The History of Florida (102 page)

Immigration and Ethnicity in Florida History · 487

Haitian immigrants began

arriving in south Florida

during the 1970s. By 1985,

when this photo of a

Little Haiti botanica, or

voodoo shop, was taken,

Florida’s Haitian com-

munity surpassed 100,000

people. Courtesy of the

proofState Archives of Florida,

Florida Memory
, http://

floridamemory.com/items/

show/106159.

mid-1980s, some 75,000 opponents of the leftist Sandinistas had established

an exile base in Miami-Dade County. The Nicaraguans found Miami, with

its large population of anti-communist Cubans, a hospitable and convenient

place of refuge. Much like the Cubans in the early days of their exile in

Florida, the Nicaraguans initial y hoped to return home. A peaceful transfer

of power took place in Nicaragua in 1990, when the contras put down their

arms and a pro-U.S. government was elected, thus short-circuiting the new-

est Latino migration stream to Florida.

What began as a temporary exile migration eventual y resulted in a new

and seemingly permanent immigrant community in Florida. It was a re-

run of the Cuban exile migration. The earliest Nicaraguan exiles adjusted

quickly, as Spanish-language use was beneficial rather than detrimental in

Miami. Many Nicaraguans had business and professional backgrounds,

which in the 1980s stimulated a new surge of immigrant entrepreneurialism.

488 · Raymond A. Mohl and George E. Pozzetta

The Cuban enclave economy absorbed many other newcomers from Cen-

tral America. The Nicaraguans (or Nicas, as they are cal ed in Miami) settled

heavily in Sweetwater and Fontainebleau Park, communities on the western

fringes of the Miami metropolitan area. In keeping with a well-established

Miami tradition, this section of Miami-Dade County quickly earned the ap-

pel ation “Little Managua.” Miami’s Nicaraguans possessed a strong sense of

national identity that was sustained by transplanted communal institutions

and Catholic parishes in Sweetwater and Little Havana. By 1990, the Ni-

caraguans had become the second-largest Hispanic group in Miami-Dade

County, and Nicaraguan children supplanted Cubans as the largest-single

group of foreign-born students in Miami-Dade County schools. The 2010

census reported some 135,000 Nicaraguans in Florida, most residing in

metro Miami.

The heavy attention devoted to the Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan mi-

grations to south Florida has tended to obscure a wider pattern of recent

immigration, especial y Hispanic and Asian immigration, to Florida as a

whole. The foreign-born and the Hispanic populations of Florida have been

rising rapidly for the past half century. Between 1960 and 1990, Florida’s

foreign-born population increased from 5.5 percent to 12.9 percent of total

state population; by 2010, the state’s immigrant population rose still further

proof

to 19.2 percent. Florida had about 272,000 immigrants in 1960, 1.7 million

in 1990, and 3.7 million in 2010. Florida’s Hispanic population has also been

increasing at a rapid pace, from about 405,000 in 1970 (when the U.S. Cen-

sus first began reporting data on Hispanics) to 1.5 million in 1990, 2 million

in 2000, and 4.2 million 2010. One final statistical measure emphasized the

degree to which the demography of modern Florida has been altered by a

half century of new immigration: 2010 census statistics reported that some

3.5 mil ion Florida residents, or just over 19 percent of the state’s popu-

lation, spoke a language other than English at home. About half of those

non-English speakers live in Miami-Dade County, where 71.9 percent of

the residents conversed in native languages at home, primarily Spanish

but also Haitian-Creole and several Asian languages. The remainder of the

non-English speakers are distributed throughout the state, both in large

metropolitan counties—Osceola, Broward, Orange, Palm Beach, and Hil s-

borough—where the foreign speakers ranged from 45 to 25 percent of resi-

dents, and in smaller agricultural counties—Hendry, Hardee, Collier, and

De Soto—where 42 to 29 percent of the population used other languages

at home. These demographic trends over several decades emphasized the

degree to which Florida has become a center of new immigration.

Immigration and Ethnicity in Florida History · 489

The Latinization of Florida general y has been attributed to the massive

exodus of Cuban exiles to south Florida since 1959. This is only partial y

true. Cubans did form a majority of all Florida Hispanics in 1970 and 1980,

but by 1990 other Hispanics considerably outnumbered Cubans. Since 1970,

the proportions of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other Hispanics all grew

more rapidly than Florida’s Cuban population. For example, the number of

Mexicans in Florida—about 20,000 in 1970—grew enormously to 150,000

in 1990 and 630,000 in 2010. The state’s Puerto Rican population rose at a

staggering rate, from 28,000 in 1970 to 848,000 in 2010. The other Hispanic

category, which includes Central Americans, South Americans, and Carib-

bean Hispanics such as Dominicans, increased at an equal y amazing pace,

from 106,000 in 1970 to 1.5 million in 2010. At the county level, only in Mi-

ami-Dade and Monroe Counties did Cubans consistently outnumber other

Hispanic groups. In Broward and Palm Beach Counties, Central and South

Americans outnumbered other Latin groups by the time of the 1990 cen-

sus, and over the next two decades the number of other Hispanic peoples

increased faster than any other group. In other big, urban counties—Hil s-

borough, Pinel as, and Duval—other Hispanics dominated in the 1980s and

1990s, but by 2010 their numbers were equaled or surpassed by Puerto Ri-

cans. Puerto Ricans also became the predominant Latin group in the three

proof

metro Orlando counties—Orange, Osceola, and Seminole. And in seven

rural, agricultural counties in central Florida—Hardee, Hendry, Highlands,

Collier, Okeechobee, DeSoto, and Glades—Mexicans predominated, and in

most cases outnumbered the other three Latin groups combined, both in

1990 and 2010.

