In the aftermath of the cocaine wars of the 1970s—1990s, Miami’s Colombian community has remained culturally marginalized in South Florida while media portrayals exoticize a violent history. Furthermore, the Colombian diaspora in Miami lacks the spatial and symbolic anchors afforded to other Latino groups through neighborhoods like Little Havana. When Miami’s wellness culture entered the neo-shamanic imagination, Colombian medicine musicians and ceremonialists cultivate a spiritual subculture of social healing, cultural redemption, and musical confluence. Here, ritualized altered states of consciousness enact a symbolic reversal of the war on drugs, reconfiguring stigmatized psychoactive plants – particularly coca – into sacred medicines and musical conduits of ancestral knowledge. Through ethnography and collaboration with Colombian medicine musicians affiliated with the Inti Runa Native American Church in Miami, I explore ceremonies that highlight how North American and Latin American indigenous communities have forged relational pathways through sharing of medicine practices and music. This convergence is understood in indigenous prophetic terms, where the reunification of the Condor (South America) and the Eagle (North America) reveal how plant medicine music in Miami articulates a pan-indigenous identity that transcends national boundaries while offering Colombians a sense of place within the city’s fragmented cultural geography. Local medicine musicians become central to the process of constructing pan-indigenous belonging by weaving together musical elements and aesthetics of Amazonian, Andean, and North American Plains music; these musicians also guide plant medicine ceremonies that connect mestize immigrants to the broader Native American identity.

Since 2023, Pascal, a Cuban arrival living in Hialeah, Florida under parole, has regarded his tenuous existence within the United States as a fragile bridge between a homeland he can’t revisit and a hostland that won’t accept him. For viewers like Pascal, the 2026 music video Puente Libertad—featuring Cuban artists Jacob Forever, Yotuel, and El Chacal—embodies both continuity and rupture, reimagining national belonging while reflecting the precarious mobility shaping contemporary Cuban migration. This presentation examines how the song reconfigures diasporic citizenship, as artists and audiences navigate unstable legal, territorial, and cultural boundaries. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a close reading of the song and its video, I analyze how Puente Libertad reshapes ideas of Cuban diasporic citizenship. Specifically, I juxtapose its visual and musical representation of transnational mobility by foregrounding connections between Havana and Miami amid the aspirations, uncertainties, and crossings that structure contemporary Cuban migration. The video’s AI-generated images of free movement, family return, and consumer spaces like an imagined McDonald’s and Walmart in Havana render migration not merely as displacement but as a collective aspiration for mobility, prosperity, and participation in global modernity. I argue that Puente Libertad reflects a broader transformation in Cuban diasporic belonging. As Miami no longer functions solely as exile and Cuba itself becomes increasingly transnational, the video enables viewers like Pascal to renegotiate cubanidad beyond territory, raising questions about how Cuban popular culture and its audiences articulate citizenship, memory, and hope amid political and legal precarity.

The Miami iteration of the Montreux Jazz Festival was in its second iteration when I arrived in February 2025. Like the original Swiss festival, the Miami Montreux Jazz festival is jazz in name, but includes few strictly jazz acts on its lineup. While my initial aim was to investigate political commentary on stage, my focus quickly shifted to a lack of visual embodiment I observed in the audience. Though political speech and expression by performers was no longer the focal point of my investigation, the timing of the event mere weeks after Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration contributed to a layer of political undertone to the evening.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation across one evening of programming, I analyze how class, race, surveillance, and genre expectations shaped audience comportment within an ostensibly celebratory Latin music setting. I argue that the contradiction between the dance-music programming and lack of overt dancing during the festival can be explained by a combination of factors including the festival’s multiculturalism, illusion of social safety, and surveillance.

I draw upon García-Mispireta’s idea of liquidarity, “a fluid togetherness that manages to hold the shape of a heterogeneous and unconnected crowd,” to theorize how this ethnically diverse, yet socioeconomically homogeneous audience negotiates unity and solidarity to the detriment of dance and corporal expression.