José Yglesias
The Life of José Yglesias
"His friend, the graphic artist Leonard Baskin, later said José’s face was so animated it was nearly impossible to do his portrait. ‘If you got him still,’ Baskin said, ‘it didn’t look like him.’”
- Mary Jo Melone, "Remembering José Yglesias"
"None of us thought of ourselves as immigrants," he said. "This was our place."
-Mel Gussow, "Jose Yglesias, Novelist of Revolution"
José Yglesias was born November 29, 1919 in Ybor City and was of Spanish and Cuban descent. He moved to New York in 1937 at the age of 17, where he was employed as a stock clerk and a dishwasher, and later served in the navy during World War II. Yglesias also lived in Brooklin, Maine and wrote as a film critic for The Daily Worker. His articles have also appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times. Yglesias protested the Vietnam War by vowing not to pay taxes and was a member of the Communist party.
The Yglesias family included other writers as well. Rafael, José's son, was a novelist and screenwriter. Yglesias bases several of his characters on Rafael, such as Ralph in The Truth About Them. Though Rafael insists that his father's novels are not autobiographical in nature, Mary Jo Melone points out that he "borrowed liberally from the surface details of his own life and pasted those details onto the characters who walked through his work. His protagonist might be Latin, at some uncomfortable psychological distance from his Ybor City roots, a New Yorker now, traveled and sophisticated." Helen Yglesias, José's ex-wife, worked as a novelist and editor. According to Melone, Helen and José were members of New York's literary circles and aligned with the radical politics of the 1960s. They divorced in 1992. His grandson Matthew is a blogger and author employed by Vox Media.
In his novels and other works, José Yglesias focused on the impact of revolutions on Latin American peoples. A Wake in Ybor City, which describes the experience of Cuban immigrants in Florida, was published in 1963. The Goodbye Land (1967), his second book, centers on Galicia, Spain, where his father was born. José Yglesias, Sr. returned to his birthplace after failing to find treatment for encephalitis. In the Fist of the Revolution (1968) portrays a Cuban town during the rule of Fidel Castro. Yglesias died on November 7, 1995 from cancer.
Seventh Avenue in Ybor City, where Yglesias grew up. Yglesias preserves the spirit of this street in his writings. Photo courtesy of Special & Digital Collections, Tampa Library, University of South Florida.