Julio Arce
Julio G. Arce was a prominent figure in early 20th-century journalism, born in Guadalajara, Mexico, to a well-educated family. Initially studying pharmacy, Arce's passion for journalism drove him to create a student newspaper and later contribute significantly to local publications. His career took a pivotal turn as he began to critique the political landscape in Mexico, especially while editing *El diario del pacifico*, leading to government scrutiny and eventual imprisonment. In 1915, he and his family fled to the United States, where he became an influential voice in the Mexican American community, particularly in San Francisco.
Arce's most notable work included a weekly column, written under the pseudonym Jorge Ulica, that provided relatable narratives and sharp social commentary on the challenges faced by Mexican immigrants. His writings often blended humor with biting satire, addressing issues like cultural assimilation and the importance of maintaining ties to one's heritage. Arce's influence waned after his death in his mid-fifties, but his contributions were later recognized with a resurgence in interest during the Chicano studies movement. His work remains significant in understanding the immigrant experience and the dynamics of cultural identity in America.
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Subject Terms
Julio Arce
Mexican-born journalist
- Born: January 9, 1870
- Birthplace: Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
- Died: November 15, 1926
- Place of death: San Francisco, California
As a columnist for his own highly successful newspaper, which served the Hispanic community of San Francisco, Arce became the most influential Latino journalist of his day. His satiric pieces on the everyday culture of the city’s teeming Mexican neighborhoods are considered an invaluable record of the era.
Early Life
Julio G. Arce (HEW-lee-oh AHR-say) was born in Guadalajara along the Pacific coast of west central Mexico. He was born into privilege and education—his father was a respected surgeon. Although his father wanted him to study medicine, Arce lacked the commitment to the sciences and opted to study pharmacy. His first love, however, was journalism; unlike popular novels, which romanticized life in flowery prose, journalism was committed to depicting the real-life world and in turn could affect real social and political change. Such power intrigued Arce. While completing his pharmacy studies, Arce started his own student newspaper, El amigo del pueblo (Friend of the People).
After finishing his degree, Arce went north to Mazatlán in the state of Sinaloa, where he, along with a friend, opened a pharmacy. He remained a frequent contributor to local newspapers and even started his own limited-circulation paper that published original fiction and poetry as well as literary reviews. Now in his mid-twenties, Arce decided he needed the challenge of a large city and moved to Culiacán. His writings there caught the eye of the local newspaper, El occidental, run by long-entrenched political powers. Seen as their friend, Arce enjoyed the respect such government support brought—his career was set.
Life’s Work
Arce soon grew restless. His observations of life in the city, particularly the impoverished neighborhoods of the working class, led him to increasingly more strident objections to the political status quo. In 1909, as the editor of the newspaper El diario del pacifico (The Pacific Diary), Arce came under fire more frequently from the government. As a precaution, he returned to his hometown, where he immediately began another antigovernment newspaper, El diario de occident (Occidental Diary). He also agitated publicly on behalf of journalists who had been jailed. In late 1915, after being jailed himself for two months, Arce and his family went into exile to the United States, determined, unlike other political refugees, never to return.
Arce headed to San Francisco, which had a large Mexican American community, many of them exiles sympathetic to Arce’s politics. He acquired a small-run neighborhood newspaper and within three years built it into Hispano-America, which quickly became the most influential and respected newspaper covering San Francisco’s Hispanic population.
In 1916, in addition to his work as managing editor of the newspaper, Arce began writing a short weekly column (a genre known as a crónica) that recorded the everyday life of the Mexican working-class community in the Bay Area, specifically the struggle to adjust to the cultural, social, religious, and economic life of their adopted country. To distance himself from the often caustic observations offered in the columns, which were written in the first person, Arce used the pseudonym Jorge Ulica.
Over the next decade, Arce’s Crónicas diabólicas (Diabolical Chronicles) became a staple of the Mexican community in San Francisco; within five years, it was syndicated throughout the Southwest. Each column, usually less than one thousand words, told a story drawn from Arce’s own familiarity with the Latino community, a story that was intended to teach, often with little subtlety, how immigrants should deal with the challenges of adjusting to their adopted country. With often biting (if ferociously funny) satire, the columns encouraged immigrants not to be too quickly mesmerized by the American way of life (broadly seen as amoral and mercenary) and not to lose too quickly their cultural, religious, and familial ties to the homeland. Arce was particularly harsh with immigrants who sought to adopt the English language, mocking their fractured Spanglish, and those who would abandon the Catholicism of their homeland for American Protestantism. He also directed criticism to Mexican women, whom he felt were far more susceptible to the fetching glitter of American influences and in turn made Mexican men Americanized—that is, effeminate and domesticated. The columns made Jorge Ulica the most widely read Hispanic writer in the American Southwest of his time, and Arce’s untimely death in his mid-fifties robbed the community of one of its most vital and engaged observers. His work lapsed into neglect until, as part of the Chicano studies movement, a collection of his best pieces was published in 1982.
Significance
Like Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), Arce was both an elitist and a satirist who used a persona to deliver his most acerbic pieces. That makes placing Arce within a broad Chicano literary tradition problematic as he (or his persona) appears to be looking down with disdain on the very culture he is seeking to define and maintain, although the satire is so blunt and so heavy-handed that it may be ironic. However Arce’s success as a newspaper publisher and his unswerving and passionate defense of the working-class Mexican culture, its lifestyle, and its customs in the face of the pressures of immigration mark his journalistic pieces as critical, even seminal texts in the study of assimilation in America as an immigrant culture.
Bibliography
Barrera, Magdalena. “Of Chicharrones and Clam Chowder: Gender and Consumption in Jorge Ulica’s Crónicas Diabólicas.” Bilingual Review 29, no. 1 (January-April, 2008): 49-65. Scholarly analysis of Arce’s columns. Emphasizes Arce’s concerns over the loss of the ideal of the strong, working-class Mexican male.
Kanellos, Nicholas. “Recovering and Re-Constructing Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the U.S.” American Literary History 19, no. 2 (Summer, 2007): 438-455. Helpful context for Arce’s career that argues the importance of newspapers (and journalists such as Arce) in establishing and maintaining the immigrant community and in providing a voice for that community in their new land.
Tatum, Charles M. Chicano and Chicana literature: The Mexican American Experience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006. Comprehensive survey of nearly four centuries that includes a detailed look at journalism in the first generations of immigrants with particular emphasis on the crónistas, among them Jesús Colón, Alberto O’Farril, Ignacio G. Vásquez, and Arce.