Sarah McNamara is currently a professor at Texas A&M University, but it's her rich Tampa history that led to her new book Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South.
The book highlights not just her own family history but the fascinating stories of women from the 1800s to the 1960s.
"I think one of the things that stuck with me is that so many of the stories that my grandmother told were all about women at the forefront of the stories. And in her stories, they were people who were working late, laboring inside of factories, they were people who were laboring inside of their homes, they were people who were making financial decisions. They were people who had larger-than-life personalities. And that's not oftentimes how we think of women historically," said McNamara.
McNamara's family is from Ybor City, and much of the research started with pictures from her late grandmother. From there, an idea was born to highlight Ybor City's rich history.
"It's the history of three generations of Latinas and Latinos who immigrated from Cuba and how their political identity and sense of self changed over time. It follows 1880 through the 1960s. But it also mirrors the change and evolution of the state of Florida, as well as the city of Tampa, as it moved from being a place where quite literally, very few people lived to a city that had a different infrastructure and a very powerful Latino contingent, especially citizens who were voting and advocating of what it meant, what Latina that meant within the state," said McNamara.
During her education, McNamara said she wanted to uncover what the pictures and memories from her late grandmother meant.
"But she actually told me these stories, she never really told me what they meant, or why they were important. And I didn't really know why they weren't important until I went to undergrad at the University of Florida," she said. "And I started to think more critically about what it meant to be a Latina or Latino and what it meant to be of Hispanic descent and think about that in relation to other people who were around me, who understood themselves differently, be that politically, being also of Cuban descent, or be that of different generations and people coming from other countries."
With such a big focus on women, one event stands out in particular.
"It was all centered on this event called the 1937 Antifascist Women's March, and in this moment, there were 5,000 women who marched from Ybor City to the front desk of the city of Tampa to advocate for the U.S. to enter the Spanish Civil War, as well as for the city of Tampa to recognize them as equal residents and citizens who had claimed to things like WPA assistance, or even just fair and just treatment, especially in the midst of Jim Crow, and vigilante violence that existed within the city. And that story emerged initially from a picture that my grandmother showed me when I was a teenager. And when she showed me this picture, there was an article in the Tampa Bay Times. It was published in 1990. But she saved it; she had this binder where she would put clippings. And she showed it to me in the early 2000s, not long before she died, and she pointed out the women in our family," explained McNamara. "But that march is one of the things that takes center stage, and I also learned that there's other labor unionists, like a woman named Louisa Moreno, who goes on to become a national figure of Latina power within the U.S. by the 1940s. And the way that she learns to do activism and organize as a union organizer really begins in Ybor City. "
