My parents immigrated from Pakistan before I was born, and my father eventually started his own civil engineering firm in Miami. He built things for a living and rarely talked about them as anything more than problems to solve: whether a drainage system could handle a hundred-year storm, whether a project came in on time and under budget.
If you’ve flown through Miami International Airport, you’ve passed through spaces he designed. If you’ve boarded a cruise ship from the Port of Miami, you’ve stood on infrastructure he built. Shortly before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, his company won the contract to rebuild the streets and sewer system of Liberty City.
Liberty City was built in the 1930s as segregated public housing for Black families, in a city that had walled them out of nearly everywhere else, literally so. A concrete barrier once ran along its eastern edge, separating it from the white neighborhood next door. My father’s firm was called in decades later to redesign the streets and sewer lines. The 14th Amendment had promised equal citizenship to everyone born on American soil generations before that neighborhood existed…