A Toast (2010) dir. Marco Ramirez

In (late) honor of the end of National Poetry Month and the fantastic O, Miami Festival, our second release is A Toast by Marco Ramirez, made in late 2010. This essay comes to you from Tobias Rodriguez-Wynwood, the founder of what is perhaps the finest fictional university in our great nation, the University of Wynwood.

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First, a little background on director Marco Ramirez:

Marco, a Miami native, returned to the city after he graduated from NYU until 2008, when he enrolled at Juilliard’s postgraduate playwriting program. During this time in the Miami he wrote no less than two classic short plays that both won the Heideman Award (the highest honor a short play can receive) and founded to the ill-fated Foryoucansee Theater project. Foryoucansee was created around the same time as Borscht, and similarly sought to create a specifically Miami theater. The company’s first production was the reggaeton musical Toners in Time, about two Turkey Point nuclear reactor employees who inadvertently go back in time and take credit for inventing reggaeton. The show had two completely sold out runs at New Theater’s old space in Coral Gables, and the company also put out a book of popular Hialeah Haikus (now in its third run, I believe).

Toners in Time was among the first wave of media created by 80’s babies to depict Miami as not being defined by nostalgia (either for another country or time) or the glitzy sheen that attracts tourists. It was one of the first works, and definitely the only play, to address and engage a uniquely Miami culture. Not Cuban-American, or Puerto Rican, or Southern, or Haitian, but Miamian- with its own set of specific references, slang, and mannerisms. I think the term that was used to define those with a sense of irony about Miami culture was “Spicster,” best exemplified by Jose El Rey (RIP), a brilliant parodist who did it first and better than anyone since.

Based on the success of Toners in Time, Foryoucansee planned two more plays. However, this was in the days before Wynwood Art Walk was Santa’s Enchanted Street Fair. The Arsht Center was still the floundering Carnival Center and did not yet truly support locals, and the audience was generally much smaller for these things. This was the reality of Miami B.K. (before the Knight Foundation’s Arts Challenge democratized artistic creation in the city): funding was scarce and there was no infrastructure to support an upstart organization like Foryoucansee.

Foryoucansee Theater fell apart (some members of the Foryoucansee Theater still create work under the name, but it is mostly in service of the Hialeah Haiku project.) Marco moved to NY, Jose El Rey was murdered, and the promise of “spicster” media was replaced by brown-face entertainment that perpetuates the worst kind of stereotypes without commenting on them, all while hiding behind the idea of parody. 

Marco currently lives in Los Angeles, where he writes for the Starz series “Da Vinci’s Demons,” but A Toast hints to what we hope will one day be a return to his hometown to create the Hialeah nerd version of Mean Streets.

Marcos Ramirez’s autobiographical paen to his specific brand of Hispanic suburban nostalgia was commissioned as the opening of Borscht 7 in April 2011.

It’s boldly unironic- deftly skirting the line between precious and dark while exploring personal Miami experiences in a universal container. Marco’s Hialeah is seen through the eyes of a dreamer who maintains his innocence in spite of being aware of the true villains in his world.

Part spoken-word poem, part melodrama, it sort of put images to a lot of the ideas behind Foryoucansee and the genesis of Borscht- albeit in a much different tone.

I guess what I am trying to say is, A Toast is essentially echoing Trick Daddy’s Born n Raised or Pitbull’s 305 till I die or Rick Ross’s Bitch I’m From Dade County, and may or may not be in conversation with Will Smith’s Welcome to Miami. It’s the articulation of a largely misrepresented culture from a fresh perspective. If Borscht had a flag, it might look like this film.

Here is the esteemed Dr. Tobias Rodriguez-Wynwood with another take on the work:

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To, or From, “A Toast (To Miami)”

Before the Face Eaters attacked en masse in Star Date XC753 and the Battle of Yambo decided the fate of the world, Miami was a quaint, multilingual metropolis in Southern Florida known mostly for being the butt of Anglo-Saxon-American jokes. This essay outlines, from within the confines of fourth dimensional narrative, the transition of Miami from cultural backwater to cultural empire to empire in decline to interstellar battlefield and demonstrates the role in this process played by Marco Ramirez’s 2010 short film A Toast (to Miami).

In Earth Year 2007 Che-Frio, Tito and Laz, pseudonyms for Ramirez, Alex Fumero, and Danny Monsalve, formed The Toners, a three-man reggaeton act. The group then re-formed the group in 2002 via a time-traveling episode instigated by a malfunction at the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant, as explained in the 2009 theatrical production, The Toners, produced by the now-defunct Foryoucansee collective. By traveling back in time and starting the U.S. reggaeton craze prior to its historical commencement, The Toners initiated the re-alignment of the time-space continuum in Miami, which had been previously marked by disruption.

The disruption began in 1565 when the fleet of Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés took shelter in Biscayne Bay during a Category 3 hurricane. Tequesta Indians found a water-logged and hungry Menéndez and sheltered him in a coral rock cave. In return for their kindness, Menéndez took the brother of the Tequesta Chief to Havana to be educated by Jesuit priests. A year later, Menéndez and his Tequestan-Cuban prodigy returned to Miami and formed a mission on the location of what is currently Bongo’s Cuban Café, adjacent to the American Airlines Arena. The mission quickly became the nexus for a hybrid Tequestan-Cuban night life where men wore loose-fitting, sleeveless clothing and women donned elaborate, bangle earrings. The music played at the mission is described in the journals of Spanish sailors as “muy sexual” and “que explosivo.”

