[ARCHIVAL “1957 TOUR OF MIAMI” CLIP PLAYS] VO: The gleaming towers of Miami Beach set against the dazzling blue of the sea are a scenic signpost for seekers of fun and sun.
[ARCHIVAL CLIP FADES UNDER LIZ]
Liz Narration: Ah, Miami in the 1950s. Sunny, romantic, and WHITE, realllyyyyy white. Back then, 85% of Miami was white, about 15% Black, and there were almost no Latinos. Very different from the city of today I know and love. You all have heard me talk often about what Miami looks and sounds like, it’s one of my favorite subjects, honestly. You really do feel like you’re at the official HQ of Latin America here. When I enter the building, Sol, from Argentina, tells my daughter Eva “buenos dias mi flaca hermosa!” As we’re walking the halls, Ms Talia, from Cuba, tells me “se te olvido la ropa de agua” reminding me I once again forgot Eva’s things for water day. As I leave my daughter’s classroom, Miss Gina from Colombia, the school admin says “mandale saludos a tu esposo” telling me to say hi to my Huz for her.
[Investigative scoring begins]
The path for Miami to get to this bilingual haven has been hard. Deep discrimination and mass resistance were what it took to get here. Today’s episode is about a decades-long power struggle between those who embraced diversity, and those who fought to repress it. This is the story of Miami’s battle over Bilingualism.
You’re Listening to In Confianza.
[Investigative scoring ends]
[Mysterious music begins]
Liz Narration: In the 1950’s, Paul George was just a normal kid growing up in Miami. His Miami was vibrant and colorful. Classic Chevy & Ford cars rolled along streets of Pastel Art Deco buildings & palm trees. New suburban neighborhoods reflected the post-war American dream. Each sunday, Paul would go to the local catholic church with his parents, and in the fall of 1959, for the first time, he started to see something different. There were a lot of new faces showing up in mass.
Dr. Paul George: Suddenly there’s a, there’s new people coming in. People with dark hair. kind of greased up, white shirts, uh, standing sometimes throughout the mass, which was not, at that point at least, the, sort of the American approach.
Liz Narration: And it wasn’t just at church, Paul started to see these new people working and hanging out around town, usually speaking spanish.
Dr. Paul George: I remember seeing domino games being played. They could be played right on the edge of a gas station on Southwest A Street, today’s famous Calle Ocho.
Liz Narration: And even in his own neighborhood —
Dr. Paul George: Suddenly there were Spanish speaking people living just west of us.
Liz Narration: These newcomers were showing up en masse because of something that had happened just a few hundred miles south of Miami, in Cuba.
ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: From his stronghold is the wild Sierra Maestra mountains, Cuba’s Fidel Castro emerged triumphant after guerilla warfare against the Batista regime. The revolution that began with Castro a fugitive, practically alone, landing with 82 followers ended with the flight of dictator Fulgencio Batista and the entry in Havana of rebel forces being claimed by the city…
Liz Narration: In 1959 after six years of guerilla warfare, Communist leader Fidel Castro succeeded in overthrowing dictator Fulgencio Batista. Castro’s revolution garnered popular support by promising land reform, economic equality, and an end to U.S. influence in Cuban affairs. But once in power, the new regime began violently repressing any dissent, by jailing political opponents, and appropriating private property and business of everyday citizens.
Eduardo Padron: Everything changed and all the rights and all the civil liberties that we enjoy in this country disappeared. No freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no freedom of anything.
Liz Narration: This is Eduardo Padron, the former president of the largest Latino-serving institution of higher learning, Miami Dade College and recipient of the President Medal of Freedom. But in 1959 he was a 15-year teenager living in Cuba.
Eduardo Padron: My parents were very horrified of the idea that we would be indoctrinated into a Marxist system.
Liz Narration: So Eduardo’s parents made a brutal choice, they decided to send him and his brother, by themselves, to the United States.
Eduardo Padron: My parents told my brother and I not to worry, not to cry, that in just a few months, we would be back and we would be reunited.
Liz Narration: Eduardo became part of a first wave of Cuban refugees.
Eduardo Padron: I didn’t know the English language. I didn’t have any money, only what I was wearing. No friends or families in the United States.
