Sicilian Affect in Tampa – Tampa Journal

When the story of early Ybor City is advised, the immigrant founders from Cuba and Spain are sometimes on the forefront.  But that narrative overlooks a big inhabitants that helped improve Cigar City: immigrants from Sicily. Tampa’s Sicilian households contributed considerably to the social and business material of Ybor City, West Tampa and Tampa as a complete.

Following the arrival of Cuban and Spanish immigrants within the mid-Eighties, the primary Sicilians got here to Tampa within the early Eighteen Nineties, many by the use of St. Cloud, Florida.  Lured by the promise of labor within the state’s sugar cane fields, they as a substitute discovered the labor grueling and harmful. Seeking higher alternatives, many turned to Tampa, the place the cigar business and its thriving immigrant communities supplied promise.

Although the island of Sicily is pretty small, Tampa’s Sicilian inhabitants largely got here from a handful of villages: Santo Stefano, Alessandria della Rocca and Agrigento, with Cianciana and Bivona contributing households too.  What started as a trickle turned a gentle stream, with greater than 2,000 Sicilians arriving over the following decade.

Their migration was spurred by circumstances in Italy and Sicily — failed agricultural insurance policies, suppression of employees’ leagues and a scarcity of alternative. Once in Tampa, many discovered a wide range of occupations related akin to farming, whereas others entered cigar factories or companies tied to the cigar commerce.  Wages have been invested again into the neighborhood within the type of L’Unione Italiano, or the Italian Club, one in every of a number of mutual support societies in Tampa.

There was additionally a robust emphasis on training. Quite a lot of their sons turned docs, whereas others took over household companies that carried into the second and third generations.

Over time, Sicilians intermarried with Cuban, Spanish and Anglo households, additional enhancing Tampa’s cultural heritage.  That legacy continues to be evident immediately — within the metropolis’s meals, structure and even its distinctive accent. 

Rodney Kite-Powell is a Tampa-born writer, the official historian of Hillsborough County and the director of the Touchton Map Library on the Tampa Bay History Center, the place he has labored since 1995. 

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