans came in, the local government was under the imperative to find ways to incorporate them. Helping the Cubans was seen as an immediate need to help foreign policy and national security during the height of the Cold War (Shell-Weiss 2009). So arriving Cubans were welcomed with open arms at a time when long-resident African Americans fought to be recognized at all (Mohl 1990). This welcome, along with U.S. support of their anti-communism, meant Cuban exiles saw the United States as an ideal place of refuge, to which they came in large numbers. The U.S. government underscored its welcome of the Cubans with unparalleled aid to these political exiles for adjustment to life in the United States (Grenier and Stepick 1992; Stepick et al. 2003). Some of the types of aid they received included automatic legal status with a fast track to citizenship, occupational training, scholarships for higher education, low-interest loans, English-language classes, and hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to establish businesses (Aranda et al. 2014; García 1996; L. A. Pérez 2003).

As white political elites in Miami embraced the cause of Cuban exiles, they gave even less attention to the African American social justice efforts. This laid the groundwork for interethnic conflict. For example, on April 29, 1959, the newly established Greater Miami chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, a pivotal African-American civil rights group, staged a sit-in at two segregated restaurants on Flagler Street. Normally sit-ins like these would be the top story in the newspapers in the Miami press and even gain national attention. However, the sit-in efforts received little press in contrast to the continued influx of Cuban refugees. White employers added to the tension by championing the hiring of immigrants over African Americans. The extensive federal, state, and city efforts to find work for Cuban immigrants stood in contrast to rising rates of unemployment among African Americans and Puerto Ricans (Shell-Weiss 2009, 178). A new racial division seemed to be emerging in Miami—whites and Cubans (as honorary whites) against African American blacks.

But if Cubans seemed to be favored by whites, this favoritism was complicated—it was not pure good will on the part of whites toward Cubans. Industrialists and policymakers, driven by the desire to lower labor costs, maximize tourism profits, and reach untapped markets, saw Cubans as an exploitable and perhaps temporary labor force that would not get embroiled in battles for equality or better labor conditions. Hence whites could use “one vulnerable population [Cubans] to exploit several others.” The groups were placed in direct competition, and whites “ultimately stood to gain from eroding cross-ethnic alliances” (Shell-Weiss 2009, 181).

When Cubans first began to arrive, African Americans viewed them as possible allies. But the seeming political favoritism of Anglo elites, along with the subsequent economic and political gains that emerged for Cubans as they settled into the city, led to an increasing sense of rivalry between African Americans and the exiles. The feeling of blacks losing ground came from the idea not only of white favoritism and Cuban power but also of being displaced because of sheer numbers. Indeed, the onset of mass Cuban immigration in the 1960s would radically alter Miami demographics. There was a thirty-fold increase in Cubans in the area from the time right before the Cuban Revolution, when there were 20,000 Cubans in Miami, to the early 1980s, when the numbers had risen to 600,000 (Boswell and Curtis 1984, 71). In 1960, African Americans greatly outnumbered Cubans, but by 1980 there were more than twice as many Latinos as non-Latino blacks (see Figure 1).

Not only did Cubans come to outnumber African Americans, but generous governmental support for Cuban exiles helped them achieve economic, political, and cultural gains that African Americans had long struggled for unsuccessfully. The traditional trajectory of immigrant assimilation in the United States is understood this way: immigrants arrive and, in successive generations, lose their ethnic distinctiveness, becoming more like the mainstream culture (Gordon 1964; Park 1950). As Alex Stepick and his colleagues (2003) point out, though, Miami Cubans have begun to exercise assimilative power, meaning that, in Miami, acculturation went in reverse (146). Reverse acculturation occurs “when established residents self-consciously adopt some traits of the newcomer culture, [for instance], learning Spanish” (31). In just a few decades, Cubans would transform Miami into a place where Spanish was widely spoken, and Cuban-owned businesses, such as restaurants, supermarkets, and salons, proliferated. Cuban culture flavored every corner of the city with the welcoming smells of Cuban cuisine and café Cubano. The Miami Cuban contingent would also grow to be enormously powerful socially, economically, and politically, unlike migrants to other places (Grenier and Pérez 2003). Cubans began to consolidate power and influence in such a way that they in fact seemed to displace white Anglos as the ones in power in the city (Mohl 1990). The mainstream media celebrated their entrepreneurship as popular magazines such as Life, Fortune, and Newsweek offered them as proof of the storied direct link between hard work and the ability for all to achieve the American Dream, with little attention to the fact that U.S. aid helped launch their success (García 1996, 110).

