ABSTRACT
The developers and hoteliers who built Miami at the turn of the twentieth century attracted new residents and tourists by mixing faux ‘Spanish’ architecture and lush tropical vegetation to create a tropicalized (Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman 1997) ‘playground city’. It was a place imbued with traits and images of sensuality, heat and foreignness that are linked in the popular imaginary with the Tropics and are associated in Western thought with notions of exotic Otherness. By the end of the century, their city had become a regional trade and financial centre as well as a gateway for immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America. Ironically, despite Miami’s ‘Latin Americanization’, to borrow Mike Davis’s (2000) phrase, tourism boosters today are selling a less tropicalized image of the city than the one sold earlier in the twentieth century. Rather than highlighting Miami’s Caribbean and Latino neighbourhoods and cultures, they emphasize its ‘cosmopolitan sophistication’, modern downtown skyline, restored Art Deco hotels and world-class shopping centres. In fact, the workingclass immigrants who give the city its contemporary ‘tropical rhythm’ – and on whose labour the tourism industry depends – are mostly left out of the image marketed to tourists.
