The Papers of Dr. Hector P. Garcia

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi is proud to honor the legacy of Dr. Hector P. Garcia (1914-1996), a Corpus Christi physician and champion of Mexican-American civil rights, through the collection of his papers and with a statue on campus. The University’s Mary and Jeff Bell Library exhibits several of his letters and photos as part of its special collections. Garcia’s papers, donated in 1990, represent one of the most valuable resources in existence on the Mexican-American experience during the last half of the 20th Century. They contain voluminous archives dealing with the American GI Forum, which he founded in 1948 to organize veterans to fight for educational and medical benefits. It includes letters to and from Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The processed collection will include a finding aid that describes sections of the collection and will be used by both library staff and researchers to zero in on specific documents. Some of the photos in the collection have already been digitized, Hodges said, and the library regularly has requests from authors and researchers, including Garcia’s daughter, Cecilia Garcia Akers.