Reflecting migration from within the U.S. rather than immigration from abroad, south Florida's Jewish population has grown since 1940 to around 581,000. While the overall percentage of Floridians who are Jewish is only 3.5%, slightly higher than the national average of 2.2%, the Jewish population of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties comprises a tenth of all Jews in the U.S., representing the third-largest concentration of Jews in the country after New York and Southern California. "The influence of the Jewish population is felt significantly in the cultural, political and economic arenas of south Florida," says Ira Sheskin, director of the Jewish Demography Project at the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies at the University of Miami.
Less well known, however, are other religious and ethnic groups that have migrated or immigrated to Florida: Sarasota has an Amish community, for example, that began in the 1920s. Among the 2.67 million immigrants in Florida, there are now Mayans in Jupiter, Finns in Lake Worth, Bosnians in Jacksonville and Jamaicans in Miramar.
How do ethnic pockets develop? Social scientists call it chain migration: Some pioneer -- perhaps a refugee resettled by a faith group, perhaps an independent-minded entrepreneur -- tells a family member or friend, who tells somebody, who tells somebody else.
Top 10 Countries of OriginCuba642,951Mexico189,119Haiti182,224Colombia157,371Jamaica141,182Canada99,139Nicaragua98,022United Kingdom70,384Dominican Republic66,690Germany64,088Source: 2000 CensusIn the pages that follow, Florida Trend looks at groups you may not be aware of -- some new, some long-standing -- that will be part of Florida in the new century.
Puerto Ricans, U.S. citizens, make up 264,627 of the state's 16-plus million population. The 2000 Census counted 50,065 Puerto Ricans in Orange County, the most in the state, followed by Miami-Dade with 49,551, and Hillsborough with 25,849.
Of the state's 2.67 million foreign-born population, 1.2 million are naturalized citizens.
Franklin County has the lowest foreign-born population in the state: 210. (69 Europeans, 68 Latin Americans, 38 Asians, 22 Canadians, 13 Australians and no Africans).
Miami-Dade and neighboring Broward are a United Nations unto themselves; the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area has more foreign-born people (1.6 million) than the rest of the state's metros combined. Six out of 10 foreign-born Floridians call south Florida home.
Amish: Sarasota
Like a lot of people from Ohio, Tim Miller's family vacationed in Florida in the winter. Indeed, Miller, 43, can't remember a time when he, his parents and brothers and sisters failed to travel to Sarasota County. Unlike a lot of people, however, Miller was raised Old Order Amish, a Christian denomination known to outsiders for horses, buggies, bearded men and modestly dressed women -- and known among themselves for an earnest adherence to Biblical precepts, adult baptism and freedom from what they consider destructive worldly influences.
Old Order Amish and their sibling believers -- New Order Amish, Beachy Amish (Miller's denomination as an adult), Amish-Mennonite and Mennonite -- began arriving in Sarasota in 1925 after, of all things, four young Amish men drove to Florida in a 1919 REO Speed Wagon. One persuaded his father in Ohio to go to Florida to farm. After a setback near Venice, the farmers found fertile soil in Fruitville in Sarasota County and made a go of celery.
Word of Florida's winter warmth spread, and a "national tourist camp" where vacationing believers built cottages was developed in the Pinecraft and adjoining Homecroft areas. Today, the small area, hemmed in by sprawl, is home to 500 residences that are tidy and often tiny -- some just 600 square feet -- bearing plaques with German and Swiss surnames such as Yoder and Miller.
On a sweltering June day, a bearded Amish man on a bicycle pedals down Beneva Road; an Amish woman in her long dress and head covering waits on her three-wheeled bicycle for the traffic light on Bahia Vista to change. (Many liberal Amish drive, as do Mennonites. The only horses and buggies are on porch decorations.)
The area is home to a few Amish-style restaurants, including Miller's Dutch Haus, which offers waistline-swelling portions of comfort food topped off with huge slabs of pie. There are a couple of produce stands and a couple of furniture stores selling Amish- and Mennonite-crafted furniture, and there's a mural by Yoder's Restaurant but little of the Amish-centered tourism business found around northern communities.
The enclave is an anomaly in Florida; it's even an anomaly among the faithful. The Mennonite Tourist Church, one of about a dozen Amish and Mennonite churches in the area, is said to be the only one in the nation where Old Order Amish and liberal Mennonites worship together. And it's unheard of for the largely rural Amish to cluster in a village. "It's bursting at the seams," says Miller. People pay dearly for space for a cot on someone's porch. "If you want to see everyone," Miller says, "you have to come to Pinecraft." (Mennonites live throughout the region.)
The sense of community is palpable. It's noteworthy how many of Miller's customers know each other. Year-round residents meet nightly at the local park for shuffleboard.
