Week 7: Migration, Mobility & Borders: Reading Response

Allison Brown HIST 5400: Migration, Mobility & Borders Dr. Hampton October 6, 2022 Reading Response - Week 7 Capó’sWelcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (2017) discusses the cultural and political existence of Miami in the early 1900s. Miami as this “Fairyland” as defined by Capó was a “a marketing strategy crafted by urban boosters, meant different things to a diverse group of people, its dominant sense was that of a place where leisure and entertainment were central to every aspect of life … where one could escape the busy life of a big industrialized city, indulge in paradise, and live out a fantasy.”1 This perception of the city as a “Fairyland” and retreat was founded in the development of the city as an exotic location, Caribbean like, highly-racialized, sexually liberated, mythological place. In reality, Miami during these periods was highly segregated by race and class, and debates over sexual expression and prostitution persisted as Miami found its identity by balancing itself as a tourist destination and modern American city. At the cornerstone of Miami’s success as a tourist destination, “from Miami’s earliest days, urban planners designed the area by consolidating the city’s black neighborhoods with its red-light district. Miami’s sexual economy proved critical to the nascent city’s success.”2 As Capó later states as well, “sexually transgressive women made fairyland work” as sex work 3 was a driving factor in increased tourism for the Caribbean/Cuba like city in the US. Focusing on how Miami became the “Fairyland” it was portrayed to for tourist purposes via a “mental geography”, the staging of Miami ultimately “mandated gender, sexual, and racial forms of transgression.”4 Underlying this perception of Miami and how it was able to exist in ways as a vacationutopia outside the cultural and political norms of the US was white supremacy and a not so distant colonial past. Central to this presentation for tourists in their “service to the white tourist industry, black and brown bodies often served as “props” on the city stage, making the landscape more desirable to a 1 Julio Capó Jr., Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940 (UNC Press, 2017), pg. 14 2 pg. 15 3 pg. 18 4 pg. 135 5 moneyed white clientele.” Fairyland’s promotion to white and wealthy tourists relied on the city’s ability to recreate the colonial past. This was also on display with performance tourism with “colonial fetishization regularly [playing] out when white tourists flocked to the Seminole Indian Village in Miami, where they watched indigenous peoples wrestle “huge, man-killing alligators.” So popular was this “spectacle tourism” that Seminoles took the show on the road, attracting visitors across the country. The 6 spectacle of seeing both the Seminoles and alligators colonized proved most profitable.” Although distinct from American Indian pageant performances as discussed in weeks prior with Phillips’ Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History (2021), a comparison can be drawn on “salvage tourism” and how perceptions of an exotic or salvage past build into the narrative 7 for tourism and other relevant industries as a form of economic reproduction. Capó, when discussing the tourist appeal of Miami to US citizens, also weighs international situation, such as the Cuban government’s impact on tourism as well as prohibition, further highlighting how Miami was able to occupy a unique space in the US as a exotic, Carribean-like location. Again central to Cuba’s tourism industry was sexual deviance and prostitution, but also allowed white and wealthy tourists to feel as though they were ‘slumming’, “Travel to places like Havana was also a transnational form of slumming, whereby wealthy white visitors explored parts of the Caribbean they deemed exotic and whose people they determined were sexually available. For U.S. Americans, travel to Cuba proved risky enough for a dangerous and titillating experience beyond the confines of their 8 traditional social and cultural barriers.” By being presented with the alternate to the white, wealthy existence of these individuals in their own sectors of society, these forms of tourism in Cuba and Miami in my opinion only reinforced stereotypes of an underdeveloped Caribbean, racially unaware, and sexually deviant population. The harms of continually perpetuating these understandings of the region is 5 pg. 135 6 pg. 138 7 Katrina M. Philipps, Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) 8 pg. 140 the cost it came at for marginalized populations, sex workers, and those with queer identities. The impacts of which can still be seen today in Miami. Discussion Questions 1. Capó writes, “While Miami and its intimate ties with the Caribbean were marketed as fairyland for a white, moneyed, and modern clientele, most of the Miami area’s black, ethnic, and workingclass people lived on the outskirts of a city where they disproportionately endured violence, poverty, and discrimination” (146) a. In what ways do we see Miami segregated by these lines? b. Is there a similar example in US-Latin American history where we see a similar division of race and labor in terms of poverty and discrimination? 2. Does the impression of Miami as an exotic, Carribean-like, sexually free tourist destination still exist today? 3. Capó continually refers to Miami’s sexual geography and cultural politics. How do these terms take form in the text and shape the historiography of the work?