Liz Narration: These early refugees were referred to as the Golden Exiles. Many were well-off, educated, and financially stable. These were people who had the means to relocate to a new home.
Eduardo Padron: These were not economic refugees. These were political refugees. Political in the sense that there was a political system that they couldn’t survive in. And they thought that they were going back. Most Cubans felt that the revolution will not last.
[PROPULSIVE MUSIC BEGINS]
Liz Narration: Cuba had been through multiple revolutions in the previous decades, and everyone assumed this regime would also be temporary, and that after a few months or years they could all go back home. Paul George, who we heard from earlier, he’s now a Miami historian who documented this era of change in Florida and in Cuba as well.
Dr. Paul George: So they’re coming over here on a, as they saw it, a temporary basis. But look, you gotta make a living, you gotta eat. So even though it was a refugee status or an exile status, these people were hard at work. Many of them, opened up mom and pop businesses, had a following.
Liz Narration: By the mid 60s Miami had a small but sizable new population of Cuban refugees. They were opening businesses, buying houses, and engaging with the/Miami lifestyle in all kinds of ways. But many of them couldn’t speak english. And over the next decade more and more Cuban’s were trickling into Miami.
Dr. Paul George: You’re finding people every day who are coming over. You can’t expect them to learn English in a day. You’ve got to assist them in different ways.
Liz Narration: In 1973, Miami’s progressive Mayor Jack Orr realized something needed to be done.
Dr. Paul George: And they just said, look, we gotta look at the realities of things. About a third of our population now claims Spanish as a first language. And a lot of these people can’t really understand things when they go before a clerk to pay their taxes or have to call an ambulance or whatever. We need to reach out to them.
Liz Narration: So the city made a practical decision to help the new population operate in Miami.
Dr. Paul George: Bilingual ordinance was passed where you could do business in Spanish with the county, pay your taxes, meet with a zoning official, or whatever it was.
[PROPULSIVE MUSIC FADES]
Liz Narration: Translators adapted thousands of pages of English public documents into Spanish and vice versa each year. Interpreters’ voices echoed at meetings and conferences. Radio stations even aired Spanish public service announcements.
Eduardo Padron: And uh, that was very well received by the Latino, Hispanic community.
Liz Narration: Things were working. But slowly as more Cubans started trickling into Miami, tensions were rising among the local white community
Eduardo Padron: I saw signs that said, “no Cubans, no Jews, no pets.” And at the beginning, I couldn’t understand whether that was a joke or whether that was something else.
Liz Narration: Growing up Eduardo faced discrimination on a daily basis, and in 1974, he decided to do something about it.
Eduardo Padron: From very early on, I became an activist. I became very involved, in spite of my youth. Because I felt that was wrong. That’s not the kind of America that I wanted to live in.
Liz Narration: Eduardo decided to take the fight against discrimination into his own hands.
Eduardo Padron: And that’s when some of us had the idea of creating the Spanish American League Against Discrimination. The short for that is SALAD.
Liz Narration: SALAD aimed to help the local Cuban communities fight the anti-Latino discrimination they saw on a daily basis. And as the decade ended, things were about to get worse — much, much worse. In the early 1980s, something happened that completely shook the relationship between the Cuban community and American-born locals that changed the landscape of language in Miami.
This when we come back.
Liz Narration: For years, the Cuban population in Miami had been steadily growing and with it tensions from some of the white community. But in 1980, it was about to get a lot worse.
[INTROSPECTIVE MUSIC BEGINS]
On April 1st, a group of six Cubans seeking asylum crashed a bus through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy desperately hoping for a way to escape. The Peruvian government refused to return the asylum seekers to Cuban authorities.
Dr. Paul George: And Castro said, okay, if that’s what you want, I’m going to empty my jails, uh, my mental hospitals. And anybody who wants to go can go over to the Peruvian embassy.
Liz Narration: Within just a matter of days, 10,000 more Cubans had come to the embassy looking for their own way out of the country, and Castro announced that anyone who wanted to leave could go through the port of Mariel. The doors were now open. Families who’d already made the journey to the US scrambled to pick up their relatives. This event became known as The Mariel Boatlift.
