Jose Yglesias: el cronista / dramaturgo de Ybor City (Tampa)

Abstract

The literary legacy of Jose Yglesias (1919-1995) consists of eight novels, four nonfiction books, four plays, and a great number of essays, short stories, journalistic and academic articles, reviews, and translations. He was born in West Tampa and grew up in Ybor City. In 1937 he moved to New York City where he spent the rest of his life, which did not prevent him from being considered by his peers “the most important writer yet produced by Tampa.” We are concentrating here on his trilogy of plays based on his family and their cigarmaker neighborhood of Ybor City: Chattahooche , which takes place in 1912; The Dictatorship of the Proletariat , in 1920, after the Russian Revolution took place (hence its title); and You Don’t Remember? during the protagonic character / author’s last visit to his hometown in December, 1978. All his work, including his plays, was geared to make “American readers aware of Ybor City and its Latin cigarmakers,” seen from the point of view of the workers themselves, an insight he thought was missing from most fiction and theatre writing.