1997

20.1

James Brock and Gerri Reaves
Signing the Sunshine State or, the Prophylactic Tour Guide to a Safe Miami

Living in December-dreary West Virginia or Pennsylvania, it is easy to succumb to the commercials on the Weather Channel that beckon us to "come to [our] senses" in South Florida. In these advertisements, we see the Miami we want—the beaches, the nightlife, the romance—and we quickly write down the 1-800 number before the commercial closes. Within a week, we receive a guidebook that displays all the delights a Miami vacation promises. Yes, we realize we are easy marks for such bald manipulations; however, in terms of construction and appropriation, we wonder what Miami will we visit, whose Miami will we see.In this essay, we will investigate the Miami tourism apparatus that purportedly offers the authentically exotic Miami, but in fact defaces and denatures Miami to market a faux place to a middle-class, white, American audience. This process reveals the necessary mechanism of the tourist industry: that is, the commodification of Miami by a deployment of basic marketing tactics, from the insidious to the innocent. While tourism always involves these mostly benign marketing distortions, in Miami’s case the packaging perpetrates a cultural misrepresentation with significant political dimensions. his marketing strategy depends on a three-part process: 1) the establishment of a neutral voice of authority in the tourist literature; 2) the creation of a spectatorial tourist subjectivity; and 3) the taming of the exotic and sexual in the beckoning tourist landscape. Ironically, these marketing ploys mirror the tourists themselves more than they mirror the actual Miami that the tourism industry sells. Caught in the circularity of their own gaze and consumption, tourists create the fodder for the creative machinery that manufactures the product of the next tourist’s gaze.

Our primary text for this inquiry is the January-June edition of the 1996 Greater Miami & the Beaches Visitors Guide, a glossy, 164-page book published by the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. Indeed, Miami is in want of such public-relations redemption following the Mariel boat-lift, race riots, the influx of Haitian refugees, Hurricane Andrew, and the headlines of German tourist murders. The Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, as Regina Eisman notes specifically, has spearheaded much of the activity to promote a "safer" Miami over the last three years (10). And according to Jeffery Zbar in Advertising Age, marketers have set out to create what they call a "safety net" to lure tourists back, and August 1995 statistics indicate that this massive campaign is re-invigorating tourism in Miami (38).

The Guide deals with this marketing dilemma of selling a product with well-publicized "complications" by eliding those recent unpleasant events altogether and by compressing time in the introduction. While the Guide devotes four paragraphs detailing the commercial and cultural developments of the 1920s, the 1980s receives a scant, vague two-sentence review: "The ‘80s brought a beautiful new skyline and a new way of life to Greater Miami and the Beaches. Although Miami had changed almost beyond recognition, the new Miami had thrived amid change and overcome many difficulties" (16). We have Miami history rewritten: apparently, the city formed itself after the upheavals the Guide slickly avoids naming.

This repackaged Miami is then available for the would-be tourist’s visual consumption as an embellished landscape prepared for what sociologist John Urry calls, in "The Tourist Gaze ‘Revisited,’" "aesthetic appropriation" (178). The Guide consequently negotiates between the casually-informed stereotypes of Miami that the potential tourist has adopted, a Miami that must be as authentic as it appears in the media, and a Miami that remains worth seeing. In terms of commodification, the book sells a recycled Miami Beach, a reconstruction of Miami as an updated 1950s paradise, a new Mia-Disney for middle-class families. Sociologist Gareth Shaw calls such repackaging of a community’s history for modern tourist consumption "the economics of nostalgia" (200), and this nostalgia is a stable, consumable product that the tourist expects to find and purchase. The problem for the tourism marketers is to temper the exotic sufficiently to quell the fears tourists may hold of the unknown Miami, but not to blanch the tropical flavor that distinguishes it. Paradoxically, tourists must simultaneously encounter and avoid the native.

