In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

vu tw Growing Pains in a Coastal South Florida Community On February 12, 2000, the town of Jupiter sponsored a party to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary. Incorporated in 1925, Jupiter experienced a brief boom period just before the Great Depression, but its population remained relatively small in comparison with nearby Florida cities. At the time of the 1970 census, Jupiter had 3,136 residents. By 1980 the population had more than tripled to 9,868, but Jupiter remained a very small town compared to the nearby city of West Palm Beach (population 63,305 in 1980). It was not until 1987 that construction on Interstate 95 brought the expressway through the northern edge of Palm Beach County and the town of Jupiter. Interstate 95 has since expanded from six to ten lanes at the Jupiter exits. Like many cities in South Florida and across the Southeast, Jupiter experienced growth and development at an unprecedented rate from the late 1980s through the late 2000s. The MacArthur Foundation held large tracts of undeveloped land in northern Palm Beach County, including much of what today makes up Jupiter. In the 1970s and 1980s the foundation began selling off relatively small parcels to several developers, and by 1999 it had released most of its land. One developer explained that “all of a sudden, when the MacArthur portfolio opened up, it was like the California gold rush.”1 Upscale gated communities began appearing along the intercoastal waterway in Jupiter. The sale of the MacArthur lands intensified the planning and construction of upscale communities in Jupiter and surrounding areas. In 1999 Divosta began 17 1 From Back Burner to Center Stage How Jupiter’s Melting Pot Boiled Over Pine Gardens North and South were very white, working-class neighborhoods . . . that’s how it was. That changed over time in ways that government didn’t even recognize at first. In some ways, shame on us. —Karen Golonka, Jupiter mayor 18 From Back Burner to Center Stage developing Abacoa, a planned community containing multiple neighborhoods, commercial areas, an FAU campus, a stadium and spring training facility for the Florida Marlins and Saint Louis Cardinals, and an eighteen-hole golf course. By May 1999 Divosta was building at a pace of three structures daily to meet the demand generated by the rapid sales in Abacoa. In less than ten years, thousands of luxury homes were built and sold in Abacoa’s nineteen residential neighborhoods. By the time Jupiter celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2000, the town had almost forty thousand residents, several golf courses, and multiple gated communities. The 2010 census put Jupiter’s population at over fifty-five thousand residents. In stark contrast to the mansions of Jupiter’s gated communities and the luxury homes in Abacoa, the older neighborhoods in the center of town were built much earlier and consist of more modest single-story homes. These neighborhoods —Pine Gardens North, Pine Gardens South, Eastview Manor, Jupiter Plantation, and Jupiter River Estates especially—became the epicenter of the events that frame this story. As new structures rose all around Jupiter, new people were also moving in. The new residents of Jupiter included both the owners of the upscale homes in the new communities and the workers building and maintaining these expensive properties. Significant numbers of the new service and construction workers were immigrants from Guatemala and southern Mexico, who also began to settle in some of the city’s older neighborhoods. Amid the hustle and bustle of the economic boom, these newcomers only gradually came to the attention of town administrators, as established residents, wellversed in neighborhood activism, began to voice concerns about changes taking place in Jupiter. Town Manager Andy Lukasik had ten years of experience in the public sector , but he had never seen anything like the growth he witnessed in Jupiter: “Coming to Southeast Florida from Michigan it was insane. The landscape changed every single day. Every time you turned around, there was a new house being built, there was a new commercial plaza being built.” As the new buildings went up, inexpensive labor was needed to maintain them. “We had the influx of folks coming from Guatemala,” Lukasik recalled. “How it began, I don’t know, but that’s where we are now. They filled this need for labor at this time of unprecedented growth.” Jupiter’s mayor, Karen Golonka, had a background in urban planning and development, but even for her the pace at which Jupiter was growing at the...

Share