Historical Ybor

The Cradle Of Mutual Aid: Immigrant Cooperative Societies In Ybor City
by Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta

If the cigar factories functioned as the economic heart of Ybor City, mutual aid societies surely served as its soul. The emergence of voluntary associations among immigrants signified an organizing impulse that left its legacy in wooden dance floors, marble edifices and modern hospitals.

According to one historian, these institutions represented "both an assertion of group identity and a tentative adjustment to the industrial metropolis."

Cubans, Spaniards and Italians brought with them traditions of voluntary associations and mutual aid. In the late nineteenth century, an organizing wave swept through Europe leaving behind thousands of voluntary organizations at village and town levels. These European societies survived the passage to the Americas. In 1887, a group from the Spanish province of Asturias organized an asociacion de beneficiencia in Havana. Asturians organized similar societies in other Cuban towns throughout the 1880s.

In 1886, members from several of these groups organized El Centro Asturians in Havana. Cubans drew upon the same patterns of self-help. In 1871, Cuban emigrés in Key West, Florida, founded the San Carlos Club a Mutual Aid Society based upon similar organizations existing in the homeland. It was no accident, therefore, that the early immigrants in Ybor City looked to ethnic clubs for solutions to the myriad of problems pressing upon them.

Birth of Mutual Aid in Ybor City
To comprehend fully the extraordinary associations that evolved in Ybor City, one must understand the milieu from which they emerged. Ybor City was an instant town. Grafted onto a city which before 1880 boasted scant numbers, Ybor City residents could expect little assistance from Anglo Tampa. A vacuum similarly existed with reference to previous immigrant groups. Whereas in northern urban areas, Italians frequently occupied neighborhoods recently vacated by Germans, Irish or Jews, Ybor City's Latins encountered a very different situation. Expansion often had to await sufficient housing, but more importantly there were no institutions to minister to newly arrived immigrants, such as charitable agencies. The Catholic Church, which might logically would have figured to step into this institutional breach, was despised and rejected.

In addition to the political and cultural traditions imported to Ybor City, the local environment contributed to the character of mutual aid. In late 1885, nature grudgingly yielded to workers clearing the palmettos and draining the swamps that would become Ybor City. For decades Ybor City's beleaguered inhabitants battled semi-tropical mosquitoes, belligerent alligators and unsanitary conditions. Water plagued the lives of the early inhabitants. Unless one carried buckets of water from Old Government Spring, the crudely dug wells or cisterns which collected rainwater yielded a substance old-timers jokingly defined as "too thick to drink and too thin to plow." Residents passed drinking water through coffee filters to remove insects and debris. The terrible yellow fever epidemic of 1887, which may have been caused by mosquitoes packed along with imported Cuban fruit, claimed a number of recent immigrants. "The mortality of all areas at Ybor [City] during the past year," reported the Tampa Journal in 1890, "has been far in excess of that in Tampa proper."

The cigar factories, free of dangerous machines, seemed on first impression to be exceedingly safe, but they in fact provided breeding grounds for tuberculosis. Workers spat on the floors or in rare spittoons, which in the warm, moist environment, spread the disease quickly. The necessity of keeping factory windows closed so as to prevent the moist tobacco from drying out added to the unhealthy conditions. "We have to take a collection every week for some consumptive comrade," observed a cigarmaker in 1917. The social, psychological and linguistic barriers separating Ybor City and Anglo Tampa aggravated the pressing need for medical and health services.

The rise of mutual aid societies in Ybor City was certainly not unique. Such ethnic associations proliferated in urban America. For example, hundreds of Slavic associations arose in Cleveland, while a similar number existed among such institutions in Ybor City was not the sheer number, but rather the consolidating nature and the encompassing character of five separate societies organized by Spaniards, Cubans and Italians. An overview of Ybor City's five leading immigrant associations shows the extraordinary number of services the five provided, which made them the center of institutional life outside the cigar factories.

The information provided in this section of our web site are excerpts from "The Immigrant World of Ybor City, Italians and their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885-1985" by Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta (Published by University of Illinois Press) and is available in bookstores near you.

Text and photos for this section provided by
The University of South Florida Library
http://www.lib.usf.edu/spccoll
Special Collections Department.