La Gaceta issues from 1926-1932 and 1934-1943 are now online in Chronicling America!
Issues through 1951 will be added to Chronicling America over the next two years.
You can find more issues of La Gaceta, including 1922-1923, 1933, and 1952-2023 in the Florida Digital Newspaper Library
This blog has been adapted from the La Gaceta title essay published in Chronicling America.
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. 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.
Founded by Victoriano Manteiga, a Cuban immigrant, La Gaceta began in 1922 as a four-page daily evening paper. Over time the paper has transitioned to becoming a longer weekly paper and is now regularly over fifty pages an issue.
When the paper was founded, Ybor City was already the well-established center of the cigar industry in the US thanks to Spanish businessman Vincente Martinez Ybor and immigrant workers from Cuba, Spain, and Italy. Devoted to serving Ybor City’s diverse immigrant residents, La Gaceta primarily covered local news and community events. The history of the mutual aid societies and cultural clubs of Ybor are well-documented in La Gaceta.
La Gaceta also played an important role in keeping residents and businesses connected with political and economic situations in their home countries. In its early years, La Gaceta was “The Only Spanish Daily Paper in the U.S. Having Direct Cable Service from Cuba and Spain” and frequently carried published articles from Cuban and Spanish press.
La Gaceta’s early content reflects a unique reading culture prevalent in the cigar factories of Cuba and Florida. Newspapers, including La Gaceta, were read aloud in the cigar factories by lectores, or readers, until the mid 1930s. Victoriano Manteiga was a lector at the Morgan Cigar Factory in Ybor while publishing La Gaceta. Lectores often compiled and translated news from different, multilingual sources, just like Manteiga did for La Gaceta.
Community newspapers like La Gaceta and tobacco labor newspapers like El Internacional, El Federal , and Boletin obrero reflect workers’ tastes for local community and labor news, political news from their homelands, theories of labor, economics and politics, and Spanish-language literature.
Sources
“Our History” La Gaceta Website: https://lagacetanewspaper.com/our-history/
McNamara, Sara. Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469668161/ybor-city/
Full Title Essay for La Gaceta in Chronicling America (English Only): https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86002403/
