Twenty-five minutes from my desk there’s a neighborhood where, for roughly fifty years, working people paid part of their wages to be read to.
Not read to as children. Grown men and women hand-rolled cigars ten hours a day at long wooden benches. Out of their own pockets they hired a man to sit on an elevated platform at the front of the room and read to them while they worked. Newspapers in the morning. Novels in the afternoon. Cervantes, Hugo, Zola, Tolstoy, Dickens, Verne, and Marx.
This story moves me. People talk about working folks and serious literature as if a professor had to introduce the two. Ybor City settled that argument a century ago, and the people who settled it were rolling cigars ten hours a day. They were called lectores.
What was a lector in the Ybor City cigar factories?
The practice started in Cuba around 1865 and came to Florida with the cigar workers themselves. Vicente Martinez Ybor moved his cigar operation from Cuba to Key West, then to Tampa, founding Ybor City in 1885. The workers who followed brought the tradition with them.
At the front of each rolling room sat an elevated chair. That was the lector’s. He read for the length of the shift while a hundred or more tabaqueros worked below him. His voice had to carry a factory floor with no amplification. This was decades before microphones.
By the 1920s Ybor City held more than two hundred cigar factories, employing something like twelve thousand people, turning out around five hundred million cigars a year. It was the cigar capital of the world, and among the best-read square miles in the United States.
Who chose the books the Ybor City lectores read?
The way the rollers paid and chose the lector turned a charming custom into something else.
The lector wasn’t on the company payroll. The rollers paid him themselves, each contributing a small piece of their weekly wage, a quarter or thereabouts. The factory owner didn’t select him. The workers elected him, by committee, and auditions ran about ten minutes and tested one thing: could this man hold a room. Literacy and pronunciation got you in the door. Whether people wanted to listen decided it.
And the workers voted on the reading, not the owner, the lector, or a committee of the educated. The people rolling the cigars decided what they’d spend the day hearing. They chose Don Quixote and Les Miserables and the political press. And they chose the same books again when they wanted them again.
Given a free vote and their own money, people doing repetitive manual labor chose literature. Nobody told them it was good for them. It made the day worth living, and they wanted their children to have a father who knew things. That paragraph makes me proud of people I never met. Nobody handed them a curriculum. They picked Cervantes because he was worth their wages, and I think that’s the most honest book review anyone ever gave.
Who were the lectores?
The community treated them as intellectuals, and some of them earned it. Jose Dolores Poyo was a biographer and a friend of Jose Marti. Victoriano Manteiga, who came from Cuba in 1913, carried the title and later founded La Gaceta, a trilingual newspaper in Ybor City that’s still published.
The job was as much performance as reading. Lectores did voices. They acted the dialogue and paced the chapters and knew where to stop for the day so the room would want tomorrow. A good one made the factory floor into a theater that ran ten hours and never repeated a season.
I wish I could hear one of those men work. A reader who could keep a hundred tired people hanging on a chapter until the next afternoon knew more about pacing than most writing teachers, and he learned it in front of an audience that could vote him out.
One detail about the economics of that trade.
The cigar factories paid by skill instead of race. In the Jim Crow South that made cigar work one of the few paths to a middle-class wage open to Afro-Cuban workers. The room the lector read to was more mixed than almost any other room in Florida at the time, and everybody in it had voted on the book.
Why were the lectores banned?
Because reading works on people.
The lectores read the labor press alongside the classics, and a workforce that hears about organizing every afternoon for thirty years becomes a workforce that organizes.
Ybor City had strong, militant unions, and the owners understood exactly where a good deal of that came from. The lector was the education system, the news service, and the political culture of the factory floor. The workers chose him and paid him. Management had no say in any of it.
In November 1931 the Cigar Manufacturers Association moved to eliminate the lector. The workers walked out on the twenty-sixth. Police jailed strikers, the owners locked the factories, and by the middle of December the strike had broken. Some workers came back at the old wages. Others were never rehired.
The lectores didn’t come back at all. Radios went up in the rolling rooms instead. Management could switch those off, and nobody voted on them. A tradition that had run for half a century ended in about two weeks. That ending still galls me. The owners took a voice the room had elected and replaced it with a box they could switch off, and the point was control over what the workers heard.
A strike over the right to be read to. That fact moves me more than almost anything else I know about this region’s history.
I’ve never found better evidence of what a book is worth to a person who has nothing else that day.Share on X
What do the Ybor City lectores have to do with writing a book now?
Three things, and none of them is a stretch.
The first is about audiobooks, and about reading aloud generally.
The lectores prove that hearing a book isn’t a lesser way of receiving it. Twelve thousand people got their literary education by ear and came out of it better read than the college graduates across the river. If you have a book and you’re wondering whether the audio edition is worth the cost, the answer has been sitting in Tampa for a century.
The second is about reading your own work aloud, the most useful revision technique there is and the one writers skip. The lector’s audition tested whether he could hold a room for ten minutes. Your chapter faces the same test with a reader who can put the book down. Read it out loud and you’ll hear the sentence that fails about two words before you can explain why.
The third is the one I care about most.
Those workers wanted to be the kind of people who knew things, and they paid for it out of wages that weren’t generous. The desire to have something, and to be somebody whose thinking is worth listening to, is old and common. It’s why so many people carry a book around inside them for thirty years without writing it.
That desire is why I get impatient with anyone who says ordinary people won’t read serious books. Given a vote and their own money, these ones did, for fifty years.
Where can you see Ybor City’s lector history?
The brick factories are still standing. Ybor City is a historic district now, and you can walk past buildings where a man in a panama hat sat above the benches with a newspaper.
The J.C. Newman Cigar Company still works in Tampa. It’s rebuilt a lector stage in its handmade factory, and has talked about bringing guest lectors back to read to its rollers.
The city has also put real work into preserving the sound of it, including audio projects that recreate a lector reading Don Quixote in Spanish over the noise of the floor. Standing in Ybor with that in your ears is the closest thing to time travel in this county. If you go, go on a weekday morning when it’s quiet. The neighborhood at night is a different place, and the ghosts are easier to hear before noon.
The oldest argument for finishing your book
People sometimes ask me whether books still matter, usually in a tone that expects a defensive answer.
I don’t give one. I tell them about a factory in Tampa where the workers taxed themselves to hire a reader. They elected him like a union officer. They voted on the novels. And they went on strike when the owners tried to take him away.
That’s what a book is worth when nothing else is competing for the attention. Everything since, the radio in the rolling room, the television, the phone, has tried to occupy that same space more cheaply. The book is what people chose when they got to choose. (See also the casita, the bakery and the mutual aid societies) (See also twenty thousand photographs of this region)
If you have one in you, that’s the argument for writing it. Work with a ghostwriter in Tampa and we can talk about it within sight of the factories. The rest of this cluster sits in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub, and if you want to know whether your book should exist before you commit a year to it, the Discovery Intensive answers that question in about thirty days.
I think every writer in Tampa Bay should know this story, and I’m a little ashamed of how few of us do. It’s the best answer I have for anyone who thinks books are a luxury for comfortable people. The cigar rollers paid for them out of hard wages and walked off the job to keep them.
