The Zócalo Poetry Prize has been awarded since 2011 to the U.S. writer whose original poem best evokes a connection to place. After nearly two years of on-and-off sheltering in place, the prize’s subject is front and center for many of us; this year, writers from all walks of life submitted more than 1,000 poems for consideration. Place and poetry have long been important elements of how Zócalo fulfills its mission to connect people to ideas and each other, exploring the ground on which we all stand and the human condition we share. The Zócalo Poetry Prize is awarded in conjunction with the Zócalo Book Prize, for the best nonfiction book on community and social cohesion. The 2022 literary prizes are again generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

Rathburn is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife, winner of the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Southern Review, the Atlantic, and other journals. In 2019, she was appointed the poet laureate of Georgia. She teaches at Mercer University and lives in Macon with her family.

Zócalo is delighted to share Rathburn’s winning poem and an interview about her connections to Miami, the Southern poets she admires, and the role of place in her work. She will be honored alongside author Heather McGhee at the Zócalo Book Prize event on June 1, 2022, and will also receive a $1,000 prize.

8 a.m., Ocean Drive

The morning opens like a shell
under steam, but that’s too warm
a metaphor for early March
on Miami Beach, where despite the breeze
and gentle sun the streets are empty
except for delivery trucks
and trash collectors and people waiting
for the bus. What I mean to say
is there’s a gradual unfolding,
everything golden and green: sunlight
on the palm trees and hibiscus,
parking spots glittering like gifts.
The drunks who stood outside my window
at 4 a.m. shouting across
the imagined chasm of the alley
are still asleep. The tourists are
just now rising. And I, neither
tourist nor citizen, walk the streets
I used to know looking for landmarks,
matching buildings to memories,
or trying to: the galleries
and boutiques years gone, guessable
only by the curve of a wall here,
a design laid into a terrazzo floor.
Around me the work that makes the dream
possible: trucks unload into kitchens
and bodegas, waiters scour tables,
men mop floors. Even the sidewalks
are freshly hosed. By afternoon,
these streets will be impassable,
the sidewalks too, with so much splendor,
such conspicuous leisure, but now
there’s room to notice the valets idling
and how, in the alley between hotels,
past dumpsters and service doors, a man
carries an armful of fallen palm fronds
carefully off like a bouquet.

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This legend, repeated for more than a century, blends truth with fiction, and reminds us that history is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. Flagler and a woman named Julia Tuttle stand at the center of the story: The importance of Flagler’s East Coast Railroad and Royal Palm Hotel led some residents to propose naming the city after him, and he is often depicted as the city’s “father.” Tuttle, a businesswoman who lured Flagler to Miami and otherwise promoted the region during the 1890s, earned the title of “Mother of Miami.” But Tuttle and Flagler did not create something out of nothing. On the contrary, Tuttle’s home and Flagler’s hotel stood precisely where earlier settlers had already left indelible marks over 2,000 years of continuous occupation.

These Miamians included Tequesta Indians who lived in the area for more than 1,500 years, and Spanish missionaries who tried to convert them; African enslaved persons tasked with turning the land into sugar fields, who instead created orchards of fruit trees; Seminole Indians who came to trade and harvest the local bounty, and U.S. soldiers who waged a war to exterminate them; and a continuous stream of Bahamian mariners, fugitive soldiers from various armies, and shipwrecked sailors. These earlier generations have been forgotten largely because Tuttle and Flagler were master illusionists who engaged in a combination of physical sleight of hand and intellectual misdirection. Rather than create something out of nothing, they built upon the storied history that preceded them—and then helped others forget it.

Julia Tuttle, widely known as the Mother of Miami. https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/29793>State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

Tuttle clearly knew that she was not the first occupant of her waterfront property. Recently widowed, she relocated in 1891 from Cleveland to the mouth of the Miami River on Biscayne Bay, where she worked tenaciously to promote the region as a commercial and agricultural opportunity. Tuttle moved into a 19th-century plantation house that had been built by enslaved Africans in the early 1830s, and constantly referred to it as “Fort Dallas,” which had been the name given to it when it was turned into a military outpost during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). Tuttle’s property contained a man-made well, a stone wall, and several gravestones. There was a decades-old road that connected her home to the community on the New River—today’s Fort Lauderdale—and elsewhere up the Atlantic coast.

Still, despite all this evidence of earlier occupation, Tuttle declared to all who would listen that she was a founder of a new community. In words that would be widely repeated, she explained her ambitions. “It may seem strange to you but it is the dream of my life to see this wilderness turned into a prosperous country,” she wrote. One day, she hoped, “where this tangled mass of vine brush, trees and rocks now are to see homes with modern improvements surrounded by beautiful grassy lawns, flowers, shrubs and shade trees.” Tuttle wanted to “settle” a place that had been settled for centuries and turn it into an agricultural or commercial entrepôt.

