Entrepreneurship Discussion: Lalo Alcaraz

Lalo Alcaraz is an Mexican- American cartoonist whose cartoons and artwork focus around the lives of Latinos. One of his most famous comic strips is La Cucaracha, a comic that is about the politics and and lives of Latino culture. It was started in 2003 and is still currently ongoing. Lalo Started his career painting murals for his high school and got his degree at San Diego State University. Something that Lalo spoke about in his lecture was that we shouldn’t drop everything for art and should be well rounded in our education, which is something I heavily agree with.

Lalo fits into the title of entrepreneur for me based on his progression within his career. He started out making small illustrations and political comics. Now he has published several books, had a comic strip that has lasted for quite some time, and was one of the key consultants for Pixar’s Coco. He also had his own show that ran for a little bit called Bordertown.

In his lecture the advice he gave was very simple, yet it made sense. He talked about how he always liked to use the simple idea people hadn’t thought of yet. Hearing that makes you think like it’s a no brainer, I think it’s more of a challenge to make the normal, exciting and interesting.

With regards to his political cartoons I felt torn with what he had shown us. On one hand the cartoons were well illustrated and some had clever word play into designs such as the twitter logo being trumps hair. However, I felt as though some of the designs were a little tasteless or an easy target that went against what he said of using the obvious no one used yet. It seemed as if they were made to pander to a specific audience, not to inform.