The Year of Dangerous Days by Nicholas Griffin

Author:Nicholas Griffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Cuban Americans now had an entire new population to take care of. By June, between the Mariel boatlift and the steady stream of Haitians arriving in the Keys, Miami had received what equaled a third of its own population in six weeks. It was the rough equivalent of having Providence, Rhode Island, dropped into Dade County, only without any provisions for housing, schools, or jobs. Despite the uproar, it wasn’t the city, the county, or federal agencies that spearheaded the absorption of Mariel’s refugees. It was the Cuban community. Cuban businessmen reported to the Orange Bowl and gave hour-long seminars on the differences between Cuba and Miami. They found immigrants unsettled, scared of Miami’s growing reputation for crime, desperate for jobs and housing, wanting to know what a parking ticket was and whether you had to pay it. Most often the questions were familiar. Where to find a job, a room, a way to move around the city, the same questions every generation of immigrants had always asked, with one advantage: they were hearing answers in their own language, in a town where the Cuban influence was already marked.

Miami’s Anglos had been relatively passive spectators amid the unrest in May and continued to be divided in their response. While the wealthy stood firm in their support for Ferré’s vision of tolerance, growth, and assistance, the middle class had had enough. They wanted a future without racial violence, without a surge of immigration. They wanted the past back tomorrow.

The talk in the Herald may have been of consensus, but it didn’t exist outside of opinion columns. The opposite had happened. Differences and divisions were deepening, nowhere so starkly as in the civil issue of language. Back in 1973, in a gesture of goodwill, a county ordinance had been passed establishing Dade as bilingual. Now, in early July, as the boatlift continued, a forty-five-year-old housewife named Emmy Shafer was spurred to found Citizens of Dade United, with a goal to revoke that bilingual ordinance and return Miami, once and for all, to English.

Shafer was a Russian-born immigrant who had managed to survive eighteen months in a concentration camp at Dachau during the Second World War. She weighed only fifty pounds when American soldiers liberated her. Even in 1980, she still carried food in her purse. Shafer spoke six languages, none of them Spanish.

Before the end of July, Shafer had collected more than twice the number of signatures required to put an anti-bilingual ordinance on the November ballot. She received up to three hundred calls a day from people eager to sign on. “It was like giving gold away,” she said. If the ordinance passed, it would “prevent Spanish from being used in public signs, emergency 911 calls, hurricane warnings and other public statements.” If you were one of the tens of thousands of new immigrants from Cuba who hadn’t yet had time to learn English, it was the equivalent of snuffing out the only candle in the room.

Shafer’s campaign walked a thin line between calls for unification and outbursts of racism.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.