According to McNamara, “Ybor City” seeks to explore how the community of Cubans and other immigrants collide and make sense of themselves, resist and figure out how to survive in the midst of the Jim Crow South.
Márquez’s book also focuses on the evolving history of communities over time, political formations and identity, and the history of race in the South.
“It’s a story about how Latino identity and Latino community forms in the South and what that has to do with the history of race in the region,” Márquez said.
“Making the Latino South” has a more regional focus than “Ybor City,” covering communities outside of historic Latino ‘destination states’ in places like Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina, McNamara and Márquez said.
“I was really interested in places where Latinos were showing up for the first time and being able to tell the story of how southern communities reacted,” she said. “I want to understand these moments of encounter.”
The book reveals how Latinidad cannot be reduced to one identity or one set of politics, but is grounded in a specific time and place, according to Márquez.
“Latino history is southern history,” she said. “We’re not just newcomers here, we’ve been here for years. The South is Latino.”
Márquez’s book argues that Latino racial identity in the South was often constructed in terms of proximity to Blackness. The South is invested in anti-Blackness in a way that controls and mediates other racial identities, she said during the event.
Danielle Purifoy, who attended the event, is Márquez’s friend, a scholar of Black geographies in the U.S. South and an assistant professor of geography at UNC.
“One of the things my work has been interested in is thinking about the positionality of Blackness in relation to folks who are not white but not Black,” Purifoy said. “And, some of the themes that both of these books touch on is the kind of centrality of this white-Black dichotomy racial structure. How, in this case, Latine folks experience race and racism.”
Conversation between the two authors flowed gracefully, brimming with insights and a healthy dose of humor.
“It’s always exciting when Cecilia and I are in conversations together because we’re the next generation of people who are writing about Latinas and Latinxs in the U.S. South,” McNamara said. “It’s a very small group of people who are doing that.”
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Authors Sarah McNamara and Cecilia Márquez celebrated the launch of their debut books at Prologue Rare & Used Books on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023.
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