There are books whose narratives draw you in, keeping you engaged and eager to turn the page. There are texts that keep you checking how many pages are left in that chapter, not because you want to finish it, but, to the contrary, because you want it to continue. It so happens that these books are not usually academic texts. This, however, is the case for Sarah McNamara's book. It is a thoroughly researched scholarly monograph written in a narrative style that captures the reader's imagination from beginning to end.
As the book title suggests, McNamara offers a rich history of Ybor City from its foundation in the late nineteenth century to the present day. Merging her own family's experiences with a wide range of archival material, the author presents a complex narrative of Latinx people in Florida, countering media-driven narratives about homogeneity. Instead, the book excels in presenting how these Latinx communities are different, plural, and diverse—all of this through the lens of Latinx women.
The book is organized chronologically, and each chapter represents a moment in the creation of this Latinx community: searching, building, resisting, surviving, remaking, and finding. In the introduction, “Searching,” the author frames the book's main arguments and offers readers a glimpse into the world her historical subjects navigate. Doing so problematizes the neat, teleological understandings of Latinx people. Instead, she paints a nuanced picture, differentiating, for example, the radical cigarmakers that arrived at the turn of the twentieth century from the mostly white, middle-class individuals that arrived after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
The first chapter, “Building,” offers a brief history of Florida, and then moves to explore the migration of Cubans to the Tampa region. It not only pays attention to labor organizers and workers, but also to people like Vicente Martínez Ybor who “envisioned his self-named company town as a place of control, [and] it became [instead] a community of immigrant power” (47). These stories are told in the context of the Jim Crow South, which also impacted racial relations at the labor and radical organizing level. In chapter 2, “Resisting,” the author focuses on the vibrant radical communities that emerged in Ybor City. She pays particular attention to the organizing of women like Luisa Moreno and Luisa Capetillo. If chapter 1 was all about the landscape of the city, chapter 2 is written and imagined from the landscape of the workshop.
In the following two chapters, “Surviving” and “Remaking,” the author showcases the ways the community changed during the mid-twentieth century. It went from a community organized around social centers and where the Communist Party had a strong presence to struggling to survive after the almost total obliteration of the tobacco industry, the returning Latinx World War II veterans who chose the suburbs, and the displacement for what the city coined as “urban renewal.” A sobering historical moment was when Fidel Castro sought to evoke the pro-independence spirit of Tampa and Ybor City, only to find distrust and a lack of support. As McNamara notes, “[n]ot only had Ybor City changed in terms of its needs and interests, but the culture of activism and collective organization had moved beyond models that relegated women to the sidelines” (162).
The book feels politically urgent even as it offers a historical overview of Ybor City. At a moment when Latinx peoples are becoming the largest minoritized group in the United States, the book offers a window into the plurality and porosity of our history. Although it is a history of Ybor City, the author does an outstanding job of pointing out the transnational connections to Cuba as well. Although I have only praised the book thus far, I would note that sometimes women escape the narrative. Of course, this might not be the author's fault; it might have been due to the silences of the archives she was using.
Overall, this book is an outstanding accomplishment and a welcome contribution not only to Latinx history, but also to the histories of radicalism, labor, and women's studies in the Greater Caribbean.
