Sunset Colonies: Photographs by Diego Alejandro Waisman

The first trailer park I ever spent much time in was the Simonton Street Trailer Park, located off upper Simonton Street not far from the Southernmost Point. It was the 1990s, and drunk tourists would stagger past the humble hand-painted sign at the entrance, unaware that within the grove of Australian pines lived the working poor of South Florida. Few residents owned cars, so bicycles were locked to fences and posts, a common sight on the island. The forty-four single-wide trailers seemed to be indiscriminately scattered as if someone had tossed them into the air to see where they’d land.

Here was the last vestige of the Key West that Jimmy Buffet immortalized. Here were today’s pirates and renegades, misfits and malcontents looking for a shaker of salt—and a place to crash. But the island troubadours were now singing a sad song: rents in Key West were higher than those in New York. Keeping a roof over your head was no small matter.

I had a friend who lived in the trailer court, and I was worried about his domestic bliss. “Roommates” seemed to proliferate in number and their names changed in dizzying flux. He’d let one person crash on his sofa, and then that person would bring over three or four other people. In addition to free rent, he’d “lend” them money—money he didn’t have, money they made him fork over, or else.

My friend was a dishwasher at a local restaurant. He couldn’t read or write. He was a victim of unspeakable childhood trauma. He allowed people to stay in his trailer because he wanted to think he was helping others who needed assistance. He himself had no bank account, no savings, and was barely hanging on.

I’d stop by when I could, and usually there’d be a crowd in the trailer of people I’d never seen before. People who had nowhere else to go. The trailer court was the last resort, a de facto shelter but it was just as doomed as the people who lived there.

Don’t look for the Simonton Street Trailer Park these days. It closed in 2019, taken over by a developer who somehow evaded the city ordinance that would’ve required him to build affordable housing units. “Gentrify” doesn’t begin to describe what’s happened in certain communities of South Florida. The average home price in Key West sits at $1 million.¹“Key West, FL Housing Market,” https://www.zillow.com/home-values/52767/key-west-fl/, accessed August 24, 2025.
Not many dishwashers–aka “pearl divers”–can swing a mortgage as hefty as that. Instead, they squat within mangrove islands, live aboard derelict vessels, or sleep in parked cars. Many work several jobs, but none of them add up to enough. At one point, a tent city sprang up along the Bridal Path of Smathers Beach. Affordable housing isn’t some kind of policy abstraction in South Florida: it’s a problem that pits dream against reality.

Or as Jeep, a local banjo player, told the Key West City Council when they were deciding the fate of the trailer court: “Somehow, maybe, you guys can figure out how to keep people like me and others in this community.”²Arnaud and Naja Girad, “The Gentrification of Simonton Street Trailer Park,”Key West The Newspaper,” November 4, 2019. https://thebluepaper.com/gentrification-simonton-street-trailer-park/,accessed August 24, 2025.

The erasure of the Simonton Street Trailer Park contains a pointed message about place and identity that forms the intellectual core of Sunset Colonies: A Visual Elegy to South Florida’s Mobile Home Communities. The book centers on the photography of Diego Alejandro Waisman, an Argentine by birth but a resident of Miami for over two decades, where he has established himself as a visual artist dedicated to the discontinuities and disfigurements caused by the sybaritic excess of South Florida. Waisman writes of using the “vernacular” of place to inform his work, and in the vanishing trailer parks of Miami, he has found a trove of distinctive tones.

The data is clear: the mobile home as a mode of domicile has decreased in Florida over the past decade, falling from 9.2 to 8.2% of all housing in the state. Yet unlike Tampa or St. Petersburg, the trailer park was never a defining feature of Miami, with just 1.3% of housing units being mobile homes–a figure that has remained stable over the years.³“Mobile Homes (Census ACS), FLHealthCHARTS, https://www.flhealthcharts.gov/ChartsDashboards/rdPage.aspx?rdReport=NonVitalIndRateOnly.Dataviewer&cid=0408, accessed August 24, 2025.

Waisman’s work directly takes on a persistent stigma that has plagued mobile homes from the beginning: the concept of “trailer trash,” a term that dates back to the 1950s as a way to condign residents of trailers to the ashbin of humanity. It’s certainly easy to bulldoze down a trailer park if conventional wisdom has it that the place was filled with lowlife scum.⁴ Harold H. Martin, “Don't Call Them Trailer Trash,” The Saturday Evening Post, August 2, 1952, Vol. 225, No. 5.

But Waisman is looking for “evidence” that even within these marginalized places, meaning and purpose can take on a multitude of forms and shapes. The photographs themselves come from his collection, For I Shall Have Already Forgotten You, a line taken from “If You Forget Me” by Pablo Neruda, a poem that appears in reprint like a miracle after the last photograph and thus lands like a thunderclap of grim profundity. Seldom has a title, poem, and art flowed together with such urbane felicity.

While Neruda in the poem might’ve been referring to a lover or to his native Chile, it’s clear that Waisman is fueled by the poem’s pervasive feeling of loss and longing. It begins: “I want you to know one thing.” Waisman takes up that same charge and then uses his camera to capture “everything that exists” within the vanishing world of Miami’s trailer parks.