The U.S. intervention in Cuba and Cuban immigration policy also encouraged a heightened sense of patriotism among Cuban Americans, and political differences would play a major role in African American–Cuban conflict. Over time, Miami Cubans established a tradition of vocal political involvement and advocacy for the concerns of Cuban Americans regarding U.S.–Cuba relations and immigration policy. Cuban American patriotism, based on fervent opposition to Castro and staunch support of the Republican Party, has been defined as “exile politics,” a primary unifying element for the Miami exile community (Stepick et al. 2003). In fact, as Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick note, the Golden Exiles, as the earliest arrivals fleeing the Castro regime were called, created a “moral community” that dictated that Cuban exiles must take on this political point of view (1993, 139). The staunch conservatism of the Cuban exile community and support of the Republican Party contrasted greatly with the political point of view of the Miami African American community, which has traditionally aligned itself with the Democratic Party. The strong political stance of the Cuban community and the clear affinity with the Republican Party meant Cubans would vote against measures supported by African Americans. Their political power has been a force to be reckoned with. When it became clear that the Cuban community could significantly influence the result of not just Floridian but also presidential elections, politicians became attuned to the community and their needs to advance their own political goals. Despite the ulterior motives of many Anglo politicians in currying Cuban favor, it is not surprising that some Cubans felt embraced by the United States and responded with patriotic allegiance. However, the United States’ prioritizing of the Cold War fight over local social justice concerns positioned “patriotic” Cuban Americans against “complaining” African Americans. As Melanie Shell-Weiss emphasizes, growing conflict between minority populations was caused neither by ethnic diversity nor by local dynamics alone; “federal intervention played a direct and prominent role” (2009, 182).

While U.S. Cold War priorities created conditions that made opposition between African Americans and Cuban Americans inevitable, it cannot be denied that some Cubans also held anti-black attitudes, were directly dismissive of African Americans, and looked down upon them (Aja 2016; López 2012). As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, Cuba has a history of colonization, slavery, and racism similar to that of the United States, and whites there also sought to maintain power through the denigration of blacks. Although Cubans who came to the United States in the first two waves were overwhelmingly white, Cubans are not racially homogenous, and a large percentage of Cubans on the island are black. The Cubans who came to the United States in the first waves were most likely to have directly benefited from black labor in Cuba. These Cubans likely brought anti-black attitudes with them to the United States (López 2010, 2012). Indeed, the view that Cubans are racists, and that some privileged Cubans abuse their power, plays a major role in African American resentment toward Miami Cubans (Mohl 1990). Miami’s Spanish-language press was often inattentive to the issues of the African American community, perpetuated a denial of Cuban racism, identified African Americans with crime, and supported the comparison of Cubans as hard-working, self-reliant, and family-oriented in contrast to blacks, who were perceived as being dependent on welfare and so on (Aja 2016; Grenier and Pérez 2003). Hence, as Cubans began to gain power in Miami, they came to be viewed by African Americans as a new (white) oppressor (Grenier and Stepick 2001, 156).

