Episode 33: Live By Night with Sarah McNamara

2016's Live By Night was a rare miss by star and director Ben Affleck. On paper, it had everything you'd think it needed to be successful: great cast (Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Chris Messina, Elle Fanning, Sienna Miller), a cool premise (mob sets up new scene during Prohibition), and a director in Affleck who has emerged as one of Hollywood's best. But it didn't quite hit.

But that doesn't mean it's not great for us. Live By Night offers the opportunity to talk about Ybor City,  the "Harlem of Tampa," and a town many of you have never heard of. But you should know Ybor City. As guest Sarah McNamara shows in her new book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, the comunidad features a vibrant Cuban American culture and history all to its own, and understanding it is key to knowing both Florida and the United States. We talk about the history of Ybor City, the role of race in Cuban American communities during Jim Crow, the changing nature of womanhood in Ybor families during the early 20th century, and the differences between Tampa and Miami's Cuban communities. This is maybe the best episode we've ever done.

About our guest:
Sarah McNamara is Assistant Professor of History and core faculty in the Latina/o/x & Mexican American Studies Program at Texas A&M University. McNamara’s research centers on Latinx, women and gender, immigration, and labor histories in the modern United States.

Her first book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, examines the U.S. South as a transnational, multi-racial borderland and argues that in this space gender and sexuality played a central role in the (re)making of race, community, region, and nation. Ybor City is the history of three generations of migrant, immigrant, and U.S. born Latinas and Latinos— predominantly from Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Americas—who collided in Tampa, Florida from the late nineteenth through the mid twentieth centuries. While popular narratives of the origins of Latina/o/x Florida focus on Cuban immigrants who fled the rise of Fidel Castro in the 1950s and 1960s, McNamara centers on earlier generations whose migration, labor, activism, and leftist politics established the foundation of latinidad in the sunshine state. This portrait of political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights the underexplored role of women’s leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are.

You can find her on twitter at @Dr_SarahMac