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Historian Sarah McNamara traces the lives of the revolutionaries that made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the Sunshine State decades before Miami became Havana USA in her trailblazing monograph YBOR CITY: Crucible of the Latina South.
McNamara, joined by fellow Florida historian Gary Mormino, will share more of the political shifts that defined Ybor City. Her work highlights the under explored role of women’s leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are.
In masterfully recovering the world of the Cuban women and other Latinas who called Ybor City home, Sarah McNamara offers important new stories about racial, class, and gender politics in this often-forgotten city of the Jim Crow South. She takes the reader on the women’s powerful journeys through Ybor’s cigar factories, centros, and dance floors as they fought the colonial, imperialist, and anti-labor forces that consumed their day-to-day lives.”
—Julio Capo Jr., Florida International University
