People & Culture - Florida - page 1078

The children of Cuban exiles are now called YUCAs, 'young urban Cuban Americans,'
while the next generation of Latinos has been dubbed Generation Ñ (pronounced enyey),
embodying a hybrid culture. For instance, the traditional Cuban quinceañera (or quince;
celebrating a girl's coming of age at 15) is still celebrated in Miami, but instead of a
community-wide party, kids now plan trips. With each other, young Latinos slip seam-
lessly between English and Spanish, typically within the same sentence, reverting to Eng-
lish in front of Anglos and to Spanish or old-school Cuban in front of relatives.
Florida has also welcomed smaller waves of Asian immigrants from China, Indonesia,
Thailand and Vietnam. And, of course, South Florida is famous for its Jewish immigrants,
not all of whom are over 65 or even from the US. There is a distinctly Latin flavor to
South Florida Judaism, as Cuban and Latin Jews have joined those from the US East
Coast, Europe and Russia. Overall, Florida is home to 850,000 Jews, with two-thirds liv-
ing in the Greater Miami area.
Florida Stories: Conquistadores & Pioneers
St Augustine
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park
Stephen Foster State Folk Cultural Center
Museum of Florida History, Tallahassee
Tampa Bay History Center
Historic Pensacola Village
Profiles of Peoples
Voices of the Apalachicola by Faith Eidse
Jews of South Florida by Andrea Greenbaum
Cuban Miami by Robert M Levine and Moisés Asís
Life in Florida
Let's get this out of the way first: Florida is indeed the nation's oldest state. It has the
highest percentage of people over 65 (over 17%), which pulls the state's median age up to
nearly 41, or four years higher than the national average. In fact, ever since WWII South
Florida has been 'God's waiting room' - the land of the retiree.