County-level U.S. census data, then, revealed two important and often

overlooked demographic trends that began to emerge as early as the 1970s.

First, these statistics documented the diffusion of the Hispanic population

throughout the state. Second, they demonstrated the rapid diversification

of Florida’s Latin population, as groups other than Cubans came to pre-

dominate in areas outside the southeast corner of the state. For example,

in the Orlando area, beginning in the 1980s Puerto Rican real estate devel-

opers embarked on a successful campaign to build for and attract Puerto

Ricans, often retirees, from the New York City area and from Puerto Rico.

Their efforts proved to be remarkably successful. By 2010, almost 848,000

Puerto Ricans resided in Florida, mostly in a broad, central Florida corridor

along Interstate 4 from Deltona through Orlando and Kissimmee to Tampa.

Dominican immigrants, many moving from New York City, increased the

diversification of Hispanic population in the Miami, Tampa, and Orlando

490 · Raymond A. Mohl and George E. Pozzetta

metro areas during the 1990s and after, and the 2010 census reported more

than 172,000 Dominicans in Florida. In southwest Florida, the Cape Coral–

Fort Myers metro area more than doubled its foreign-born population be-

tween 2000 and 2010, rising from just over 40,000 to more than 95,000,

primarily a consequence of Hispanic migration. The latest census also re-

ported that other Central and South American nationality groups had ar-

rived in Florida in large numbers by 2010—300,000 Colombians, 107,000

Hondurans, 102,000 Venezuelans, 101,000 Peruvians, and tens of thousands

of others from Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, El Salvador, Panama, and the rest

of Latin America. Brazilians, Latin but not Hispanic, also established large

ethnic communities in Florida in recent decades, especial y in the three-

county Miami metro area, but also in Orlando, Jacksonville, and the Tampa

Bay area.

The Latinization process, moreover, has now extended to Florida’s rural

areas, where over several decades Hispanic immigrant workers have largely

replaced black and white Americans in the farm labor force. For instance, in

2010, Mexicans comprised 43 percent of the population of Hardee County,

an agricultural area once known as the cucumber capital of the world. Mi-

ami’s Little Havana is well known as a center of Hispanic life and culture in

Florida, but a visit to Wauchula, Bowling Green, or Zolfo Springs—Hardee

proof

County’s chief towns—provides unmistakable visual and cultural evidence

that the Latinization process has spread to the agricultural center of the

state. The most popular holiday in Hardee County now may be Cinco de

Mayo, a Mexican national holiday, during which Aztec music, dancing, and

folk culture are celebrated by these new Floridians. In Indiantown, a small

agricultural community in Martin County, the big holiday is the festival of

San Miguel Acatan, the patron saint of a large colony of Maya Indians, exiles

from civil war in Guatemala who have settled in Indiantown and nearby

farm communities. By 2010, a Mayan diaspora of almost 84,000 resided in

Florida, primarily in agricultural and farmworker communities stretching

from Immokalee to Homestead. As these examples demonstrate, the Lati-

nization of Florida has spread far beyond Miami’s Little Havana, and the

Hispanic newcomers to the state represent a broad spectrum of Caribbean,

Central American, and Latin American peoples. Nicaraguan, Brazilian, and

Dominican, Puerto Rican and Cuban, Aztec and Maya—these newcomers

and others from south of the border represented the powerful impact of

immigration and migration, forces that reshaped the social, cultural, and

economic life of much of modern Florida over the past half century.

Immigration and Ethnicity in Florida History · 491

By the end of the twentieth century, new immigration streams of Mexican and Guate-

malan farmworkers began to transform Florida’s rural spaces. Here, in 1990, three gen-

erations of a Latino family watch American television at a laundromat in Greenacres,

an unincorporated area of Palm Beach County. Photo by Raymond J. Mohl, from the

personal collection of Raymond A. Mohl.

proof

The ethnic transformation of modern Florida is not simply a conse-

quence of Latino immigration, however. Mirroring national patterns, Asian

immigrants emerged as another fast-growing foreign-born group in Florida

as early as the 1980s. The 1990 census reported 152,000 Asians in Florida,

almost triple the number in 1980, but by 2010, Florida’s Asian population

had surged to 455,000. When the census added Asians “in combination,”

that is, multiracial people with some Asian heritage, the total number of

Asians or part Asians in Florida reached 571,244. As noted earlier, small

colonies of Chinese and Japanese emerged in the late nineteenth century,

but racial discrimination and immigration restriction limited Asian immi-

gration until the post–World War II era. The more recent Asian immigra-

tion to the Sunshine State stemmed initial y from U.S. military involvement

in Asia and the Pacific region, involvement that brought war brides and

military spouses, military employees, and refugees. Asian numbers in Flor-

ida remained small until after passage of immigration reform legislation in

1965 that abolished the national origins quota system and established new

492 · Raymond A. Mohl and George E. Pozzetta

immigration preferences based on family reunification and professional

skil s in such fields as engineering, science, and medicine. This shift in im-

migration policy led to a rapid rise in the nation’s Asian population from

about 1.2 mil ion in 1965 to 14.7 mil ion in 2010. Most Asian immigrants

entered the United States in California or New York, but over time a second-

ary internal migration brought rising numbers of Asian people to Florida,