Ybor City

“Ybor City is the best that Latinx history has to offer—deeply researched and rigorous but with respect toward diasporic peoples and the rich communities they build and evolve within.”—NACLA Report on the Americas

“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."—The Americas

“The book is not some alternative perspective on what happened in Ybor City, but real history and storytelling verified by records in the archives of the USF special collections, petitions in the City of Tampa archives, and the city directories that are part of a treasure chest of artifacts at the Tampa Bay History Center.”—Creative Loafing Tampa Bay

“Sarah McNamara offers an exciting multi-scale history told from a local vantage point that attends to the realities of diasporic life . . . A key contribution to the postwar, place-based histories of Latinas/os living and working in the various regions of the South. . . . McNamara’s book will serve as a model for how to balance individual, familial, and communal histories with attention to (trans)national historical processes.”—Southern Spaces

“Ybor City broadens our understanding of Latino politics in the state and of labor and ethno-racial community organizing in the American South more broadly, while also providing a formidable example of Latino solidarity, ever timelier in the wake of the renewed far-right politics of the Florida of today.”—The Volunteer

“A rich account of Ybor City’s cigar workers that deepens our understanding of the New South, American labor history, and immigration history. . . . The story of Ybor City also tells us much about what it means to be southern and American.”—Journal of Southern History

“A well-researched, convincingly argued, and engagingly narrated book.”—Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

“Sarah McNamara brings a dedication to historical craft—a fealty to the archives as well as command of oral history as practice and praxis. Writing with passion and precision, she always ensures that her interpretations are solidly grounded in primary sources. Ybor City will become a benchmark work in Latino history, labor studies, and the U.S. South.”—Vicki L. Ruiz, University of California, Irvine

“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 Capó Jr., Florida International University

“Ybor City is poised to make valuable contributions to women’s history, labor history, urban history, and Latinx history. Through McNamara’s focus on Cuban women laborers and organizers at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth, we learn valuable lessons about three generations of Americans in a southern city.”—Perla M. Gurrero, University of Maryland