Queers and Competing Tourist Markets in Miami and the Caribbean, 1920-1940

• In Event: Queers, Laughs, Jabs, and Visitas: Exploring New Directions in Cuban-American Studies

Abstract

Incorporated as a city in 1896, Miami is a relatively “new” urban space that has historically been shaped by the Caribbean. By the 1920s, the tentacles of U.S. imperialism ensured that racialized sex tourism in Cuba and the Bahamas became central to Miami’s own success. This work, extracted from the author’s forthcoming book Welcome to Fairyland (University of North Carolina Press), reveals how Miami’s entrenched relationship to the Caribbean—and with Cuba, in particular—provides a necessary transnational view of Prohibition-era culture and politics and the uneasy urban battles that ensued upon repeal. These proved to be two key phenomena to the development of queer cultures and networks. Indeed, these and several other transnational tensions nudged Miami towards becoming a “wide-open town,” a status that allowed queers to carve out distinct spaces in the city, particularly during peak season. Like Miami’s “exotic” connections to the Caribbean, queers made the tourist economy work, staffing the service industry and as physical representations of the fantasy and transgression urban boosters marketed; keenly designed as alternatives or supplements to what cities like Havana offered North American tourists.

Author

• Julio Capo, University of Massachusetts at Amherst