Welcome to Texas Tech.

I'm Gilbert Garcia, metro columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.

On this show, we bring you one on one conversations with some of the most fascinating figures in Texas politics, sports, culture and business.

Politicians often go to great lengths to convey the impression that they have a compelling personal narrative.

Jose Garcia doesn't have to try very hard to make that impression.

The San Antonio State representative spent her childhood bouncing from one foster home to another and attended 13 schools.

By the time she reached high school.

The openly bisexual lawmaker went on to serve 20 years in the US Air Force during the Don't Ask, Don't Tell era, including stints in Iraq and Germany.

A mother of eight, including twins with autism, she got involved in politics by joining the police reform movement that formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

During this year's legislative session, she was named Freshman of the Year by her fellow House Democrats.

On this show, Garcia talks about her dramatic life story and her experiences in the legislature.

Let's get started.

Representative Garcia, thank you so much for being in Texas us.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I think before we get started, I should probably let people know that you and I are not related at all.

Right.

As far as we know.

No.

So not as far as we know.

I wanted to ask you about the big news in Texas now in May.

You joined the overwhelming majority of your colleagues in the Texas House in indicting Attorney General Ken Paxton, who's about 70% of the Texas House.

On allegations from whistleblowers that he had abused his office, He accepted bribes.

He had protected one of his big donors named Paul from prosecution.

This last weekend, the Texas Senate voted to acquit him on all 16 articles of impeachment.

And one of the things that that came out of that is we've seen the House speaker debt ceiling respond by saying the outcome, quote, appears to have been orchestrated from the start by Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.

Do you agree with the speaker Phelan's take on this?

I can't say that I have enough information to make that assessment directly.

But what we do know is that with an overwhelming bipartisan collaboration of support, you know, we saw evidence that, you know, indicated that the utmost integrity was not being maintained and in one of the highest offices in Texas.

And that was a problem for our constituents.

And to see the 150 of us who represent Texas be in the large majority of us, see where wrongdoing and where that integrity didn't seem intact and we voted our constituencies.

This isn't just our own opinions.

We receive hundreds of emails.

We receive calls.

We receive comments at town halls.

And overwhelmingly, I believe the constituents of Texas were let down.

We not only saw Speaker Feely criticize the the Senate process and Lieutenant Governor Patrick, but we saw senator Governor Patrick after the verdict, criticized the House for the way they'd gone about impeachment.

Does it feel to you now and this is in the context of a legislative session this year when there was open conflict between Dan Patrick and debt ceiling, Does it feel to you like the House and the Senate are kind of at war with each other or.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

We we've seen very good bills be killed because of, you know, grudges and me being new.

I'm very new to politics.

This was my very first year serving.

I was sworn in in January to see the type of liberties taken to kill good bills that are going to affect Texas and Texans.

It's very disheartening for someone like me who's new.

Because you hope that everybody that serves our our our state has the utmost of integrity and has their constituent C at heart.

And we're not seeing that measure out.

And to hear the house be attacked for agreeing and voting to impeach, it just leads me to wonder who who he's representing in terms of if if 150 of us are representing, you know, our constituencies of Texas.

I thought we all had the same constituency base and it feels like there's something vaguely different happening here.

We'll probably have another special session in the next few weeks dealing with what has been something that Dan Patrick and Governor Greg Abbott have been calling for for a while, which is a school voucher program for the state.

What do you think the likelihood is that something like this could end up passing?

Vouchers was bipartisanly killed on the House floor again, 150 of us voted no for vouchers.

Again, our constituencies and our job is to represent Texans.

And when we do that and we see so much push to tell us we're wrong, you know where we need to do this.

Again, I'm new to politics, but it doesn't feel right.

It doesn't feel genuine.

It feels like there is another it feels like to me there's something more important than Texans.

Your upbringing, as you said, your politics was not something that you necessarily envisioned for yourself.

Never.

And you've talked about, you know, your your childhood.

You bounced around from one foster home environment to another.

I think you've lived in several different states, probably at least five states.

Is that about right?

Oh, more than that.

I went to 13 different schools in various states up and down the East Coast.

So, yeah.

What was the situation with your parents that that put you in that situation?

I lived with my mother and my mom was young.

She was 22, 23 years old at the time.

