Miami: Mistress of the Americas

Chapter 6: Transience and Civil Society

c h a p t e r 6 Transience and Civil Society The 2008 obituary for Roger Sonnabend (age eighty-three) named him ‘‘a pioneer in South Florida.’’1 The chairman of the board of Sonesta, he brought one of his namesake hotels to Key Biscayne in 1969. With its iconic pyramid shape, the Sonesta was one of the first modern full-service resort hotels in the area. Sonnabend was a part-time resident who maintained a winter home on the island. He was ‘‘very much a Bostonian’’ and is buried in Wake- field, Massachusetts. In the footsteps of Henry Flagler, and others , Sonnabend was a part-time pioneer whose real home was a long distance from Miami. The news media like to celebrate their ‘‘pioneers,’’ and sometimes this includes even ordinary folks. In 2005, Marlene Naylor was the longest continuous resident (!) of Miami Lakes, a town in Miami-Dade County with about 27,000 inhabitants. She had moved to South Florida forty-two years before, settling in the area later incorporated as Miami Lakes. Nobody in the entire town had lived there longer than she had. But at the age of seventy-two, Ms. Naylor decided it was time to return to the Northeast and rejoin some old friends, ‘‘taking a little bit of the town’s history with her.’’2 What made Ms. Naylor special was not that she went home after all—it was that she had stayed so long. Few people seem intent on making Miami their eternal resting { 117 } ground. Indeed, the Miami Herald reported in 2002 that even if you wanted to, you could not spend eternity here. The reason: ‘‘Urban planners failed to plan for sufficient cemetery space.’’3 The thought of dying in Miami seems not to occur to many people passing through this city, excepting perhaps displaced and aged foreign dictators from Central America, three of whom have their resting places at Woodlawn Cemetery. Other mortals manage to leave even after they die: the bodies of an estimated 20 percent of South Florida’s deceased are shipped out, more than from any other region in the nation.4 Fort Lauderdale International Airport ships more HRs (the industry’s shorthand for human remains) than any other U.S. airport and its cargo is usually headed up north. Most of the HRs going abroad depart from Miami International Airport. According to the CEO of Pierson, a leader in this business since 1964, the range of foreign destinations has steadily grown to include almost all of Central and South America and a number of European countries.5 The cost of shipping a body is not cheap, ranging from about five hundred dollars to well over a thousand—all fares are oneway . Some small immigrant communities in South Florida have set up special foundations to finance and arrange burials in the homeland. ‘‘We believe there’s a certain honor in going home, an honor in being buried at home,’’ says Antonio Nava, the Mexican leader of such a foundation, Hispanos Unidos de America.6 Transience has always been Miami’s genius loci—a constant coming and going of people dating back to the times of Ponce de Leon. It has only intensified in more recent, global times. Very few people here seem to plan a permanent stay. For most, the city is merely an interlude in their unfolding lives. For the past quarter century or so, Miami had relatively more foreign immigrants than any other major metropolitan area in the United States. Well over half of Miami-Dade County’s current resi- { 118 } c h a p t e r 6 dents were born abroad, compared to just over a third in New York or Los Angeles. In nearly three out of four Miami homes, a foreign language is spoken. A majority of all foreign-born people here are from the Western Hemisphere. Cubans are the largest group by far: they number over six hundred thousand. The next largest national groups are Haitians, Colombians, Jamaicans, and Nicaraguans, each with around one hundred thousand people. Venezuelans are another rapidly growing contingent, now estimated at around fifty thousand. Miami has no less than twenty-four national groups of ten thousand or more, including a sizeable number of Canadians and immigrants from six different European nations. Transience is not the same as immigration. Several U.S. cities have a long and common history as...