James Henry Ingraham, president of the South Florida Railroad Company of the Plant System, was but one of the newcomers she impressed. Ingraham proclaimed that Tuttle had “shown a great deal of energy and enterprise in this frontier country where it is almost a matter of creation to accomplish so much in so short a time.” But his description of Tuttle’s efforts, too, revealed the preexisting history that made her successful. Tuttle, he wrote, “converted [Fort Dallas] into a dwelling house after being renovated and repaired with the addition of a kitchen, etc. The barracks … is used as office and sleeping rooms.” Despite her “improvement … on hammock land which fringes the river and bay,” Ingraham explained, the natural world remained largely untamed. “Lemon and lime trees,” which were planted by the earlier waves of Spanish, Bahamian, and American occupants, “are growing wild all through the uncleared hammock.” Ingraham, Tuttle, and others knew that citrus was not native to South Florida. Their claims about untamed wilderness were disingenuous.

Tuttle ignored evidence of the ancient Indian world that surrounded her. Like others of her generation, she recorded the presence of several large man-made mounds and shell middens in the area. Some were ancient burial sites or ceremonial centers, and others were basically landfills, built from generations of discarded shellfish and tools. They were all constructed by the Tequesta Indians, who had first settled the waterfront site 2,000 years earlier and lived there into the 17th century, when they attracted the unwanted attention of slave raiders, Spanish missionaries, and others moving in. Tuttle, like others who declared themselves to be on the frontier, deemed the Indian past to be inconsequential to the development that would follow.

With Tuttle engaged in acts of intellectual misdirection, Flagler and his construction crews took care of the physical destruction. Flagler, like most Gilded Age industrialists, is more typically associated with building than with razing. He earned his fame for helping found Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller in 1870 and then creating Florida’s modern tourist industry with his railroad and luxury hotels in St. Augustine, Palm Beach, and elsewhere along Florida’s Atlantic Coast. Tuttle lured Flagler to Miami with gifts of orange blossoms after a brutal frost had destroyed the citrus crop in central Florida, and clinched the deal by dividing her property on the Miami River with him.

In 1896, Flagler’s laborers at the mouth of the river leveled the ancient Tequesta mounds that stood in the way of progress. They were unabashedly brutal about it. One of the workers noted that a burial mound “stood out like a small mountain, twenty to twenty-five feet above water” and “about one hundred feet long and seventy feet wide.” Flagler’s African American workers struggled to remove “a poison tree” that grew on the top of the mound, as it “would knock them cold.” Those workers “who were not allergic to it” leveled the mound, uncovering and hastily removing “between fifty and sixty skulls.” One of the workers took home the bones, “stored them away in barrels and gave away a great many … to anyone that wanted them.” When construction ended, he dumped the remaining skeletons “nearby where there was a big hole in the ground.” Another bayside mound was hidden behind a “great tangle of briars and wild lime trees.” The midden materials from these and other mounds were strewn across the property, becoming the foundation for Henry Flagler’s opulent Royal Palm Hotel.

The city of Miami incorporated in July 1896, a bit more than a year after the railroad reached the site of the Royal Palm Hotel. Thanks to the vision of Tuttle and marketing genius of Flagler and others, Miami quickly became a tourist destination. City boosters built roads and canals, plotted new communities, constructed man-made beaches, and established new civic organizations. The real estate boom that followed incorporation pushed the residential community out from the mouth of the river and in only a couple of decades turned the small town into a bustling city. Tuttle died in 1898 and Flagler in 1916, but their collective imprint on Miami survived the hurricane of 1926, even as it destroyed the Royal Palm Hotel and temporarily slowed the city’s growth during the Depression. Miami remained a city committed to reimagining the future rather than one interested in celebrating the past.

Tuttle and Flagler shared an illusion that they were settling untouched wilderness—even as they were surrounded by evidence of earlier occupation. In this way, their story is no different than those of settlers across the continent whose shared myth of the frontier allowed them to ignore the history that preceded them. In the 1880s, the frontier was a fairly simple but magical idea: It allowed white Americans to ignore the ancient history of Native America. The myth of the frontier—that pervasive and most-American idea—allowed Tuttle and others in Miami to see “unclaimed lands” in the United States as an untapped and disappearing resource, and to imagine that white American ingenuity transformed wilderness into civilization.

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New America Foundation vice president Andrés Martinez, the panel’s moderator, opened the discussion by asking Miami-Dade County chief economist Robert Cruz to put immigration today in South Florida in a larger historical context.

Cruz explained that after World War II, immigration to Miami exploded; in 1940, Miami-Dade County had under 30,000 foreign-born residents. By 1960, that number had increased about five times, and by the year 2000, half the county’s population was immigrants, a percentage that’s stayed steady over the past decade. Today, more than half of Miami’s tourists are international, and in 2012 about $100 billion in trade came through the city by air and sea—two-thirds of which was from the Caribbean and Latin America. Both human capital and financial capital from abroad, said Cruz, have been vital to Miami’s growth.