Young mom, her and my father weren't together and she ended up living a very high risk lifestyle.

And I, I came along for that ride.

I remember I remember a time where we hitchhiked from New York to Florida.

My grandparents had moved to Florida and literally my mom and I and my mom's, she she's passed now, but she was about 515, two £90, soaking wet.

And just being a mom.

Now, thinking back to her being a young 20 something in the seventies, hitchhiking from New York to Florida with a young girl.

It's terrifying.

But that was the life that we lived.

And she got addicted to substances.

She was the victim of domestic violence and family violence as well.

A lot of alcohol addiction.

And in my family and my mother's family and she she really got caught up with drug abuse.

And unfortunately, I was witness to a lot of that.

I lived homeless in the streets with her.

We even lived in a chicken coop at one time in New York.

And I remember it being really cold and her hugging me and and being in this chicken coop with me.

I thought it was neat because there's chickens.

But, you know, again, being a mom now, you know, it's it puts everything into perspective, seem more frightening when you look back on it, when you realize how dangerous.

Absolutely.

I couldn't imagine.

I just couldn't imagine what my mother was going through.

You know, And I did live a lot of my life with anger towards her because of what I experienced.

You know, when you're a child, you kind of think, you know, mom doesn't love me as opposed to understanding she was a victim of a lot of traumas.

And that's what I'm so grateful for understanding now, because it helps me in my advocacy and my own healing.

I can relate to my community.

I can relate to them in ways that people in this position don't typically relate.

And that means a lot to me and it's it's healing for not just them, but for me.

And, you know, it was hard.

And being here today, I would have never thought I had the value to be able to advocate for other people.

Like, it's touching.

I'm trying.

I promise I'll keep my face to worry and worry.

I know it's 16.

You signed up for the Air Force's delayed enlistment program.

And I'm wondering, as we talked about, you were going from one foster home to another.

Were you trying to get yourself out of that environment or what was it that made you decide at such a young age that you wanted the military career?

So I grew up in the eighties.

You know, Vietnam was real fresh.

A lot of people that my mother hung around with were Vietnam veterans and I learned a lot about the war and about how our soldiers endured such horrors and how they were just treated so disrespectfully.

And hatefully when they returned.

And reading Encyclopedia Britannica, Those were my escape as a young child was reading, and I would read about World War Two, Vietnam, Korea.

My grandmother would tell me stories about my Uncle Ike, who was in Iwo Jima.

I, I grew up hearing these stories.

And then in the eighties, a show came out called Tour of Duty.

I loved that show.

And and it wasn't war that made me feel like I loved it.

It was fighting for our country.

And I remember being told by adults at that time, like, you have no idea what this means.

And and, you know, and I didn't.

But when I found myself at 16 years old in Memphis, in a place outside of Memphis, Tennessee, as I mentioned, I grew up and I grew up up and down the East Coast.

I'm originally from New York, spent a lot of my childhood in Florida, and biracial Tennessee was literally like diving back into those Encyclopedia Britannica eyes because I was witnessing racism up close and front.

And it wasn't necessarily hateful racism.

And I know somebody is going to say what other all racism is hateful.

But what I'm saying is, is that this was institutional racism.

This was racism to the heart where one of my friends that I had met being new to the school where white folks sat in the front of the class, black folks sat in the back of the class.

I'm biracial.

Things had to change when I came through there and even for homecoming, you had a white homecoming made and a black homecoming made.

I have the yearbooks to prove it.

When you take somebody like me who grew up multiracial, multicultural, and you throw me back into racism and segregation again, it was like this perfect storm.

Because around that same time, the Rodney King beating occurred in L.A., the the riots, the beating of Reginald Denny.

All of this stuff had occurred.

And I led a little mini, you know, protest through my school, bringing folks together and saying, look, love has no color.

So your activism goes back far, far.

It goes back to my core because I lived it and I've lived this experience where, you know, I was hated by my own flesh and blood because of my color.

I was called racist names by people who were supposed to love me because I wasn't pure of blood.

I was taught to be ashamed of being Garcia.

And I couldn't be ashamed anymore because I didn't belong with white folks.

I didn't belong with black folks.

I didn't belong with Latinos.

And I experienced that.

And so when I wanted to go to college, I never thought I could because I didn't have family that could support me in college.

