Both from 1981, Tent City and Mayami Nuestro present contrasting and penetrating non-fiction portraits of Latin American diaspora communities in Miami.

Over several months in 1980, some 120,000 Cubans left their island for the United States in a mass exodus known as the Mariel boatlift. Fifteen years after having left Cuba herself, Miñuca Villaverde, alongside her husband Fernando visited the so-called “Tent City”, an improvised camp of these marielitos beneath the I-95 highway in Miami. Tent City explores that microcosm and reveals the day-to-day life of several refugees, “men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, whose lives were only separated by cloth curtains hanging between the beds like floating walls”. Empathetic but refusing victimhood, moving and reflexive, Tent City is one of the essential films about the Cuban diaspora, a portrait of people discarded by history in their incessant search for agency and liberty.

Carlos Oteyza’s Mayami Nuestro, meanwhile, takes a satirical yet affectionate look at Venezuela’s elite, capturing the exodus of petro-dollars from Venezuela to Miami in the 1980s. Contrasting Venezuela’s social inequalities with Miami’s sanitised consumerism, the film humorously registers both a frivolous neocolonial fantasy as well as a fleeting reversal of global capitalist hierarchies, when oil wealth gave the Venezuelan upper classes unprecedented power. With millions of Venezuelans in recent years traversing the Darién Gap in search of opportunity in the US, Mayami Nuestro resonates anew, highlighting the persistence of economic and cultural hierarchies in the Americas and beyond.