Tales of Two Americas

by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)

  “We want to get away from the Miami kind. They’re the ones taking over.”

  Then each man takes his turn at the counter, ordering a dozen empanadas to go.

  ■ ■

  After eight days at sea, twenty-four Cuban migrants making their way to Florida shores on a shabby vessel spot the coast guard in their wake. They throw themselves into the water and climb the American Shoal Lighthouse six miles off the coast of Sugarloaf Key, hoping it will amount to having touched dry land. It takes an entire day for officials to coax the Cubans off the red iron lighthouse rails. They are detained for a month until a judge rules that the lighthouse, despite its name, does not count as U.S. soil. The Cubans will be repatriated and will likely serve prison sentences for having fled their island.

  The Magic City.

  La Puerta de las Américas.

  The Capital of Latin America.

  ■ ■

  The rainbowed Brickell Avenue high-rises, made as famous as the flamingos in the opening credits of Miami Vice, are now tiny folds in a much taller and more congested panorama of mirrored towers that glisten like machetes; the Miami that cocaine and money laundering built.

  Brickell Avenue snakes into Biscayne Boulevard, cutting through downtown, a place everyone but the diamond and drug dealers used to avoid, now lined with new condos and chic restaurants, with a view of the restored waterfront parks, unfolding along the bay into urban pockets where longtime residents have been edged out by developers and hiked rents, christened with catchy names and written about in travel magazines as the trendy new neighborhoods to explore.

  ■ ■

  Far down Biscayne, in a sleepy subdivision built along the Intracoastal, your friends Joe and Nicole live in a small stucco house with a red-shingle Spanish roof. Their next-door neighbors recently moved out so their baby could pursue a career in toddler modeling in Atlanta. A single guy in his forties moved in a few weeks later.

  You all assume he’s a bachelor because of the different girls coming to the house. Young, beautiful. Some in fancy cars. Others dropped off. There is a girl who arrives on a skateboard. Another, on her own Ducati.

  One day while barbecuing in the backyard, Joe decides the neighborly thing is to invite the bachelor over.

  The guy arrives and drinks tequilas around the patio table till long after dark.

  At one point he leans over to you and says, “I hear you’re Colombian. I’ve got a couple of Colombian girls working for me. They’re the best. Second only to the Russians.”

  You ask what sort of business he’s in.

  “Film production.”

  “What kind of films?”

  “Well, not really films, per se. More like video production. For the Internet.”

  Another tequila and the guy admits he’s running a porn studio out of his house. Each bedroom outfitted with lights and cameras operated from a central control room. The girls perform for subscription Internet channels. Most have loyal followings and do private shows, sometimes alone, sometimes with each other.

  “Where do you find these girls?” is all you think to ask.

  “It’s easy. One girl tells another. I’ve got a waitlist thirty girls deep.”

  He pats your hand as if to assure you.

  “Believe me, it’s all perfectly legal. I don’t hire minors. I leave that to the guys up in Fort Lauderdale.”

  ■ ■

  In the mailroom of your apartment building, you say hello to another resident checking her box near yours. She’s the type who complains about anything. The weather. The color of the paint on the walls. A speck of lint on the lobby floor. “This country is screwed,” she always says, “especially Florida.” She kicks herself every day for moving down from Delaware twenty years ago and constantly threatens to go back.

  “How’s work?” you say.

  She’s a masseuse and tells you her least favorite clients are the “Latins” because they make her use the service entrance when entering their homes—the same door meant for the maids, cooks, and plumbers.

  “Can you imagine?” she says, horror streaked across her face. “They treat me like a servant. They don’t even want me to walk in the front door. They act like they own this city. They’re so entitled. They’ve ruined Miami, turning it into their own colony.”

  “Now you know how it feels,” you say, dropping your junk mail in the garbage.

  Your neighbor stares at you, her pale cheeks flushed with anger, but says nothing in response and walks away.

  ■ ■

  There’s a saying locals throw around:

  The best thing about Miami is how close it is to the United States.

