MA Candidate in Southwest Studies
Department of
Spanish and Portuguese
Biography
My name is Judy Garcia and I was born and raised in Albuquerque’s South Valley. I am teaching Spanish 1110 in the Sabine Ulibarrái Spanish as a Heritage Language program, while working on my Master’s degree in literature of the Southwest. I did not grow up speaking Spanish because of the racism and social pressure of the time I was raised. My parents were shamed for speaking Spanish, so they, like so many others, did not teach their children Spanish. Now, so many of us raised in that generation have been shamed for not speaking Spanish. I decided to take my language back. My Bachelor’s degree consists of a double major in Spanish and Women’s Studies and a minor in Chicano Studies: I like to say I studied “me.” (When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s we also did not learn much in schools about our culture or history and very little, if any, history of minority women.) I love to travel and learn about different cultures. My main interest is to preserve the language, history, culture, identity and stories of the Nuevomexicano people.