Journal article
Designing Latinidad: Gulf South Migration and Contemporary Gentrification in Ybor City, Florida
The global South, Vol.12(1), pp.89-111
10/01/2018
DOI: 10.2979/globalsouth.12.1.06
Abstract
This article focuses on the circum-Caribbean and Gulf South migration of Cuban, Spanish, and Italian working-class radicals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a major hub of the cigar industry, Ybor City, in Tampa, Florida. In this multicultural enclave, a sense of international working-class solidarity overtook nationalist affiliations thanks to José Martí's Florida campaigns that launched Cuba's independence movement and to continuous union organizing among cigarworkers. I show how the globalization of capital and industry—and the globalization of workers' resistance—is an integral part of the story of labor in the Global South beyond the plantation. Historical and literary representations of Ybor City expose the complexity of Cuban-American identity and latinidad, which requires a multifaceted approach to ethnicity that accounts for class and political commitment. However, late-twentieth-century development projects in Ybor City have erased the radical politics of the area's history and have gentrified the area and marginalized its black inhabitants. By tracing the process of historic preservation and development, I critique how design choices, memorials, and murals create a whitewashed, depoliticized Cubanness and a fabricated narrative of multiethnic harmony stripped of class struggle in order to make Ybor City compatible with profit-driven redevelopment schemes. Urban design and historic preservation has occluded Ybor City's rich and tumultuous labor history in order to make it an investor-friendly site of touristy redevelopment. Ultimately, I argue that the process of gentrifying Ybor City depended on fabricating a depoliticized ethnic identity in order to sell authenticity as a product to consumers.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Designing Latinidad: Gulf South Migration and Contemporary Gentrification in Ybor City, Florida
- Creators
- Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- The global South, Vol.12(1), pp.89-111
- Publisher
- Indiana University Press
- DOI
- 10.2979/globalsouth.12.1.06
- ISSN
- 1932-8648
- eISSN
- 1932-8656
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 10/01/2018
- Academic Unit
- English; Interdisciplinary Programs
- Record Identifier
- 9984398744402771
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