comfortingly I saw “Little Havana” on my maps of Miami and felt I simply had to see the place, so I made a point of heading there when I had a little time to myself. It surprised me by seeming so utterly normal. It is true that the population was entirely Spanish-speaking; Miami is I think the only American city where it can be actually difficult to do things in English. I went into one CVS looking for shoe polish. I never really imagined that I would have to come up with the Spanish for “shoe polish” in an American CVS. But the woman who worked the counter really didn’t know any English at all.
http://sunsationalhomeimprovement.com/insight-into-some-of-our-products/trackback But other than the language, and the number of older men with moustaches sitting on stools outside the shops, what is most striking about Little Havana is that nothing is striking about it. Eighth Street (“Calle Ocho”), the main drag, looks like your average American vehicular street/shopping mall from the 1950s. One-story shops line the road; places are a little run-down; this could be Detroit or it could be Paterson or it could be Tallahassee. The area wasn’t built to be “Little Havana”: it was just built as a normal American city. (Half a century ago there weren’t very many Hispanics in Miami.) Down the side streets are neighborhoods of one-story ranch houses which look the same as the 1950s ranch homes in Tulsa or Houston. But everyone speaks Spanish. In this respect it reminded me of Dearborn, which is most notable for not being particularly notable. It is America, just with a different language.
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