In his history of ethnic relations in Miami, Raymond Mohl (1990) provides as an example a Miami Times quote by a black columnist discussing the 1989 Miami riot (which occurred the year before the Mandela visit), a response to an incident of police brutality against a black resident. The unrest was in part blamed on Cubans. The columnist wrote, “The reality of Miami today and in the foreseeable future, is that the Cubans are the new masters in Miami. They should not be surprised when those who feel they have nothing to lose rise up against the new rulers” (Mohl 1990, 54). In his statements, the columnist exhibits the more overtly antagonistic views of members of the black community while seeking to bring attention to the often more subtle ways Cubans demonstrated racism toward blacks. But the emerging view that Cubans were somehow to blame for many of the problems African Americans faced offended many Cuban Americans. They saw African American problems as centuries old related to slavery, racism, and segregation and advanced the opinion that the newly arrived Cubans were being used as scapegoats (Mohl 1990, 55). As scholar Antonio López argues, Cuban exiles cannot be taken off the hook and should be held responsible for seeking to benefit from a white identity at African Americans’ expense (López 2012, 191). I agree with this wholeheartedly. At the same time (as López would likely agree), when analyzing Cuban–African American conflict, placing all the focus on Cuban exile attitudes would blind us to a very important part of the story—the ways the already entrenched black/white binary helped facilitate such attitudes and shaped the repercussions of these attitudes in the U.S. context.

Though demographics and power were shifting dramatically over time with the new Cuban migration, the historical “racialized institutional structures” put in place by the white Anglo power base lived on and were actively defended (Aranda et al. 2014). Though whites nationally were celebrating Cubans as the new “Horatio Algiers” (García 1996), the rapid change to Miami was alarming to many whites locally. With the large-scale migration from Cuba, in just a little over ten years Miami became one of the country’s largest immigrant cities (Shell-Weiss 2009, 7). By 1970, Miami had become a “city of immigrants,” with 40 percent of its residents foreign born (in comparison to only 12 percent in 1960), and was now “majority-minority” as together Latinos and African Americans outnumbered whites (Shell-Weiss 2009, 206–207). Although the old black/white divisions remained strong and foundational to race relations in the area, nativity, along with race and class, would polarize people (Shell-Weiss 2009). The area experienced substantial “white flight”; between 1970 and 1980, there were 30,000 fewer whites in Dade County (Boswell and Curtis 1984, 68; Shell-Weiss 2009). Whites also showed their contempt for Cuban immigrants in other ways, such as refusing to rent to Cuban apartment seekers, with apartment owners posting signs reading “No Cubans Allowed” (García, 1996, 29). In 1980, after the Cuban community was well established, local political leaders made an even clearer statement that they did not like the changes that were happening when they passed an anti-bilingual county referendum, which set off the English-only movements of the United States (Stepick et al. 2003, 99). The proposal sought to repeal the Bilingual-Bicultural Ordinance originally passed in 1973 and to prohibit the use of Metro Commission funds for programs that used any language other than English (García 1996).⁷ The proposal affirmed the white dominant assimilationist view that all newcomers should speak English. By 1980 Miami had become the “Cuban capital of the United States.” Anglos saw the transformations in the city as proof that Cubans refused to assimilate and were in fact unassimilable (García 1996, 89). Thus, just as Cubans began to consolidate economic, political, and social power in Miami, their threat to the white Anglo power base also began to expose their vulnerability as not-quite-white foreigners.

Racial Order and Worthy Citizenship in the Miami Scenario

As this chapter has illustrated thus far, racist forces in Miami imposed a strict separation between people placed within the categories of “African American” and “Cuban,” and between “black” and “white,” creating distinct categories despite their actual heterogeneity. A close look at Miami’s history demonstrates that despite the diversification of the population over time due to immigration, racialized structures remained intact as whites actively worked to maintain power. Coming from a country with its own black/white divisions, the largest migrant group, Cuban exiles, reinforced rather than disrupted the racial status quo. Yet, although they did not disrupt the black/white division, they did underscore a new division that was beginning to matter more and more in the U.S. nation as newer immigrants arriving from non-European countries retained their ethnic distinctiveness rather than following the traditional assimilation narrative. The white Anglo power base found this problematic because they felt the newcomers would ultimately be a threat to what they had defined as American culture. In this context, divisions between Cubans and African American ensued, a division the white Anglo establishment encouraged through foreign policy moves, through local business and hiring practices, and through the perpetuation of discourses deeming one group worthier of their access to the American Dream than the other group. As such, this chapter has argued that the conflict that emerged between African Americans and Cubans was not simply the natural result of two different groups living together but directly related to the ways African Americans and Cubans were actively positioned by the white power base within what Claire Jean Kim (2000) calls a “racial order”—a system of dominance.

