Magic City Killjoys: Women Organizers, Gentrification, and the Politics of Multiculturalism in Little Haiti

Abstract

“Magic City Killjoys” is a fieldwork-based study of women of color advocacy for community justice in Miami’s Little Haiti. The article draws on scholarship from urban and gender studies as well as on critical conversations about Miami’s multiculturalism and blackness, demonstrating how women organizers and leaders spearhead the local anti-gentrification movement to curtail displacement and cultural appropriation. My focus on feminization of organizing in the contentious battle for Miami’s future reveals the persistent and self-perpetuating gender and race imbalance between the city’s grassroots and official development politics. The women organizers who populate the pages of this essay defend a community-driven process and protest the masculinist, top-down approaches to urban development, even as they don’t always agree about the ways in which that protest should take place. Ultimately, I argue that thinking through the multigenerational, varied, and periodically opposed perspectives and practices within this women-led advocacy allows us to evaluate the social landscape of Little Haiti as neither politically nor economically hermetic, neither an issue to be fixed nor a culture to be consumed. Instead, the complex infrastructure of grassroots organizing reveals the Little Haiti community as entrepreneurial, politically-engaged, and economically, culturally, and generationally diverse. This image stands in direct opposition to the two-dimensional frameworks of cultural branding that index Haitian and Haitian American culture via the simplistic tropes of poverty or consumable difference and to the city of Miami’s history of ignoring or repressing its Black roots.