Most people meet Ybor City at night, and I think that’s the worst way to meet it. The bars are loud, the street is crowded, and the neighborhood performs a version of itself that has little to do with what happened there. It bothers me that plenty of writers around Tampa Bay have only seen that version, because the daytime district holds a story few places in Florida can match.
Go on a weekday morning. The brick factories are still standing. The wrought iron and the tile are still there. Roosters wander the streets. The district shows exactly what it is, a place built for one purpose by people who came a very long way to work in it.
Why was Ybor City built?
Vicente Martinez Ybor was a Spanish-born cigar manufacturer. He moved his operation from Cuba to Key West, then in 1885 to a patch of scrubland northeast of a small Florida town called Tampa. He bought forty acres, built factories and housing, and imported a workforce.
That workforce was Cuban, Spanish, Italian, Sicilian, and later others, and it arrived in enough numbers that the neighborhood was never an American town with immigrants in it. Tampa annexed Ybor City in 1887. By the 1920s the district held more than two hundred cigar factories, roughly twelve thousand workers, and something like five hundred million cigars a year.
It was the cigar capital of the world, and the reason Tampa became a city.
What are the mutual aid societies?
A writer should care most about the mutual aid societies.
The immigrant communities organized themselves into mutual aid societies, and those societies built clubhouses that still stand: the Cuban Club, the Italian Club, the Centro Asturiano, the Centro Espanol, and others. Members paid dues and in exchange got medical care, including their own hospitals, along with libraries, theaters, ballrooms, cantinas, and education.
Working people built and ran their own health system and their own cultural institutions. Most were recent immigrants and few were wealthy, and they did it decades before anybody offered them either. The buildings are large and ornate and cigar wages paid for them. That history makes me impatient with the way Florida usually gets written, as beaches, retirees and theme parks. Cigar rollers running their own hospitals don’t fit that picture, so they get left out, and the people who built this city vanish from the books about it.
Then consider what I wrote about the lectores, the readers those same workers hired out of their own pockets to read them novels while they rolled. The pattern is the same: people with limited means taxing themselves for things that made life larger. That’s among the best subjects a writer can have, and it happened here.
How did Ybor City’s cigar workers fund Jose Marti’s revolution?
Jose Marti, the Cuban poet and revolutionary, came to Ybor City repeatedly in the early 1890s. He came to organize, and to raise money for Cuban independence. He spoke from factory steps and in the clubs, and the cigar workers gave, reportedly a portion of their wages, week after week.
A revolution partly financed by factory workers in Florida, organized by a poet, in a neighborhood where a lector read the workers novels while they worked. There’s a park in Ybor commemorating Marti, and the land it sits on is Cuban soil by legal arrangement. For anyone writing about diaspora, exile, labor, or how political movements find money, this is primary material sitting an easy drive away.
The strike that ended the reading
The neighborhood’s labor history isn’t background color. Ybor had strong unions and a militant streak, and the confrontations were real ones with real consequences.
The clearest example is one I’ve written about separately. In November 1931 the manufacturers moved to abolish the lectores. The workers walked out. Police jailed strikers.
The owners locked the factories. Within about two weeks the strike had broken. Some workers returned at the old wages. Others were never rehired, and radios went up in the rolling rooms.
That’s what a defeat looks like from inside, and anyone writing about a workplace should study it. Most books about work describe either triumph or grinding routine. The more common shape is a fight the workers lost, after which people went back and got on with it, and nobody replaced what they lost. I wish more memoirs had the nerve to tell a loss like that one. Writers skip the fight they lost or the job that ended badly because it doesn’t flatter anybody, and those are the chapters a reader believes.
What should a writer see in Ybor City?
Walk it, and go in the morning. The district is a National Historic Landmark District and it’s compact enough to cover on foot.
The brick factory buildings, which everything else stands on. The social club buildings, several of which still work and host events, including the Cuban Club. That’s the home of the Tampa International Book Fair I wrote about in the Tampa Bay festival calendar. The Ybor City Museum State Park. It’s the fastest way to get the history in order. The casitas, the small worker cottages that housed the families. And the J.C. Newman Cigar Company, still operating. That has reconstructed a lector stage in its handmade factory.
Take a camera. The tile, the ironwork, the brick, and the light through the factory windows are worth the trip on their own. I’ve spent a lot of mornings there doing exactly that.
Getting there and doing it properly
From Safety Harbor it’s about twenty-five minutes on a decent day, longer at rush hour. A streetcar connects Ybor to downtown Tampa if you’d rather park once and ride. Give it three hours. An hour in the museum to get the chronology straight, an hour walking the factory blocks and the club buildings, and an hour sitting somewhere with a coffee writing down what struck you while it’s still fresh. People skip that last hour, and it’s when you capture the material.
Bring a notebook as well as a camera. Photographs record what a place looked like. Notes record what you thought standing in it, and six months later the notes are what you need.
Why this matters for a book
Three reasons.
The first is that it refutes the idea that ordinary people don’t make history.
Nobody in those rolling rooms was famous. Collectively they funded a revolution, built hospitals, elected readers, and produced most of the world’s cigars. The individual lives left almost no written record, the same problem I run into standing on the Tocobaga mound.
The second is scale. Writers routinely decide their material is too small, meaning too local, too specific, too much about one family in one trade. Ybor City is one industry in one neighborhood, and the story runs to Cuba, Spain, Sicily, Key West, and a war. Specific is usually the route to significant.
The third is practical. If your family came through a place like this, and a great many families in Tampa did, the records exist. Social club membership rolls, factory records, Spanish-language newspapers, photographs. That’s the raw material of a family history that’s more than names and dates, and I go into how to build one in recording a life you brought here from somewhere else.
I’ve written memoirs from a deceased subject’s papers by interviewing the family. A membership roll can tell you somebody paid dues to the Centro Asturiano. Only a relative can tell you what the club meant to them, so get that half while there’s still somebody alive to give it.
The neighborhood now
Ybor is a working district with a nightlife economy layered over a historic one, and the two coexist unevenly. Somebody keeps some of the buildings beautifully, and nobody keeps the rest. The roosters are protected and wander freely, descendants of birds kept by the original residents.
What survives best is the architecture and the institutions. What has largely gone is the industry that built it, along with the sound of a lector reading Cervantes over a hundred people working with their hands.
Walk past the Cuban Club on a busy Saturday night and you’d never guess that the people who built it paid for their own hospitals. Closing the gap between what a place was and what it sells now is a writer’s job, and too many of us leave it to the tourist brochures.
That’s what happens to places. The buildings outlast the life inside them, and the life is only recoverable if somebody wrote it down. (See also writing Florida without writing a postcard) Ybor has better records than most, and even here, most of the individual stories are gone. (See also the museum in the old bakery and what it holds)
Twenty-five minutes from here
I bring clients to Ybor sometimes, especially the ones who think their working life was nothing special. It’s difficult to hold that position standing in front of a factory where twelve thousand people made something the world bought and left almost no personal record of having done it.
I hate how much of that record is already gone. Twelve thousand working lives shrank to factory records and a few photographs because nobody thought a rolling-room job was worth writing down, and the same thing is happening right now in families who assume a parent’s forty years on the job isn’t a story.
If your family passed through this kind of world, or if the book you’ve been meaning to write is about work and the people who did it, we should talk. As a ghostwriter in Tampa, I can have that conversation within sight of the buildings. The rest of this cluster is in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub, and the Discovery Intensive is where we work out what your book is and what it would take.