  ■ ■

  They come from other cities and from other countries, looking for paradise by the sea; looking to be South Beach models, to marry rich and become queens of Star Island, but instead find themselves in the republic of pills and powders and paid sex.

  You see them standing outside of hotel lobbies on Collins Avenue, dressed in designer clothes, balanced on sharp high heels. Legs tanned and shiny. Breasts large and fake. You see tourist men come out of the building to look for a girl to take in to the hotel bar, or up to a room. You see red rented Ferraris pull up to the curb and the women step over to them casually, as if the man were just asking for directions, and then climb into the passenger seat. He doesn’t even open the door for her.

  You see them walking along Biscayne Boulevard, even in parts the city has worked so hard to clean up. You see them outside of the Wonderland strip club on Seventy-Ninth, ignored by cops patrolling the area, and among the homeless and stray dogs in the concrete yards beneath I-95 that used to hold the Mariel refugee tent city.

  You see them standing outside the motels among teenagers smoking cigarettes and working as lookouts for drug dealers. You see them wandering the few vacant lots still left along the bay that haven’t yet been bulldozed and flattened to make room for more skyscrapers; the ones where body parts often wash up—a hand, a foot, even a whole leg, that will remain forever unidentified.

  ■ ■

  You knew one of these girls once. A white Texan named Toni who worked a five-block stretch on lower Biscayne where your boyfriend at the time lived with his bandmates. She was always high and would get in the car of any guy who whistled her way, but always said hello and watched after you when you walked alone to your car late at night.

  “This city’s not safe for nice girls like you and me,” she used to say.

  One day her father came from Dallas to collect her. Everyone in the neighborhood heard her shouting that she didn’t want to leave. You and your boyfriend watched from the second-floor window as she fell to her knees on the sidewalk and cried. But then her father scooped her up, embraced her long, and she let him take her home.

  ■ ■

  A dozen Cuban migrants land on the beach near your apartment building. They arrive in a motorless wooden boat loaded with broken paddles, empty water jugs, and a torn plastic sheet they used as a sail during their two weeks at sea. They are sunburned and filthy, thin, their faces crusted with sea salt. A mob of beachgoers gather on the sand around them, welcoming them to Miami, offering the migrants their sunglasses, hats, towels, and shirts with which to cover their charred shoulders; water and beers from their coolers, until the police arrive to process them for amnesty, and release them to their relatives.

  La Ciudad Mágica.

  La Ciudad del Sol.

  Cuba con Coca-Cola.

  ■ ■

  Down U.S.-1, past the waterfront mansions of Coco Plum and Gables by the Sea, the sprawling estates and ranches of Pinecrest, a few turns off the highway onto a narrow dusty road, you find people selling fruit out of tin shacks; papayas the size of footballs, guanabana, carambola, and unbruised mangos, perfectly ripe, erupting with nectar.

  Here you will drink strai
ght from the coconut while, a few yards down, another vendor offers barbecued iguana—the same ones they sell in pet stores that owners grow bored of and release to the wild, and people in the suburbs pay to have removed from their property—or wild hog, alligator, and diced python, served with hot sauce and rice, freshly hunted down in the Everglades.

  Out here, you can pick out a pig from a corral and they’ll slaughter it right in front of you, ready to take home, head and all, to roast for all your friends in your caja china; or you can whisper your request to a guy who knows another guy, and in a few minutes find someone to sell you horsemeat.

  Out here you can watch a live dogfight, buy a peacock to take home and keep in your backyard to protect you from the evil eye of your enemies, have your illnesses cured by the polvos of a curandero, and a spell cast by a brujo so you’ll be lucky in money and in love.

  Nobody will ever know you were here.

  ■ ■

  The shrine to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre sits on Biscayne Bay, with its own replica of the Havana malecón. Elderly people are bussed in daily from retirement communities and senior centers; families come together in pilgrimage from all over the state. Here, people gather to pray to Cuba’s patron saint, and to leave sunflowers for her other face, the orisha Ochún.

