Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, University of Iowa Group: Place, Erasure, Cultural Representation, and Marti

Cultural Memory in West Tampa and Roberts City After Urban Renewal

The term gothic in the circum-Caribbean and U.S. South conjures images of decayed plantations and the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and the ritual practices that accompanied systems of exploitation. In his poem “Ruins of a Great House,” Derek Walcott writes, “A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose/The leprosy of empire,” describing a familiar rotting plantation that repeats across the transnational South, from Faulkner’s Sutpen’s Hundred in north Mississippi to Macondo in Colombia and beyond. How does an abandoned cigar factory in West Tampa, Florida fit into the tropical gothic of the circum-Caribbean South? West Tampa, a small mixed-ethnic neighborhood that was its own independent city from 1895-1925, houses a significant handful of boarded up massive brick structures, which symbolize a sense of loss of the halcyon days of Tampa’s “Latin” communities, which were made up of immigrants from Spain, Cuba, and Italy that thrived on the cigar industry. One of these factories, the Berriman-Morgan Cigar Factory, was one of the few renovated and then became a branch of Argosy, a for-profit university, but now sits empty in the shadow of I-275, the expressway that cuts through the middle of West Tampa. When reading about this area, the word ghost appears often, at times describing actual hauntings, but mostly in reference to the loss of the cigar industry and its original Latin community. Urban renewal haunts stories from this area; the expressway is a major factor responsible for neighborhood decline in West Tampa and Ybor City and places Tampa in the larger context of post-industrial and urban renewal America. How do communities in Tampa narrate what is lost from urban renewal? What is the response to the double-edged sword of historic preservation, which preserves buildings but often results in gentrification and thus displacement of residents? West Tampa’s more illustrious neighbor, Ybor City, has been renovated in what we could call a second wave of urban renewal—commonly called gentrification—that capitalized on the area’s unique ethnic makeup and transformed an impoverished, forsaken neighborhood into a place that celebrates the cigar factory entrepreneurs of the past and their contemporary kin: investors willing to try their hand at historic preservation. West Tampa is overshadowed by Ybor City, despite the fact that West Tampa has more cigar factories, descendants of cigarworkers, and a piece of epic claim to Cuban history: it was at the O’Halloran cigar factory where Cuban writer and activist José Martí sent a letter to initiate the Cuban Revolution. The people at the factory in West Tampa there allegedly rolled a telegram into a cigar and sent it to their contacts in the Caribbean. You will hear this story repeated continually by tour guides and local historians, and it is exemplary of Tampa’s pride in their connection to Cuba. While Ybor City has been mostly renovated and repackaged as a tourist destination, West Tampa has largely been left alone, with a planning committee only recently forming in 2015. Together with Roberts City and Martí City, these neighborhoods of Tampa connect with a network of cigar-making and radical politics that reached out toward Key West, Havana and other points in the Caribbean and Gulf South, then northward to Jacksonville, New York, and Philadelphia. This chapter of US transnational history is understated—if it is recognized at all—despite the fact that anarchists and socialists with roots in Cuba, Spain, and Italy rallied for worker’s rights and defied Jim Crow laws in Florida. Their historical presence explodes the narrative of the US South as a monoculture of white supremacy and confederate nostalgia. The South’s rich history of immigration, labor rights, and transnational communities must be recognized and analyzed in order to put their subsequent movements that are shaping the region today. It also takes the South—US and Caribbean beyond the plantation and focuses on the industry that always existed in the region, lest we view it as a solely agricultural society. It is not only the plantation that repeats across the Caribbean and U.S. South, but also the cigar factory, where a worker could walk into the same design in a factory in Havana, Key West, Tampa, or Jacksonville and know exactly where to sit. The repeating factory contributes to or perhaps disrupts Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s image of the Caribbean as “a repeating island” where the chaos of the colonial past and its overlapping histories converge. This haunted landscape, what I refer to as industrial gothic, is rooted in the urban renewal and gentrification that disappear people, graves, and entire neighborhoods. An industrial gothic landscape upends the vision of southern gothic by focusing on a non-agrarian landscape in a very southern place. As James A. Crank argues when describing the outskirts of New Orleans, “it’s liminal space— not quite urban, not quite rural, not country, not city—and the setting works as akind of new noir aesthetic in which authenticity is a subject to be wondered at but is present to be gazed upon” (106). This description describes the dichotomy between Ybor City and West Tampa—one can wonder about the authenticity of the heavily renovated Ybor City, where the Church of Scientology inhabits the old Ybor factory. But West Tampa is what local historian Maura Barrios calls a “living museum,” an authenticity to be gazed at and listened to while sitting at a table with “displaced Latins” who reflect on the past. Included in this aesthetic are not only the ruins that remain, but the somber lament that accompanies stories of the past. These narrations happened in lectures and tours at the NEH Summer Institute, but emerged most prevalently in the archive of Roberts City, a demolished town to the east of West Tampa. My