Cigarmakers had world at their fingertips
A newspaper exhibit will show the global education that workers, even if nearly illiterate, received.
By ALEXANDRA ZAYAS
Published October 7, 2005
They rolled cigars for a living - all day, every day. But Ybor City and West Tampa cigar factory workers looked forward to something new and different each morning.
They paid several cents a week to listen to a lector read homegrown Spanish newspapers from a pulpit in the factories for two hours a day.
During their half-hour lunch breaks, the cigar workers referenced newspapers such as Cuba, published in Ybor City in 1893 during Cuba's revolutionary struggle against Spain to try to organize exile communities in Florida. Or they'd get riled up by labor publications that advocated better working conditions.
Over time, they grew to know the names of elected officials and foreign leaders and events happening half a world away in countries they'd never visit.
"The Latino cigarmaker was the most informed working class in the United States at the time, because he may not have known how to read or write very well, but for two hours in the morning, he was finding out what was happening in Japan, in Paris, in London, in New York, in Moscow," said Judge E.J. Salcines, a West Tampa native and local historian.
They owed that education to local newspapers, many of which published for a year or two, then faded into obscurity.
Until now.
Beginning Monday, the Ybor City Museum Society will showcase 90 of these Spanish and Italian language publications for the first time in "Otras Voces: The Radical and Alternative Press in Ybor City," an exhibit highlighting the "Other Voices" in the city's 100-year history.
Collected over the years by the University of South Florida's Department of Special Collections and through donations from local historians, the papers published between 1886 and the 1980s were digitally scanned and saved electronically.
Prints of the digitized papers will be on display at the Borders bookstore in South Tampa with their English translations.
"A newspaper is a snapshot of that moment in time. All the little details - the ads, the cartoons, the headlines - tell us something about what was going on right at that moment in history," said exhibit curator Manny Leto.
"It's not like reading a history book. A history book is someone else's summary of what happened. When you look at these papers, you really get a sense of the times, the mood of the people."
The exhibit will move to the West Tampa public library Nov. 1. From there, it will go to the Cigar Heritage Festival in Centennial Park on Nov. 19, the International Bazaar in Centro Ybor on Nov. 21 and the Ybor City Museum State Park on Dec. 9.
Leto will be at Borders to answer questions on the exhibit's opening day. Admission is free.
"People would be really shocked to find out the sheer number of papers that existed," Leto said. "You get a very immediate sense of what the people were thinking at the time."
- Alexandra Zayas can be reached at 226-3354 or azayas@sptimes.com
IF YOU GO"Otras Voces: The Radical and Alternative Press in Ybor City" runs from Monday through Oct. 31 at Borders, 909 N Dale Mabry Highway. For information, call Manny Leto at 247-1434.