And so the one thing I knew how to do was move a lot.

The one thing I knew how to do was not get attached to people.

So you're prepared for the Air Force.

So I was prepared for the military.

I wasn't prepared for the Air Force.

I was prepared for the Marine Corps.

16 years old.

I remember going to Bolivar, Tennessee.

It's outside of Middleton, Tennessee, where I went to school.

I lived in Salisbury, Tennessee.

And if I can paint it out for you, it's a crossroad with one grocery store.

That's it.

And I went to Memphis, Tennessee.

I mean, to Bolivar, Tennessee, to the recruiter's office, because I was not going to fight for my life through school and went to the Marine office.

The Marine office was closed.

The Air Force guy came out and said, Hey, what are you doing?

And I said, Oh, I'm here to see the recruiter.

He was like, No, you don't want to see them.

They're not.

You don't want them, Come over here.

Talk to me.

And that's how I, at 16 was until enlistment.

Wow.

Now, you were you were deployed to Cameroon, Germany, Iraq.

You were there during the Iraq war and the the aftermath of that.

What was I mean, for those of us who were here and I mean, we there were so many stories about, you know, terrorist bombings that were happening there.

What were you doing?

What was your role there?

And and how dangerous did the situation feel to you at the time?

My role was to serve as an adviser to the Iraqi military.

And it's a multifaceted role because we focus on the job in particular, which my subset of Iraqi soldiers were medics and dentists, doctors, medical personnel.

We were helping them create a system of tracking and treating their soldiers, because, as everyone knows, you know, the key to any type of readiness is making sure that your soldiers are in good, good order.

So that was part of it.

With that, we would travel all through Iraq to various different posts.

But yes, it was extremely dangerous because I'm an Air Force dental technician.

I clean teeth for a living.

I do all things dental.

We are trained to be medical, but this was my first wartime deployment with the Army Special Forces on an Iraqi FOB, meaning forward operating reading base.

Typical American soldiers could not get on our post and there were very few of us, and I was in the minority being one of the only women.

But oddly, I was never afraid.

When I was there, I was prepared.

And when I say prepared, I mean that at that time, you may remember our social media didn't exist, but what did exist was YouTube and what did exist was Yahoo!

And Al Jazeera.

And it wasn't long before that that I had witnessed the death of Daniel Pearl that set in my mind as a single mom.

At that time, I had four children to include my brother that I adopted when he was three and I was 19.

He was my first child.

Technically, I have twins who are on the autism spectrum and minimum to no family.

So when I got chosen for this assignment, the military didn't issue us, our families.

I had served over a decade at the time.

I had to serve my country, and going over there was the one thing I knew was I wasn't going to come back.

The other thing I knew was that my sons weren't going to witness me being beheaded on Al Jazeera.

So I knew that I would fight and I was prepared for that fight.

And I'm just I'm grateful that I never had to, you know, be involved in a firefight.

You spent the final years of your military career at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

What was it that made you decide this is this is a place you wanted to stay?

I decided that early on I had the choice between Louisiana, Texas, California and a couple other place, maybe Minnesota.

I hate the cold.

I have tropical blood.

I do not like the cold.

And again, being multiracial, having my brother, who is also biracial and he presents as a black man.

My children are also multiracial.

I never wanted my brother, my dark skinned children, to experience the things I did as a light skinned person.

I experienced racism through other other states and other places, and I didn't want my my browner and darker skinned children to experience that type of racism.

So I chose Texas San Antonio, particularly because there are multiple places in Texas I could have gone.

So I chose San Antonio, particularly because of the culture, because there was everybody here and I felt like I never wanted my children to have to say they want to.

13 different schools.

Now, you've talked about your bisexuality and you served in the military at a time when don't ask, don't tell was the policy.

Yes.

How challenging was that for you?

Very much so.

I do.

I do have the luxury of being culturally ambiguous.

I am able to, you know, get along and to be a part of most communities and not really be questioned too much.

So where I wasn't masculine presenting or I wasn't a male feminine presenting, I still would would experience harassment of a sexual nature, you know, and that's something that's difficult.

You know, it's difficult to be sexualized just based off of.

Did you feel like this was something you couldn't report or.

Oh, you can't.

No, absolutely not.

You lose your career.