goal is to suture the acts of urban renewal and historic preservation to expressions of deep emotional loss for a community shaped by industry. By taking seriously people’s emotional response, I call into question the process of modernity, which presents itself as new and cutting-edge rather than something that will one day be remembered. Postcolonial theorist David Scott observes this aspect of social memory, what he calls the temporality of generations, defined as “I am looking back through my generational experience of the ruin of the postcolonial and post socialist present at what my interlocutors are remembering looking forward to see as a horizon of future possibility” (160). The temporality of generations interrupts the academic distance between us and the nineteenth century. How does it affect our collective cultural analysis when people have grandparents and great grandparents as history-makers? The generation of scholars such as Barrios and James Lopez cannot easily extricate themselves from the familial web of Tampa and carry the burden of their grandparents’ future possibilities for a sustainable community based on workers’ rights and a hope in an industry that is now dead. The cigar industry represented modernity’s promise for a multicultural and transnational United States, where immigrant workers could move freely between the U.S. and the Caribbean. José Martí advocated this vision at the end of the 19th century by creating the idea of a free Cuba and delivered this promise to the people of Tampa. Martí’s anticolonial rhetoric is based in loss; his opening line to his famous speech delivered to Tampa cigarworkers in 1891 “With All, For the Good of All” dedicated the first word to “suffering Cuba.” There is a sorrow that accompanies his vision, his death, and the ultimate failure of Cuba to become an independent nation free from U.S. intervention or racism. Martí’s left a legacy on how tampeños express longing and loss over Cuba and over the fading histories. Their affect is marked with a profundity that exceeds the limits of English. So I turn to the word saudade, a Portuguese and Galician word defined by Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa Contemporânea “a memory of something that was pleasant but is distant in terms of time or space” and in its noun form saudosismo is looslely translated as “a nostalgic yearning for the good things of the past” (205). In its deep felt absence, one cannot escape it; nor does it seem that the person suffering would want to. Even a more apt word would be morriña: “tristeza o melancólia, especialmente la nostalgia de la tierra natal” [sadness or melancholy, especially the nostalgia of one’s origin] (RAE). A Galician term, morriña, takes this emotion a step further to imply a deeper loss and even has a further definition to mena the grime that collects over a period of long neglect. The abandoned cigar factories of West Tampa reflect these definitions in their physical decay and in their narrative of decline. Saudade and morriña are more than emotions or even affect, they are emblematic of national character for Portugese and Galician people. For tampeños, these words describe a deep characteristic embedded into their cultural fabric, for which there are no equivalents in English. It is an emotion without a modifier. For this reason, I want to use these as a framework to understand cultural memory in West Tampa and Roberts City. My immersion in these places lead me to ask how does a feeling migrate from Galicia to Cuba, then to Tampa? And how does it shape an archive? I want to argue that migration of saudade from Galicia to Tampa results in multidirectional absence, a term I adapt from memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg and his theory of multidirectional memory. Rather than see collective memory as competing for memorialization space, Rothberg argues that collective memory can be “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (3). Multidirectional absence describes productive nostalgias--that is multiple losses that do not compete with each other but compound each other. Maura Barrios calls the empty park where the Cuesta-Rey factory once stood the “hole in the heart of West Tampa,” because she conflates the loss of the factory with the loss of a community, which is created by her in the very act of remembering. Her re-creation is confounded with the socialist dreams she grew up believing that she must negotiate in the age of Trump the way her ancestors negotiated the failure of Martí’s vision for Cuba. The “hole” is the absence that symbolizes many different and varied absences, and includes the fear of future obsolescence. Urban renewal and “revitalization” compromises cultural memory increases the multi-generational pace at which places are forgotten. The act of remembering a community becomes politicized and a challenges to the narrative that modernity is progressive. In a recently published article on Ybor City’s urban renewal and gentrification, I argued: Ybor City’s recent urban renewal project, like many other examples across the world, has cast itself in a positive light because of its attention to the historical preservation of ethnic authenticity. But what is being preserved, and for whom? When the community is not involved in the decision making of preservation efforts, which histories are made visible, and which are obscured? Much literature has been written about the racist and classist policies of urban renewal, and in the case of Tampa these decisions were not democratic. Through my transhistorical lens, I compare urban renewal to the initial founding of Ybor City and West Tampa, which cleared the natural environment by paternalistic factory owners, such as Vincente Martinez-Ybor, who wanted to build houses and a community that would organize and make permanent his workforce. This meant displacing workers from Cuba based on economic decisions such as tariffs and labor laws that would benefit their employers. Then, like now, displacing workers was a method to depoliticize them. These casitas