[INTROSPECTIVE MUSIC ENDS]
[ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE]: Since last month, 25,000 refugees from Castro’s Cuba have come to America. Between midnight and noon today, 23 boats filled with over 800 Cubans reached Key West, Florida. U.S. Marines are now on duty at Key West to keep order among the restless refugees waiting resettlement in the United States.
Liz Narration: Over the course of several months, thousands of boats of all shapes and sizes made the journey to a packed & chaotic Mariel Harbor. An estimated 125,000 Cubans left their Caribbean nation for The United States. U.S. immigration policy dictated that any Cuban who arrived on US shores could stay. This was known as “wet-foot/dry-foot policy.” But welcoming this many people was a huge challenge. Thousands of refugees were processed in churches, military bases & the Miami Dome. They were then moved to larger compounds to reunite with relatives and access social services. You all can imagine the influx seriously strained local resources and heightened tensions. The refugees were people from all walks of life. But the U.S. media went wild with the idea that the whole boatlift was full of Castro’s criminals, mental patients, and “undesirables.”
[ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP]: These are sociopaths. They’re not, uh, uh, good citizens. They have no potential to be good citizens. And, uh, they proudly display the time that they’ve spent in Cuban jails. And this terrified local populations.
Liz Narration: While it was true that there were some criminals, and some mental patients among the refugees, it was a relatively small percentage, just around 10%, compared to the thousands of everyday citizens simply looking for freedom. But the fear took hold, and started a new wave of backlash against the Cuban community. By the early 1980s, the population of Miami Dade County was more than forty percent Latino, compared to around ten percent in the 1960s. As the Cuban influence grew, Miami’s white population was starting to feel alienated from their Latino neighbors and threatened with the loss of the community they had known. All this, combined with an incredibly tumultuous and violent period known as “The Cocaine Wars,” and the stage was set for a new chapter in Miami’s relationship with the Spanish language. Some White Miamian’s became increasingly hostile to Spanish speakers.
Eduardo Padron: They were not very different from some of the things you hear today, to be honest with you.
Liz Narration: A Miami resident named Emmy Schaefer, spearheaded a campaign aimed at stopping bilingualism in Miami. Several years earlier she had founded an organization called Citizens of Dade United. The group was vehemently anti bi-Lingual and their sole purpose was to overturn the 1973 ordinance. The fear and controversy over the Mariel boatlift was just what she needed to get energy behind this movement.
Dr. Paul George: They took advantage of the anger and the disconnect that a lot of people had. Like, where’s this place going? What role do I have in this place? Will I have a job tomorrow?
Liz Narration: The group gathered volunteers and set out on a campaign to get a new voter referendum on the ballot, one that would reverse the bilingual ordinance. They claimed it was an initiative to unite Dade County, but the thousands of Spanish speakers felt very differently. Here is Emmy Shafer in a press conference:
[Emmy Shafer Archival]: It doesn’t mean that all Spanish people have to get on a boat and go back to Cuba. It does not mean I hate. The petition means one thing. To eliminate expenditure and to bring two communities together. To work together, to understand together, to do things together, but not to divide.
Dr. Paul George: it was a grassroots campaign. They knocked on doors, they handed out brochures, they had campaign gatherings, they encouraged people to get to the polls.
Liz Narration: The odd thing was that Emmy Shafer was herself, an immigrant. Shafer was born in Russia before coming to the US later in life. She herself was bi-lingual, although she didn’t speak spanish. Shafer & Citizens of Dade United held gatherings and rallies where you would see people waving american flags, holding signs that said “I LOVE English,” and shouting anti-immigrant sentiments.
[ARCHIVAL MEETING CLIP]: When I go to Spain, I speak Spanish. When I go to France, I speak French, and I’m going to Germany next year, and I’m learning German.This is ridiculous. It is another way to spend more money. That’s another way to use up more tax dollars.
[ARCHIVAL CROWD SINGING “GOD BLESS AMERICA”]
Liz Narration: Citizens of Dade United wanted to put a new referendum in front of voters that would repeal the Bilingual Ordinance passed seven years ago. To do this they collected tens of thousands of petitions from around the county.
