florida forever

an ode to the best place in the world

“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.”

The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham

Cypress Swamp courtesy South Florida Water Management District.

I'm rolling west, picking through traffic at the edge of the vast expanse of the everglades. The hot humidity and flatness of the swamp have a sedative effect on my body, everything is still and harmless. It’s so flat you’d think you could see anything coming from miles away. But that’s the trick with the swamp. While you’re busy staring out at the horizon, there’s a whole damn world lurking just beneath the surface—predators, prey, life, death, all tangled up in that murky stillness. I wanted my life to feel as calm as the Everglades does on the surface, like nothing’s changing but me. But change is sneaky. It creeps in when you’re not looking, just beneath the surface, slowly shifting everything around you, whether you’re ready for it or not. Sometimes that’s good. 

Everything in the swamp is teeming with opportunity and life, from the ancient, still, observant gators to the saline adapted, resilient mangrove trees with their roots rising and arching winding through the thick, brackish water as if yearning for the sky, but bound to the mud below. Yet when I tell people I’m from Miami they instantly think: vapid glamor, unserious, crypto. Although the gilded reality of Miami is part of its beauty, it’s only the teensiest bit. Anyone who actually grew up there knows that. The truth is that most of South Florida is a bunch of strip malls with the best Cuban, Peruvian, Argentinian, Jamaican, and Puerto Rican food you’ve had in your life and coffee brewed so strong you’ll never forget it. Towns like Hialeah, Wynwood (past MLK Boulevard), Little Haiti and Little Havana, North Miami, all have a lot of character. Our infrastructure isn’t at the mercy of the seasons so being poor in Florida doesn’t deprive you of beauty, which is a privilege in its own right - when life is hard enough you can still enjoy a cold beer by the water. There’s lush green everywhere, that’s just how plants grow down there, even in the harshest neighborhoods. There’s beauty all around due to the environment that facilitates it. There’s a reason Walt Disney built Disney World in Florida, her natural form enhances the Magic. 

Some people shit on not having seasons, yada yada, but to me the consistency is lovely. After I hit puberty and basically stopped growing, I didn’t need to turnover a new wardrobe regularly. It was crop tops and shorts all the way until I moved to Philly for college. It’s actually really nice to be tan all the time, and because it was humid, I didn’t need to use moisturizers until I moved to the northeast. Everyone in Miami speaks Spanish, to the point where even our CVS chains have ‘y mås’ added to their neon signage. The story of first generation Americans like myself, bilingual, immigrant parents, multicultural, is the norm. If you stand out it’s for your intellect, your creativity, your talent - you are more than just another sob story for gringos. While it’s true that first gens face diverse challenges, the camaraderie in Miami is unmatched. The culture bleeds into everything from how we work, to how we play - and the implicit higher trust society that thrives based on not just a shared language, but the ambition to be better. 

Life in Florida is mostly chill and easy, hence why your grandparents would love to retire in Boca Raton. Floridian culture reflects this in some ways, we don’t have a ton of protests and people are generally good-spirited and easy-going. It’s hard not to be. But Floridians are also mostly Latin American immigrants, many of them undocumented like I was most of my life, and incredibly high achieving. It takes a certain kind of person, delusional enough, ambitious enough, to leave everything behind and start from scratch in a new country. That grit is imminent, especially in cities like Hialeah, not in Brickell where UMiami students from Ohio and bi-coastal tech transplants flock. 

The hustle in Florida never ends. There’s a ton of fraud in Miami-Dade County, for sure, and you don’t need to watch Scarface (although I highly recommend it) to know that part of that business is selling drugs. We have the second highest number of rehab centers in the country, second only to California, which has 77% more people. But the hustle is deeper than drugs. Even I had a side gig in high school, writing essays or selling homework for $20-30 a piece. We’re all hungry, and to quote Jason Kelce from the Philadelphia Eagles: hungry dogs run faster. Florida, with very few natural resources, is the fourth largest contributor to U.S. GDP - and those are just the numbers that are legitimate, not accounting for the endless side businesses. It’s literally a swamp, with a beach, and yet it is massively successful not just in tourism, but in creating desire more broadly, from paradisiacal second homes to its expansion in the space industry (Apollo 11 was launched from the Everglades, being near the equator provides a speed advantage for rockets launching eastward). Florida’s success is driven largely by the cities with the highest concentrations of immigrants and I don’t doubt that in twenty years it will continue to be an economic powerhouse largely built on the backs of people who cared to make this place home for generations to come. 

a stretch of I-95, from shutterstock.

Off Bird Road, there’s a tattoo place that’s turned into a bit of a meme, called Inkaholiks. It’s super millennial-coded, most tattoo snobs turn their noses at it. But whatever, that’s where my best friend Mika and I got our first tattoos at eighteen: three birds on the ribcage. I could say that they represent the concept of illusory freedom, that the birds are flying, feeling free, unaware that they are permanently bound to my ribcage. But the real answer is that if you take I-95 down to Miami Beach there’s a long stretch of concrete walls with birds engraved, in series of threes. Growing up, seeing those birds when I looked out the window meant we were close to the water. I still get excited just thinking about it. 

