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'Marketplace' Searches For A New American Dream During A Week At Miami's WLRN

Dan Grech

  

 

Marketplace-B-Tues.mp3
The second part of the Mayor Tomas Regalado interview.

Marketplace Morning Report will spend the first week of President Obama's second term broadcasting from Miami and demonstrating what some of the president's inaugural themes mean in real life.

The raw materials for show host Jeremy Hobson and his production team of three are Miami's huge immigrant population, its great wealth and crushing poverty, and the enormous empty space between those economic extremes.

The first show of dozens that will originate from WLRN's Miami studios featured an interview with Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado and a Venezuelan immigrant who's just beginning her new life in Sunrise.

Credit Dan Grech
HOBSON ON MIAMI: 'It's the perfect place to look at what the new American Dream is.'

Those are the two ends of the immigrant story, Hobson figures: one at the beginning and the other at the end of the path to the American Dream.

"It's a place with such a huge foreign born population, it's the perfect place to look at what the new American Dream is because you're talking to people who have just arrived," said Hobson.

The Regalado interview, broadcast in two parts on Tuesday morning, should be particularly eye-opening, Hobson said, and not just because of a compelling immigrant story that ends with becoming the elected leader of a multi-ethnic population.

It's because the guy has a thick Cuban accent.

"You don't go to almost any other city in the country and find a mayor who is speaking with an accent," Hobson said. "In fact, when he was talking to his press guy while we were setting up for the interview, he was speaking in Spanish."

To Americans in more homogeneous places, hearing the mayor of Miami speak with a heavy foreign accent is a reminder, perhaps a shocking reminder, of the population trends that many say brought President Barack Obama to a second term.

"Some people might be a little nervous about that," said Hobson in a quick interview between two of the seven shows he and his team will produce every morning in Miami.

"But the most important cities in the world have that. New York, London, Hong Kong, they're all international cities," he said. "Miami has that."

And that's a positive thought that Miami may need to cure one of its laughably obvious neuroses, its inferiority complex.

"I've heard from so many people, 'We've got to have the best art museums or people aren't going to take us seriously.' Or, 'We’ve got to have the biggest stars in sports or people aren't going to take us seriously.'"

Hobson, who believes Miami is usually regarded (outside of its own borders) as a top-tier American city, says Miami's low self-esteem would be amusing it weren't also so damaging.  He says Marketplace is exploring a theory that Miami has undermined some of its critical assets -- transportation and education, for instance -- by spending too much of its money on status-conscious white elephants like sports arenas.

That's a topic for one of Wednesday morning's broadcasts. Hobson's guest will be the Miami Herald's economy reporter, Doug Hanks.

Being chosen by a national news program as a social and demographic metaphor for modern America may go a long way to addressing Miami's self-perceived inferiority but Marketplace is already advising us not to let our heads get big.

Remember the end of the presidential campaign, with all the attention on Ohio? Back then, the important national city with epidemic issues was... Cleveland. Marketplace spent a week there, too, documenting its crumbling manufacturing base and its desperate lunge for economic diversification--and testing a conclusion that we'd all face similar developments sooner or later.

But right this minute, says Marketplace Morning Report producer Sean Bowditch after three days in South Florida, it's all about Miami.

"I'm still processing what we're hearing," he said. "It's been a fabulous quilt of perspectives and thoughts and insights."

Jeremy Hobson will be a guest Friday at noon on The Florida Roundupon WLRN. Click here for a tentative rundown of the Marketplace Morning Report's Miami topics for the week.

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