By Lucia Preveto
Born in Southern California, Jim Garcia came to the University of Oregon as a student in 1973. After graduating, he started work at UO that would eventually carry him to a 25-year career at Lane Community College. Garcia is an active figure in the Latinx community and has fought hard to provide opportunities for every student. His work on the GANAS program and in the multicultural center at LCC shows his dedication to promoting equity.
Garcia identifies as Mexican American whose heritage is from central Mexico with Indigenous ties to the Purépecha people. Growing up in California, he was very close to his grandparents who helped foster in him an Indigenous way of living. “They taught me a way of living that’s very different from what I encountered in school… That’s always kept me a way to survive in these kinds of institutions that really aren’t set up to honor the humanity of colleagues and the humanity of the students that we’re interacting with,” Garcia said.
Garcia’s career started as an instructor in the GED social studies program at the University of Oregon. “What I found was that there weren’t too many Latinx people like me working in professional positions like that, especially in higher education. And so a lot of the community just knew me. They came to me. It didn’t matter if I was a social studies instructor. What matters is that I was a Latino person, I spoke Spanish, and I was a resource.” Garcia noted.
After returning to the University of Oregon following two years working at New Mexico State University, Garcia found that his new role as advising coordinator in the multicultural affairs office put him in a similar position as before; taking on responsibilities that went beyond his job description.
In 1998, Garcia found a position at Oregon State University that allowed him to focus on his work with the Latinx community. Although he loved how much the university welcomed the Latinx population, it being a four-year institution prevented him from working with the most marginalized communities. “I wanted to create opportunities for students who are the most marginalized, that was my passion.” Garcia said.
That was when he started his work with Lane Community College in October 2000 as a diversity coordinator and later, in 2005, became the Chicano Latino student program coordinator in the multicultural center.
In an email from Lane Community College’s Dr. Michael L. Sámano, he discussed his personal experience working with Garcia. “He was also crucial in demonstrating how to teach from a culturally respectful indigenous framework. In other words, he showed me that it was possible to succeed in an academic setting without losing one’s sense of self,” Sámano writes.
LCC Social Science Dean Philip Martinez has known and worked alongside Garcia for 30 years. “[He is] a very important and active person in the culture and politics of the Latinx community here in the whole region, not just specifically to Eugene and Springfield,” Martinez said.
Martinez highlighted the GANAS program as a key achievement in Garcia’s career. The MECHA DE UO blog states that Garcia and UO professor Roscoe Caron founded GANAS in 1996. The program provides after school tutoring and mentoring from UO students to Kelly Middle School. “This program helps improve Kelly student’s grade point average, develop bicultural leadership skills and break barriers of higher education,” the blog states.
The multicultural center at LCC, where Garcia worked for 20 years, provides admission, planning, and registration help for students of all ethnic backgrounds. “What I appreciate about the multicultural center is that students, community members, or parents just come in, for any reason and any question and we’re able to respond to that,” Garcia said.
When discussing administration and policy for diversity, Garcia urged a prioritization in students over institution and money. “Everything we do at Lane, every policy, every way we teach, our pedagogy is, for me, about making sure that it creates equity, it deals with equity, or disrupts inequity.”
In a 2018 Q&A with Eugene Weekly, Garcia urged education policy makers to “Get to know your students in the building, in their classrooms, in your district and get to know their families.”
After working at LCC for 25 years, Garcia left his position in June 2024. Despite his retirement, he’s still taking an active part in training his replacement. Garcia is currently finishing a community college leadership certificate program through the University of Illinois.
