Nick Jimenez

Dr. Garcia film will tell a great story

The story of Dr. Hector P. Garcia is coming closer to being told to a national audience, thanks to a lot of friends of the late civil rights leader and because of the local public broadcasting station, KEDT-TV.
   Jeff Felts, the producer of a documentary on Garcia, has spent hundreds of hours compiling photos and documents to put together a video profile of Garcia, who died five years ago on July 26. Based on an early script, the profile should do much to teach a new generation about what one person can do when armed with compassion and a directed sense of outrage.
   Even a 90-minute documentary (those are the hopes anyway) of Garcia cannot capture the totality of the late doctor's impact on so many people. Many of us in South Texas know what a difference Garcia meant to the dispelling of the worst vestiges of discrimination, to raising the standards of health and sanitation in the barrios and colonias, and to the simple dignity he gave every humble person.
   Garcia's story
   The basic story of Garcia is well known to South Texas: how he became a doctor when even the most basic education was nearly impossible for Hispanics, how his service in World War II gave him a deeper sense of being American than any experience he had ever had, then his disappointment and arousal to activist because of the injustices he saw in his own country.
   In reviewing the story, I was struck again by how wise Garcia was in so many ways. He had a sense of perspective and sense of timing that we sorely lack now.
   Garcia came to his activism when the worst sorts of discrimination were casually accepted by mainstream society as the lot in life for vast numbers of fellow Americans. Hispanic children lived in disease and filth. Americans with Spanish surnames were routinely barred from serving on juries. The children of Hispanic migrant and blue-collar workers were kept suspended in the same grade year after year, supposedly for their benefit, but with the result that generations never graduated. All this was accepted.
   He chose his issues well
   Garcia could have marched and protested every day. But he didn't. The doctor chose his issues well. He chose those issues that were so clearly unjust that no reasonable person could do anything but say, "This is not right; Americans shouldn't be treated this way."
   Even at that, when he did identify an issue and called it to public attention, he was often called an agitator. How hollow that sounds now.
   The most famous issue was that of Felix Longoria, a World War II veteran who was refused the most common funeral decency by his South Texas hometown of Three Rivers. The Longoria story struck a deep chord in South Texas and across the nation. By elevating that incident of denied humanity, Garcia identified Hispanics as Americans with equal standing with any patriots, past or present.
   That kind of discrimination was so rank as to demand no other approach but that it be torn out root and branch. Garcia's goal in taking such tactics was not only to arouse his own supporters, but to engage the vast majority who came to the issue with no preconceived ideas.
   We still hear the cries of discrimination. I would be the last to say that every stain of discrimination has been cleansed from our hearts, or that every injustice has been made right. But so often those cries came for causes whose rightness is not clear. We know there are injustices in the world. We also know that some people just don't get selected for some things, that every contestant isn't going to win, that sometimes you don't wind up being first in line. Is it all discrimination?
   Garcia is honored now because he could tell the difference and he made us understand the difference.
   He was not satisfied just to arouse emotions. He wanted to educate us, not just Hispanics, but all Americans, and he wanted to educate us about what being an American meant.
   That story of one great man's life needs to be told again and again.
   Nick Jimenez can be reached by phone at 886-3787 or by e-mail at jimenezn@caller.com.
  

 
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