A Tale of Two Cities

Any discussion of Miami is really a discussion about two different Miamis: “a perky engine of commerce fueled by condominiums and the celebrity machine of South Beach, and … the people of Liberty City, Overtown, Model City, and Little Haiti, hard-scrabble neighborhoods in America’s poorest city” (Austin 2006: Introduction). Analysis of 2000 census data showed growth in the number of low-income and high-income residents but a decline in the number of middle-income residents, leading some to characterize Miami as a city without a middle class (The Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy 2003). Miami consistently ranks as one of the poorest (in some years, the poorest) large cities in the United States while at the same time housing some of the wealthiest residential enclaves in the country. In some instances mapping onto these divisions between rich and poor, and in some instances cutting across them, are divisions along racial and ethnic lines. Over the past forty years, Miami has experienced an enormous demographic shift from a metropolitan area that was 80 percent non-hispanic white in 1960 to a metropolitan area that is 57 percent Hispanic, 19 percent non-hispanic black, and 21 percent non-hispanic white in 2000 (Warren and Moreno 2003: 286). The city of Miami is 67 percent Hispanic as of the 2000 census (U.S. Bureau of the Census). ¹ Portes and Stepick (1993: 8) describe the impact of this population shift as “acculturation in reverse—a process by which foreign customs, institutions, and language are diffused within the native population.” Miami became a Latin city, in a way that other cities with large Hispanic populations (like Los Angeles or New York) have not.