Historian Sarah McNamara traces the lives of the revolutionaries that made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the Sunshine State decades before Miami became Havana USA in her trailblazing monograph YBOR CITY: Crucible of the Latina South.

McNamara, joined by fellow Florida historian Gary Mormino, will share more of the political shifts that defined Ybor City. Her work highlights the under-explored role of women’s leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are.

Purchase your copy of YBOR CITY here!!!

In masterfully recovering the world of the Cuban women and other Latinas who called Ybor City home, Sarah McNamara offers important new stories about racial, class, and gender politics in this often-forgotten city of the Jim Crow South. She takes the reader on the women’s powerful journeys through Ybor’s cigar factories, centros, and dance floors as they fought the colonial, imperialist, and anti-labor forces that consumed their day-to-day lives.” ​​​​​​​—Julio Capo Jr., Florida International University

Sarah McNamara is Assistant Professor of History and core faculty in the Latina/o/x & Mexican American Studies Program at Texas A&M University. McNamara’s research centers on Latinx, women and gender, immigration, and labor histories in the modern United States.

Her first book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, examines the U.S. South as a transnational, multi-racial borderland and argues that in this space gender and sexuality played a central role in the (re)making of race, community, region, and nation. Dr. McNamara’s work has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association for University Women, the American Historical Association, and the Tulane Center for the Gulf South, among others. In recognition of her commitment to research, service, and teaching she was named a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars as well as a Montague-Center for Teaching Excellence Scholar at Texas A&M University. 

Gary Mormino, based in St. Petersburg, is the Frank E. Duckwall Professor of History Emeritus at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. He is the winner of the Florida Humanities 2015 Florida Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and serves as Florida Humanities scholar in residence. His many books include Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.