Miami is a Technicolor city …
If you are not regularly reading the Virginia Quarterly Review, you are missing one of the finest quarterly journals out there. The fall 2009 issue ($14) has just arrived.
Miami is a Technicolor city, especially in neighborhoods like Liberty City and Little Haiti, where the architecture unfolds like a graphic novel of black culture and history, painted in murals on storefronts and awnings and under overpasses. Buildings of almost every color are splashed with visages of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and now Barack Obama. You recognize a barbershop because a barbershop scene is painted on the storefront. Chitterlings, oxtail, wigs—everything inside is advertised without, and through a language painted in fits of color, in every breed of typeface, the city advertises a tough, bright psyche.
– Paul Reyes, “Opportunity Knocks”
