About La gaceta. [volume] (Tampa, Fla.) 1922-current
Tampa, Fla. (1922-current)

La Gaceta

La Gaceta is the oldest continuously published paper from Ybor City, a neighborhood in Tampa, Florida. The Manteiga family has published the paper without interruption since 1922. La Gaceta was founded by Victoriano Manteiga, a Cuban immigrant, then published by his son, Roland Manteiga, from 1961 until Roland's death in 1998. It is currently published by Patrick Manteiga, Roland's son, and Angie Manteiga, Patrick's wife. As the most widely circulated Spanish-language newspaper in Tampa, La Gaceta contributes to and documents over a century of life and community in Ybor City.

La Gaceta began in 1922 as a four-page daily evening paper with a dense seven-column layout, published Monday through Saturday, excluding holidays. In 1943 it expanded to eight pages, until late 1953, when it briefly decreased to six pages before expanding to twelve pages in 1954. In the same year, the paper changed from publishing daily to weekly, a schedule it maintains today. Over time, the paper has become progressively longer and is now regularly over 50 pages an issue.

Devoted to serving Ybor City's diverse immigrant residents, La Gaceta primarily covers local news and events. It still includes a daily "Notas Sociales" section, which publishes personal news including births, baptisms, weddings, divorces, and local events. In the early decades of La Gaceta, the "Teatro" and "Eventos" sections published theatrical performances, concerts, Latin dance exhibitions, and cultural events for the Latin and Italian communities. "Deportes," the sports section, published local league games and statistics as well as sports news from the United States and Cuba, especially baseball and boxing in the first half of the twentieth century. Victoriano Manteiga's daily, often front-page editorial column "Chungas y no Chungas" presented short pieces of political news with Manteiga's analysis of the ramifications for the local community. From its origin and today, La Gaceta was and remains heavy in local advertising and from 1963 to the present also publishes legal notices.

In addition to local content, La Gaceta heavily featured international news from Cuba and Spain, especially in its first four decades. The paper billed itself as "The Only Spanish Daily Paper in the U.S. Having Direct Cable Service from Cuba and Spain". In addition to international cablegrams, La Gaceta published articles from Cuban and Spanish press and original articles on US, Cuban, and Spanish politics. The Cuban Revolution, Spanish Civil War, and the rise of fascism are heavily covered. All La Gaceta's editors, three generations of the Manteiga family, have taken a personal and professional interest in politics and have always published editorials on municipal and state politics as they relate to Ybor City.

First published only in Spanish, La Gaceta added regular articles in English and Italian in 1954. Over the years, the paper has included equal measure Spanish and English content, while "La Pagina Italiana" has consistently remained only one page at maximum. In its early years, La Gaceta frequently published translations and summaries of local news from the English-language press in Tampa. The paper also featured English-language comic strips, first with Spanish translations below and then exclusively in English from the 1930s onwards.

La Gaceta was published in Ybor City, a neighborhood in Tampa developed by the cigar industry, and historically populated by Cuban, Spanish, and Italian immigrant workers. La Gaceta's early content reflects a unique reading culture prevalent in the cigar factories of Cuba and Florida. Newspapers like La Gaceta were read aloud in the cigar factories by lectores, or readers, until the mid-1930s. Victoriano Manteiga, the paper's founder, was also a lector at the Morgan Cigar Factory in Ybor while publishing La Gaceta. Lectores often compiled and translated news from different, multilingual sources. Community newspapers like La Gaceta and tobacco labor newspapers like El Internacional, El Federal, and Boletin Obrero reflect workers' interest in local community and labor news, political news from their homelands, theories of labor, economics and politics, and Spanish-language literature.

Provided by: University of Florida