South Florida is one of the most diverse places in the United States; Miami and its immediate suburbs, in particular, function just as much as the northernmost part of Latin America as they do the southernmost part of the United States. Miami is often considered to be one of the centers of South America’s financial and media sectors, despite, of course, not actually being in South America.
In addition to being a crossroads for Latin American and Caribbean capital and culture, the Miami area is also a crossroads for generations of immigrants and part-time foreign residents. That extends well beyond Miami’s city limits to its suburbs, and really the entirety of Miami-Dade County; there are four congressional districts that are found entirely or mostly in Miami-Dade County, three of which are Latino-majority (all with a Cuban plurality) and one of which is black-majority (with a large Haitian population). Many of the suburban towns, in fact, have an even higher Latino percentage than Miami proper.
Of those three Latino-majority congressional districts in the Miami area, the one with the highest Cuban percentage—43.3 percent of its total population—is Florida’s 25th district, located mostly in the suburbs to the northwest of Miami. Unsurprisingly, since the large majority of America’s Cuban population lives in Florida, that also makes it the most Cuban district in the entire country. That may seem surprising, since Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, the cultural nexus of the Cuban-American community, isn’t in the 25th; it’s nearby in the 27th. However, just as with pretty much every immigrant group that came before them that spilled out of their first traditional neighborhood as they became more integrated into the broader culture, the bulk of the Miami area’s Cuban population has moved out to the suburbs.
The other characteristic that distinguishes the 25th is that it has the highest percentage of residents who are foreign-born: 56.3 percent were born outside of the U.S. and its possessions. (That number includes naturalized citizens as well as non-citizens.) Many of those 56.3 percent were born in Cuba, of course, consisting of both senior citizens who’ve been in Florida since the Cuban Revolution, and more recent waves of immigrants. However, as we’ll discuss next, a wide variety of other Latino immigrants are still arriving, many of whom are making the suburbs of the 25th district their first destination.
The Latino population in Miami’s suburbs is by no means limited to Cuban-Americans. Successive waves of immigrants from both Central and South America have joined them, cutting into both the cultural and the political dominance of the Cuban community within the Miami-area scene. While there are 338,000 people of Cuban origin in the 25th district, there are now also 53,000 Mexicans, 34,000 Colombians, 33,000 Venezuelans, 26,000 Puerto Ricans, and 24,000 Nicaraguans. (The Puerto Rican numbers might seem low, given Miami’s proximity to the island, but much of the Puerto Rican movement to Florida has been further north, to the Orlando area.)
In fact, there’s a lot of variation in national origin just moving from one suburb to the next in the 25th. The largest incorporated place in the 25th, Hialeah (with a population around 225,000), is more than three-quarters Cuban-American. Nearby Doral, however, has one of the highest percentages of Venezuelan-Americans of any incorporated place in the country (nearly one-third of its population of 56,000 is Venezuelan; both Venezuelans and Colombians outnumber Cubans in Doral).
The 25th, if you look at the map, isn’t confined to Miami’s suburbs (though that’s where almost all its residents live); it crosses the empty swampland of much of the Everglades, and takes in rural parts of Collier County on Florida’s Gulf Coast. It doesn’t have the ritzy oceanfront property in Collier County around Naples—that’s in Florida’s 19th district—but it covers the mostly Latino inland parts of the county, including Immokalee, a very impoverished tomato-farming community of around 25,000 residents, most of whom are Mexican-American.
Interestingly, that wide array of different groups of Latino residents still doesn’t make Florida’s 25th the district with the highest Hispanic percentage overall; that distinction belongs to California's 40th district, centered on East Los Angeles; it’s 88 percent Hispanic, while Florida’s 25th is “only” 75 percent. CA-40, by contrast, is heavily Mexican-American, and many of its residents have been in the U.S. longer, long enough for many of them to have had native-born children, which keeps it from being at the top of the list for most foreign-born: The 40th’s residents are 39.2 percent foreign-born, compared with the 56.3 percent in Florida’s 25th.
The 25th has one other unusual distinguishing characteristic: It’s one of the few remaining Latino-majority districts in the U.S. that elects a Republican Representative (the big one left is Texas’s 23rd district, a swing CD in the San Antonio area; there’s also Texas’s 27th district, a much redder district around Corpus Christi whose Latino population barely squeaks over the 50 percent mark). Both of its neighbors, Florida’s 26th and 27th districts, elected Republican House members until this year, but Carlos Curbelo (in the 26th) lost re-election, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Congress’s first-ever Latina member, saw what was coming and retired. That leaves Mario Diaz-Balart, who has represented Miami’s suburbs since 2003, as the last remaining Cuban-American Republican House member from Florida; in 2018, he managed to hold off a fairly strong Democratic challenger, Mary Barzee Flores, defeating her by 20 points.
That’s not entirely surprising, as the 25th is a somewhat redder district than the 26th and 27th; the 25th gave a 50-47 edge to Donald Trump in the 2016 election, compared with Hillary Clinton winning 57-41 in the 26th and 59-39 in the 27th. (And that was considerable progress from 2012, when Mitt Romney won the 25th 55-45.) That’s probably because the 25th is simply more Cuban than those other two districts. While the Cuban community as a whole has moved in the Democratic direction lately, partly as the first wave of oldest Cuban emigres (who were strongly motivated by anti-Castro foreign policy) die off, partly as anti-communism just becomes less salient and economic or cultural issues move to the forefront, it’s still a Republican-leaning constituency, especially in down-ballot races.
As younger, more progressive Cubans age into the electorate, though, and as South Americans from a wider variety of backgrounds become a bigger share of the population in the 25th, Diaz-Balart will need to keep looking over his shoulder in future elections. In fact, the 25th may well be a top Democratic offensive target in 2020, if only because there are only three remaining districts (Texas’ 23rd, Pennsylvania’s 1st, and New York’s 24th) that are bluer at the presidential level than the 25th that are still held by Republicans.
“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. Click here for all posts in this series.