Lalo Alcaraz

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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

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?

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