11 February 12-18, 2026 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com NEW TIMES | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | “I’ve done a lot in my career — worked in a lot of different places, a lot of different cities,” Cleckley says. “What I always tell people, though, is that there may be over two thou- sand transit agencies or transportation de- partments throughout the country. But there’s only one Underline. So, for me, it’s ex- citing to do something that hasn’t been done before. A lot of us in this field dream of a proj- ect like this…of repurposing a public space to its higher, better use, of being a part of build- ing something impactful that touches so many people’s lives — while also serving as a powerful economic generator that benefits the entire community. I’m lucky enough to help do exactly that every day.” The uniqueness of the Underline is itself, Cleckley believes, a byproduct of the unique- ness of its germination and blossoming. The prime mover of the project is Meg Daly, who, after breaking both arms in 2013 and being unable to drive, began taking the Metrorail to physical therapy. On her pleasant walks to the station, she envisioned an alternative reality for the uncultivated, virtually abandoned space shaded below the tracks above. This epiphany threw the spark from which Friends of the Underline was born — Daly re- mains Executive Chair of the organization — and set about the tough, joyful business of kindling support at every single level of gov- ernment and within private industry. In this, the sustained efforts of countless civically minded citizens across several years and hundreds of planning and design meet- ings would prove key. “The people-powered approach,” Cleckley says, “is really what pro- vides the throughline towards accomplish- ing something great, bold, and innovative like the Underline.” (For her part, Daly has praised Cleckley as a “visionary leader with an impressive record of delivering large- scale transportation projects that enhance mobility and connectivity.”) And, while Cleckley hopes other cities across the coun- try will build their own Underline, he recog- nizes his adopted city is built different. “Miami, at its core, is entrepreneurial in na- ture,” he says. “It has a dynamic spirit. People in Miami take chances and think big. That’s at the heart of what makes Miami great — anything can happen here.” MARVIN DUNN BY YUVAL OFIR Miami is a city known more for its surface-level trendy glitz and glam- our than for substantially deep his- torical clout. Even the history it does claim is usually dressed up to look pretty: Art Deco fonts, vintage postcards, and a carefully curated past that looks great on a condo lobby wall. But Dr. Marvin Dunn sees things through a different lens. The longtime Florida Inter- national University professor emeritus has spent decades pointing out the parts of local history that risk being forgotten and asking why they’re always the first to get erased. As one of the most prominent voices document- ing Black Miami’s story, Dunn has devoted himself to the unglamorous work of public memory: Teaching, writing, touring, organiz- ing, and, when necessary, making noise. In 2026, he’s worth watching not because of any single fight, but because he has emerged as one of South Florida’s most per- sistent figures, insisting that history (Black history in particular) is not disposable, even when powerful political and financial inter- ests would prefer it be treated that way. The recent battle over the proposed Trump Presidential Library in downtown Miami is the clearest example of Dunn’s ap- proach. When a valuable parcel tied to Miami Dade College was steered toward a Trump- controlled foundation, Dunn didn’t limit his objections to partisan politics. He challenged the underlying logic of the deal itself: Who public land belongs to, and who gets to decide its future. “It hit me immediately as a theft of land that belongs to children unborn in Miami- Dade County,” Dunn said at the time. “You’re stealing land from children who are not even born yet, and any politician who would stoop to that...is entitled to my sense of anger and repulsion.” That challenge briefly halted the transfer and forced the issue into the open, drawing hours of public testimony and scrutiny. Al- though the college’s board later re-approved the deal after a redo meeting and the lawsuit was dismissed, the episode served as a case study in what Dunn has been arguing for years: that procedural compliance is often used as a shield, not a safeguard; and that “by the book” doesn’t always mean in the public interest. For Dunn, the library fight appears less as an endpoint than a symptom. It sits within a much broader struggle over who controls his- torical narratives, academic freedom, and civic space at a moment when public educa- tion itself is under