In Kim’s notion of racial order, the positioning of groups within a racial hierarchy serves the purpose of maintaining white power by disciplining groups of color. Racial categories, she says, are reproduced relationally to other groups in a distinct (but dynamic and continuous) order, in a field structured by at least two axes: superior/inferior and insider/foreigner. Blacks and whites are major anchors, with whites on top and blacks at the bottom; incoming immigrants are positioned in relation to these anchors. Immigrants “are racially ‘triangulated’ both as inferior to whites and superior to blacks (in between black and white) and as permanently foreign and inassimilable (apart from black and white)” (Kim 2000, 16). Kim illustrates this in her important analysis of African American and Korean conflict in New York City during the Red Apple boycott of 1990. African American and Haitian activists boycotted Korean grocery stores after a physical altercation between a Korean female grocer and a Haitian female customer. The exact details of the altercation are confusing and disputed. Nevertheless, members of the black and Haitian communities felt discriminated against and targeted in the incident. After the incident, blacks were constructed in the press as irrational actors targeting “model minority” Koreans. Kim argues against such constructions, asserting that the tensions among these groups arose from both groups’ positioning: Asians in her study were positioned above blacks because of their economic and educational success in the United States. Because the black population as a whole is stereotyped as being like the poorest of these groups, the successes of the black middle class that are similar to those of immigrants are often erased. Nevertheless, Kim argues that the popular focus on immigrant success absolves the nation from its responsibility in African American disenfranchisement and allows the United States to blame poorer African Americans for their own “failures.” In effect, legitimate problems are erased by the focus on the successes of model immigrants.⁸ Still, immigrants aren’t clear winners here, as they are often simultaneously positioned as unassimilable outsiders when they retain aspects of their ethnic distinctiveness (such as the languages they spoke in their country of origin). Because these ethnic qualities are seen as incongruent with being “American,” these immigrants never get to be fully “American.” Regardless of whether immigrant groups are positioned as unassimilable outsiders or as superior to blacks, whites remain neutral or normative in this racial order. The ability for whites to remain neutral in instances of interethnic conflict is related to what Kim terms “racial power,” the fact that the racial status quo tends to reproduce itself in ways that maintain white dominance atop the social hierarchy (2000, 2).

In the Miami scenario, African Americans and Cuban Americans were placed within the racial order by the white establishment in ways that maintained crucial racializing binary frames that have been essential for maintaining white dominance. It is these racializing binary frames that I argue compose worthy citizenship. Within the notion of worthy citizenship, groups are deemed more deserving of citizenship or national belonging by the extent to which they can prove that they conform to “proper” Anglo, middle-class, moral standards. I identify three main overarching racializing frames that groups working to position themselves more favorably within the nation may draw upon: (1) the black/white frame, the seemingly antiquated primary frame that still exists today and that most overtly reinscribes biological race; (2) the good/bad immigrant frame in which immigrant groups can make claim to the nation on the basis of their “proper” morality; and (3) the native/foreigner dichotomy, in which groups claim to be more entitled to citizenship on the grounds that their group has a longer history of time or investment in being included in the United States. These frames are adapted from the racial ideologies that have justified the positioning of whites above other groups within a racial hierarchy. These frames, which govern interethnic conflict, can be distinct at times but are more often overlapping and interconnected in their work of maintaining dominance.