The Guide first addresses this problem by constructing a disembodied, authoritative narrative voice, devoid of gender and ethnicity. This insider voice establishes itself in the above-mentioned history section and immediately neutralizes the threat of Miami--even before the tourists venture there--by emphasizing the city’s youthful vitality and its stable boundary defined against the wilderness:

It’s not every day that a city turns 100 years old and still looks so good. But then, Miami has always been that kind of place—vibrant, full of energy and eternally young. Just a glimpse of the city’s sparkling skyline tells you that Miami has come a long way since July 28, 1896, when Henry Flagler’s pioneer settlement was incorporated. Carved out of a tropical wilderness, Miami has gone through its share of growing pains and emerged, in the 1990s, as a world-class city. . . .

Over the century, fortune seekers and dreamers have arrived in hordes, each with a distinct vision. Some were searching for a better life; others were trying to make a quick buck; still others had a noble cause. (8)The text reifies the refrain of the U. S. westward expansion, placing Miami well within the frame of common American folklore; tamed by pioneer fortitude and secured by free enterprise, Miami becomes integrated into the American landscape. Perhaps, too, the tourist can become something of a pioneer, another seeker or dreamer, vicariously reliving something genuine of the American past.

Second, the Guide places the tourist in the subject position in the narrative frame of the tourist literature, a common device in advertising literature. The tourist in this privileged and insider position occupies a Miami ever-pastel, clean, sunny, and air-conditioned, and free from hurricanes, insects, humidity, violence, drugs, and poverty—also aspects of the real Miami. Indeed, the first community that the Guide describes is not Miami, but Miami Beach, a more palatable neighborhood to place the tourist:

When you think of Greater Miami and the Beaches, this eclectic community [Miami Beach] is usually the first thing that comes to mind, along with images of white sandy beaches, clear blue skies and sun-kissed waters. Miami Beach is a place where beautiful people sun by day and revel by night in a party scene as legendary as the celebrities who grace the neon-lighted clubs, bars and restaurants. Once you explore the Beach, however, you’ll discover there is so much more, from fine shopping and dining to the pastel-covered Art Deco district, all in a funky atmosphere unlike any other place in the nation. (18)In the words of the advertising expert Jeffrey Zbar, it is a "perfectly seasoned" Miami (38), a term that emphasizes the consumptive nature of the marketing ploys, and a term that now accompanies advertisements in The New Yorker for the 1997 edition of the Guide.

The Guide safely ensconces the tourist in prefab subjectivity, in which passivity and the spectatorial role are crucial. Indeed, according to Frederic Dimanche and Diane Samdahl, "mainstream leisure theorists have argued that the ‘selling’ of leisure is antithetical to developing a stronger sense of self . . ." (120). The active role of the tourist as depicted in the Guide is to watch. The cover photo, for instance, presents an empty beach chair, mercifully shaded, with towel and sunhat to give it color against the blue ocean backdrop. A tourist can then fill this vacant place by simply taking a seat and doing nothing but gazing—not even the usual beach accessories of a best-seller novel or fashion magazine is featured on the cover to distract the tourist. The opening advertisement, entitled "Surf and Turf," also invites the tourists to inhabit another open, uncluttered beach, peopled by other healthy, safe, white tourists, or to join in a round of golf on an almost impossibly unpopulated and pristine golf course. The photos embody models of possibility for tourists; they define the safely known horizon of experience. They simultaneously make concrete the tourists’ fantasies of the extraordinary in Miami and reassure tourists that indeed they can easily "fit" into these pictures with no real investment of or risk to self.

