I first moved to Little Havana from Washington, DC in 2006. A job was waiting for me in Little Havana. I had been hired as director of the neighborhood’s monthly arts festival, Viernes Culturales (Cultural Fridays).
I’d left behind a burgeoning consulting business. In DC, I had advised clients on how to advance racial equity and foster inclusive public engagement in projects related to land use, community development and the arts. I had developed plans for inclusive community engagement in urban planning and transportation projects, and had proposed DC’s first convening aimed at increasing the participation of DC’s Latinx community in land use decision-making. My equity work is featured in the textbook, Becoming an Urban Planner: A Guide to Careers in Planning and Urban Design.
In DC, I had also directed the Adams Morgan Day festival, DC’s largest multicultural neighborhood street festival. I was even a member of DC’s first Afro-Cuban dance troupe, Ashe Moyubba.
But I left everything for Miami, and for the Cuban man I’d fallen in love with. Yes: I came to Miami not for the sunshine or the beaches, but for love. Plain and simple.
In the long run, it didn’t work out with the fella, but I did end up falling in love with Little Havana.
I started offering my first tours of Little Havana back in 2006, trained by the first folks to offer tours of Little Havana: former leaders of the Little Havana Development Authority, founded in the 1970s. They were board members of Viernes Culturales.
I had begun my study of Cuban history and culture well before I moved to Miami, however. In DC, I had become intrigued by Afro-Cuban music, dance and religion. I was a board member of the Latin American Folk Institute, which was founded by an Afro-Cuban woman: Marietta Ulacia.
I took Afro-Cuban dance classes with her and with Oscar Rousseaux, learned Cuban musical genres and instruments, and delved deeply into the study of Afro-Cuban religious and spiritual traditions like Santería (aka Lukumi or Regla de Ocha), Espiritismo and Palo. I also organized Cuban rumba performances in DC parks.
After I moved to Miami, I soon ended up in the barrio of East Little Havana, where fruit vendors, knife sharpeners, ice cream trucks, and the lively shouts of my transgender Santera neighbor (“La China”) kept me company. Other neighbors included the viejita Cubana who smoked a cigar nearly every night and los Mexicanos across the street, who belted out mariachis after hard days at work.
Through Viernes Culturales, I also met numerous artists, musicians, playwrights and other creative people who participated in the festival.
And on my own, I also met numerous people involved in Miami’s world of Santería. I attended at least a hundred religious drummings and spiritual masses, and also fell in love with rumba, a secular form of Afro-Cuban music and dance.
But Viernes Culturales didn’t pay me enough to live on, so I took a position as director of a countywide civic engagement initiative, Imagine Miami, with the nonprofit Catalyst Miami. I organized and led a summit on arts and civic engagement and a series of Miami Changemaker Conferences.
Although I loved Little Havana, others didn’t. Often I encountered Miami locals who denigrated the neighborhood, calling it a “ghetto” or “a slum.” Often, they would use all kinds of barely veiled racist language to describe local residents, too. In response, I started to write about the neighborhood, and I created a site called “Little Havana Guide.” I also started offering tours of the neighborhood on my own.
To get to know Little Havana better, I walked street after street talking with the owners of bodegas, laundromats, cigar shops, fritangas, nightclubs, and other places where people gathered. I sat down with the owners of cigar factories and chatted with the ladies at the ventanitas. I participated in the saint processions, the rituals of Noche Buena (Christmas Eve), the conversations at cigar lounges, with my own lit cigar.
Domino players revealed their strategies and advised me to bota la gorda until I improved my skills (and I sure did!). Señoras showed me how they made their tamales or frijoles negros. I defended the domino players from those who wanted to throw them out of the plaza.
I joined neighbors in founding a short-lived tradition of monthly “Barrio Nights” festival in East Little Havana.
I wrote about every kind of ethnic restaurant or shop I found in Little Havana, because I knew that Little Havana was not a “Cuban” neighborhood. It was a racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood that consisted of a lot more than just what you can find in the “heritage district.”
