Cultural Memory in West Tampa and Roberts City After Urban Renewal
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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.