Loosely-organized thoughts on Florida from a chat conversation with my colleague Natya Hans.
Author's note: In one of the messages I accidentally typed 'locally codependent' instead of 'locally interdependent.' This is really funny to me and I'm never changing it.
Of the many definitions of 'nation' - ethnic, political / civic, etc - I think of Florida as a nation according to the concept of a people and their relationship to the land. There is, however, an inherently political element - although Florida has multiple distinct bioregions of geography, climate, culture, and even language, as a part of the political entity of the United States, Florida as a political unit also exists in interaction with (and often perceived opposition against) the rest of the country. 'Florida' as a political / cultural entity has earned it a reputation to the broader country that solidifies a sense of 'us versus them' - even those who consider themselves more cosmopolitan and want to distance themselves from the national stereotype tend to distance themselves from their Floridian identity by doing so. The smaller Floridian regions may be in many ways distinct from one another, but we share the political consequences of our relation to the rest of the country, and that has - and has always had - a distinct impact on the broader culture. It may manifest in different ways in different parts of the state, but it is perpetually there. So, we are, to me, a nation.
Of our diverse histories, our indigenous history's impact has currents running through the state to this day, long after the many horrific ways in which those numbers diminished. Because we have had at different points in our history various influxes of migration between here and the Caribbean / South America, consisting of peoples often more immediately aware of and connected to their indigenous backgrounds (this is an oversimplification and there is much literature on the subject, of course), the Latin populations of Florida have kept various indigenous traditions of the state alive in unique, complex ways. Latin indigenous / Floridian indigenous are not synonymous, but they are mutually influential (sometimes even genetically).
You cannot talk about Floridian history without talking about Latin American history. It is all well and good to talk about actual Spanish colonial history in the state, and the various turf wars between the Spanish, French, and British, but it gets really interesting when Florida falls under U.S. jurisdiction and the U.S. starts targeting the Caribbean (in particularly Puerto Rico and Cuba) in various propaganda campaigns to situate one against the other in different ways throughout its history - first depicting Cuba as this beautiful señorita full of potential and ripe for the taking; later with Cuba as a roguish rascal and Puerto Rico as the fertile helpless señorita in need of strong masculine North American protection (whoever came up with that imagery clearly never met a Puerto Rican woman, by the way). In the interplay of these regions' interactions with their northern neighbors throughout U.S. history, Florida has always been a central 'third space' - sometimes refuge, sanctuary, other times cultural and even literal battleground.
This influence is most strongly seen and felt in South Florida, which has risen and fallen many times in various kinds of extravagance, art, intellectualism, and romanticism punctuated with income disparity, fierce loyalties, and concentrations of crime that are penalized by the justice system in ways that ignore systemic injustices when it is useful to certain powers to do so, and completely overlooked by those same authorities when it benefits them to turn a blind eye. South Florida has regions that almost only speak Spanish, and has also become home to one of the nation's strongest Jewish communities outside of New York.
During the early waves of Cuban emigration, Cubans came largely to Tampa first, before Miami, and that influence remains prominent, especially in Ybor City. In fact, in many ways Ybor feels even more distinctly Cuban than Miami because Miami became much more culturally diverse with other Latin American / Caribbean populations (along with other migrant communities) concentrating in one region. This situates Tampa Bay as an epicenter of three major Floridian phenomena: the largely Latin / Jewish South Floridian region, with a focus on multiculturalism, art, commerce, and flexible / multilayered notions of identity, along with subtropical climates and ecology, and a curious interactive relationship with New York; the largely agricultural and more spread out North Florida region, with a strong fishing & hunting culture, smaller, grassroots-driven community development, and a number of the first freed slave towns established during and in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War; and the politically infamous I-4 Corridor, referring to the highway that stretches West to East from Tampa to Daytona, always known in electoral circles as a fickle and unpredictable swing region.
There is something of an invisible cultural highway between New York (the city) and South Florida. Both Latin (especially Puerto Rican) and Jewish communities have an almost nomadic relationship between both states, with an established expectation that if you are a Puerto Rican or Jewish family in South Florida, part of your family is in New York, and there is a regular flow of family members in perpetual transit between both places. That doesn't explain the entirety of the Jewish Floridian identity, however, as South Florida, with its history of Latin American / Caribbean migration flows, also has a sizable Sephardic Jewish community who didn't come from New York like their European Ashkenazi counterparts. They speak Ladino - whereas Yiddish is a Hebrew / Slavic / Germanic pidgin language, Ladino is a Hebrew / Spanish / indigenous pidgin language. Just as Yiddish can be linguistically hard to pin down because it represents nomadic traversals across Northern and Eastern Europe, Ladino is similarly hard to track because of the many ways Spanish is spoken in Latin America!
The Jamaican Jewish community gets a special shoutout here; there was an influx of Sephardic Jews into Jamaica during the Spanish Inquisition who established port towns in the island and became involved in piracy, collaborating with Muslims against Crusaders and so on. They are largely no longer in Jamaica but some of their numbers have assimilated into South Floridian Sephardic Jewish lineages.
Zooming out, New York and the Tampa Bay region enjoy something of a 'frenemy' relationship and have an ongoing traversal between the two regions. The tourist regions of St. Pete, Tampa, and Miami all experience an intense tension with New Yorkers, with the local (especially working / service class) perceiving New York tourists and snowbirds (affluent northerners who spend part of their year up north and part of their year in Florida) as consistently dismissing the state of Florida as barbaric, lacking in culture, lacking in public resources, lacking in education, lacking in public transit, while much of the economic appeal of this state to them is that there is no state income tax, which would, of course, fund many of the amenities the state of New York enjoys.
