Week 1 at HistoryMiami Lina Fernandez

My first week at HistoryMiami has been enriching and eye-opening. I have spent most of the week doing training with the educators to better understand what they do on a day to day basis, from serving as gallery aides to leading the art-making activities in the learning gallery or running the touch cart. I have also begun to outline a tour that I will give in the Folklife gallery of the museum on overlooked communities in Miami that deserve more attention for their cultural and historical significance, such as the area where I went to school, Homestead (which I learned researching this week is the 2nd oldest city in the county after Miami!). 

One of the most interesting things I’ve learned so far in my time at HistoryMiami is that educators have the power to tell stories within an exhibit that can go beyond what is exhibited. The museum’s permanent exhibit, Tropical Dreams, aims to tell the story of Florida’s history. It was completed in the 80s when the museum opened and has had minor renovations since, but the content has largely remained the same, and the exhibit ends in the 80s with the Mariel boatlift and Haitian immigration to Miami. When I first realized that the exhibit I saw as a kid visiting the museum in 3rd grade was still there and virtually unchanged, I was astounded and upset. It seemed to me nonsensical that a history museum would allow an exhibit like that to be frozen in time, removed from the present context. It is clear to see what hasn’t aged well: in the entire exhibit, there is only a small section on slavery tucked in the corner of a room, and the description of native peoples is outdated and totally ignores the fact that Miccosukee people still live in Miami today. I brought up my concerns with the exhibit with my supervisor and we talked about the ways in which the exhibit was lacking, but she also challenged me to imagine what might be lost if it was updated. In her tours, she doesn’t try to hide the faults of the space; instead, she acknowledges that it is a reflection of the time in which it was created, and can be used as a tool for understanding how perceptions have shifted in the last 4 decades. This taught me a valuable lesson about the necessity for educators to work with the space they have. Although she can’t change the whole exhibit, she can bring in supplemental info on tours, like she does when she tells the story of Francisco Menéndez, a former pirate and the captain of Fort Mose, the first free black community established in America, who escaped enslavement twice in 18th century Florida. I’d never seen anyone do a tour with props and supplemental material before and I thought it was a really clever way to make the information relevant, engaging, and more inclusive of untold stories. 

I’m really excited to be able to take this lesson and apply it to my own tour, which focuses specifically on communities that don’t have representation currently in the museum. I’ve chosen to talk about Homestead/Redlands, Doral, Hialeah, Kendall, and Little Haití because I want to get at what it is that makes each of these communities so distinct but still so Miami. I am learning to view Miami as a culture more than a physical place with boundaries, and I will be bringing in supplements to illustrate what I think is interesting about these communities that deserves to be presented in a museum like HistoryMiami. For instance, there is nothing in the museum currently about Doral, so I’m planning on bringing in a photo of El Arepazo, a restaurant where Venezuelans gather to watch the news coming out of Venezuela, serving a similar purpose as Cafe Versailles did for Cubans. What is happening in these places is just as important to the story of Miami as what is happening Downtown and on the Beach, and I want to highlight them in my tour to talk about what we want our communities to look like moving forward and how we want them to be remembered.

This is an interactive aspect of the gallery I'll be touring in. It asks visitors to consider what they think should be collected to tell Miami's story. 

This is the photo of El Arepazo that I'll be bringing in to talk about Doral during my tour.