A contrarian might say that Miami is booming without immigration reform, said Martinez. What sorts of benefits might reform bring to the immigrant community and to everyone else?

Marleine Bastien, executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nam Miyami/Haitian Women of Miami, asked the audience to imagine the pain and agony that the children of undocumented immigrants go through every night, wondering if tonight will be the night that their parents are taken away and deported. If comprehensive immigration reform passes, she said, we’ll be able to keep families together who have been living in the U.S. for as long as 20 or 30 years. “People will come out of the shadow of fear and into the light of freedom, and respect, and dignity,” said Bastien—adding that these people have worked in our hospitals, schools, and restaurants, keeping Miami running. “We owe them that much,” she said.

Both Bastien and Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, a Republican who represents Florida’s 25th congressional district, spoke about the larger economic contributions immigrants would be able to make for the community once their legal status changes. Immigration reform, said Diaz-Balart, is among the “very few things we could do in Congress right now that could immediately help the economy.” The undocumented immigrants who already live and work in America “tend to be the most aggressive, the most hard-working” people from their home countries, he said. They’ll continue to work hard—and they’ll also have the potential to lawfully, openly create businesses. “We can have a huge shot in the arm to the U.S. economy if we are able to pass immigration reform,” he said.

Turning to Michael Grunwald, a senior national correspondent for TIME Magazine based in Miami, Martinez asked if he has a sense of how the conversation around immigration reform is distinctive in South Florida as opposed to Texas or California, which also have large foreign-born populations.

“Immigration is so—it’s such a part of the fabric of life here—in a way that’s regardless of party or which part of the world you came from,” said Grunwald. In Washington, immigration is an abstract issue—a problem to be solved. In Miami, immigration is seen as a strength; here, he said, we don’t see immigrants as people in desperate straits who need help. We see them as the people who run businesses and run our community.

Immigration reform seems to feel less polarizing in Miami than in other parts of country, noted Martinez. Is that, he asked Diaz-Balart, a fair assessment?

Diaz-Balart said that immigration reform remains polarizing in other parts of Florida and in the community because it’s such a highly emotional issue. But lately, he said, we’ve been successful in bringing down the decibel level in conversations around it. And he added that he has sensed a desire to fix our system everywhere he goes.

The economic case for immigration reform has been key to selling it to the public, said Martinez. Does Miami-Dade County have a sense of what the economic impact will be of the legalization of hundreds of thousands or millions of people?

Cruz said that people tend to forget that most undocumented immigrants are already paying property taxes if they are homeowners or even renters. He said that legalizing workers who are already here will mean less wage exploitation and more buying power for the economy. And for every potentially negative factor, there tends to be a positive factor to counteract it.

Martinez asked Bastien to speak to what the immigrant community in South Florida wants to see the legislation address.

The community wants to see “inclusive” reform that keeps families—both traditional and nontraditional together; reform “that trail-blazes a path to citizenship”; timely reform that doesn’t keep people waiting 15 or 20 years to reunite families; and non-discriminatory policy that doesn’t heavily tax immigrants, she said.

Diaz-Balart couldn’t comment on the details of ongoing negotiations, but he said that he sees consensus among the American people about a pathway to citizenship: “We don’t want a group of people who are permanently here who can never aspire to become a U.S. citizen.”

In the question-and-answer session, a number of audience members who are undocumented or have undocumented family members asked the panel to talk more about the legislation’s effects on families. One audience member asked why the Obama administration has kept people in Haiti who have been approved to come to the U.S. waiting for so long. Is there anything, Martinez asked Bastien, that President Obama could do now to help the community?

Yes, she said. He can, without Congress’s approval, enforce Deferred Enforced Departure and also approve Haitian family reunification for all.

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Is Miami really so adaptable? Photographer Chad Ress, a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion, has been traveling throughout the United States to chronicle where people go to get a sense of connection–to a place or to other people. Ress isn’t looking at work, school, or home, but to gatherings organized and informal to find out how we think about public space and community today. What do people coming together in South Dakota, Miami, and Los Angeles share–or not share? What does the look of these “third places” tell us about community in America?

One of Ress’s first extended examinations of place was in South Florida, where Ress traveled in December to capture images of how Americans gather today. The photographs that follow are the first installment of a series that Zócalo will publish over the coming months. Ress’s effort will culminate in an exhibition of final prints. In Miami and its surrounding areas, Ress captured weddings, dance parties, fishing, yoga, and the annual Art Basel Miami show. Is Miami still a “surreal sandwich”? Is it quintessentially American? Are these communities “community”?

Whatever answers Ress’s work provides, or doesn’t provide, to such questions, you’ll find yourself enthralled by the way his images ask them.

Chad Ress is a photographer based in Los Angeles and a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. His most recent project, America Recovered, was featured in The Wall Street Journal and Time.

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