Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

This essay is about contemporary Miami’s underbelly. Patricia Engels places the audience in the shoes of a protagonist who overhears conversations or has encounters with some of Miami’s inhabitants and takes the audience on a tour of the city, from the glittering to the seedy. The audience encounters immigrant communities, the porn and sex work industries, and elite, privileged social circles.

Latinx communities exist throughout Miami, and Cuban refugees regularly arrive. Immigrant childcare workers appear all over town, and the reader meets the mothers of the children they take care of. These women enjoy leisurely lunches during which they denigrate their employees while also bragging that their children are bilingual, thanks to these women. She writes about standing in line at a bakery where her reader overhears two men complaining about the city’s shifting demographics: “One man tells the other he and his family plan on moving away soon. ‘We’re tired of feeling like foreigners around here. You can’t go anywhere in this city without hearing Spanish spoken’” (295-96). Next the men turn to the counter to order empanadas, happy to enjoy the food of the same foreigners about whom they grumble.

A porn producer exploits young women who have presumably come to Miami to pursue modeling careers. Her reader also has an encounter with a racist neighbor. The neighbor, a massage therapist, bemoans her Latinx clients who request that she use a back entrance when she comes to their homes. She continues to complain that immigrants are taking over the city and have made it “their own little colony” (298). Engels’s protagonist replies that now the racist and xenophobic woman can understand what it feels like to be colonized, referencing European colonization of the Americas.

Ultimately, Miami is a microcosm of the broader United States, where social tensions are high and opportunities limited. People come to the city full of hope but do not always find what they expected:

They come from other cities and from other countries, looking for paradise by the sea; looking to be South Beach models, to marry rich and become queens of Star Island, but instead find themselves in the republic of pills and powders and paid sex (299).

Miami’s underbelly is the failed American Dream.

Natalie Diaz’s poem “American Arithmetic” tackles the inequality that Indigenous Americans face. The poet centers police brutality. Though Indigenous people make up less than one percent of the total national population, they die at the hands of law enforcement at a rate of 1.9 percent. Diaz says, “Police kill Native Americans more/ than any other race. Race is a funny word” (305). The word has a double meaning. While it might reference skin color, she writes, “Sometimes race means run” (305). Moreover, it suggests competition, something inherent in a society built on colonialism. Diaz highlights the isolation that she feels as an Indigenous person surrounded by others who are not like her. The math is against her, and she feels as if she is disappearing.

Ann Patchett’s contribution focuses on the community service work of a Nashville-based priest, Charles (“Charlie”) Strobel. The essay explores Strobel’s background, what drew him to his life of service, and his dedication to the city’s homeless.

Charlie recounts that after this father’s untimely death, his childhood losses and family struggles shaped his life as a “worthless servant,” someone who loses the self in service work “so that the worthlessness [of the work] becomes a kind of transcendence” (314). When Charlie’s mother went out to work to support her four children, two elderly great-aunts looked after him and his siblings. These two women provided him with a model of giving, loving service.

Charlie went on to establish a shelter and center for Nashville’s homeless in the mid-1980s. His vision is “radical,” and he believes that “the homeless need not be served in low, dark places, and that people with nothing should be able to stand beside people with everything and hold their heads up” (312). The center does not only serve the homeless; it provides all with “the opportunity to respond directly to the broken and disenfranchised among us” (313). The center thus binds together a community of people who act as “worthless servants” and those who come to be served by people who care for them and recognize their inherent worth.