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José Yglesias and Ybor City

 

 

 

                              

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

José Yglesias’s The Truth About Them (1971) illustrates the boom of Ybor City's cigar industry and the influence of immigrant families, especially those of Cuban and Spanish descent. Through the fictionalized narrative account of Pini, layered in many instances with Yglesias’s own rich past, readers begin to get a sense of Ybor City’s complex history. The novel is both a humorous and bittersweet account of family, history, and the legacy of immigrants in Tampa. In his story about Ybor, Yglesias offers an alternative to the dominant narrative of the city’s past. Even the Seventh Avenue of today has been shaped by the events in the novel.

Our project at the Ybor City Museum State Park seeks to highlight the relationship between literature and place. Fiction can serve as a tool in preserving the histories of bygone decades, cultures, and places. In “The Radical Latino Island in the South,” Yglesias reflects on the contributions of Cuban, Spanish, and Sicilian immigrants to the development of Ybor City. He discusses various social clubs, such as the Centro Asturiano, the multiple cigar factory strikes, and the impact of the Cuban revolution on Ybor’s cigar industry. For Yglesias, “Ybor City is not a place where time has stood still, but a town ravaged by time and lost social struggles. This doesn’t mean there is nothing to celebrate about the special contributions this Latino community has made to Floridian and Cuban history...but if it was inevitable that its special ambiente die out, the truth about it must not.”

 

This website seeks to fulfill Yglesias's wish that the Latino community be remembered for its impact on Ybor City. Furthermore, we hope to preserve Yglesias's legacy as a Ybor City author who captured the history of this unique place. Throughout our website, visitors can read or listen to passages from The Truth About Them that correspond to displays at the Ybor City Museum State Park. Interviews with José Yglesias are also available by clicking the respective buttons.

"José wanted to accomplish one thing—to honor the cigar workers of Ybor City, the men and women who gathered at ethnic clubs like Centro Asturiano after their work was done, to talk, to dance, to live...he wrote in one of his books that he would not at all mind being remembered as the child of these hard-working, resilient people.”

 

          – Mary Jo Melone,

           “Remembering José Yglesias” 

          The Havana manufacturers who had begun the cigar industry in Key West some four decades earlier to escape the radical activities of the nationalists back home were no longer surprised at all this; some had already ten years earlier set up a company town in Tampa to get their businesses away from the ferment in Key West, but there too the fervor for Cuban independence was accompanied by strikes for higher wages, a closed shop, sometimes simply for a better grade outer leaf for the cigars they made. The manufacturers were in the main Spanish and they seemed at a loss to diagnose the fever that swept their workers everywhere. They were as ignorant as the medical scientists of the day: in Key West (and then in Tampa) the manufacturers had imported from Havana the skilled workers necessary to make luxury cigars in this new uninfected island, and when the same malady broke out there, they did not know what sea wind had carried the seeds from Cuba.

          That southwest corner of Key West was Grandfather’s Athens. José Martî was its philosopher-king. He formed the Cuban Revolutionary party there, and there and in Tampa delivered some of his most important speeches. When he arrived from New York for one of his stays, Grandfather was in the committee that welcomed him – though well in the background because Grandfather was its youngest member. He was also the youngest member of the strike committee at the factory, and each Saturday set up a small table he brought from home at the factory entrance, opened a folding chair, and checked off in a notebook the names of the workers who paid the 10 percent of their salaries pledged to the revolutionary movement.

The Truth About Them, pp. 38-39

 

Photo courtesy of Special & Digital Collections, Tampa Library, University of South Florida

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