  A year ago, on a day like any other, as the viejitos sat before the altar praying for freedom from Fidel, as they often do, President Obama entered the church unannounced, walked down the aisle, and knelt beside the faithful in the pews.

  Your friend Alejandro’s grandmother was there.

  She said it was like seeing Jesucristo himself.

  Alejo was born in Cuba and spent three months in a Guantanamo refugee camp before his family received permission to enter the United States. His father worked as a dishwasher in Sweetwater. His mother sold watermelons at the intersection of Eighty-Seventh Avenue and Coral Way. He’s a lawyer now and plans on running for a public office.

  “Why do you think Obama came that day?” he says. “It’s because every politician knows that without the abuelos of Miami in your pocket, you won’t make it to the corner.”

  He says there are other major Latino cities. Los Angeles. Houston, San Diego. Even Chicago and New York. But none like Miami, where a national minority is the ruling majority, with 67 percent of the population, where the money and the political power sit firmly in Latino hands.

  “Miami is the city of the future,” Alejo says, “and in a few years, the rest of the country will finally catch up.”

  ■ ■

  Your Miami begins in New Jersey where you were raised far from the ocean in an Anglo suburb near woods and mountains, speaking Spanish among family and close friends, while outside your home, classmates and townspeople mocked the color of your skin and your parents’ accents, asking with suspicion how they managed to come to this country, and they’d answer that they came on a jet plane.

  Your only community was your family. From the world beyond your tíos and primos, you were made to understand, before you could spell your own name, that even if you were born in this country, even if you speak the language, you will always be an outsider; this country will never belong to you.

  Your Miami begins in New York, where you moved to at eighteen, lived in different downtown apartments and tried on different lives for more than a decade before finally deciding to leave.

  Your Miami begins in the Andean highlands, across the mountainous cordillera, low in the valleys of the Río Cauca, and deep in the wetlands of the Orinoco; before Bolívar, before the conquest, before Colombia was Colombia, when you were Muisca and spoke Chibcha; and before that, it begins across the Atlantic, on the northern coast of Africa.

  Your Miami begins in Puerto Rico, where your older brother was born, and before that, it begins in the other América, where your father worked since age fourteen to support his family of eleven in Medellín; where your parents married in a chilly church in Bogotá; your Miami begins in Colombia, the country your parents loved but left, like so many others, so you, the child they did not yet know they would have, might have a chance at something more.

  ■ ■

  After they settled in the United States, as soon as they could afford it, your father took your mother on vacation to Miami. There is a photograph of her leaning on a crooked palm tree in the last pink hour before sunset. She stares at your father, who holds the camera. She is barely twenty-two. Her long hair colored a rusty red, still pearl-skinned from the lifelong overcast of Bogotá despite her indigenous blood.

  There is a picture of you holding your father’s hand a decade later; you, a child of two or three years old. Your mother took the photograph from the beach while your father led you into the shallow and flat edge of the ocean. He stands above you like a tower; you, in your red gingham baby bikini. They tell you that you hated the ocean when you first felt it on your skin. You tried to stomp and slap it away. You cried and reached for firm land. But then something changed and you began to swim on your own before you could speak full sentences. And then they couldn’t pull you out of the water.

  As you grew older, despite the years you spent in other cities, feeling their claim on you, you knew Miami would one day be your home, at least for a little while.

  You are not a refugee, but here in Miami you believe you have found a sort of refuge.

  ■ ■

  You walk along a nature trail in one of the city’s spectacular ecological reserves, canopied with thick banyans and mangroves lining a lagoon. As you pass him standing on the edge of the trail, an old man with a thick belly and a T-shirt crescented with pit stains calls you over to him and points out a fat, furry golden weaver, what locals call “lighting spiders,” centered on a web shining like glass in the fractured sunlight.

  “That is one big spider,” you say.