I moved to Philadelphia for college after high school. Back then I was driven by an insatiable desire to see as much of the world as possible, but for a few weeks at a time Florida felt big enough. The muggy stillness of the swamp wasn’t suffocating, it was raw and honest. It didn’t feel ridiculous to believe in magic, or that maybe I didn’t need a Hero’s Journey to transform. Maybe there wasn’t a truth in the world that Broward County couldn’t reveal to me, that what I was seeking was at home all along. Everything I would eventually learn stared at me in the face: that Truth and transformation often sneak away in the spaces between words - unnoticed, alive, boring, inevitable. I wanted my life to feel grandiose, I worked hard to get into a good school to someday get a good job and feel like I had earned some significance that I would be able to cash in for a better life. More than anything, I wanted to make my parents and my people proud, but I wrestled with a sense of guilt for feeling that what they had already given me was more than enough. 

Mika and I hugging, somewhere in the Everglades. December 2022. Photo courtesy of my talented bestie: Dwayne Dawkins.

The best part of Florida is nestled in the swampy veins of the Glades, far from the greedy city lights: a small observatory near the Kennedy Space Center where you could lay claim to any star in the sky. One of my friends, Dwayne, found this spot. We were changing, we were growing, but time seemingly forgot altogether about this part of Florida’s face. Second best is parking just outside of a small airport in Fort Lauderdale and watching planes tumble from the night sky like whispers, indiscernible from stars. If we got hungry, there was Quickie’s, a fast food joint by the beach where we’d indulge in fried conch and fries, the rhythmic thumping of the water crashing into the limestone in the background. 

It was easy to get lost in the sound of the waves, but in my mind I needed the catharsis of a big moment to transform into a version of myself I could finally love and trust and enjoy being. The problem is nothing’s ever really enough, the milestones keep piling on like mires of a swamp; that’s why it’s a rat race. Meanwhile, my dreams weren’t even my own, something that wasn’t clear to me at the time. The desires I thought were mine were all status-driven fantasies that promised transformation: an Ivy League degree, living in the East Village of New York, working in finance, and the lifestyle that that’d unlock. By proxy, the version of myself that would unleash. For so long I yearned for that vision, that self, unquestionably chasing what I thought would finally make me happy. Once I got it, the magic peeled off and erupted fast. It felt like surfing a wave that took forever to catch and only thirty seconds to enjoy, leaving me with nothing but seafoam and sand up my ass. I couldn’t figure out where things went wrong.

It felt like backsliding to concede that I would probably deeply enjoy being back in Florida. That I would actually love a life architected around my family, my friends, the beach, the swamp, and the city that raised me. Admitting to myself that Florida was big enough meant that I never actually grew; that I failed to transform; stunted like a caterpillar condemned to its cocoon. I was supposed to conquer lands, my dreams all had to be far away and uncomfortable, there was necessarily suffering involved for me to learn and come back and be better. Being home was rarely ever glamorous, but life in other cities wasn’t inherently much different either. Sure, the problems were different, but at the end of the day: wherever you go, there you are. 

Maybe this is bearish on me, but growing up in Hialeah, Florida, taught me that in some ways I could be very happy with very little really, I guess that’s good because I want to be a writer. I was loved and had friends, and I loved and had Florida, before I had anything to my name. I thought status would free me but in that way I was sort of always free, the kind of freedom afforded by having nothing to lose. Maybe the status games are just for the sake of an easier life, not necessarily a better life, and definitely not a happier life. My little life in Florida was somehow always big enough - even when I didn’t want to believe it. That doesn’t mean I won’t play the game for a little while longer, just for the sake of competition and adventure, but I stopped believing that achieving x amount of points would bring me closer to an illusory version of me that quite frankly might not even be happier than I am - just differently unhappy and more adorned. How different would your life look if you decide you’re already worth loving, and that anything you dream should only serve to bring you closer to meaning versus status? That meaning and status could be fully, entirely separate goals?

Mom and Dad in Miami Beach, ft. baby me.

When I look into the eyes of my people, I see where I went wrong, I see that what makes dreams big is that they stretch beyond the self. Every immigrant in Miami is there because they want to build something better, not for themselves, but for their families, whether they’re back in a different country or right there with them. It took me years to learn that my dreams weren't big enough or authentic - driven by the myopic view of status. Anything worth fighting for, building towards, must be rooted in selfless love for others. This is what makes Florida great: it was built with love, to serve - a mission haphazardly and unintentionally driven by a diverse people who risked it all for the sake of making someone beyond themselves better off. 

Grand narratives have their place, but the Small things are transforming us relentlessly - all we can do is guide that inevitable process towards something that feels authentic and real. There’s enough magic sometimes in just having somebody to share it with, in seeing the beauty in your home like no one else can, or in the plight of getting up and building a better world for someone you love. You never know just how deep the truth lurking beneath the surface of the moment could be. Some truths get lost in the rearview mirror of time, while others grow like shadows - bigger and bigger the further away you are. I hope I can look back and be proud of dreams that were authentic, that transcended me. 

A few years ago I’d get tattoos to build permanence into my skin the way God built rest into Sundays, each design an attempt to defy the idea that nothing lasts forever. My flesh will die with me, but I hope that whatever my legacy is keeps Florida’s magic alive a little longer, maybe even forever and a day. 

The birds! Courtesy of my Instagram, @m.valesc.