Andrew Otazo needed a new god.
His god needed to explain the absurdity he saw around Miami. It needed to address the beauty of the Everglades. The traffic in Brickell. The pervasiveness of New Yorkers and chisme, gossip. Only the divine could explain the bliss of croquetas.
The traditional deities left him wanting. So Otazo — a humorist — made up his own. He wrote The Miami Creation Myth. And in it, a panoply of gods explain the Miami miasma.
The Zeus of this very Miami world is the mighty Pachango, who breathes life into his children through a puff of his cigar smoke. His daughter, the goddess Marisleisis, begets the Everglades. Goddess Yamilet engenders croquetas. And a wayward wisp of smoke accidentally creates their foil, Achepé — the god of chisme.
At least one lives at the center of the most holy place — Mount Trashmore.
That tracks for Otazo. If his name rings a bell, it’s because he’s the one on your social media feed picking trash out of the mangroves. He’s removed more than 10 tons of trash from South Florida’s mangrove forests. Even HistoryMiami has a 35-pound bag of trash he carried at the Miami Marathon.
When he isn’t picking up trash, he’s trash-talking Brickell in his comedy. He’ll be reading excerpts from his new book on Saturday at the Villain Theater in Little Haiti.
On the Feb. 28 episode of Sundial, Otazo talks us through his comedic and spiritual awakening.
On Sundial's previous episode, Joanne Hyppolite told us about how Miami inspires her work at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Listen to Sundial Monday through Thursday on WLRN, 91.3 FM, live at 1 p.m., rebroadcast at 8 p.m. Missed a show? Find every episode of Sundial on your favorite podcast app, such as Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.
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