Abstract:
Starting in the mid-1880s and becoming fully effective by the 1930s, the “curriculum of culture”
Tampa’s Latin immigrant, cigar-making enclaves circulated in the spaces they and residents
occupied regularly—the cigar factory, mutual aid society, the coffeehouse, and the theater (also
in homes and the union hall). These Cuban (and Spanish and Italian) cultural and social values
were passed on from one generation to the next, and even to non-Cubans, via reverse
assimilation. The outcome was an ethnic American identity whose impact thoroughly
transformed living and working spaces in a segregated, Jim Crow space, and fundamentally
reshaped its landscape, foodways, and identity. Our purpose will be to examine this “curriculum
of culture,” a culturally and socially situated set of values that conveyed knowledge, beliefs, and
behaviors, and was contingent upon community-defined and redefined competencies regarding
how not only to survive and thrive in the host society but also to be agents of their own lives and
mediate social class and cultural differences. We will analyze this culture as it flourished in the
abovementioned spaces and also in homes and union halls, all through historical evidence,
translated theatrical excerpts, and oral histories.