I even left my job at Imagine Miami to open up a shop on Calle Ocho, selling items made locally, as well as CDs by local musicians and groups, books by local authors, and eco-conscious items. Although people loved it, the store was a flop: Little Havana did not yet have enough tourist traffic to sustain it. I realized I enjoyed doing tours more than sitting in a shop, anyway! Fortunately, Viernes Culturales hired me back as an interim director when the loss of my business left me flat broke.
Well-known local businessman Bill Fuller and I then co-founded the Little Havana Merchant Alliance, in part because we wanted to protect the neighborhood from chain stores, and from developers who were already calling it “West Brickell.” I was increasingly concerned about the impact of rising rents on the many lower-income families and seniors who live in Little Havana. Bill and I were also concerned about the destruction of historic buildings that was already taking place.
I became active around issues of access, housing and transportation in Little Havana.
While conducting research for my Little Havana tours, I happened to meet a British Chinese Santero (priest of Santería) anthropologist (yes) who was a Ph.D. student in the Global & Sociocultural Studies (GSS) program at Florida International University--and loved it. Soon, I was applying to the program myself! It was everything I had been looking for in a graduate program, and here it was in my own backyard ...
The graduate program director (Guillermo Grenier) in invited me to co-author a book on Little Havana, as he’d just received an offer from a publisher. Our book was finally published in 2015: “A History of Little Havana.”
While I was spending day and night immersed in the immense amount of work required in graduate school, other tour operators started to “discover” Little Havana. I had little time to even lead or market my own tours (I was a Teaching Assistant, instead), so. I focused my time on conducting in-depth research on Little Havana.
During graduate school, I received fellowships that led me to revisit what I had been initially taught about Little Havana. In 2014, I was one of a dozen graduate students from across the U.S. selected to participate in the Smithsonian Institution’s Latino Museum Studies Fellowship Program. As a recipient of the prestigious Goizueta Graduate Research Fellowship, I spent a month immersed in the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection, the premier repository of materials on Cuba outside the island and the most comprehensive collection of Cuban exile history and the global Cuban diaspora.
The “official narratives” about Little Havana weren’t holding up when I deepened my investigation into the neighborhood’s history, and my knowledge about the Cuban diaspora and U.S./Cuban history. The coursework I’d taken for my Graduate Certificates in African and African Diaspora Studies and Afro-Latin American Studies greatly influenced how I would approach my dissertation research, which examines the racial politics behind the making of Little Havana’s heritage district.
While in graduate school, I continued to offer tours of Little Havana, but now my tours were focused on building critical thinking skills. Instead of repeating the grand ole myths I heard over and over again (about Little Havana and Cuba), I decided I would help guests learn how to deconstruct these myths, and I would do so in a way that was as engaging as it was educational. And my guests absolutely loved it.
But I always had issues marketing my tours. I had no time or energy to market my tours. For years, I had called my business “Little Havana Tours,” and had owned the domain name since 2006, but then another Miami tour operator started calling itself “Little Havana Tours.” I gave up trying to claim the name after getting my Florida trademark for “Little Havana Tours,” because I didn’t want to pour any more time or money into the effort, and decided to call my business “Little Havana Experiences” instead. But I still own the domain name. :-)
I finally finished my dissertation, earning my Ph.D. in summer of 2019, and now I’m going in the direction of writing, consulting and offering my tours. I’m the winner of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Arts Challenge for AfroOchoDance, a site-specific Afro-Cuban dance festival based in Little Havana’s heritage district.
AfroOchoDance, which will take place in April 2020, will deepen awareness of Little Havana’s murals, monuments and public spaces while building appreciation for Afro-Latinx and other African diasporic historical and cultural contributions. Marisol Blanco (also a Little Havana resident and the AfroOchoDance choreographer) and I are among the ten Little Havana personalities also selected by the National Trust for Historic Preservation for its “Little Havana Me Importa” public exhibit on Calle Ocho.
I remain as active as I can in Little Havana civic affairs. I was a Graduate Teaching Fellow and Advisor for “Civic Engagement & Neighborhood Revitalization: Issues and Options for Miami’s Little Havana” graduate level course (Fall 2015-Summer 2016). For this final planning project for graduate students in the School of Urban and Regional Planning, I connected students to local stakeholders, led field trips to the neighborhood, and assisted with research projects focused on the neighborhood, with final presentations for community members.
