CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The nation's largest Mexican American civil rights collection sits on the second floor of the Mary and Jeff Bell Library at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.
"Either as a doctor, an educator, as a Mexican American coming from Texas - All the material that he's done, his life is sort of captured or encapsulated in these boxes," Director of special collections and archives Lori Podolsk said.
Dr. Hector P. Garcia had the chance to put these archives at Yale, the University of Texas, even the Library of Congress. Instead, he chose to keep them in Corpus Christi, a place he called home.
His son in law, Jim Akers, said the history inside the library walls spans decades.
"I don't think that there was any other single person that could ever say that he accomplished as much as he did," Akers said. "He had a lot of help, but he was a very intelligent man. He was a medical doctor. He was a major in the army and people listened to him."
Garcia's legacy lives on not just through his archives, but through the Dr. Hector P. Garcia Memorial Foundation.
In 2017, first-generation college student Mariella Jimenez received a $20,000 scholarship. She said the gift from the foundation changed her life.
"I always thought of myself as never being lucky and even though I put in all this hard work, I never thought it would pay off," Jimenez said. "Receiving that scholarship really made me feel special and that everything I had gone through, and all the work I put in during high school was paying off."
After graduating from A&M Corpus Christi, Jimenez became an educator. She now teaches geometry at Mary Carroll High School.
"I hope that now that I have students that I'm teaching and lead by example and let them know that even they don't have the financial ability to pay for college that there's other resources and opportunities for them," she said.
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