Spanish-Language Newspapers in Ybor City and New Mexico

 Eron Jenkins

History of News Media

Jeff Johnson

November 28, 2011

Spanish-Language Newspapers in Ybor City and New Mexico

In 1898, the Cuban War for Independence ended. 12 years later, the Mexican Revolution against the autocratic president Porfirio Díaz began. Not surprisingly, the ramifications of these two events were not limited to Cuba and Mexico. Thousands of Spanish speaking people came to the United States in search work and asylum. In Tampa, Florida, in a neighborhood called Ybor City, cigar manufacturers offered work to immigrants from Cuba and Spain. Conversely, in New Mexico, Spanish speaking people had lived in the region north of the Rio Grande for hundreds of years. However, growth and stability in the region offered new opportunities to Americans from the east and Mexican immigrants from the south. The goal of this paper will be to examine the development and content of Spanish language newspapers in these two areas from 1900-1910 by looking at two newspapers: El Diario de Tampa of Ybor City and La Estrella of La Cruces, New Mexico.  

            To understand any aspect of any culture one must note the historical context in which the event occurs. In this case, the goal is to study the history of the news media, specifically newspapers, in Ybor City and New Mexico. Because of the corresponding migration and revolutionary atmosphere, the context of the development of the newspapers in these two places is similar. However, they diverge in terms of their perspective. The press in Ybor City is influenced by their emigrant community and more fixated on revolutionary advocacy.  While the press in New Mexico is shaped by the effort to conserve, not transform, Hispanic culture.

The Development of Ybor City

To understand the Spanish-language press in Tampa at the turn-of-the-century is to first see the city as a developing urban community with a booming niche industry. In fact, by 1900, Tampa was the leading manufacturing city in the state of Florida (Ybor City book 43). But unlike other manufacturing centers in the north, Tampa was not leading the way in making iron, steel, or automobiles. In Tampa, they made cigars. In the second half of the 19th century, capitalists from Havana, like Martinez Ybor, began bringing their successful business model of hand-rolling cigars to Tampa. With its growth and its labor-intensive nature, cigar manufacturing help create the stable working environment in Tampa that neither Spain nor Cuba could. The result was the development of a distinctly Spanish atmosphere in Tampa. And this is the climate that the Spanish news media in Ybor City developed in.

        Initially, the people immigrating from Cuba to Tampa and the rest of Florida were not seen as “immigrants” in purest sense of the word. Because of the obvious proximity of Cuba to Florida, Cuban immigrants, a significant number of whom were 2nd generation Spaniards, had more options  in terms of mobility than say Italian immigrants arriving in New York City. Therefore, for the thousands of Cubans that came, working in Florida was seen as normal and not as leaving Cuba for good. In fact, in the 1890s, as many as 100,000 people passed between Cuba and the United States and back again each year (Ybor City book 76). Ramón Williams, the American consul general to Cuba in the 1890s explained to a congressional committee that “They go back and forward as those French laborers go from Canada into New England and work and then go back home. Sometimes the Cubans return, but a good many of them have remained there [in Florida]. The whole commerce of Cuba is with the United States” (RW link in email).

The ethos of industry, capitalism, and consumption that began at the turn-of-the century was also the driving force that paved the way for establishment of Ybor City. In 1885, a Spanish born and Cuban immigrant business man named Vicente Martinez Ybor moved his cigar manufacturing plant from Key West to Tampa. In the spring of 1886, the first cigars were made at the factory of Mssr. V. Martinez Ybor and Co. And by 1910, there were almost 9,000 employees of cigar manufacturers in Ybor City; more than 7,000 of them were immigrants (Ybor City Book 109).

However, the rise of the cigar factories in Ybor City was not a result of happenstance. In 1895, the Cuban War of Independence against Spain began. It ended in 1898 with an intervention from the United State and the subsequent Spanish-American war. The result was that places like Tampa were able to offer businessmen in Cuba the stability of peace, the prospect of growth, and workforce that had been exiled from its home country. The Cuban revolution changed migration to Ybor City. While there were thousands of people migrating between Cuba and Florida each year, the numbers were subject to fluctuation based the revolution. Also, the revolutionary atmosphere carried over into the sphere labor relations. Work stoppages in the cigar factories had been a part of Ybor City from the beginning, but the increased immigration brought on by the revolution cemented the need for labor organization.

In their book The Immigrant World of Ybor City, authors Gary Mormino and George Pozzetta describe the atmosphere for Spanish immigrants as  “Held together by a vibrant Latin culture, infused with a set of distinctive work rhythms, and accentuated by a heightened political consciousness, [offering] contrasting values and alternatives: solidarity buffered by individuality; an isolated community beset by revolution and unrest; and an elite work force challenged at every point by a Cuban proletariat” (75).

The Press in Ybor City

Not surprisingly, as more people immigrated to Tampa, newspapers began gaining more popularity. Also, perhaps unique to the area at least in terms of popularity, lectors who read the newspapers in the cigar factories served as a catalyst for growth. In his article “A Socio-Historic Study of Hispanic Newspapers in the United States,” author Nicolás Kanellos explains how the newspapers in Ybor City reflected the divisions of race, class, and ethnicity there. He explains that “there were the periodicals that served the interests of the owners of the cigar factories, such as La Revista (The Magazine)…on the other side of the equation were the periodicals that served the interests of the workers and unions: Federacion (Federal), El International (The international), and Boletin Obrero (Worker Bulletin).” This is important to note because the goal of the newspapers in Ybor City was usually first to advocate, and then to inform.