Bienvenido a Miami*

Oh comrades, dearest comrades! I have now lived in Miami for just over a month. What follows are the three most distinct (if entirely non-scholarly, anecdotally-based, wholly subjective, and only initial) impressions I have of this curious, sometimes brutal, sometimes astoundingly beautiful city.

As a woman of the West, born in the desert, whose baseline phenomenological landscape is one in which foliage is sparse and sunset reds and browns glow through the evening, the first thing that struck me about Miami was the plant life. Everywhere you go these massive, sinewy, insanely green and lush trees and bushes reach their leafy arms in all directions. There are flowering things, too, that might be something else entirely (and that look, certainly, as though they’ve grown underwater). This ubiquitous flora sends its various vines dripping down. It shakes off its warm winter rain collections onto the streets below. One feels sometimes, walking among such creaturely greenery, like civilization, infrastructure, and all the stuff of urban life, is teetering very near the edge of its annihilation at the hands of the hungry jungle upon which it was built. It is amazing. And sometimes terrifying.

Equally astounding is the linguistic diversity. It would be very difficult indeed to get through a day wandering around the city without hearing at least 3 languages. More if you could trace the incredible and dynamic shifts between the regional dialects of Spanish. But while this is, it seems, a Latin American more than a U.S. American city, Spanish is by no means comfortably holding an aural monopoly. Haitian creole, Portuguese, French, German, Italian… They combine in busy bars and restaurants, and among the crowds on Miami’s beaches, to make a cosmopolitan cacophony that sounds, if you’re in the right mood, like a strange, avant-garde piece of music.

Finally: the sprawl. I have written in the past of the potentialities (both positive and negative) of urban sprawl, but my time in Los Angeles did not prepare me for the bizarre machinations of sprawl as they exist in Miami. The way the city grew into and around its suburban and pre-urban enclaves and (from what I understand) its byzantine and likely corrupt collection of development policies and politics means that infrastructure is clogged. Cars are privileged while pedestrians and bikers and public transit riders are largely ignored. The arterial Route 1, off of which I live, is a hellish parking lot that I think I would be willing to claim is worse than Los Angeles’s infamous 405.

There is much more, I hope, I will soon write about the complex of neighborhoods and their particularities. For now, these three observations of the so-called Magic City will have to suffice. It is a jungle of both plant and automotive life, and of linguistic acrobatics. Miami is proving to be, if nothing else, fascinating.

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*When one is moving to Miami, one learns with terrifying quickness that Will Smith’s 1998 hit single “Miami” is the most salient cultural reference to the city (at least among my generation) for many, many people. One makes this deeply upsetting realization when one is forced to listen to many of one’s friends and loved ones sing the chorus again and again and again. The damage Mr. Smith did to Miami’s global reputation cannot be calculated.