[INTROSPECTIVE STEEL DRUM-BASED MUSIC BEGINS]
Latino organizations sued, saying it would be discriminatory and unconstitutional to overturn the bilingual ordinance.
[ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP]: The suit filed by the United Cuban American Association seeks to halt a petition drive by citizens for Dade United to repeal a resolution adopted in 1973, which declared Dade County officially bilingual in English and Spanish.
We’re trying to stop what we consider an unconstitutional petition.
Liz Narration: Citizens of Dade United kept campaigning, collected signatures and eventually, the English Only Movement, succeeded — in a few months the official language of Dade County would be up for a vote. The air was tense
[Archival News Clip]: The bilingual repeal issue may decide whether former Mayor Jack Orr’s 1973 welcome and act of friendship is still valid in 1980.
Liz Narration: And then the time came to vote.
Dr. Paul George: About 60 percent voted for repeal.
[Archival News Clip]: Emmy Schaefer and her supporters opened their champagne shortly after 9 p.m. last night to celebrate the passage of their anti bilingual ordinance.
As far as, uh, the ordinance is concerned, this is a one step forward. Everyone should put 100 percent effort so that we can communicate instead of making this community farther and farther apart.
[INTROSPECTIVE STEEL DRUM-BASED MUSIC ENDS]
Eduardo Padron: And that was not well taken by the Cuban community. A lot of people had not realized up to that point the antagonism, the dislike, the fear, that a lot of people had.
Dr. Paul George: There was a feeling of betrayal on the part of the Cubans.
Liz Narration: The new law prohibited county officials from using any language but English, and from fostering any culture other than that of the United States. It prohibited county funds from translating any documents into Spanish, Creole, or other languages used by Miamians. The ordinance was so restrictive that even zoo signs identifying an animal’s name in Latin violated the law and had to be taken down.
Dr. Paul George: It restricts you. It can cause a loss. It could be a monetary loss. It could be a medical loss. Uh, it’s just, uh, it’s, it’s just unreasonable. It’s crazy.
Liz Narration: Even outside of government the new ordinance was having an effect. Many employers mistakenly believed that it applied to them as well. There were accounts of supermarket employees being suspended for speaking Spanish to fellow employees. Children complained that they were forbidden to speak Spanish in school hallways and on school buses. Even hospitals weren’t immune! An 18-year-old clause in a hospital handbook requiring employees to speak English during the workday was used for the first time to prohibit employees from speaking a foreign language to non-English-speaking patients and to each other. Eduardo and his colleagues at SALAD were shocked. They needed to find a way to fight back against these attacks. And Eduardo realized that there was one clear reason why such a damaging law was able to pass.
Eduardo Padron: We did not have enough, Cubans, Latinos registered to vote. In order to have a vote, you needed to register. In order to register, you needed to be an American citizen.
Liz Narration: But even years after the Cuban revolution, many refugees had still retained this transitory mentality, not wanting to nationalize because they were still hoping to go home one day. SALAD wanted to convince Cuban residents that voting was the ONLY way to start getting fair treatment in their new home.
Eduardo Padron: So we started several campaigns. We had the help of radio stations and television stations.
Liz Narration: They coined the phrase —
Eduardo Padron: Vota para que te respeten. It meant vote so you can get respect.
Liz Narration: And SALAD was not alone in this fight. Miami’s Spanish-speaking population was growing, and so was opposition to the English-only ordinance. Things were getting heated. Jorge Valdes, a County councilman proposed that the law be repealed. He was met by angry protests with signs threatening to hang council members Finally, the Federal Government came in and ruled that Miami’s lack of multilingual signage on its public transportation systems was a violation of citizens civil rights. The Dade county commision decided to allow certain exceptions for promoting tourism, providing medical and emergency services, and serving the elderly and handicapped. A slightly more relaxed version of the law was grudgingly put into place by the county to avoid federal defunding, but educational information was still restricted to English. Spanish directional signs in the county hospital had to be removed, fire-prevention information, neonatal care literature, bus schedules — none of these could be printed in Spanish. In a particularly dramatic case, the Clerk of Courts actually banned marriages conducted in languages other than English.
