Toxic Tour of Miami

This tour will show you the richest and poorest neighborhoods in Miami-Dade county, starting on Indian Creek Island, then moving to Little Haiti, and ending in Liberty City. Through the interpretation of the rhetoric of the walls and fences in these places, I hope to provide you with a deeper understanding and awareness of the deep division between the classes and races in the United States.

The tour will start in a boat, traveling around Indian Creek Island. Since no tours are allowed on the island, we will be able to see the big houses and beautiful beaches from a far. This mode of transportation will also allow us to feel how removed the extremely wealthy are from the rest of the world; they live in an alternate, utopian-like, reality that we may only view from afar. We will then dock the boat and get onto a tour bus to travel to LIttle Haiti and Liberty City. By taking a bus we will experience the poverty of these places closer than from a boat but feel removed, mimicking the way we often only see poverty through the lens of our privledge (bus window).

Finally we will have time walk around LIttle Hait and Liberty City to look at the art on the walls and shops.Walking around, will allow us to get out of our comfort zones and experience our true closeness to poverty that we usually ignore. As we move to more impoverished places, our transportation becomes less glamorous until we are left only with our bodies to transport us. This symbolizes the great responsibilities that rest on the shoulders of the poorest people in this country and how little help they recieve. It also brings us closer to the poor people that are often foreign to us in order to humanize them.