Lalo Alcaraz

"It’s what we do as cartoonists, to cut through the [bull] and expose it."

"I cartoon because I got tired of feeling excluded from the comic stage."

"We’re not here to fix the world’s problems but to shine a big, fat light on them hopefully."

"There is still this American societal attitude that we are foreign."

"The other person (sending hate mail) is at war with me, but I’ve already defeated them. I made some drawings that will be in their heads forever."

"I'm just a guy who was predisposed to be a cartoonist, who happened to make it through all the bullshit that comes with being poor and brown."

"I dug Mad Magazine, my brain is wired to mock, and Mad just confirmed my world view since I was a kid."

"In college I was an editorial cartoonist for my school paper, The Daily Aztec...I did straight, news-oriented editorial cartoons. Occasionally, my Chicano background snuck in to the toons simply because I might do a César Chavez toon about how the School Student Board was too stupidly racist to allow him to speak on campus or other anti-frat toons on how they were so racist in doing fund-raisers for Tijuana kid charities--dressed in sombreros and begging with tin cups."

"in Hollywood, I mean they don’t know we exist. They’re barely starting to figure out that there are Mexican Americans. And so I use humor as a way to cope with that and to let our community know that we’re not invisible, at least not to us."

"And I do push Spanglish. I do push biculturalism, to make it normal. That’s what I didn’t see, growing up, on TV. I grew up on the border, in San Diego, as a kid. Never saw brown people on TV unless I watched the stuff in Spanish. But so eventually I realized, wow, we are just not anywhere — what’s going on?"

"why did I not learn in school that my culture is older than 2000 years. It’s maybe 20,000 years old. And how come they don’t teach you that in school?"

"And I eventually — when I went to Berkeley, which is where I got my masters in architecture, there I met other Chicanos that wanted to do sketch comedy, wanted to make music, wanted to write comedy. And we, of course, aggregated, and that’s when I realized, wow, this is what I was meant to be doing."

"I feel like, definitely, melancholy, mixed emotions. I’m sad that we’re still — I’m now drawing again almost the same cartoons that I was drawing 22, 23 years ago, during Prop 187 in California, the first anti-immigrant — big anti-Mexican-immigrant law that came out, modern time."

"La cucaracha speaks for the disenfranchised with humor and a cutting voice"

"(the cockroach) is a metaphor of how immigrants, Mexicans, have been represented as insects, as a nuisance, as space invaders, the Latino threat to be eliminated. Alcaraz appropriates this and turns it upside down. It’s a way of empowering through this image that was actually used to marginalize."