La Gaceta Newspaper (Tampa)

The Reader

In 1913, a young man named Victoriano Manteiga arrived in Tampa from Cuba to take a job that no longer exists. At the Morgan Cigar Factory, he was the reader: while rows of workers rolled the cigars that made the city famous, he read aloud to them — novels, social notes, the news from Tampa and from the rest of the world. His audience worked with their hands; his job was to fill their minds.

Nine years later, he found a way to reach beyond the factory floor. In 1922, Manteiga founded La Gaceta, an afternoon daily newspaper in Spanish. The voice that had carried stories across the rolling tables now traveled on paper, into homes, and from the beginning its readers turned to it for something they could not find elsewhere: a distinctive view of local people, local politics, and the wider world.

A Paper That Learned New Languages

Leadership of La Gaceta Publishing eventually passed to Victoriano's son, Roland Manteiga. Under the family's stewardship, the paper followed its community's great preoccupation — politics — so closely that it began to draw readers who did not speak Spanish at all. By the mid-1950s, English-speaking followers of local politics had recognized how much influence the paper carried, and La Gaceta added an English section to serve them. An Italian section followed, created to help Tampa's large Italian community keep its culture and language alive.

The result is something no other American newspaper can claim. La Gaceta calls itself the nation's only trilingual newspaper, published every week in English, Spanish, and Italian.

Small Paper, Big Stories

A weekly paper is not supposed to beat the dailies. La Gaceta often does, breaking stories ahead of larger newspapers and broadcast outlets, and its readers have learned to study every page for the unexpected. Alongside the news, each edition carries columns by experienced journalists, long interviews with notable local figures, coverage of Latin social events, community news, sports columns, business news, community calendars, and historical photographs and articles that keep the city's past in view.

Three Generations

Today, Roland's son, Patrick Manteiga, serves as publisher, the third generation of his family to run the paper. In 2012, La Gaceta celebrated its 90th anniversary, a milestone that, according to the paper, makes it the oldest family-owned, minority-owned and minority-targeted newspaper in the United States.

More than a century after a cigar-factory reader first raised his voice above the work, the family's newspaper is still speaking to Tampa — in three languages.