FL S2000

Florida Senate Resolution 2000 honors La Gaceta newspaper for 100 years of continued service to Florida's Latino community, recognizing it as one of the oldest minority-owned and -focused newspapers and the only trilingual (Spanish, English, Italian) newspaper in the United States

Founded on May 22, 1922, in Ybor City, Tampa, by Cuban immigrant Victoriano Manteiga, who originally came to West Tampa in 1913 to read books and newspapers aloud to cigar rollers at the Morgan Cigar Factory

The newspaper championed causes important to Florida's Latino community, including laborers' rights, access to education and recreation, political representation, and support for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War

La Gaceta survived the Great Depression, World War II newsprint rationing, the collapse of Tampa's cigar industry, and the destruction of Ybor City through urban renewal and interstate construction, transitioning from a 6-day-per-week Spanish-language daily to a trilingual weekly publication in the 1950s

The newspaper has been published across three generations of the Manteiga family—Victoriano, Roland, and current publisher Patrick Manteiga—and currently serves 10 Florida counties including Hillsborough, Pinellas, Orange, and Polk