Gary Mormino and E. Salcines, during a small gathering of peers at the University of South Florida. The tour concluded in the ornate theater at Centro Asturiano, one of the many Ybor City social clubs and mutual aid societies, a relic of the turn-of-the-century heyday of Ybor as a cigar boomtown.
As Dr. Mormino launched into his explanation of the Spanish history of the club, E. Salcines leaned to the ear of the young professor. Salcines, sotto voce , wove an enchanting picture of growing up in the rich culture of Ybor City, an anomaly in the American Southβa thriving, interdependent, multi-immigrant society devoid of racial violence despite the ethic discrimination of the times.
The young professor, Dr. Kenya Dworkin, whose dissertation concerned the Cuban identity between colonial rule to the first republic, fell under the spell. She returned to Pittsburgh with a new intellectual curiosity on fire: given the importance the Ybor City cigar workers played in Cuban independence, what about Cuban theater of Tampa? The cigar workers organized that, too.
What were the plays like? Who was writing them? What did they say about the people, the times? Surely, somewhere, someone had a stockpile of manuscripts from this creative outpouring of Cubans in Tampa. Then, Dworkin stumbled upon one other scholarβjust one, out of the entire United Statesβwho cared enough to peep into the cultural history of Ybor City, one of the most fascinating social experiments of the American 19 th century.
Hispanic Heritage of the United States. He had one reference in his book. Dworkin eventually learned through E. In the Mesa collection, I found several photographs and paraphernalia. Mesa was a Tampa native and very involved. On summer break from the university, Dworkin traveled to Tampa on the trail of the missing manuscripts and in search of anyone who could fill in the gaping holes on the subject. She remembered visiting the offices of La Gaceta , the oldest family-owned, minority-owned newspaper in the country, on her tour with Gary Mormino, so she stopped in.