There is also a general shared perception that Florida has a snowbird population that strategically legally 'resides' in Florida just long enough to get voting privileges, and many Floridians have long perceived these voting habits disadvantage those who live here full-time. Those who are retired and not raising children here, for instance, do not have a vested interest in our educational system, and as most public schools are funded in some way by property taxes, guess who votes in ways that are advantageous to lowering property taxes at the expense of the public school system? (an oversimplification, and a political stance, but indicative of a broader perception shared by many who live and raise their families in Florida's tourist economies).
I bring up this tension because it contributes to a wider cultural antagonism between those parts of the state populated part- and full-time by New Yorker snowbirds and transplants and their children, and those whose families' incomes rely, and have historically relied, on serving that class of people. It is punctuated by the fact that many Latin communities in South Florida come from - and are still connected to - regions of Latin America and the Caribbean that echo this U.S. tourist / native worker tension, at a broader scale.
Similarly, you have a tension between a) the Northeastern U.S. flavors of political progressivism that have a more state / public -centric view of 'environmentalism' as a branded political issue, and b) the coastal and northern Floridian tourist workers / fishers / hunters / farmworkers who are day-to-day impacted by changes in the environment and carry a deep familial memory that facilitates sensemaking around climate change and capitalist interference with the environment. These peoples - especially the North Floridians - tend, as I said, to be more ground-up in their organizing approach and suspicious of public services they perceive as having traditionally failed them and being more institutional and less worker-friendly in nature. Again, there is a Floridian perception that outsiders from the Northeast are coming in and assuming an attitude of superiority and expertise over the lived experience of Floridians.
This antagonism feeds the 'us against them' mentality of 'Florida versus the world' that unites the entire state in ways that impact even those who don't feel they resonate with the Floridian identity, because that distinction still shapes their sense of who they are. Regionally, it feeds a large part of North Florida / South Florida suspicion and animosity, which is often only overcome when it becomes Florida against the World.
Florida, ecologically, has this incredible natural highway that has in our lifetime been revitalized to once again permit a historic migration pattern between animals that has existed for a decent part of the region's more recent history. The implications for biodiversity are interesting, because you have these historic migrations of animals up and down the state that have survived in very different climates and around distinct types of vegetation. This is not my field, so I won't pretend to know too much about it, but I do know this almost 'micro-migration' of wildlife up and down the state has led to cool kinds of biodiversity that are of great interest to ecologists.
I grew up in coastal Pasco County, at this weird intersection of Tampa Bay and the Nature Coast. My hometown is technically not even on Tampa Bay proper, but was considered part of the Tampa Bay Area by virtue of getting Bay News 9 on non-cable television. (I am being somewhat tongue-in-cheek there, but Bay News 9 was also a regional institution and lifeline for us as the primary source of all news, from weather to politics to cultural happenings, as well as the primary resource during hurricane season. We could also access it on the radio which became invaluable during storms.) I see a lot of flora up here in Gainesville that reminds me of where I grew up in startling ways I didn't even realize I remembered or had been missing.
To me, Pasco and Pinellas counties represent an excellent case study in Floridian ecological distinctions and cultural tensions that are also (ecologically and culturally) completely inextricably tied up in one another. This joke doesn't really mean much to people outside the area, but I sometimes say 'Trinity is the Pinellas of Pasco County and Largo is the Pasco of Pinellas.' Basically, there are two border towns of south Pasco and north Pinellas that problematize the stereotypes of the differences between the two. Those who live in St. Pete may fully believe that they are an island apart from 'that other Florida,' but coming from just north of there, I cannot ever experience St. Pete without seeing the undercurrents of that agricultural, fiercely independent, grassroots ground-up preference for community organizing, refusal to be defined, extremely locally codependent, commitment to self-sustainability, weird quirky spiritual movements, and a more broad general bizarreness that merely transitioned from outsider farm assemblages in Pasco to unabashed pageantry in St. Pete.
Florida is absolutely riddled with those funny little juxtaposition transition regions. It is a space marked by transition, by defiance of definition, by convergences between currents running in opposite directions that perpetually pull from and flow into one another. If you know one region, you cannot help but see it reflected everywhere in what is supposedly a totally distinct region. One could argue that any region in the country, maybe even any region in the world, is marked by those spaces if you know them intimately enough, and that's probably true, in its way, but here it is expressed, of course, in a Floridian way. We may not be the only ones who express it that way, but it is the only way we can express it.
Moving up to Alachua County has been absolutely delightful because I have been connected to the Nature Coast my entire life, but am seeing it from an almost flipped perspective, and everything feels simultaneously so familiar and so fresh. When I hear people joke about 'ACRs' (Alachua County Residents) I cannot but think of the people of my home town and county, yet much of the town of Gainesville itself reminds me of a slightly younger St. Pete. Every new combination of elements makes each region its own thing, yet also a product of its surroundings.
I also gave a bunch of migrant communities short shrift, like the Muslim and Indian populations of Tampa or the South Pacific of the Southeast, and so on and so on forever.
The farmworker communities of central Florida deserve their own book series.
I know I should stop because I will keep thinking of more examples I didn't explore but this one definitely needs mention: the state's history is also punctuated with anti-establishment anarchist movements that can not be read outside of the context of anti-plantation, anti-Klan, anti-Confederate attitudes among working Southerners. Florida is a proud site of black-led resistance movements that are studied in anarchist literature but largely forgotten in Floridian histories. The fiercely independent, libertarian political attitude attributed to Floridians as a whole owes much to this history.
Florida is my favorite place in the world. The people who lead it never deserve it.
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