Also distinctive is their industry. Many grew up with German as their primary language, and traditionally Amish education ends with the eighth grade. Most are self-employed. Miller has not only the restaurant but also a furniture store. The Overholt home on Bahia Vista has a produce stand and also is the epicenter of a publishing enterprise that brings out The Christian Hymnary, a 1,000-song hymn book used throughout believer communities and compiled by John J. Overholt. He moved to Florida in 1967 with his wife, Vera, and their two kids for the warmth. They later had three more children. The family made recordings and toured communities in Europe and sang in churches. "It was a rich life but not in dollars and cents," says Vera Overholt, 71. (John Overholt died in 2000.)
Eldest son, Nathan, 37, seems the modern Amish-Mennonite man. He quotes the Book of Proverbs with ease, sings on the family CD, composed a hymn in the songbook and has his own landscaping business. His secretary, Caryn Swartzentruber, wears the traditional Amish-Mennonite dress and head covering -- and a cell phone earpiece as she updates him on business. And Overholt and his brother Matthias are cutting-edge ranchers: They're raising water buffalo, the source of gourmet mozzarella.
With Pinecraft surrounded now by newer developments, the Overholts' water buffalo are on land around Myakka City east of Sarasota -- home to a new Amish and Mennonite area.
Mayans: Jupiter
To see how an ethnic pipeline flows, look at Mayans living in Jupiter. In 1981, a Catholic priest took eight Guatemalan war refugees from a Miami-Dade detention facility and brought them to Indiantown in west Martin County. Family and friends followed. Within a few years, the area had thousands of Mayans.
Indiantown had agricultural work, and the name pleased the Mayans -- "in a humorous sense, this is a town where we Indians ought to go" -- says the University of Florida's Allan Burns, who has written about them.
Later, a few Mayans originally from Jacaltenango in northwest Guatemala ventured down the road from Indiantown to Jupiter, a booming, upscale, coastal town in north Palm Beach County. They started a wave of immigration by men such as Prudencio Camposeco from Jacaltenango and its nearby villages -- a mountainous, agricultural area close to the Mexican border.
While in his late teens, like others from Jacaltenango, Camposeco crossed into Mexico and then into the U.S. west for a year and from there to Jupiter. "My friend came here before," explains Camposeco. "He was here, and we had some other friends from our town. They knew how to get jobs."
Camposeco, 30, has been in Jupiter for 10 years, one of an estimated 700 Jacaltenango men and 2,000 Mayans in Jupiter. It's been tough going for the group. While the Mayans provide a labor pool for toil most Americans don't want, there's been friction over the scores of day laborers who gather in the mornings on Center Street to be picked for $60 to $80 a day (or less) work in landscaping, construction and golf course maintenance.
The average Center Street day laborer pulls down about $60 a day, which at best would be $1,300 a month presuming he doesn't get sick, it doesn't rain and he gets picked to work every day.
He pays about $150 to $225 a month in rent (usually four to six men split a $900-a-month rental) and sends back $500 to $800 to family in Guatemala, leaving himself no more than $275 to $650 to pay for utilities and food. Upward mobility is hard for the many who lack proper immigration papers. Immigration status is their top concern, according to a survey by Timothy Steigenga, a Florida Atlantic University Wilkes Honors College professor in Jupiter who has researched and worked with them.
Few women immigrate, so men have a tough time starting a family. Many feel lonely away from Jacaltenango. There "at least we have the support of the community, the family and friends," says Jeronimo Camposeco (no relation to Prudencio), a social worker with Redlands Christian Migrant Association and a local leader.
The Mayans have created what community they can. Steigenga says new arrivals get low-interest or no-interest loans from friends and family to pay off the $4,000 to $6,000 high-interest debt owed to the "coyotes" who got them across the border.
When a countryman dies, Mayans go house to house to collect money to ship the deceased back home. There's a soccer league with teams representing different villages around Jacaltenango; the games are both sport and social occasion.
In 2002, with the Honors College's help, Mayans held a Fiesta Maya music, dance and folklore celebration coinciding with an annual traditional church-community festival in Jacaltenango. A Jacaltenango priest said Mass in Jupiter to open the celebration, then flew to Jacaltenango to say Mass a few days later. The Mayans secured marimbas, a xylophone-like percussion instrument. "It's the most important musical instrument in Guatemala," used in ceremonies and celebrations, says Jeronimo Camposeco, himself a musician.
Prudencio Camposeco's life beyond work revolves around church. He coordinates transportation for the local Catholic church, St. Peter, which just added a Mass in Spanish.
Prudencio Camposeco, who trained to be an elementary school teacher in Guatemala, has his own landscaping business in Jupiter. To preserve his immigration status, he hasn't returned home in 11 years. In June, he was sick for a week, his first extended illness, and it made him realize how much he misses his family. He talks by phone at least each week with his parents and sisters, with whom he shares his pay. "I decided to come here to find a better way of life and help my people," Camposeco says. "Leaving there is hard," he says of the politically unstable country. Then he adds: "To live there is hard."
Finns: Lake Worth
As a boy in post-war Finland accustomed to homemade toys, Peter Makila marveled at the battery-powered, factory-made wonders from his uncle in America.