The unique geometry of Waisman’s work flows from his use of juxtaposition, the constant tension between old and new that in Miami sees skyscrapers arising next to thousand-year-old Tequesta sites. Waisman’s eye for such incongruity takes many forms in his collection. One arresting image features in the foreground a well-tended double-wide of white planks and blue trim while in the background a monstrous banality of rebar rises as if to devour the trailer in one rapacious gulp. Given the demise of the Simonton Street Trailer Park, it’s reasonable to conclude that in time too this landscape will get subsumed by the "predatory capitalism” described as the casus belli of gentrification by anthropologist Louis Herns Marcelin in his fine Afterword.

Other works also play with the tension between old and new. Sometimes the reference juts into the composition like an interloper (below), such as how he centers a “Now Leasing” sign jabbing like a dagger into the belly of a home—this work reads like an act of violence, a needless and wanton gesture of dominance.

In another, the new building remains to the far right edge, rising up into the sky with a defiance that borders on mockery. The helpless trailers can do nothing but accept this fate, a finality rooted in a dream of Florida that is in open conflict with the grinding truth.

Then, in works that are somber and soulful, Waisman follows the fervid logic of Growth to its deflating conclusion: a scattering of pieces just depict the new environment with the trailer parks completely gone. Another condo project is taking shape, and on the fence surrounding it hangs a festoon of fiction, happy older couples frolicking care-free. The condo being built has no personality, no sense of self, and stands in stark contradiction to the very idiosyncratic decorations of trailers, no two of which are the same.

Waisman explores lines with great precision, finding unique ways to capture how segments can align to produce meaning. For example, in one photograph, the horizontal lines of jalousie windows stand perpendicular to the vertical lines of a metal post and door frame. Both then seem to merge with criss-cross lattice, as a clearly delineated triangle of shade falls across the trailer. The “evidence” here is of the evanescent sort: as South Florida booms, the most vulnerable places must stand in quiet opposition, affirming their own nuance in subtle ways that Waisman’s camera can singularly capture. He has spoken of his photographs as a way of slowing down the gathering decimation of these communities. His work forces us to stop, look, and ponder where exactly the American experiment is headed.

Beyond the geometry is a pulsing humanity that suggests the work of Andres Serrano, whose Residents of New York series from the 1990s conveyed the enduring spirit of Gotham’s unhoused. Waisman’s trailer park dwellers are certainly housed, but in effect his portraits are a kind of memento mori, a moment in time that will not last.

The man holding the cigarette, how long can he make it before the wrecking ball comes for the entire park? And when it’s gone, where will he go? The lattice here serves more like a net that the subject is caught in–that has ensnared all of us. His expression, though, speaks to a consanguinity, a softness that belies the other ravages the man has endured. Here Waisman is playing with juxtaposition again, but this time the viewer must enter this conversation, must hear the man out. There’s no turning away.

And the trailers . . . Waisman has assembled a wide array of examples, using an expansive color palette to capture the distinctive hues of the region. Lime greens, cerulean blues, and cherry reds all speak to the allure of South Beach, yet without the glitterati and glam. Some of the trailers have been lovingly landscaped, while others sit on bare concrete. Some are in pristine condition, and others display repairs that have accreted over time, in clunky layers of rust. Many have their hurricane shutters drawn shut, as if the corrugated metal can’t bear to witness the impending doom.

In addition to the trailers and the people in them, Waisman has added a wrinkle: photographs of ads that ran in newspapers during the 1960s and 70s, all of which extol the virtues of these communities. This is yet another kind of juxtaposition, this one ironically cultural. Waisman rightly views the backstory of trailer parks with a raised eyebrow. Why did so many people work so hard to attract retirees to Florida only to castigate and then obliterate these very communities when they are needed the most? Waisman’s splashes of history are bracing, cold water applied to smug faces. He is suggesting that there used to be a world where lower-income people could live in affordable housing–and a world where Florida led the way in pioneering an alternative to gaudy McMansions. It wasn’t even that long ago, and yet Waisman demands us to answer: what happened?

Waisman isn’t on the prowl for good guys and bad guys. He’s not offering an answer, because artists don’t answer questions, but ask them. And the question is often some variation of Thales: why is there something rather than nothing? What huge forces are shaping the landscape? The key to this collection resides in the title: it’s an “elegy,” visual lament to the dead, the dearly departed cut down by a market-driven mania to maximize profits at the expense of the unfortunate. But Waisman lifts these dead upwards so that we can celebrate the dignity these hardscrabble people display.

Three other essays complete Sunset Colonies. Amy Galpin’s helpful Introduction establishes an academic perspective for assessing Waisman’s collection. Her essay serves as a kind of map that adds context to the photographs that follow. Without Galpin, Waisman’s pieces might come off as a random assortment that could be befuddling.

But what Waisman is doing, very cleverly, is exploring the dynamics of “trailer trash” that has tarnished this community from the beginning. He is exploding this framework by offering a deeply human look at the “trash” whose lives are imperiled by the rampant development that caters to the well-off. The portraits of the residents and their homes speak to the enduring struggle to maintain even as the world seems to be crumbling around them. One image haunts, that of broken sidewalk tile, an apt metaphor for what Waisman has catalogued: the bombardment of a community that will end in permanent exile.

About the Author

Lee Irby's peer-reviewed publications include works of history, fiction, and poetry. His study of "trailer-trash" culture has received numerous awards, and his novel 7,000 Clams (Doubleday, 2005) was named by the Tampa Bay Times as one of the "10 Books Every Floridian Should Read."

• fEconomics
• fPhotography
• fUrban and Suburban Studies