Learning to Live in Miami

Abstract

“Learning to Live in Miami” takes another look and listen to Cuban exilic creativity from a city imagined as both refuge and terminus: a location that preoccupies Greater Cuba with sensations of revulsion, pleasure, and disavowal. With the encouragement of Lydia Cabrera, the performance innovators behind Teatro Prometeo, the disco supergroup Foxy, and other artists-in-residence of past and present, Vazquez pries open the familiar narrativizing about the exilic “condition” that enshrouds Cuban cultural artifacts from Miami and enters into their difficult mangrove aesthetics.

Residual Transcriptions: Ruth Landes and the Archive of Conjure

“…The scribblings illustrate that Landes was willing to use whatever pieces of paper necessary to mark this connection, albeit perhaps unconsciously. Their casual nature reminds me of how Lydia Cabrera observed a “lifelong attention to the minutiae that make everyday objects magical” (Vazquez , 853). Indeed, Cabrera liked to doodle in her journals, providing herself relief from “work.” (See Figure , Altar for Lydia Cabrera where her doodling and notebooks are displayed.)…”

Mangled, Mangroves

“…The manglar that Francis Sancher thinks he can cross, but ones he will never spike because, just like the whites in Loíza's mangroves, he does not know and to some extent, cannot imagine how to move unless it is through a counter-intuitive crossing. 37 In a 2001 interview Condé explains her intention of disrupting ideas of "magic realism given that, she responds: "What matters much more to me are problems of finding the right structure for the story, of translating cultural practices" 38 In Condé's novel, the mangrove is that vital 7 presence, a material symbol that immerses the reader tracing a circular movement score that interconnects, but does not necessarily find, relationality in all of the twenty-two perspectives. Thus, the mangrove is not magical.…”

“…transform and grow through, in between, and below "the US's prolonged military invasion of Puerto Rico and the spatial and psychic residues of the sugarcane plantation and slavery: these systems force(d) disasters and visual regimes onto the lands and seas of the region and its imaginary. "38 In the erased and displaced machucales and mangroves of Ocean Park Beach, "chimerical ecologies" grow alongside the fast-paced changes of tourist invasions. The beach becomes the beach for the tourist.…”

“…These traces that erode over time within Puerto Rico's landscape the chimerical ecologies that grow "afterlife of munitions reveal a concatenation of monstrous, warped, beautiful, and humorous formations. "38 Ren Ellis Neyra, 'The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics', Dissident Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). P. 9339 Ren Ellis Neyra, 'The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics', Dissident Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).p 93.…”