Ybor City

When we think about the origins of Cuban immigration to the United States, we often imagine the anti-Communist exiles who fled the regime of Fidel Castro and settled in South Florida during the 1950s and 1960s. But before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, working-class migrants from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the Florida Straits and made Ybor City the center of the immigrant South and the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry. Located on the eastern edge of Tampa, a port city along Florida's Gulf Coast, Ybor was a multiracial, multiethnic neighborhood where radical thinkers and laborers found work and refuge against the shifting tides of international political turmoil during the early half of the twentieth century. In Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, Sarah McNamara tells the story of how immigrant women ensured and fought for community survival across generations and against the backdrop of a post-Confederate, Jim Crow-controlled southern order. Together these women organized strikes, marched against fascism, and criticized American foreign policy. While many maintained their dedication to progressive ideals for years to come, supporting Castro and raising funds for the revolution, many American-born Latinas disavowed leftist politics amid the Red Scare and the wrecking ball of urban renewal. This searing portrait of the political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights the underexplored role of women's leadership within movements for social and economic justice while vividly illustrating how racial identity is made.

Sarah McNamara is assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University.