The Ybor Workers and Their Newspapers

The cigar workers of Ybor City were among the most informed industrial workers in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and they became that way through an unusual combination of their own organization and the lector system.

But the lectores were not the only source of political education in Ybor City. The community sustained its own Spanish-language press, multiple newspapers produced in and for the immigrant cigar-worker community, covering labor news, Cuban independence politics, local affairs, and international events. La Traducción was one of the earliest. La Gaceta, founded in nineteen twenty-two, is still published today, the only trilingual newspaper in the United States, printed in English, Spanish, and Italian, a direct inheritance of the community that built Ybor City.

The relationship between the cigar workers and their newspapers went beyond readership. Workers organized labor committees through the newspapers' pages. Cuban independence organizers used the press to raise money and recruit supporters. José Martí contributed essays to Ybor City publications during his visits. The newspapers served as institutional memory for a community that had no other consistent record-keeper.

La Gaceta's founding by Victoriano Manteiga in nineteen twenty-two established a family publishing tradition that continues with his grandson Patrick. The paper has endorsed candidates, opposed urban renewal projects, covered the decline of Ybor's cigar industry from inside the community, and served as a document of continuity between the Tampa of eighteen eighty-five and the Tampa of today.

The Tampa Bay History Center holds archival copies of Ybor City's Spanish-language press. Reading them, even in translation, is a different experience from reading the mainstream Tampa Tribune coverage of the same events. The cigar workers saw a different city. Their newspapers recorded it.