Keywords
Ybor City, historical narrative, destination marketing, heritage tourism, urban tourism, Tampa history
Abstract
Ybor City is a historical neighborhood in Tampa, Florida, and a tourist attraction known for its immigrant roots and once-thriving cigar industry. This thesis places Ybor City into the context of the burgeoning heritage tourism market, examining how cities financially reliant on tourism often sanitize their public historical narrative. I identify the main actors involved in Ybor City's marketing and preservation by investigating contemporary newspaper articles and multiple National Park Service documents, thereby uncovering the motivations and decisions that led to Ybor's cultural image of a bustling, relatively peaceful early 20th-century "Latin" community. To correlate Ybor's aestheticized public image with the official record, I review and contrast historical primary sources, academic literature, tourism advertising material, and Ybor's physical historical markers designated to its landmarks. My main argument is that embellishing local memory with overt celebratory overtones and a patriotic message not only fosters a misleading narrative, but it also sidelines traditionally marginalized racial and ethnic groups: Ybor's working-class families, as well as its Jewish, Black Cuban, and African American heritage. This thesis seeks to advance a more authentic interpretation of Ybor City history by proposing a reinvestigation into literary sources and applying both GIS and mobile technology to update the existing scholarship.
Completion Date
2023
Semester
Fall
Committee Chair
French, Scot
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
College
College of Arts and Humanities
Department
History
Degree Program
Public History
Format
application/pdf
Identifier
DP0028033
URL
https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0028033
Language
English
Release Date
December 2023
Length of Campus-only Access
None
Access Status
Masters Thesis (Open Access)
Campus Location
Orlando (Main) Campus
STARS Citation
Galindo, Janine A., "Erasing the Past for Marketability: The Effects of Selling National Myth in Ybor City's Public Historical Narrative" (2023). Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024. 15.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd2023/15