Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Miami Model

There is no place better than Miami to begin reflecting upon the relations between the Latin American countries and the United States. For what 30 years ago was a sleepy, mid-sized American town, populated largely by vacationers and the elderly retired, has become one of the most powerful metropolitan centers of the North American continent. Any visitor to the city immediately discovers that in addition to the gangsters, drug-runners, and exiles the movies and TV have taught him to expect, Miami also features a constellation of bright lights, a forest of skyscrapers, a maze of superhighways, new industries, a succession of trade shows—in sum, an entire world that by force of sheer effort has established its place in the vanguard of modernity.

But Miami has also become something much more than that: the point where two utterly different worlds meet and produce an unexpected symbiosis. While not wholly without tensions or an occasional incident, nonetheless it is in Miami that “Hispanics” and “Anglos” have finally come to understand one another and work together.

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