Evan Winkler | Assignment 3 (makeup)

I have been to 20 of the 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C. Much of that total comes from educationally-themed trips organized by my aunt for me, my brothers, and my cousins in the summers of 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2017. We visited a large number of national historical sites, and these trips overall contributed to the interest I have in civics and history today. In total, I have been to D.C. eight times, including on three of the aforementioned trips.

            In June of this year, I visited Florida for the first time. My uncle, who is originally from the Bahamas, lives in Pembroke Pines with my aunt and two cousins, the youngest of whom had just recently been born, and last summer was the first time I got to see both of them in person. Visiting South Florida was a very interesting cultural experience, considering the area’s predominately Hispanic population. As someone with a racially ambiguous appearance, there were a couple of times when pedestrians and street vendors spoke to me in Spanish after I had spoken to them in English, and Spanish was certainly the language heard the most often throughout the city. It was different from the areas in Southern California where I grew up, where there was also very large Hispanic population but with a greater focus on multilingualism.

Another interesting thing about the Miami area was how uniform and large the buildings were – the urban landscape had far fewer old courthouses, old churches, or gilded-age art-deco skyscrapers than it had postmodern flats and towers. This was because, as I knew before the trip, the area of Miami was very sparsely populated before the end of World War II. Between the architecture and the demographics, travelling to South Florida presented me with visual evidence of the influence that historical events have on the appearance of affected places.