Absolutely not.

And to kind of put it in perspective, I was actually in Iraq when I received an email from an anonymous source threatening to out me in war in wartime.

And for me, I served honorably as well as many soldiers and airmen and Marines.

And a lot of them lost their careers just based off of who they chose to love.

There there's no mass like trying to turn people gay.

It wasn't anything like that.

But what it was is it was a very gross discrimination.

And because of that, I chose to come out as an adult later in life.

I didn't have to.

I could have just kept that in the pocket.

But I don't deserve to live culturally ambiguous.

I don't deserve to act like that experience didn't happen because it did.

And people got hurt because of it.

They lost their their livelihoods and even their lives.

Numerous, numerous armed forces members have killed themselves over it.

And so this this year, on the same theme, Texas legislature passed a bill that banned gender affirming care for which we were primarily talking about puberty blockers, hormone treatments for transgender kids.

There also was another bill signed into law that puts restrictions on drag shows.

What do you make of what's what's happening in Texas is just one of several states that's doing this kind of stuff is disheartening because we're witnessing our civil rights and civil liberties being attacked.

I come from the military medical field and there are laws in place, the Hippocratic Oath there are and the Hippocratic Oath states that we do no harm.

Doctors go to school to become the profession, the professionals of their fields.

And I don't believe the legislator has a room to be making medical decisions for families.

How I feel either way, it doesn't.

It's it's neither here nor there because as a legislator, that's not our job.

Our job is to protect our constituency.

And by blocking health care from our constituency.

Not only that, a very vulnerable, very minor population of our constituency as a armed forces member, as a retired military member, I find that very disheartening and very alarming because we're witnessing the erosion of the fight for civil rights and the erosion of the fight to be free in America.

I think that we overstepped a little, you as you pointed out, you were just elected last November.

This was your first legislative session and you were voted by your fellow House Democrats as freshman of the year.

What do you when you look back at this session, what are you what are the accomplishments of your proudest of in tying into my statement about, you know, the sexualization and the harassment in the military?

One of the most things that I'm proudest of this session is the passing of the Vanessa Guillen Bill.

It was an honor for me to be chosen by State Representative Christina morales, who was one of the initial representatives who brought forward the Vanessa Guillen bill last session.

She also happens to represent their district, the family's district.

Her, along with my chairwoman, Victoria Criado, chose me to carry the Vanessa Guillen bill this year, being the only woman veteran to ever serve in the House.

It was an honor.

So many women and men came forward to testify in support of making September 30th military sexual trauma day.

We want to break the silence and take the stigma away from sexual trauma because it occurs to anybody we've witnessed, it occur to males, it occurs to females.

It can it occurs to any identifying gender.

It occurs to no matter what your religion, your your political background.

We need to start healing and start implementing healing.

And I think this law that's going to be this September 30th is going to be instrumental in moving forward and being able to heal from sexual trauma.

And that's one of my proudest moments for this session, I think.

A turning point for you.

We just got a little bit of a turning point for you.

Was your activism in 2020 when you joined with others calling for police reform after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis and your chief of staff, General Clark, You all met through through that that activism.

And one of the things that struck me was that you talked about you talked to city council recently and mentioned that your colleague, Barbara Griffin Hawkins at the time told you that she admired your passion, but that you needed to look at the whole apparatus, which I thought was interesting.

And what did you in the little time we have?

Could you talk a little bit about what you took from that, what that meant to you?

What that meant to me was we have to advocate and advocate hard, but we have to understand how it all works.

I think as activists and advocates, we want instant gratification.

We want the end, the the unjust actions to stop now.

And we want the change now.

And looking at the whole apparatus mean means understanding that there's multiple parts to making change.

And the number one part to making that change is relationships.

I came in to this office, Pharrell and I had done a lot of work collaborating with every level of city government, state the mayor, chiefs excuse me, Cher Salazar.

Chief McManus, You know, because we want to learn how we can be a part in act of change.

And we carried that with us to the capital.

Jesse Garcia, thank you so much for being on the show.

We appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me.

That's all for this episode of Texas Talk.

Thanks for watching.

We'd love to hear from you.

If you want to share your thoughts about the show, please email us at Texas, talk at KLRN.org We'll be back next month with a new guest.

Until then, take care.