While the Guide centers the tourist as the consuming subject, the essence of the city becomes peripheral. The lens supplied by the Guide allows tourists to imagine themselves in the middle, in a subtropical border between the first and third worlds, authentically experiencing the "rich and strange." The Guide fortifies tourists’ conceptions of themselves as the genuine Americans. Thus, Miami becomes a microcosm of our American tendency to Anglicize: that is, we revere Plymouth Rock and Jamestown as our origins, ignoring decades of exploration and settlement by the Spanish, founders of the oldest city in the United States, St. Augustine, which oddly enough is just up the coast. Tourists can say they encounter the non-American—the tropical, the foreign—in a place where they don’t sweat, don’t see blacks (save as entertainers, athletes, or hotel employees), and don’t need to know a word of a language other than English. Of the Guide’s 227 photographs, only seven contain images of African-Americans: only one, a woman dining in the company of two white female friends, is clearly a tourist; one photograph of the baseball Marlins’ Charles Johnson is printed twice; another photograph depicts two linemen defending the Dolphins’ white quarterback Dan Marino; two photographs are of street musicians placed in parks in the daylight, promising a contained and enriching chance meeting with the locals; and the last two photographs are of a mural of African-American history on the Lyric Theatre. Latinos do occasionally appear in the background. And, if they are subjects, they are represented in stereotypical settings, for example, Cuban men playing dominoes in Little Havana. Thus, tourists need not fear seeing anything or anyone too foreign, anchored in the knowledge that they remain central to whatever passes before them and that they are still physically connected to the States.

The third marketing strategy, taming the exotic, is a considerable effort for the Guide: it must present a Miami that will not be culturally challenging for the tourist. One element, to be sure, of the authentic Miami experience is to partake of the Caribbean influences in Miami. The Guide does not entirely whitewash the international patina of Miami. A one-page description of "other" neighborhoods reduces ethnicity to street fairs (i.e., packaged foreign culture), photographs of Seminole Indians weaving, and Jamaicans playing music. Like the Cuban domino players, these are canned, familiar images. What is important for the tourist is to collect such signs; in other words, the homebound tourist’s ability to authenticate the cultural experience to friends and family is directly dependent on having seen, paradoxically, the familiar. The booty the tourist returns with must have unquestioned validity, must declare that the tourist has indeed been to the Miami that everyone back home can recognize. Consequently, the Guide relies on the tourist’s familiarity with stereotypes of Miami to soften and sell the exotic. In fact, the tourist actually authors the exotic in these photographs. As Daniel Boorstin has said of this tourist desire: "The French chanteuse singing English with a French accent seems more charmingly French than one who simply sings in French" (qtd. in Culler 128). The sociologists Allan Williams and Gareth Shaw also assert that these tourists’ clear and clichèd expectations "about the types of landscapes that are appropriate for tourism experiences" determine what is authentic (140).

Furthermore, the publicity of recent attacks on tourists by "natives" requires the Guide to shield tourists and encourage them to stay near the hotel. For example, the book does not provide any information on self-guides, and the ads emphasize private beaches, restricted pools, and in-house restaurants. In fact, the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau is practiced in supplying tip sheets for tourists, and Regina Eisman documents that the Bureau gives "reassuring answers to such questions as ‘What areas should a visitor not go into in Greater Miami and the Beaches?’" (10). Perhaps most telling in the Guide is the map of Miami provided to tourists. The conventional function of a map is to give the user knowledge and authority over the unknown. But the Guide's map exemplifies how tourist maps deliberately do not represent a geographic or cultural reality. This map details all the Miami neighborhoods mentioned in the narrative, but it is curious how the map and narrative construct two African-American neighborhoods—Overtown and Liberty City—with token and predictable references. Overtown is important because within its boundaries is Miami Arena, home of the hockey Panthers and basketball Heat. Liberty City showcases "African-American history, with exciting and colorful food, music and dance" (22). However, Overtown in the only neighborhood not labeled on the map itself. Also Liberty City is the only neighborhood in which the roads are completely erased. In effect, the map renders both neighborhoods inaccessible deserts by erasing them: the map effaces Overtown, and it eliminates the routes in and, more importantly for the tourist, the routes out of Liberty City, N.W. 54th St. and State Highways 7 and 195. The Guide, then, gives the tourist no means of authority to navigate these neighborhoods. The obvious subtext, coded in omission, is that these areas are inhospitable for the traveler; in the words of John Urry in "The Tourist Gaze and the ‘Environment,’" such demarcated sites harbor "social pollution." "The result," he argues, "is to make certain places seem contaminated and unsuitable for visual consumption" (19).

