ABSTRACT
FOR THOSE RESIDENTS OF SOUTH FLORIDA who still thought of the area as a resort, 1989 began badly, very badly. The worst seemed to be happening all over again. Immigrants, more Spanish-speaking ones, were rolling into the area. At the end of 1988, the U.S.-supported Contra war was winding down, and thousands of Nicaraguans began flowing up through Guatemala and Mexico to Texas and on to Miami. The stream of new immigrants swelled through the last months of 1988 until, at the beginning of 1989, it became a flood. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials estimated that as many as three hundred refugees a week had been settling in Dade County since the summer of 1988. 1 At the beginning of 1989, Greyhound assigned special buses to run continuously between the Texas-Mexico border and South Florida. In the second week of January 1989, ten buses arrived in Miami on one day alone. 2
