"A comprehensive book on baseball in West Tampa [Florida], from the Little League to the Major Leagues. [Melone and Keeble] note that baseball has deep roots in Tampa, dating back to the 1980s, and point out that Tampa has produced more Major League players than any other city in America. From Al Lopez to Lou Piniella, MacFarlane Park to Yankee Stadium, Tampa's place in baseball history is secure."--Cover.
In 1896, Wenceslao Gálvez y Delmonte fled the violence of Cuba’s war for independence and settled in Tampa. He soon made his new home the focus of a work of costumbrismo, the Spanish-language genre built on closely observing the everyday manners and customs of a place. Translated here into English, Gálvez’s narrative mixes evocative descriptions with charming commentary to bring to life the early Cuban exile communities in Ybor City and West Tampa. The writer’s sharp eye finds the local characters, the barber shops and electric streetcars, the city landmarks and new Cuban enclaves. One day, Gálvez offers his thoughts on the pro-independence activities of community leaders like Martín Herrera and Fernando Figuerdo. On another, our exiled bourgeois intellectual author wryly recounts his new life as a door-to-door salesman and lector reading aloud to workers in a cigar factory. This scholarly edition includes photographs and newspaper clippings, a foreword on Gálvez’s extraordinary pre-exile years, extensive notes to the translation, and a wealth of other supplementary material putting the author’s life and work in context. A volume in the series New World Diasporas, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington
Florida Historical Society Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Award From the founding of Ybor City in 1886 to the dispersal of Tampa's Latin population in the years following World War II, Tampa's Cigar Workers documents the history of the Cuban, Spanish, and Italian immigrants who created the cigar industry in Tampa and the extraordinary multi-ethnic community that flourished around it. More than 200 photos capture this community's personalities and way of life while commentary drawn from newspaper accounts, oral histories, and archival documents identifies and explains each photograph's historical place and significance. In linking the photographs with historical text, the authors allow the cigar workers to tell their own story, in the language of their day. The rich photographic record around which the book is organized communicates the lives of these workers not only in the workplace but also in their vibrant Ybor City and West Tampa neighborhoods. The book depicts the making of cigars, the work culture, local support for the Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898), unions and strikes, community institutions such as mutual aid clubs, leisure activities, and social practices surrounding courtship, marriage, and death. Highlighting the diversity of the cigar workers' community, the authors present an inspiring and deeply moving story of how these immigrants carved out their space in Tampa while struggling to survive economically and defending their ideals and way of life.
A detailed historical description of the financiers and the highly skilled cigar-making workers of West Tampa and Ybor City, once the cigar production capital of the U.S.
The Tampa Bay area has a rich and fascinating history. Truly an international city, Tampa attracted its residents from all over the world, and the city's natural deep-water port and proximity to the Panama Canal encouraged significant growth around the turn of the twentieth century. Visionary pioneers came together with Henry B. Plant's railroad, the construction of the Tampa Bay Hotel, and Tampa's five "C's" (climate, cattle, citrus, cigars, and cheap labor) to build the city that became the "Gem of Florida's Gulf Coast." During this same period in Tampa's history, from the 1890s through the 1920s, the postcard was an extraordinarily popular means of communication. Postcard photographers traveled the nation snapping photographs of busy street scenes, documenting local landmarks, and assembling crowds of local children only too happy to pose for a picture. These images, printed as postcards and sold in general stores across the country, survive as telling reminders of an important era in American history.
