by Melanie Feliciano

There are two major industries in Miami: Tourism and Real Estate. Everything else – advertising, pornography, wellness, dance clubs – depends on this king and queen.

When I arrived in late 2003, it was relatively easy for me to find a job as a journalist with a start-up newspaper called the Biscayne Times. Publisher and artist Skip Van Cel tapped into the frenzied real estate boom to support his monthly community newspaper full of reports on the latest debacles at Miami City Hall.

Since real estate crashed in 2006, it has been extremely difficult to find my way in Miami because of its limited market. And once media started to crash in 2009, it became a bleak place for a writer who depends on an employer to pay a salary.

As of January 2010, the unemployment rate in the US was 10.6%. Sounds bad, but consider this piece of data from the Labor Department’s recent report: the number of self-employed Americans grew by 126,000 in the last quarter. Add to that another telling statistic: the number of temporary jobs has increased by 250,000 in the last quarter (The Labor Department consistently under-reports the rate of temporary job growth). Read more at Elancers.com…

Sounds fantastic, and this is an especially true statistic for Miami, where you’ve gotta be an entrepreneurial shark. Sharks swim, turtles sink. As a writer, I am a turtle, but underneath my shell, I have a sharky secret weapon: programming skills. I decided I could stay afloat with these skills, so I hit the pavement.

“I don’t do business with women,” one man told me. “I can’t focus.”

Another man asked me to dress in a particular costume instead of considering the proposals I had for promoting his business.

Another man told me that I could be the bait for luring in new customers.

In other words, “Just shut up and shake your ass, bitch, we’re not interested in your brain.”

Because it is historically a tourist destination, Miami is a place where a girl’s value increases on a tabletop. This is not to say there aren’t women who don’t enjoy this line of work, or successful women making it as business professionals in Miami. From what I saw, many of them were either linked to a man OR they had business in other cities – San Francisco, New York, Washington, DC – where political correctness has leveled the playing ground. Was it a coincidence that the two clients I had were located in St. Augustine and London?

I realized that I could stay in Miami (which I absolutely love for its climate, beaches and proximity to my family), but I would have to travel up north to find a client who would believe I could do this kind of work.

I found one such client in Washington, DC and my plan is to get to know them over the course of three-seven months and then bring the work back to Miami. I want to be a virtually employed person. Because I believe one should work to live, not the other way around, and in Miami, this type of lifestyle is possible with a little bit of creativity.