White Tiger is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer Bill Mantlo and artist George Pérez, the character first appeared in The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #19 (December 1975). A Puerto Rican college student, White Tiger was the first Latin American main character in American comics and Marvel's first Hispanic superhero. White Tiger is the superhero persona of Hector Ayala, a native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, attending Empire State University in New York City. After discovering three mystical tiger amulets discarded by the martial arts team the Sons of the Tiger, Ayala found that wearing all three transformed him into a superhuman fighter with enhanced strength, speed, agility, and near-superhuman mastery of martial arts.

The character was conceived by Mantlo to depict the gritty realities of New York's inner-city neighborhoods, with Pérez drawing on his own experiences growing up Puerto Rican to shape the character. Since his creation, White Tiger has been the subject of discussion around the representation of Latino identity in mainstream American comics, with academics debating whether the character challenged or reinforced prevailing stereotypes about the Nuyorican community.

Hector Ayala is the first member of his family to hold the White Tiger mantle, and is the uncle of Angela del Toro and the brother of Ava Ayala, both of whom later assumed the mantle. In 2003, White Tiger was killed off in a Daredevil storyline where he was accused of murder. His death has remained largely permanent within mainstream continuity and most other media. Hector Ayala appears in the first season of the Marvel Cinematic Universe television series Daredevil: Born Again (2025), played by Kamar de los Reyes.

White Tiger was the first Hispanic superhero in Marvel Comics. He was among the first Hispanic superheroes in mainstream American comics; arguably, he was preceded by El Gaucho, an Argentine version of Batman who appeared in 1955. In 1975, George Pérez and Bill Mantlo collaborated to produce White Tiger; comics scholar Frederick Luis Aldama calls him the first "fully realized Latino superhero." Aldama points out Mantlo's attentiveness to bilingual communication and to Pérez's visual expression of White Tiger's hair and facial features that indicate his AfroLatinidad ancestry. Editors had decided that White Tiger should replace the Sons of the Tiger as the main character of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, and asked Bill Mantlo to implement this; he intended to adequately depict the "gritty/city slums" of New York City.

The magazine gave Mantlo and Pérez unusual creative freedom; Mantlo later recalled that the two "pretty much did as we pleased", working with minimal oversight from Marvel's color comics editorial department. Believing that, due to being Puerto Rican, George Pérez had "intimate knowledge" of the daily life in the South Bronx during the 1970s, he approached the artist with a proposal to create a "character that reflects that grim reality". Due to the monochromatic style of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, the initial concept for White Tiger's costume was simply Spider-Man's suit "without any detail". With this idea, Pérez designed the visual aspect of the character, to the satisfaction of both as it was considered elegant and worked well within the constraints of the palette.

The artist stated that the socially-conscious Mantlo "was probably more aware of the significance of creating the first Latino Super Hero" headliner and described the process of creating White Tiger as "organic" due to his background. Pérez named that character after some of his "neighborhood friends", gave it a face reminiscent of his brother David and a mother based on his own. The artist illustrated the character's surroundings based on his own experiences in the inner city. The "streamlined" look was meant to emphasize the word "white" and accommodate it to the format, but Pérez later grew to regret not adding stripes to the design. The move set in his illustrations was composed by "exaggerated" martial arts. The character wears T-shirts expressing Puerto Rican cultural pride and also pursues a university education, at Empire State University.

White Tiger first appeared in The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #19 (December 1975). Following his debut, the character subsequently appeared in The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #20–24 (January–May 1976), #26–27 (July–August 1976), #29–32 (October 1976 – January 1977). Working under Marv Wolfman, then editor of Marvel's black-and-white magazines, Pérez faced sustained criticism of his backgrounds and perspective work during the magazine's run. In response, he produced for approximately issue #21 (February 1976) an elaborate bird's-eye-view splash page of White Tiger surveying a cityscape in which the buildings themselves formed letters, which Pérez credited as a turning point in his draftsmanship and which he later joked had proved Wolfman right rather than wrong. Pérez departed the strip three issues after White Tiger's introduction, returning only for issue #30 (November 1976).

Mantlo moved the character into The Spectacular Spider-Man, where he appeared across numerous issues between 1977 and 1981, as well as in Human Fly #8–9 (April–May 1978) and The Defenders #62–64 (August–October 1978). Mantlo expressed doubt in a 1979 interview about Marvel's willingness to support a Hispanic superhero with his own ongoing series, suggesting they believed the character lacked appeal to what he described as Marvel's "predominantly white middle class" readership.