Refuge in Miami

A lizard the color of dry mud scampers across a patio wall painted sapphire in the Airbnb studio I am renting for a few days. Nearby, in a neighbor’s yard, there is a rooster crowing, competing with traffic on Biscayne Boulevard. I look up from my coffee and notice that the palm leaves overhead are perfectly still, as if captured in a tropical landscape by Gauguin. It is not yet 9 am, but it will soon be too hot for my northern bones to bear. I am a Chicago girl after all, and this is July in Miami.

I am here helping my daughter Aster build her own pied a terre in the city where she will act as a teacher’s assistant for City Year, a branch of AmeriCorps that places volunteers in inner city schools. Miami has the fourth largest school district in the country, surpassed only by districts in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The booming population is in part fueled by immigrants’; principals have had to divide classrooms or use janitors’ closets as makeshift classrooms.

Yesterday we bought a twin bed for Aster in little Havana—delivery and set up included for a good price. We celebrated with mojitos on Calle Ocho. The next day we visited the city’s history museum after an hour on south beach had tested our limits of sunbathing.

Miami has always been a magnet for tired and poor and persecuted of Caribbean. But long before the Marielitos, and the flotillas of boat people fleeing poverty, there were the children of Pedro Pan. We learned about this little known exodus in the Miami History Museum. Shortly after Fidel Castro came to power, some Cuban families believed that their children would be better off in the United States, freer to choose their own paths and practice their Roman Catholic traditions. Castro’s regime would topple in a year, they thought- their separation would be brief. And so they came—14,000 children—some as young as six, to be cared for by relatives or church groups in the US. Within six years, most children were reunited with their parents, who were given immigration priority by US officials. But some never saw their families again. Looking at their teddy bears and dolls under museum glass, the tiny suitcases they packed with authorized numbers of shirts and shoes, made my heart cry.

Just last year, there was another wave of unaccompanied children coming to Miami, anguished parents once again sending their children across the sea, this time to flee violent streets of Mexico and Honduras. Better to risk the journey than be forced into a gang or have no future, they think.

Maybe my daughter will teach some of these children from far away. I hope so.