would have been perceived as cutting-edge urban planning and the factories were extolled for extracting maximum production, which meant controlling worker mobilization. Urban renewal also displaced workers, such as the case with Roberts City. I spent a lot of my time outside of UT in what was formerly called Roberts City, now Julian B. Lane park, a beautifully landscape of green lawns with views of downtown Tampa, a walkway with mature trees that must have a been a street at some point, a playground and a splash pad where my children relieve themselves from the heat. The families there are black and Latino, I also hear island accents and thick southern drawls from white people. I welcome this racial and class diversity after a long day in a seminar. There are always many kids and families enjoying the park; it obviously directly benefits the neighborhood. A verbose, but compelling, historical marker boasts a onetime harmonious multi-ethnic community of cigar workers and boxing enthusiasts. Because of this personal connection, I was drawn to the Roberts City archive at USF Special Collections, which was compiled by local historian George Lopez. It is three boxes of mostly old photographs and newspaper articles from early-to-mid 20th century, but there are also contemporary artifacts: narratives from living community member and their children, and photographs taken in the year 2000. The Roberts City archive challenges both urban renewal as well as the politics of preservation. The unlikely media I found challenges notions of what gets preserved and called on me as a researcher to confront the emotional register of the collection. Lopez’s methods recall the term rasquache in their unorthodox recording of history. An example is the photo album of the unveiling of the historical marker, covered with kitschy fake jewels with an address label. There is an element of the homemade that might seem humorous to a “serious” researcher, but look at Lopez’s homemade maps on loose-leaf paper and on the back of folders, and the evident struggle to remember and place memories in their correct position emerges. The same address label appears again on his homemade maps and by labeling his archival materials with his current address, Lopez claims ownership while reminding the researcher of the archivist’s displacement to Seffner, a suburb of Tampa far from Roberts City. A post-it stuck to the inside of the folder preserves the memory of a nameless woman, “Joe Darrigo mother taught most Italian women how to make the best Bread cook in outside YARD OVEN.” Memories such as this feel as though they were written in haste, at a desperate pace to get all the images in before they are forgotten. The Bernardo Brothers narrate the loss of their community in “ONE FAMILY’S CORNER”: Robert’s City is no more, completely obliterated by urban renewal and I-275 (formerly I-4). My homesite is marked by a lone fire hydrant, a vigilant sentinel standing guard over a neighborhood long disappeared. There is no Grace Street that intersects North Boulevard, no Garcia Avenue where my grandmother and aunts and uncles lived, no houses or businesses filled with family, friends, or neighbors. Today there are tennis courts and open space, and area forever changed and resculpted by bulldozers. The area seems so small. How did so many lives fit into what now seems so spall a space? Then came the rumblings of something called urban renewal. Tampa was progressing and the neighborhood of Roberts City had no part in it…I remember the ghost town appearance of the neighborhood, no people, but dogs and cats in packs as pets had been abandoned…To see houses and businesses spray painted with the letters URX, was some sort of message being sent? Was this not in a way a type of genocide, a people, a community, a neighborhood displaced by the decision of others?

The Bernardo Brothers wonder if private enterprise would have revitalized Roberts City because of its proximity to the waterfront. But what would have been the natural progress? The fate of Roberts City? Would it be condominiums today? The park takes a complicated political position: it destroyed a neighborhood to make a space for the community. To put that aside, the people were not asked, just as the environment was not asked to be raised for development. It is a repetition of not- asking and not thinking through consequences that haunts urban renewal projects. The album Roberts City: The Pride of Tampa is one of the strangest artifacts I’ve found in an archive. In the album Lopez provides pictures of individual men standing in a parking lot in a strip mall in Tampa. He gives their names and their nicknames. He follows this catalogue of old men with photos of their cars: Saturns and Dodges from the 1990s. Then photographs of the personal, ordinary lives of the Roberts City group: Lopez’s wife with a dog, grandchildren, etc. This album creates an uncanny archiving experience: it looks like one’s own personal shoebox archive and resists the scholarly tendency to revere the old and rare. By resisting traditional archiving through Lopez’s contemporary interventions, memory-making takes on more of a fragmented and rasquache form. Those of us who do no keep meticulous papers take advantage of our permanence in a place, George Lopez might say. I read this archive as a lament that emerges from the presence of absence Lopez feels toward Roberts City. And I ask: Does Lopez’s contemporary artifacts fill the gaps of the post-it memories that have been lost? Or are they a reaction to saudade that manifests as an urgent need to record one’s ordinary life? Images of old men and their cars are not traditionally gothic…yet. But the Roberts Collections and the industrial gothic landscape of West Tampa reorients my perspective on ghosts, and what haunts communities across the contemporary South. Lopez’s uncanny archive, which takes saudade as its point of genesis, forces me to rethink archives and archival research, asking: what role does emotion play in the imperfect archives of immigrant and marginalized communities?