On our ride to the hotel from Tampa’s airport, our Uber driver strongly suggested that we visit Ybor. He didn’t tell us much about it other than it was historic, and that it’s worth visiting during the day, where we can visit museums and eat, as well as during the night, where the party is living it up.
Yesterday I discovered Ybor’s daytime side.
The Ybor Visitor Center thoroughly explains the National Historic Landmark District’s origin. Named after its founder, Vicente Ybor, the population was around 700 people at the time he arrived. Ybor bought some swamp land and decided he’d start a cigar business here; it had a railroad and nearby ports after all.
It turned out to be the largest cigar factory IN THE WORLD, producing over a million hand-rolled cigars a day!
The area attracted tons of skilled workers from all over—Spain, Cuba, Sicily, Germany, Romania—becoming a strong and blended Latin culture.
Ybor also had many social clubs for its residents. Communities could access labor and civic organizations, created their own foreign-language newspapers, and experienced an equality few other immigrants did. As I understood it the immigrants living here got the best of the American dream available to them.
The factories had a lecturer whose job it was to read aloud to the factory workers the news, novels, and political literature. These cigar rollers became one of the most highly educated blue collar work forces. Pretty great benefit for working in a factory. Eventually Ybor became the center of the Cuba Libre movement (way before Miami!).
Ybor has been restored beautifully and now hosts all sorts of eateries, bars, tattoo parlors, and more alongside and within the historic landmarks and cigar shops. There’s also a streetcar that runs through Ybor.
The Ybor City Museum State Park building is closed Mon/Tues, so I didn’t go in, but the park across the street has wild chickens and roosters! 
Despite how much I love watching the chickens and roosters cluck around, I love the prominent immigrant statue.
Recently my grandmother was asking me about where Jon’s family is from. I replied that his mom is Lebanese and that his dad and his parents were born here. But she wouldn’t let it go, asking me where each previous generation was from. I tried to explain in my broken Chinese that they’ve been here for probably about the entirety of American history, thinking in my head “they’re as American as you can get.” She kept insisting though, asking me where they were from before they came here. And then I caught myself. You can’t be “more American” can you? It doesn’t matter how many years or generations you’ve lived we are all equally American. As much as I feel like I know we are a country of immigrants, it was refreshing to hear such an innocent question pointing out the obvious and neglected truth of these United States, one that I needed to catch myself forgetting, even as a direct product of immigrants myself. Unless you’re from an American Indian tribe, you are an immigrant and this doesn’t make you any less American.
With the RNC-bashing and Trumpism’s ridiculousness consuming my social feed, I’ll now sidestep the obvious and underlying politics and instead just say this: Cheers to America and let’s continue to celebrate immigrants!
Love it. Yes, cheers to America and to celebrating of our melting pot