Conclusion

Miami has a racial history that is distinctive from other areas of the country but not entirely unique. Like most other southern states and arguably the nation as a whole, the city was founded by white settlers whose powerful positioning relied on the subjugation of blacks. During the civil rights era and thereafter, the city became increasingly diverse, preempting the patterns of increased migration and diversity that would be seen across the country. What is most unique about Miami is that one of those immigrant groups, Cubans, managed to become immensely powerful unlike post-1965 immigrants to other cities. The fact that they were invited to the United States as refugees and were provided unprecedented aid not offered to other migrants allowed them to gain a “model status” and strengthened their desire to become patriotically aligned with the United States and against the ruler of the nation they left. Moreover, coming from a country where they were considered white and where blacks are also denigrated, they brought with them already entrenched ideas about the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness. These distinctive qualities intensified divisions that would ensue between African Americans, still fighting for their place within the U.S. nation, and the Cuban newcomers. Yet, the dynamics of interethnic conflict, particularly between a minority group that sees itself as “native” to the United States, such as African Americans, and Spanish-speaking newcomers, are quite similar in other U.S. cities where groups also adopt binary racializing frames of reference to position one group above another. Because of the constant bombardment of the white racial frame, people of color can internalize and operate from the dominant frame “using the language, stereotyping, imaging, or emotions of that white racial frame” (Feagin 2010, 190). The tenuous hold on an American identity felt by groups of color at times gives rise to the need for them to fight to (re)gain their standing. I utilize the concept of “worthy citizenship” to describe not only the desires of groups of color to become “true” Americans but also the ways excluding others in the process seems necessary for such inclusion. As such, despite the diminished presence of white people in Miami over time, and in many of the nation’s cities currently, white Anglo elites and white supremacist ideologies continue to play a central role in supporting a politics of interethnic division.

The Miami situation provides an illustration of why and how this all plays out. By pointing out the uses of binary racializing frames by African Americans and generations of Cuban immigrants in Miami, I seek to illuminate their concerns about jobs, family, social standing, and, ultimately, their quest for human dignity. I contend that underneath antagonistic attitudes between “minority” groups lays a critique of the continued disenfranchisement of people of color. When we read between the lines, we discover a challenge to the discourses that claim Americanness is exclusive to whites and illuminate the need for a broader picture of the way racism is working today, particularly how it works in communities where Anglos are the minority and the enemy is an “other” racialized group. By exposing the fallacy of worthy citizenship, the analysis contributes to the reformulation of ideas about what qualifies as “belonging” or being accepted as part of the nation.

In the coming chapters, we will gain a closer look at how marginalized groups may draw upon the racial binaries of worthy citizenship in attempt to place themselves in positions of power. But we also see how these same groups, as well as newcomers that would come on the scene, such as two new waves of Cuban immigrants as well as Haitian refugees, illuminate the fallacy of racial binaries and exclusionary politics. In Chapter 2, I begin with a look at Cuban American reactions to the 1980 Mariel exodus, a migration wave from Cuba that would dramatically challenge the divisions that had been set up between African Americans and Cubans. The exodus would also illustrate how racial identities taken to be distinct are actually much more complex. The Mariel Cubans would differ from previous Cuban waves because a much higher percentage of them were black. The Mariel Cubans were also different from previous waves in that rather than being regarded as anti-communist heroes, they were more immediately stigmatized in the U.S. press and public. This new Cuban stigma derived both from Castro’s depiction of the Mariel refugees as criminals and from their blackness. In the face of this new stigma, Cuban Americans grappled with threats to their status as model anti-communist heroes. As exile Cubans attempted to regain their status, they deployed U.S.-based ideals of worthy citizenship, intersecting with a Cuban white/black racial dynamic, in an attempt to distinguish “good immigrant” Marielitos from the “bad” ones. Although Cuban Americans were less overt in pitting themselves against African Americans, their reaffirmation of the black/white narrative through strategies of dissociation from blackness promoted (or perpetuated) ideologies that would undergird tensions between African Americans and Cubans, black and white Cubans, and Cuban immigrant cohorts. Yet the Afro-Cubans who were arriving in the Mariel wave presented a challenge to the use of “race” by Cuban Americans to make claims to the nation. By including Afro-Cuban voices, Chapter 2 will allow a look into how Afro-Latino positionality complicated notions of blackness for Cuban Americans and destabilized the idea that multiple racial identities cannot coexist (Jiménez Román and Flores 2010, 10; Rivera-Rideau et al. 2016, 11). Moreover, the chapter’s focus on Afro-Cuban immigrants provides a view into how Afro-Cubans interpret the effects of the antagonistic racial discourses that were circulating in their daily lives.