The Florida You Don't Know Is Better than the One You Do
Live by Night, Ybor City, and a New Story of Immigration, Womanhood, and Latinidad
“Welcome to Ybor, the Harlem of Tampa,” advises Chris Messina’s Dion Bartolo to Ben Affleck’s Joe Coughlin in 2016’s Live by Night. “Cigars built this place. What you’re smelling now is probably bolos or empanadas. The rest of Tampa leaves Ybor alone. As far as they’re concerned, we’re a bunch of dirty spics and wops and we can fuck off and do what what we need to do as long as we leave them alone. You’d think we get along, but it don’t work out that way.”
Live By Night was a rare miss by star and director Ben Affleck. On paper, it had everything you'd think it needed to be successful: great cast (Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Chris Messina, Elle Fanning, Sienna Miller), a cool premise (mob sets up new scene during Prohibition), and a director in Affleck who has emerged as one of Hollywood's best. But it didn't quite hit.
But that doesn't mean it's not great for us. Live By Night offers the opportunity to talk about Ybor City, a town many of you have never heard of. But you should know Ybor City. As guest Sarah McNamara shows in her new book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, the comunidad features a vibrant Cuban American culture and history all to its own, and understanding it is key to knowing both Florida and the United States. We talk about the history of Ybor City, how immigration in Florida in the last 19th and early 20th centuries is unlike anywhere else, the role of race in Cuban American communities during Jim Crow, the changing nature of womanhood in Ybor families during the early 20th century, the power of immigrant families, Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, and the differences between Tampa and Miami's Cuban communities. We also spoke about the differences in a dissertation and a manuscript, the challenges of inserting one’s own family into the narrative, and having faith in the process.
You don’t know this movie, but you need to know this story. From a sheer history perspective, this is maybe the best episode we've ever done.
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In addition, during the talk Sarah listed several foundational works that were crucial to her understandings of immigrant and Latina/o life and how to write about cities. I wanted to include them here as well so that you might find more scholarship that appeals to you:
George Sanchez, Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy (2021)
Natalia Molina, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community (2022)
Julio Capo, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (2017)
N.D.B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (2016)
Alejandra Dubcovsky, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (2016)
Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (1999)
Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885-1985 (1986)
Robert P. Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa, 1882-1936 (1993)
Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (2010)
Finally, I would not be doing justice to you if I did not offer you the cookbook that my late father-in-law left to me, one of the sacred texts of Cuban American cooking by Clarita Garcia, Clarita’s Cocina. Go get this book.
Alright that’s a lot of words. I hope you like this week’s pod. I’m really thrilled about it. Please keep reviewing it and sharing it. We’re gaining a little traction each week! And if you like this substack please share as well! We (I) couldn’t do this without you.