By the time the first tourist hits the sand at Sunny Isles, Peruvian TV producer Jose Crousillat has been working the phones for hours, checking on his offices in Milan and Madrid. By afternoon he is in the Capitalvision studios videotaping Guadalupe, his latest Spanish-language telenovela, seen around the globe.
Meanwhile, out on trendy South Beach, Dutch businessman Ger Vrielink is busy sorting a barrage of faxes from German catalog clients waiting for pictures from the latest fashion shoots. With six photography teams out, at $20,000 per team per day, he is a happy man. "There is no place in the world shooting more fashion than Miami today," he says, beaming, between calls.
At day's end, as a fiery orange sun sets over the Everglades, Italian developer Ugo Colombo looks out from his 31st-floor office toward a distinctive circular white condominium tower, near completion, on Biscayne Bay. Developing real estate has made him a millionaire at 32. Half his buyers now, he says, are Latin Americans and Europeans willing to pay from $200,000 to $1.6 million for a condo in the hottest place to be at the moment: Miami.
Yes, the rumors about Miami are true. Just ask Jose, Ger and Ugo. "Foreigners" have taken over. There are Brazilians buying condos, Frenchmen opening clubs, Nicaraguans selling TVs and washers, Italians building public rail systems. And the Cubans -- everywhere. Today half the population of Miami's Dade County -- a million people -- were born in a foreign country. Dade is the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. with a Hispanic majority. Nearly 60% of its residents speak a language other than English at home, mostly Spanish. In Miami even a deejay for the new Latin MTV channel must be fluent in two languages.
While some Americans might look askance at the prospect of Hispanization, it is already a fact of life in Miami. In the 1980s the city's location made it the beachhead for nearly 300,000 refugees and immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. What seemed like a burden at the time, however, has become a business bonanza. Miami, once a town of tourists and retirees, is today being remade by its bilingual immigrants into a hemispheric crossroads for trade, travel and communications in the 21st century -- a sort of Hong Kong of the Americas.
Sociologists and businessmen alike see Miami as a model for other American cities learning to cope with multiethnic populations and new economic realities. "Miami today is a laboratory for the U.S. -- if not the Americas -- of a new kind of city in terms of international business and ethnicity," contends John Anderson, who serves as president of Miami's Beacon Council, an economic-development group. "Other large metropolitan areas will be dealing increasingly with the social and ethnic challenges we are dealing with today."