  “I used to practice shooting on them when I was a kid. Till I got bitten by one and my hand swelled so much the skin split like a banana peel.”

  He misses the old Miami, he says, when it was vast and empty, and you could walk for miles from what’s now the Palmetto Expressway to Dinner Key and not run into a soul.

  “Now it’s crazy and crowded and full of foreigners. It’s like watching your first love turn into a junkie and finding her begging for pennies under the highway.”

  You tell him you still think there’s a lot of beauty to Miami. Just look around.

  “You didn’t grow up around here. I can tell.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t. But I’ve lived here for twelve years so far.”

  “You’re real brown. How’d you learn to speak English so good?”

  You look back at the spider and then at the man, tell him to have a nice day, continue on your way down the trail, leaving him alone by the trees.

  The man calls after you.

  “You watch out for those big spiders, girl. Miami is dangerous territory. Remember, there are people like me out there.”

  American Arithmetic

  Native Americans make up less than

  one percent of the population of America.

  0.8 percent of 100 percent.

  O, mine efficient country.

  I do not remember the days before America—

  I do not remember the days when we were all here.

  Police kill Native Americans more

  than any other race. Race is a funny word.

  Race implies someone will win,

  implies I have as good a chance of winning as—

  We all know who wins a race that isn’t a race.

  Native Americans make up 1.9 percent of all

  police killings, higher than any race,

  and we exist as .8 percent of all Americans.

  Sometimes race means run.

  I’m not good at math—can you blame me?

  I’ve had an American educa
tion.

  We are Americans, and we are less than 1 percent

  of Americans. We do a better job of dying

  by police than we do existing.

  When we are dying, who should we call?

  The police? Or our senator?

  At the National Museum of the American Indian,

  68 percent of the collection is from the U.S.

  I am doing my best to not become a museum

  of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.

  I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.

  In an American city of one hundred people,

  I am Native American—less than one, less than

  whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction

  of a body, let’s say I am only a hand—

  and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover,

  I disappear completely.

  —Natalie Diaz

  THE WORTHLESS SERVANT

  Ann Patchett

  IN THE MIDDLE of June in Nashville, a few days before the summer became unendurably hot, I was in the car with Charlie Strobel, driving out toward the river. To grow up Catholic in Nashville is to know at least some of the members of the Strobel family, and long before Charlie and I became friends, I knew the stories of what he had accomplished, and what he had lost. We were on our way to the Stadium Inn to visit some homeless men who were about to get their own apartment, and while he drove, Charlie told me a story about Father Dan Richardson. Father Dan was the priest at Assumption, the North Nashville parish in the poor neighborhood where Charlie grew up. It was not too far from where we were headed now.

  “Father Dan was a father figure to me,” Charlie said, his own father having died when he was four. “We lived down the street from the church, and by the time I was in the third or fourth grade, I was an acolyte.”

  Assumption was a parish with an older congregation, and Charlie remembered the funerals coming one after the other. For every funeral, Father Dan gave the exact same homily. “We knew it word for word. We could mouth it along behind him,” Charlie said, and though he is sixty-nine now, a good distance from his altar boy self, he begins the recitation: “Father Dan would say, ‘We’re on this earth to get ready to die. And when we die, God’s not going to say, “Charlie (Ann, Sally, John, fill-in-the-blank), what did you do for a living? How much money did you make? How many houses did you have?” God is only going to ask us two questions: “Did you love me?” and “Did you love your neighbor?” And we can imagine that Charlie (Ann, Sally, John, fill-in-the-blank) will answer truthfully, saying, “Yes, Lord, You know I loved you. You know I loved my neighbor.” And then God will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Now enter into the kingdom of heaven.”’” Charlie smiled at the thought of it. “He nailed it every single time. He had this soft voice, and his cadence was perfect. Even though I knew exactly what was coming, it never failed to grab me. It was sad, especially if I knew the person who had died, but I never heard it as anything but a positive and hopeful message. We come from God, we return to God, so death was never frightening.”