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As Miami’s Bahamians and U.S.-born blacks had found in the early 1900s, structural barriers created inter- and intra-ethnic and racial tensions in the city – even as they were often exaggerated and fueled by the existing urban power. In addition to those who entered during the boatlift, new waves of Haitian, Nicaraguan and Colombian immigrants also competed for the already limited resources and jobs available to them. The area was still recovering from the effects of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, in which roughly 125,000 Cubans entered the United States in a span of just a few months and resettled throughout the city. The era’s hallmarks were by no means unique to Miami - the drug wars, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the shrinking welfare state, heightened policing of people of color - but some circumstances in the Florida city were unique. This history of segregation is the background to Moonlight’s narrative, the story that explains the world in which the characters’ live, but it is the Liberty City of the 1980s that is most visible to the audience.
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This process was sealed when the federal interstate program built I-95 right through the heart of Colored Town, displacing thousands of blacks who fled to Liberty City, particularly in the 1960s, which rapidly became another black ghetto. Shortly after the 1937 completion of a black public housing project called Liberty Square, the area that became known as Liberty City quickly grew. New Deal housing programs in the 1930s provided them the opportunity to redistrict this prime location and push its black residents farther northwest. As the city grew, the land on which those shacks stood became more appealing for urban planners. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder.Īlthough Colored Town was a thriving center for black culture, sometimes referred to as the Harlem of the South, most residents lived in shacks and slums there. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. Black Bahamian women, especially those who were single or unaccompanied, often had even more difficulty: Mythologies of gender and race found Miami’s immigration inspectors anxious that these women were sexually suspect, or prostitutes, and many were denied entry.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. But once they entered Miami, they too lived in segregated neighborhoods - where they were often depicted as being in direct conflict with U.S.-born blacks and other immigrants, forces that helped justify their surveillance - and local law enforcement heavily policed them for numerous “crimes,” including vagrancy, fornication and sodomy. Black Bahamian men, whose labor was particularly in high demand, often had little difficulty crossing borders. (Juan, played by Ali, reminds protagonist Chiron that “a lot of black folks are Cuban.”) In the first two decades of Miami’s urban history, around the turn of the 20th century, migrants and immigrants from the Bahamas proved central to establishing a local agricultural economy and building the nascent city’s infrastructure. White residents and tourists often went “slumming” there to voyeuristically see how the other half lived and, sometimes, expand the limits of their own sexual appetites they often engaged in interracial and homosexual sex during their visits.Īs Moonlight highlights, Miami’s black communities have historically been tethered to numerous migrations and ethnic experiences, particularly those in the Caribbean and Latin America. Miami’s segregated black neighborhoods (including an area known as “North Miami,” and later, what was then known as “Colored Town,” or today’s historic Overtown) also housed the area’s thriving sexual underworld spaces where the city’s black, immigrant and white, working-class gender and sexual transgressives could make a living. From the very start, Miami’s white urban planners designed the city in ways that not only kept blacks segregated from whites, but also allowed white investors to exploit and capitalize on black poverty, disenfranchisement and labor. Unlike many other major metropolitan areas in the United States, Miami is a relatively “new” city, incorporated as a distinct municipality in just 1896. And glimpses of Miami’s rich black history are threaded in the collective experiences and memories of its characters. Moonlight, of course, deals with violence, drugs and poverty in Miami too, but centers the lives of those most directly and negatively entangled in these realities they are not secondary and mythologized characters or villains, but real people with rich histories.