Thus wrapped as a tourist map to Miami, the Guide ultimately conforms to marketing conventions that are as old as the first travel narratives to the New World, with embellishments and erasures proven most successful, whether written by Christopher Columbus, John Smith, or the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. Such embellishment is perhaps a necessary and implicit part of the tourism apparatus. Specifically in this case, we see how maps and texts mask chaos, the extreme ethnic, cultural, and environmental diversity that threaten to rupture the tourist gaze and disrupt the tourist desire to consume. Miami, consequently, is transformed into an "American" city, a generic town, with just a digestible touch of cultural spice that the consumer already knows and anticipates. Thus, the Guide highlights modes of transportation that will ensure that tourists stay within these boundaries of familiarity. The Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau itself has erected roadside "Sunshine Signs," golden sun emblems embossed on blue backgrounds, to direct tourists from the airport to Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, South Beach, and nine other "tourist-friendly" sites. As both Columbus and Smith were wise and honest enough to warn investors, patrons, and other adventurers about unfriendly natives, so does the Bureau instruct tourists on how to find safe passage through well-channeled routes. The exotic can be safely penetrated, and once penetrated, it can then be understood, apprehended, snapshot, and framed.

The Guide further tames the exotic by peddling "family value" activities and insuring a family-based tourist identity; for instance, the entry form for the bureau’s sweepstakes requests information on the number of children, with no check box for "zero." The ads are replete with children’s activities, and happy wedding-banded couples are shopping together everywhere. Almost all of these ads are cleansed of signs of premarital and extramarital sexuality. And the nightlife, although supposedly "famed," is dismissed in a few lines. South Beach is a place where you "can dance the night away" and be seen at "trendy cafes" (118).

This family-values Miami contrasts with a "gay-friendly" website entitled "A Week in South Beach," produced by the South Beach Tourist Bureau (SoBe). SoBe depicts South Beach in all its queer decadence. Using terms such as "au courant," "first-world metropolis," and the "American Riviera," SoBe actively counteracts the Guide’s nostalgia for the 1950s South Beach. Instead, SoBe encourages visitors to see South Beach in terms of Soho or the French Quarter, improvising daily and nightly exploits and adventures in the narrative, and creating links to other websites that feature virtual salons for even more explicit encounters with the online natives. The Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau also has its own new website which lifts all its images and text from the 1996 Guide; significantly, it does not provide any links to other websites, thus prohibiting the viewer from investigating electronic renderings of South Florida that might compete with or subvert the Guide’s version. In fact, the only advertisement for South Beach in the Guide is singularly heterosexual, for Portofino Tower, "South Beach’s Most Fashionable New Address." Projected upon the torso of a model, with her hands resting behind her head in a gesture that lifts both dress and breasts, is the tower itself, an amber-glowing phallus. Thus, the Guide twists South Beach straight. In contrast, the SoBe website exploits South Beach’s "international flavor"—the beaches where women sunbathe topless, as in Europe, and the nightclubs where multi-racial revelers dance in the nude. These digital images and interactive narratives appeal to multi-racial, multi-lingual, and multi-sexual viewers, and indeed, as even Time magazine has noted, South Beach advertises itself as a gay-friendly haven for tourists, tourists who have ample disposable income for hotels, restaurants, galleries, and nightclubs (Drummond 55). However, the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau epitomizes how mainstream tourism reinforces an ideological wholesomeness and family orientation that belies the city’s complexity, and thus, it avoids any mentioning of a gay culture, despite the clear economic advantages of appealing to that audience.

What, then, is the family tourist to do in Miami? According to the Guide, the activities are again spectatorial and consumptive. Sporting events, for instance, are given thirteen pages of text, while the arts take up three pages. While the text does give a few lines to "extreme" sports such as scuba diving, wind-surfing, and roller-blading, the activities highlighted in the book are most conventionally recreational and accessible: tennis, boating, and golf. The Guide offers detailed information on how to purchase tickets for the Miami sports teams: the Dolphins, Marlins, Heat, and Panthers. However, the true sport in the Guide is shopping, with the Bayside Mall receiving most notice—its ad displays two fashionably-decked white children, beneath the claim "Bayside, What Miami Is." The ads and the text reassure tourists that these shopping malls, and Bayside especially, feature familiar chain-stores so that they can buy clothing, jewelry, and gifts with some confidence and within the comforts of a climate-controlled environment. Again, the familiar masquerades as the different. As leisure sociologists Frederic Dimanche and Diane Samdahl claim, shopping "reaffirms identity" and gives tourists a chance to "try out" other identities (123), all within a safe setting, as if they never left home and never confronted another America. Miami, consequently, becomes a place from which tourists return home with clothing and jewelry from mall stores and postcards or snapshots of tropical beaches, with their identities untouched, their horizons falsely broadened by a mirage of the tropics.

