Tampa's Archives Awareness Week wraps with talks about the radicals and revolutionaries who changed Ybor City

Some people associate Ybor City with roosters and hand-rolled cigars. Three women—Dolores Ibárruri, Luisa Moreno and Margot Falcón Blanco, immortalized in a mural on 7th Avenue—might add a layer to that point of view.

Ibárruri was an activist in Spain from where many of Ybor’s first immigrant families arrived. A fierce antifascist and orator, she once said, “The Spanish people would rather die on its feet than live on its knees.” While she did not live here, Ibárruri embodies the spirit of an antifascist movement that was prevalent in the streets of Tampa’s historic district in the late-1930s.

Moreno, for her part, left her home and husband in New York City in late-1935. She had her seven-year-old daughter by her side and sought to leave the Communist Party behind, too. A bus took her to Tampa where she worked for nearly two years as an organizer for the American Federation of Labor.

In 1937, less than a year after Francisco Franco’s fascist Nationalist Party started the Spanish Civil War, Blanco was one of about 5,000 Latinas who marched west on Seventh Avenue to downtown Tampa. The women delivered a petition to the mayor condemning what the Tampa Tribune called the “ruthless killing of women and children by Franco’s forces.”
Ybor City’s women planned that march; the Tribune says men made up the rear of the contingent. And this weekend two women will reintroduce Ibárruri, Moreno and Blanco to the community as part of the finale to the City of Tampa’s Archives Awareness Week.

On Friday, Sarah McNamara—a native Tampeña and author of a new book, “Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South’’—leads an evening discussion about the district’s radicals and revolutionaries who stood up for themselves, led global movements, and fought against fascism.

Moreno will be visited, but so will Luisa Capetillo, a Puerto Rican anarcho-syndicalist, feminist, and labor organizer who is the only known lectora to live and work in Ybor City. Paulina Pedroso, Afro Cuban co-owner of the Pedroso Boarding House (José Martí Park sits on the land where this home and business once stood), is one of the characters of McNamara’s untold stories, and so are Tampeñas Dolores Patiño Río and Blanca Vega—both survivors of the Great Depression, and everyday radicals and revolutionaries. The lives of a few other figures will teach attendees lessons about the importance of writing, inter-ethnic and interracial organizing, as well as queerness.
And the talk will be a party, too. Tampa artist Michelle Sawyer, who painted the mural commemorating Ybor City’s 1937 antifascist women’s march, also programs The Bricks and has taken the reins for the event, added a photo exhibit, planned themed cocktails with bar staff, made custom shirts and stickers, and even built a Tampa-themed selfie station.

Those still itching to get down and celebrate can even return on Saturday for a daytime Ybor City walking tour led by McNamara, who’s now a professor of history at Texas A&M. After the walk, The Bricks hosts a 136th birthday celebration for the City of Tampa, complete with cake.

Sawyer, whose large scale mural work is all over the city, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that she was initially apprehensive when first approached to do the women’s march piece, her first solo commission mural in about a decade.

“This was an arena I wasn’t sure I wanted to step back into and from a health standpoint, I was a bit scared to do another mural,” she said about the work that is painted on the western wall of the Ybor City Community Redevelopment Area office. But the uniqueness and messaging made it an opportunity Sawyer could not pass up.

“The excitement over the mural has been refreshing,” Sawyer said, adding that she feels proud of the role she played. “Proud of my hometown, its history, my heritage and proud to have been selected for the project.”

And for McNamara, this weekend is a chance to take off the academia hat and bring the book—which represents a decade spent in cold rooms, surrounded by boxes, folders and old documents—to the neighborhood and people who are writing their own Ybor City history right now. “What researchers do really does have real life lessons and real life implications,” she said.
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. “I followed specific families and explained where they lived, worked, and moved throughout Ybor,” she said.

McNamara also explored how those families reacted when authoritarian or fascist regimes, and those that dealt with white supremacy in a really overt way, took complete control and sought to fund a state through immigrant labor and immigrant work. She found that those families did not roll over.

“They said, ‘This is now my home, and I really care about this place, and you’re going to recognize me whether or not you like it or not,’” McNamara explained. “And they figure out a way to mobilize and how to claim space for themselves.”
The timing is not lost on her either.

“I didn’t anticipate that the book would become as precious or as in-the-moment-important as it has.”

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“I didn’t anticipate that the book would become as precious or as in-the-moment-important as it has,” McNamara told CL. Activists have emailed her to say they discussed parts of the book in their labor union meetings to illustrate different moments of resistance. Because what’s also baked into “Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South’’ is the stories of how individuals and communities changed as part of their activism.

“I find it interesting,” McNamara said. “What people are seeing in the lessons of the book, which may not have been prevalent during the last 10 years, have become very apparent now.”
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