The Nicaraguan Wave
What Happened
The Sandinista revolution and the contra war of the 1980s drove a large Nicaraguan migration to South Florida — by some counts on the order of 175,000 to the Miami area over the decade. Many were middle- and upper-class Nicaraguans whose anti-Sandinista politics aligned them naturally with the existing Cuban exile community, and they settled heavily along the Little Havana SW 8th Street corridor and westward toward Sweetwater, which earned the nickname "Little Managua."
Like the Haitians arriving in the same years, Nicaraguans often faced a harder immigration path than Cubans, and the community organized around legal relief (eventually the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act of 1997). Hondurans and other Central Americans followed similar paths into the same corridor.
Why It Mattered
The Nicaraguan wave is the hinge between Cuban Miami and the broader Latin American metropolis. It was the first major migration to demonstrate that the city the Cubans built could absorb and serve other Latin American nationalities — that Miami was becoming a pan-hemispheric capital rather than strictly a Cuban one. The demographic transformation of Little Havana from Cuban to increasingly Central American begins here.
It is also a key part of the Latam Capital Era's human story: crisis in a Latin American country sending its people, and often its capital, to the one U.S. city organized to receive them.
Where You See It Today
The Central American character of the Little Havana corridor and the heavily Nicaraguan and Central American city of Sweetwater are this wave's living map. Nicaraguan restaurants, fritangas, and businesses are woven through southwest Miami-Dade, and the community is a significant part of the region's Latin political and economic life.
Further Reading
- Portes & Stepick, City on the Edge
- Histories of Central American migration to South Florida
- HistoryMiami Museum collections
Neighborhoods: Little Havana Eras: The Latam Capital Era · The Cocaine Cowboys Era Related movements: The Cuban Exile Wave · The Colombian Wave