Interestingly, the new 1997 edition of the Guide exhibits only the most modest changes. It sports a slightly different cover—the same beach chair, but now occupied by a model in a one-piece swimsuit, as she reclines in the chair, her leg kicked up, perhaps inviting another kind of occupation—and a new chapter on the movie industry, promoting star-gazing, yet another passively consumptive activity for tourists. Otherwise, the text is the same, accompanied by mostly the same advertisements and photographs. Significantly, two of the photographs that featured African-Americans no longer appear in the new edition. That the new edition has such cosmetic changes suggests that the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau saw little need to promote Miami any differently this year; in fact, the 1997 Guide only ossifies the strategies and assumptions we have noted in our study of the 1996 edition. Indeed, while the actual Miami as an incorporated entity is currently threatened to disintegrate because of graft and corruption in the city government, the Miami of the tourism industry is secure, a city built upon the tacit agreement between the provider and consumer, the host and tourist.

As the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau constructs cultural myths to create the shimmering Miami in the Guide, the actual Miami commits an act of collusion in the reshaping of itself and in the sanctifying of the tourist as a subject who supposedly determines the "real" experience. The tourists’ final approval of what constitutes authentic Miami—the type of consensus that Jonathan Culler calls "a major stabilizing force in Western society" (139)—is confirmed by the Guide. The Guide no longer serves as a marker; it becomes the principal sight itself. What then is obscured and rewritten on the cultural map is the real city itself, and what is then constructed is an authenticated commodity: the Miami that the tourist can know, the Miami that accommodates the tourist, the Miami that mirrors the tourist—a Miami that makes real the narrative designed by the Guide.
 

English Composition University of Miami Coral Gables, Florida 33124

Graduate School University of Miami Coral Gables, Florida 33124

Dimanche, Frederic, and Diane Samdahl. "Leisure as Symbolic Consumption: A Conceptualization and Prospectus for Future Research." Leisure Sciences 16.2 (Apr.-June 1994): 119-29.

Drummond, Tammerlin. "Not in Kansas Anymore." Time 25 Sept. 1995: 54-55.Eisman, Regina. "Violence against Tourists Forces Miami to Address Safety Issues." Public Relations Journal 49.12 (Dec. 1993): 10-11.

Greater Miami and the Beaches 1996 Visitors Guide. January-June edition. Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. Miami: International Voyager Media, 1996.

Greater Miami and the Beaches 1997 Visitors Guide. January-June edition. Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. Miami: International Voyager Media, 1997.

Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. "Greater Miami and the Beaches." Online. Internet. 10 January 1997. Available: http://www.miamiandbeaches.com/.

Shaw, Gareth. "Culture and Tourism: The Economics of Nostalgia." World Futures 33(1992): 199-212.

South Beach Tourist Bureau. "A Week in South Beach." Online. Internet. 30 August 1996. Available: http://www.sobe.com/.

Urry, John. "The Tourist Gaze and the ‘Environment’." Theory, Culture and Society 9 (1992): 1-26.---.

___. "The Tourist Gaze ‘Revisited’." American Behavioral Scientist 36.2 (Nov. 1992): 172-86.

Williams, Allan M., and Gareth Shaw. "Tourism Research." American Behavioral Scientist 36.2 (Nov. 1992): 133-43.Zbar, Jeffery D. "Ad Boost, Up-North Snows Aid Miami Tourism." Advertising Age 18 Mar. 1996: 38.