Associate Professor Maria Cristina Garcia, outside of McGraw Hall, joined the faculty in January. Robert Barker/University Photography
In January, Maria Cristina Garcia sold her trusty Honda Civic, bought a four-wheel-drive Ford, cleared out her Texas house and set off on a three-day trek to begin her new faculty appointment at Cornell.
The trip went well. But a glitch in shipping orders delayed the arrival of Garcia's books, so the shelves in her McGraw Hall office are conspicuously unadorned.
Garcia, an associate professor of history, also holds a joint appointment in the Latino Studies Program. She arrived at Cornell recently tenured from Texas A&M University.
This semester, Garcia is teaching Introduction to U.S.-Latino History and a seminar on immigration and ethnic history in the 20th century. She also is designing a freshman writing seminar with a history component for the fall. In addition to her course work and research, Garcia is a faculty fellow at the Latino Living Center and adviser to Phi Theta Chi, the new Latino sorority at Cornell.
"What attracted me to Cornell was the diversity in the Latino student community," said Garcia, who was born in Havana but grew up in Miami, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. "There's a lot of pain associated with the growth of the Latino Studies Program here. Part of the challenge is to convince all different Latino constituencies that despite this history, we can come together and we can create a program that will represent and serve the different constituencies, a program we can use to find out more about ourselves."
Garcia received her master's and doctoral degrees in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to teaching at Cornell, she taught at Texas A&M and served as a Fulbright lecturer in American studies at the Polytechnic of Central London at Westminster. She specializes in immigration and ethnic history, Latino communities of the United States, 20th century U.S. social and cultural history and the history of Cuba.
Richard Polenberg, the Goldwin Smith Professor of History, said Garcia brings a "wide range of knowledge and expertise in crucial areas of study, many of which we have never before offered to our students. Her presence expands our course offerings in a most exciting way."
Sophomore Ezekiel Moreno attends Garcia's introductory course and said he takes pains to arrive before class to explore important ideas.
"I usually arrive 10 minutes early because I like to have conversations with her about any new concepts that I come across. Usually she provides me with insight on them and raises new ideas that probably would not come up in class because of time constraints."
In Texas, much of Garcia's work focused on Chicano studies: She was a folklorist for the Institute of Texan Studies in San Antonio, and as a researcher for Hispanic Studies at the Texas State Historical Association in Austin, she edited and contributed numerous articles on Mexican American history for the Handbook of Texas, a multi-volume encyclopedia of Texan culture.
Garcia is Cuban, the daughter of an Havana-based family, which despite pro-revolutionary sentiments, fled Cuba in 1961 to escape the fractious and often brutal political fallout that followed Fidel Castro's revolution. Her family first settled in Miami. One result of exile is Garcia's passion for the history of Latino immigrants in the United States and elsewhere.
"Immigration research is 'me-search,'" she said. "As a child of immigrants, I have always been interested in the experiences of immigrants."
Garcia's commitment to the subject is reflected in her first book, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994 (Berkeley: University of California), and her work in progress, Central American Immigration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada, 1979-1997.
Havana USA received superb reviews and was praised in the Journal of American History as "a stunning contribution to the fields of immigration, ethnic and urban history."
In 1991, Garcia took part in a delegation presenting papers at the University of Havana. It was her first trip back since her family left in 1961. This summer, she will return to Cuba to visit relatives.
Although Garcia was offered the Cornell appointment in 1997, she initially declined, because she wanted to be closer to home during her father's sudden illness. Following her father's death in 1998, she again was offered the Cornell position and accepted.
Books aren't the only thing that's still back in Texas, however. As fate would have it, just prior to accepting the Cornell post, Garcia married a University of Texas at Austin professor.
"We're in a commuter marriage," said Garcia, adding that she does have Franceso Clemente, her 11-year-old Maltese, for companionship. She hasn't had a lot of time to commute.
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