About
Garcia earned his B.A. in Chicana/o Studies at California State University Channel Islands and his M.A. in Latin American Studies at California State University Los Angeles. He intends to couple his work in critical media studies with ethnographic research in order to understand how immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America have built and maintained communities within Los Angeles despite moral panics surrounding their presence.
His previous work focused on media and film portrayals of Latinx people in the United States as workers and immigrants. His masters thesis titled "The Cost of 'The American Dream': Media, Violence, and Immigrants in American Films from 1983-2009" analyzes three major films, El Norte (1983), La Misma Luna (2007), and Sin Nombre (2009), all of which portrayed the experiences of Mexican and Central American immigrants on their journey to the United States. This work argues that while these portrayals intend to humanize immigrants from these regions, their humanization is solely tied to their value as laborers. In addition, the stories in La Misma Luna (2007) and Sin Nombre (2009) intentionally exclude the historical context needed to deconstruct the social construction and enforcement of legality throughout these films.
