Miami Update

Turns out the Andeans give Miami a skip. They prefer the restaurant kitchens of the New Jersey and New York areas and don't really have a foothold in the capital of Latin America. These are the time-honed patterns of immigration: pioneers taking root, bringing their friends and family. Yesterday I spent the day chasing after the Ecuadorian and Peruvian communities in Miami, and found out that they barely exist. In fact, the whole idea of a barrio or ethnic neighborhood seems to have been exploded down here. Even the Calle Ocho, supposed center of Cuban life (Cubans make up over half of the Hispanic population in Miami), seemed dispersed and more of a drive-by strip than a hot-bed. Elsewhere, I was told by one Peruvian restaurant worker to check out Kendall, the lower middle class suburb to the southwest, but even there, despite a row of Peruvian chicken joints and even a local "chifa" serving Peru's take on Chinese cuisine, the car culture had managed to dissipate any concentration of feeling.

"Do you ever see tecnocumbia?" I asked.

"We check the local papers -- there's La Cronica and El Golazo -- and see what's playing. But shows like that, they'll just stop off here for a night or two on their way to New Jersey. Up there, I can tell you, my cousins are into that. It just never took off here."

How could tecnocumbia never take off in Miami, where the melting pot muddles what it is to be a Latin American national? What -- they have too much taste in music here? That was one theory we floated. What is the critical mass required to have home-country musical phenomena come through? How many Ecuadorians is enough (because the assumption is that there will be no "crossover" appeal) to make it worthwhile for Grupo Deseo to make a stop, put on their bikinis and waggle their hips to the tune of Mi Chiquito?

No luck, meantime, tracking down whoever is responsible for the estrellasecuatorians site that got me going on this wild goose chase to begin with. Turns out the phone number on the contacts page is listed from Summerland Key. A strange location for a music promoter. Especially one who never returns calls.

In South Florida

Down in Miami poking around the capital of Latin America, catching up with a couple of local promoters of technocumbia, just possibly the world's worst music. It's a phenomenon that mixes many of the things I'm interested in right now: how immigrants bring their past and homes with them across countries, why they like to stay in touch with what they knew before, and how new technologies change the way they do that.
If you've never seen technocumbia, click below, but consider yourself warned.



Also hoping to catch up with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, 100 miles due West. Lately, they've been asking Burger King to raise the price of their products by one penny, to cover unfair wages for the migrant tomato pickers. Want to guess what BK has said?