Tourism and the Hispanicization of race in Jim Crow Miami, 1945-1965

This article examines how Miami's significant presence of Anglo Caribbean blacks and Spanish-speaking tourists critically influenced the evolution of race relations before and after the watershed 1959 Cuban Revolution. The convergence of people from the American South and North, the Caribbean, and Latin America created a border culture in a city where the influx of Bahamian blacks and Spanish-speakers, especially tourists, had begun to alter the racial landscape. To be sure, Miami had many parallels with other parts of the South in regard to how blackness was understood and enforced by whites during the first half of the twentieth century. However, I argue that the city's post-WWII meteoric tourist growth, along with its emergence as a burgeoning Pan-American metropolis, complicated the traditional southern black-white dichotomy. The purchasing power of Spanish-speaking visitors during the postwar era transformed a tourist economy that had traditionally catered to primarily wealthy white transplanted Northerners. This significant change to the city's tourist industry significantly influenced white civic leaders' decision to occasionally modify Jim Crow practices for Latin American vacationers. In effect, Miami's early Latinization had a profound impact on the established racial order as speaking Spanish became a form of currency that benefited Spanish-speaking tourists—even those of African descent. Paradoxically, this ostensibly peculiar racial climate aided the local struggle by highlighting the idiosyncrasies of Jim Crow while perpetuating the second-class status of native-born blacks.