As a teenager in 1965, he moved to Lake Worth to be with his uncle and got the unimaginable -- his own car. He returned to Finland, spent 27 years in Canada and then finally returned to Lake Worth, where he leads a double lif as an insurance agent and Finland's honorary consul.
He's a busy consul. Lake Worth for decades has been a hub for the hospitable Finns -- from Canada first, then the upper Midwest and then the home country. There are 4,900 people of Finnish descent in Palm Beach County, according to the 2000 Census.
Finns danced their beloved tango at Finn social clubs and stayed in Finn-owned motels. "It's very comfortable to go where there are other Finns," Makila says.
Buses deposited Finns at the door of the Scandia Bakery & Coffee Shop downtown, where they checked bulletin boards for rooms to rent and Seurakuntien Tietoja (church news). "Very good days," remembers Aune Kaanto, who with her husband, Taisto, owns the bakery. A delightful throwback with its tasty and inexpensive pastries and karelian pies, Scandia shows no sign of imitating the monotonous trendiness of post-Starbucks coffee shops.
But business has slowed. Finnair stopped direct flights to south Florida a few years ago, impacting Finn tourism. Hispanics and Haitians are more numerous.
Makila, 57, has hopes. Finnair is starting direct flights again in October. And this February, Lake Worth hosts FinnFest, an annual gathering rotated around the U.S. He expects 4,000 to 5,000 Finns to visit, hopefully 1,000 direct from Finland.
Jamaicans: Miramar
Miramar in southwest Broward is known for booming growth (doubling to 90,000 people since 1995) and corporate relocations from Miami-Dade across the county line. Less well known: A majority of its five-member city commission is Jamaican-born. Jamaicans are Miramar's largest single foreign-born nationality at 9,075 in the Census, part of the total of 26,468 from Latin America.
Don't call Miramar Little Jamaica. "Certainly not," says Jamaican-born Commissioner George S. Pedlar. "We have a very diverse population here." Indeed, Latin American and West Indian immigrants make up a quarter of the city's population. But Jamaicans have proved adept -- in a city with at-large voting -- at electing their own. "It just happened," Pedlar says. "We don't want to be labeled a Jamaican community. Our people are spread around all over. I like it that way."
In Broward as a whole, Jamaicans are the largest single foreign-born nationality at 60,241. The Jamaica National Building Society, akin to a savings and loan and Jamaica's oldest and largest such institution, opened a representative office in Lauderdale Lakes in Broward in March, to serve its 3,000 Broward customers and its 30,000 in south Florida, says manager Carmen Bartlett.
Vietnamese: Pensacola
After the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, the U.S. established a camp at Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola for refugees such as 27-year-old Thoa Nguyen and her husband, Truong Pham, and their children.
They fled Vietnam in 1975 with his family on his uncle's fishing boat. "I just cried. I cried very hard," remembers Nguyen. She feared she would never see her parents again. The Eglin refugee camp explains why an estimated 1,200 Vietnamese today call the Pensacola area home. There is a Buddhist temple, a Catholic Vietnamese church and Protestant Vietnamese churches. There are Vietnamese restaurants, Vietnamese-owned convenience stores and nail shops and a Vietnamese association.
"Some work for the state. Some work as farmers and some fishing," says Father Augustine Nguyen Hue, who spent more than seven years in captivity in Vietnam and now is pastor of the decidedly Asian-looking Our Lady Queen of the Martyrs and its 115 Vietnamese families.
A feature of how life in America differs for Vietnamese, says Nguyen, is how well Vietnamese of different faiths get along. A teacher in Vietnam, Nguyen studied accounting at Pensacola Junior College and now works for the state. She sponsored her mother's immigration here, and two sisters and a brother followed her. "I'm glad now I'm in the United States. There's a lot of opportunity. I tell my children all the time -- in the United States if you have a goal and you want to reach your goal, you can."
Bosnians: Jacksonville
In winning the NCAA men's singles tennis championship and National Player of the Year honors this year, Amer Delic, Jacksonville Wolfson High graduate, followed in the footsteps of Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe.
In moving to Jacksonville in 1996 with his parents and sister, he followed in the footsteps of his Bosnian countrymen fleeing war. Bosnians found Jacksonville through Lutheran Family Services. The area's relatively low housing costs and ease of finding employment make it a good candidate for settling refugees. The 2000 Census counted 1,992 people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, second only to Filipinos (7,260) as the largest single foreign-born nationality in Duval County.
Jacksonville has proved to be more than a first stop for Bosnians. Harisa Kapetanovic was 25 when she fled Bosnia in 1993. She originally settled in California, fell in love with a Bosnian refugee in Jacksonville, married and moved to the city, where she works for Lutheran Family Services, helping refugees like herself. (In Bosnia, she was a land surveyor; in America her first job was cleaning a nursing home.)
Like many refugees, she returned to Bosnia when the war ended to visit. She says many go back intending to stay but minority status or lack of work brings them back to Florida.
For Kapetanovic and her husband, Nadim, the deciding factor was how much had changed since they left. "I'll still be a stranger there," she says. "I feel more comfortable being here."