In 1570, armed by one of Menéndez’s rivals, Calusa Indians raided and destroyed the mission, which was never rebuilt. When Spain surrendered Florida to the British in 1763, the Tequestas were sent to Cuba, and then to barracks in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In prison, they continued to experiment with drum patterns and looped melodies. Diaries of the guards describe the prisoners as “muy guapo” and “tremenda avant-garde.”

When the United States took over the Panama Canal construction project in 1914, they supplemented the project’s workforce with illegally conscripted indíos and other non-white Puerto Ricans, a population that included an overwhelming number of Tequesta descendants. The Afro-Panamanian culture that formed out of the Canal project—work songs, culinary experimentation, jorts—traveled back to Puerto Rico, created “Spanish Reggae” in the 1960s, and led directly to the underground mixtape culture that eventually gave birth to what we know now as reggaeton.

So we can see how Spanish-Calusan interference into Tequestan-Cuban culture disrupted the time and place of the birth of reggaeton, displacing to Puerto Rico and the greater Caribbean what is rightfully a purely Miamian phenomenon. We can only speculate as to the other cultural non-events created by this disruption (computer models have suggested, for instance, that the natural area code of Miami is 999), but one of them is without question the creation of an alternative Miami. This Miami, which lasted until The Toners realignment in 2002, is well-documented in Western history as being dominated by aggressive real estate speculation, mid-grade plastic surgery, and overpriced Asian fusion restaurants.

2002 is significant for many reasons, the most important of which is that it is the first year in which the Miami Circle is electromagnetically active. Unearthed in 1998 thanks to the efforts of time-traveling explorer and glow stick-pioneer Bob Carr, the Miami Circle took four years to re-gather its particle field, after which point it began to act as a magnet for psychic energy from other time periods. Due to its roots in Tequestan culture, the Circle immediately latched onto reggaeton devotees Che-Frio, Tito and Laz and used the 2009 malfunction at Turkey Point to draw them, across the tiny span of seven years, back to itself. With reggaeton suddenly re-established in its native space, the fourth dimension of time also began to realign, and the entire culture of Miami began to shift into a period of empire.

In 2003, director Michael Bay, reeling from 2001’s Pearl Harbor, returned to Miami to shoot Bad Boys II, an art-house film disguised as a buddy-cop picture. It would end up grossing $273 million world-wide. The same year Art Basel created a stateside version of the largest art fair in the world and inexplicably chose Miami Beach, a city previously known in the art world as the home of a Brazilian children’s face-painter. 2003 also witnessed the Detroit Pistons drafting Serbian center Darko Miličić at number two overall, a comical maneuver that allowed Dwyane Wade to fall to the Miami Heat at pick number five. 2004 brought the release of Pitbull’s M.I.A.M.I. (Money is a Major Issue), a revolutionary concept album addressing the death of the alternative Miami, and the Heat’s acquisition of center Shaquille O’Neal. In 2006, as the Heat were winning their first NBA Championship, the County opened its first major performing arts center. In 2007, Ultra Music Festival, the modern Woodstock, moved to a two-day format. 

Then on July 8, 2010, LeBron James, whose 1/116^th Tequestan blood made him particularly susceptible to the electromagnetic waves emanating from the Miami Circle, announced that he was spurning the larger New York and Chicago markets to sign with the Miami Heat. Playing alongside Wade and above-average center and Interstellar Space Prince Christopher Bosh mere steps away from the original Tequestan-Cuban Mission (now emanating low-frequency bass tones from beneath Bongo’s), LeBron James reconnected downtown Miami across three centuries to its cultural roots, ushering in an empire that was immediately and always already ascendant.

As one of the principal instigators of Miami’s return to its disrupted world dominance, Marco Ramirez is a central figure in galactic history, and A Toast (to Miami) is not only a nostalgic and averagely-made short film but also made a lyrical diary of 300 years of Miami history. Arriving as it did at the zenith of Miami’s reconstructed empire, the film’s MC Escher-esque map of the formation of reggaeton via a series of carefully constructed poetic images is often referenced by other multiverses as a shining example of image-based archival material. (Making these images literal would rob them of their pataphysical attributes, so I’ll only say, armed with the current narrative, any person of even limited imaginative capacity will be able to connect the lyrical to the actual.)

According to galactic historians, in the wake of Ramirez’s film, Miami’s empire begins to wane as corruptive elements sneak through the Miami Circle’s force field. The most nefarious of these invaders are a species of space worm harvested by the Calusans (who left Earth for Planet R-K0 in 1791) that implant themselves in the brains of several otherwise well-intentioned humans and hybrid-humans such as Jeffrey Loria, Filomena Tobias, J.J. Colagrande, David Rivera, Rudy Eugene, and Banana Man.

In 2013, the demonstrable effects of Miami’s decline, besides a few random outliers, are not yet visible and will not begin to be felt for another ten years, during which time a few notable events will occur: the Miami Heat win three more NBA championships, Udonis Haslem is elected Governor of Florida, the Miami Marlins stadium becomes the world’s premiere cockfighting venue, the Freedom Tower is discovered to be a hidden nuclear missile silo, the Miami River is paved over to create a RollerBlade nature trail, Werner Herzog takes a job teaching sophomore English at Palmer Trinity Academy, and an underwater Metrorail line is built that links the Malécon to the parking lot of La Carreta.

 By 2024, no one in Miami is toasting anything, nor has anything to toast with, as all the alcohol on earth has dried up. It was a bad time for the empire.

- Tobias Rodriguez-Wynwood, Founder, University of Wynwood