sustained political attack. In Florida, those pressures have been in- tensified by Governor Ron DeSantis’ cam- paign against so-called “woke indoctrination,” including the Stop WOKE Act, which took effect in 2022 and reshaped how race, history, and systemic inequality can be discussed in classrooms. Dunn has become one of the law’s most vocal critics, publicly pressing DeSantis on what, exactly, profes- sors are now allowed to teach, and whether lived experience itself has become off-limits. “We will not allow DeSantis to kill our his- tory,” Dunn told New Times in 2023. “We just won’t allow it. We will take our history di- rectly to the parents if that’s what’s required, and apparently, it is what is required.” That defiance has taken practical form. Through the Miami Center for Racial Justice, which Dunn helped establish after the mur- der of George Floyd, he has worked to distrib- ute banned books and create alternative pathways for students to access African American history at a time when school dis- tricts and universities are pulling back. His concern, he says, extends far beyond any sin- gle demographic. “My concern is that our kids, not just Black kids, in our Flor- ida schools will not know the very basic things about African American his- tory,” Dunn told New Times. “They will not know about the essential issues that we’ve held as African Amer- icans in this country or all the triumphs — that’s incredibly important for all school kids to know in this day and age.” Long before these legislative battles, Dunn was sounding alarms about a different kind of erasure: Black burial grounds and historic sites that were neglected, paved over, or qui- etly absorbed into Miami’s endless develop- ment cycle. In neighborhoods like Allapattah and Overtown, he has repeatedly warned that progress often comes at the cost of memory and respect for the dead. That is a through- line that has shown up consistently in Dunn’s work: Politics and development don’t just al- ter the physical landscapes that we live in, but can literally and metaphorically erase parts of the past. RENATA BOZZETTO BY CAROLINE VAL Renata Bozzetto, deputy director at the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC), has lived most of her life be- tween two countries. She was born and raised in Brazil, but as she tells New Times, “my family has been liv- ing in the United States one way or another since the 1960s.” An uncle migrated to New York back then, and from that point on, her childhood was “always a bit transnational,” with relatives moving back and forth between Brazil and the U.S. In the early 2000s, her parents moved to Palm Beach County. Bozzetto followed in 2004, arriving to pursue a university educa- tion that would eventually lead to an under- graduate degree, a master’s, and a Ph.D. But it wasn’t just the degrees that transformed her life — it was what she saw happening to the people studying alongside her. “Very early in my experience, I realized that the opportunities I had were not the same as those around me,” she recalls. As an international student, she watched friends who were “by all measures American” — raised here, fluent in English, rooted in U.S. communities — pushed to the margins by an unforgiving immigration system. “Some of them were on the verge of drop- ping out because they could not pay the out- of-state tuition,” Bozzetto says. “Some of them were fearing deportation, because at that time, DACA was not yet a protection for dreamers.” That realization led her to FLIC in 2010, at the height of a youth movement demanding the passage of the DREAM Act, which would grant legal protection to undocumented ap- plicants who came to the U.S. as minors. She remembers meeting the coalition while young organizers from Miami were walking to Washington, D.C., to demand action. “When I met the coalition, [I found] a po- litical home. It was an opportunity to be part of this movement and to give back to the com- munity that was receiving me and continued to receive me and welcome me over time.” Bozzetto went from being a grateful new- comer to a leader in a statewide fight she never imagined would move in reverse. “We had a huge victory in the state of Flor- ida,” she remembers, referring to the 2010 bi- partisan bill that allowed many immigrant students to pay in-state tuition. “Then, last year, the legislature invalidated that provi- sion, really making college access much harder for youth who grew up in the U.S.” That reversal is part of a broader hardline turn that she now confronts daily in her work, from local municipalities in Florida actively working alongside a surge in ICE agents, to the Department of Homeland Security’s crack- down on Temporary Protected Status (TPS). “We have thousands and thousands of community members, from Cubans Friends of the Underline photo Eulois Cleckley >> p12 P E O P L E TO W ATC H 2026
