Prologue: Arrivals and Departures
The scene is played out each and every day at the Miami airport. A porter loads a trolley with the suitcases of an inbound passenger from Bogotá, Colombia; Caracas, Venezuela; or other points south. The trolley—loaded six or seven hardbound cases high—is jostled ever so slightly, but the tremor begins, and after seemingly hesitating for a second, the luggage crashes to the hard tile floor. As they hit, they make a deep, hollow, empty sound: the acoustics of empty Samsonite waiting to be �lled. Their owner has come to Miami on a routine shopping trip, purchasing goods sometimes made in the Americas but most often in China, India, or Europe. Speciality malls (such as Sawgrass Mills or the appropriately named Mall of the Americas) cater to this transnational trade, their marketing campaigns expressly aimed at a cosmopolitan class. Other people arrive to undergo medical procedures, to stash monies earned elsewhere, to secure temporary dollar-paying employment, or simply to ferry products back and forth through the wired channels of an underground economy that is everywhere visible. Even on such an everyday level, Miami functions as the nucleus for global circulations of goods, people, services, and capital. Hyperaware of its position in the cosmology of hemispheric capitalism, the Miami-Dade Board of Tourism has marketed the city aggressively and internationally as the region’s world-class shopping, banking, and entertainment experience. And though Miami has one of the highest crimerates in the Americas, its shopping malls are privatopias secured by hidden cameras, high-tech surveillance, and armed guards.

Within the context of the multiple and overlapping cultures of circulation that interconnect the Americas, this essay seeks to develop a notion of the urban imaginary, conceptualizing it as a culturally imaginary space that is created in and through the relationship between these forms of circulation and the practices of stabilization that seek to objectify the city as a totality.1 The issue is how the postmodern city can imagine and represent itself as a totality—as an enframed, territorialized space of events, ethnicities, landmarks, and representations—when it must internalize persons, histories, and economic realities originating elsewhere as a condition of its reproduction. How is the social imaginary of a city engendered when the circulations that de�ne that city and give it a recognized identity depend on necessarily fluid and transversal spaces and a temporality that is intrinsically connected to temporalities elsewhere? In what way, for example, can we consider Miami a city in standard modernist terms when there is a constant circulation of large numbers of people between Haiti and Miami and between Cuba and Miami and when the histories of Haiti and Cuba are grasped as intrinsic to the city’s ongoing history? And, it is not simply people from Cuba and Haiti, but also from Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, Jamaica, and elsewhere that are—each in his or her own way—internalized.

As will become clear, Miami is a particularly appropriate place to pose these questions, positioned, as it is, in the interstitial social, mental, and geographic space connecting North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Not the least of the ironies created by its location is that most (if not all) of the urban studies approaches developed in the context of older modernist cities make little sense, with the result that Miami has received only sparse attention and in ways that are often grossly undertheorized. To counter this, our essay attempts to further develop the concept of cultures of circulation (Lee and LiPuma 2002), using it to highlight the way in which processes of stabilization are framed. The point of our essay is to suggest by example a theoretical reversal: rather than presupposing that cities are self-delimited and relatively stable spaces, connected by circulations to other urban spaces, we argue that the postmodern city exempli�ed by Miami is an increasingly global space that is better conceptualized as, constitutively, the site of multiple, transversal, and reflexive circulations that are variously and provisionally stabilized to engender the urban imaginary. We highlight this tension between circulation and stabilization by focusing on the highly ambiguous categories of ethnicity and ethnic identity, which exemplify the centrality of circulation and the quasi-ritualized rites of stabilization necessary to map the image, ideology, and institutional grounding for the imagination of Miami as a city.