Juliet García

When Juliet García became president of Texas Southmost College (TSC) in 1986, she didn’t know she was “the first of anything,” let alone the first Mexican American woman to lead a U.S. college or university.

“I had no idea that I was the first of anything. … I guess I didn’t know the odds were stacked so heavily against me,” she said.

A native of Brownsville, Texas, García would go on to lead TSC — a community college on the Texas-Mexico border that would eventually merge with the University of Texas at Brownsville — until 2011.

She quickly learned how to navigate working in a “boy’s network.”

Nearly every other president of the Texas Community College Association was male at the time, García said. The year she started as president, the state community college presidents were planning on having a meeting over golf, and García recalls being the only one who was told to invite their spouse.

“I said, ‘Well, sir, I thank you for the invitation for my husband, but he doesn’t play golf and he doesn’t travel with me and I will see you at the meeting,’ ” García said. 

García battled the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security in 2008, when construction began on a border fence on university property.

“They were going to build a wall, and I was to give them permission to build the wall. So I decided I couldn’t do that,” García said. 

The fence would eventually be built.

“My purpose in being a president of a university was to help sustain the democracy of the United States,” García said. “So when the United States of America is all of a sudden now suing me, it was very hard to deal with the irony of that whole thing.”

— J. Edward Moreno

photo: courtesy of Juliet García