"Combining powerful images with compelling quotes, Ingalls and Perez capture the extraordinary world the cigar workers created and the imprint it has left on the historical landscape even after its demise."--Nancy A. Hewitt, Rutgers University "An inspiring and deeply moving account of how immigrant tobacco workers from Cuba, Spain, and Italy arrived and created communities in the Tampa Bay area . . . accompanied by a remarkable collection of historic photographs of Tampa's cigar workers."--Gerald E. Poyo, St. Mary's University From the founding of Ybor City in 1886 to the dispersal of Tampa's Latin population in the years following World War II, this book documents the history of the Cuban, Spanish, and Italian immigrants who created the cigar industry in Tampa and the extraordinary multi-ethnic community that flourished around it. Over 200 photos capture this community's personalities and way of life while commentary drawn from newspaper accounts, oral histories, and archival documents identifies and explains each photograph's historical place and significance. In linking the photographs with historical text, the authors allow the cigar workers to tell their own story, in the language of their day. The rich photographic record around which the book is organized documents the lives of the immigrant cigar workers not only in the workplace but also in their vibrant neighborhoods in Ybor City and West Tampa. Highlighting the diversity of the cigar workers' community, the book depicts the making of cigars, the work culture, local support for the Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898), unions and strikes, community institutions such as mutual aid clubs, leisure activities, and social practices surrounding courtship, marriage, and death. Focusing on the public spaces of work and society as well the private sphere of the home, Tampa's Cigar Workers tells an inspiring and deeply moving story of how immigrant cigar workers from Cuba, Spain, and Italy carved out their space in Tampa while struggling to survive economically and defending their ideals and way of life. Robert P. Ingalls is professor of history at the University of South Florida. Louis A. Perez, Jr., is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In tobacco fields, auto and radio factories, cigarmakers' tenements, textile mills, print shops, insurance companies, restaurants, and bars, notions of masculinity and femininity have helped shape the development of work and the working class. The fourteen original essays brought together here shed new light on the importance of gender for economic and class analysis and for the study of men as well as women workers. After an introduction by Ava Baron addressing current problems in conceptualizing gender and work, chapters by leading historians consider how gender has colored relations of power and hierarchy—between employers and workers, men and boys, whites and blacks, native-born Americans and immigrants, as well as between men and women—in North America from the 1830s to the 1970s. Individual essays explore a spectrum of topics including union bureaucratization, protective legislation, and consumer organizing. They examine how workers' concerns about gender identity influenced their job choices, the ways in which they thought about and performed their work, and the strategies they adopted toward employers and other workers. Taken together, the essays illuminate the plasticity of gender as men and women contest its meaning and its implications for class relations. Anyone interested in labor history, women's history, and the sociology of work or gender will want to read this pathbreaking book.

A major history of the impact of Caribbean migration to the United States. Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael, Louis Farakhan—the roster of immigrants from the Caribbean who have made a profound impact on the development of radical politics in the United States is extensive. In this magisterial and lavishly illustrated work, Winston James focuses on the twentieth century’s first waves of immigrants from the Caribbean and their contribution to political dissidence in America. Examining the way in which the characteristics of the societies they left shaped their perceptions of the land to which they traveled, Winston James draws sharp differences between Hispanic and English-speaking arrivals. He explores the interconnections between the Cuban independence struggle, Puerto Rican nationalism, Afro-American feminism, and black communism in the first turbulent decades of the twentieth century. He also provides fascinating insights into the impact of Puerto Rican radicalism in New York City and recounts the remarkable story of Afro-Cuban radicalism in Florida.