Eduardo Padron: A lot of people really wanted to hear, “I love you,” “you are married,” “you can kiss each other” in Spanish. It has so much more meaning.
Liz Narration: So Eduardo’s partner at SALAD, Osvadlo Soto, set up a tent in a parking lot of Little Havana and offered free Spanish-language marriages in his “open air chapel.”
[INTROSPECTIVE STEEL DRUM-BASED MUSIC BEGINS]
But as the 80’s rolled into the 90s Miamii continued changing. The Latino & Cuban & Haitian populations grew and began to wield more influence and power.
Dr. Paul George: About 60 percent plus of the county was Spanish as a first language, as opposed to what had been back in 74 when it was about a third. So it almost doubled.
Liz Narration: By this point, the only thing keeping the unpopular English-only ordinance in place was a white dominated county commission, but that too was about to change.
Dr. Paul George: A judge, Donald Graham, had ruled back in the early 90s in favor of district representation on the county commission. So you live in a certain neighborhood, you have a certain commissioner who represents you.
Liz Narration: The courts decided the county commision needed to be elected by the citizens in each district. This meant that Latino or black Miamians could vote for someone from THEIR community to represent them. This drastically changed the makeup of the commission. As of 1993, for the first time, the Miami Dade County commision was made of majority Black & Latino commissioners. To top it off, only a few years earlier it came to light that John Tanton, the leader of a group called U.S. English had made horribly racist remarks which put a mark on the whole movement. With the English only movement on the brink, the stage was now set for a new showdown to decide Miami’s official language.
[INTROSPECTIVE STEEL DRUM-BASED MUSIC ENDS]
Gregory Samms: Contentious? Yeah, it was contentious.
Liz Narration: Lawyer Gregory Samms remembers the country commission meeting on May 18th, 1993.
Gregory Samms: It was packed. There were news cameras there. it was going to change the face of the town.
Liz Narration: Gregory was one of the lawyers who would address the commission and argue against the English-Only Ordinance.
Gregory Samms It was, it was feeling like Miami. There were different groups. You had your groups of Anglos sitting in one section, a whole bunch of people from the Cuban community that was all for it. I signed up to speak, uh, against the English-only ordinance because I just felt that this didn’t make sense as to who we are and where we wanted to go.
Liz Narration: Both sides gave impassioned speeches during the six hour meeting that was conducted under bomb threat.
Gregory Samms: Are you really what the Statue of Liberty says you are? Are you really what the Constitution says you are? Well, now’s the time to prove that. You know, it was new Miami versus old. The future versus the past. That’s what it was.
Liz Narration: The decision from the 13-member commission was unanimous. English only was dead. Inside the courtroom the Cuban community celebrated. It was a long-fought victory; one that people like Eduardo Padron wanted the whole city to recognize. The mood outside the courtroom wasn’t as jubilant, remnants of the English-only protestors stood outside chanting “God Bless America.”
[Archival Protestors singing “God Bless America”]
[Percussive Music Begins]
And the English-only refrain we’re still hearing today. 30 years after this victory, Miami is unquestionably a bilingual city. But the fight over the right to speak our language and be who we are, is as alive as ever. Here in Florida, the right to learn our full Black history and learn the triumphs of our Latinos heroes is being banned by state government. Moves to eliminate initiatives that incentivize equal access to higher education and diversity initiatives across industries are also being banned. As the Latino population of the United States continues to grow, the fight for bilingual representation is still a battle worth fighting for. As Eduardo Padron says, the work to attain language recognition was more than just cultural identity — it actually reflected what we want for everyone who lives in this country.
[Percussive Music Begins]
[Theme Music Begins]
This episode was hosted by me, Liz Rebecca Alarcón. It was produced by Charlie Garcia, with editing by Mark Pagán. Audio engineering, scoring, and mixing by Charlie Garcia.
You can subscribe to In Confianza wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like what you heard please leave us a review on apple podcasts and tell a friend to give us a listen. Have questions or story ideas to send our way, send us an email to [email protected]
That’s it for this week. Thanks for joining me, Pulso Fam. We’ll be back next week, In Confianza.
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