Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South by By Sarah McNamara (review)

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• Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South by By Sarah McNamara
• Jennifer E. Brooks

Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South. By Sarah McNamara. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 251. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6816-1; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6817-8.)

In Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, Sarah McNamara restores the history of cigar workers, their radical politics, and their dynamic community [End Page 630] to the history of Florida and the New South. McNamara neatly threads the needle of multiple historiographies, including southern history, immigration history, and labor history. Inspired by her family’s history in Ybor City and in Tampa, the author crafts a nuanced account of the Cubana/o cigar workers who fashioned a vibrant community along with their top-notch cigars, remaking Tampa and themselves in the process. The first generation arrived around the turn of the twentieth century and set to work crafting cigars, their community, and a radical progressive politics that “battled for just employment, supported Cuban independence, organized against fascism, and wrestled with Jim Crow” (p. 10). The accelerating collapse of the American cigar-making industry in the 1930s, followed by the expanded economic opportunities brought by war mobilization and the stifling anticommunism of the Cold War, prompted relocation away from Ybor City and the remaking of ethnic and political identities by later generations. Ultimately, U.S.-born Latinas/os birthed “a new ethnic, non-Black identity” to transform themselves from “foreign subversives to acceptable U.S. citizens” (p. 10).

McNamara organizes this rather complicated narrative through a nicely straightforward structure of chapters, titled “Searching,” “Building,” “Resisting,” “Surviving,” “Remaking,” and “Finding.” The author also packs a lot into this concise monograph. In “Building,” for example, readers learn how Latina/o cigar workers built Ybor City and transformed Tampa into the industrial heart of Florida and an international hub of labor activism. As Tampa emerged as a New South “borderland” city, Ybor City’s Cuban cigar workers disrupted the stability of Jim Crow “because the economy of this one-industry town depended on their labor and their presence” (p. 21). Cuban cigar workers thus made Ybor City their own community, and Ybor City made Tampa more than it had been.

McNamara finds, however, that de facto segregation still shaped Ybor City, with white Cubans living separately from Black Cubans who experienced lower wages, discrimination, and violence. Not being Black, nonetheless, did not protect white Cubans from Anglo violence directed against foreign-born residents. The advent of World War II and the anticommunist pressures of the Cold War changed both the national context and the local economy in ways that served to “other” all Latina/o cigar workers. Ybor City’s and Tampa’s Latina/o communities distanced themselves from their radical roots and emphasized their “Americanism” (p. 16). Whereas cigar workers of earlier generations enthusiastically supported the movement for Cuban independence, their descendants gave tepid support to or opposed Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. But community leaders also energetically defended Ybor City against the razing impulse of urban renewal. Ultimately, white Cubanas/os scapegoated Black residents, including Black Cubanas/os, to defend Ybor City from demolition. A remaking of Ybor City as an “ethnic” tourist destination obscured its racially diverse and radical past.

McNamara has produced a rich account of Ybor City’s cigar workers that deepens our understanding of the New South, American labor history, and immigration history. Above all, she makes the case for the central role of Latina women in building, sustaining, and defending their community. McNamara reminds us that the “the story of the people who lived here and the [End Page 631] work of the women who fought for its survival tells us much about what it means to be Latina/o in the U.S. South” (p. 179). The story of Ybor City also tells us much about what it means to be southern and American.

Jennifer E. Brooks Auburn University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...