About

David G. García, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Education and History at UCLA. He is one of the few historians documenting Chicana/o community histories of education across the country. His interdisciplinary research trajectory follows three main lines of inquiry: Chicana/o teatro as public revisionist history, the pedagogy of Hollywood’s urban school genre, and Chicana/o educational histories. His work addresses the interconnectivity of history and education in relation to Chicana/o and Latina/o communities in the United States, examining how constructs of race, culture, and class shape educational experiences for Communities of Color over time. His book, Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and The Struggle for Educational Equality, published by UC Press in 2018, unearths the ideological and structural architecture of racial inequality within and beyond schools in Oxnard, California, spanning from 1903 to 1974. Based on extensive archival research and over sixty oral history interviews with Mexican Americans and African Americans, the book exposes a segregated and unequal school system linked with racially restrictive housing covenants. It also highlights one of the nation’s first desegregation cases filed jointly by Mexican American and Black plaintiffs. García’s research has been recognized with multiple awards, including the 2024 Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education, and his work has been reviewed in prominent journals. His interdisciplinary approach also chronicles the evolution of the Chicano-Latino performance group Culture Clash, demonstrating their theater as a form of public revisionist history. His ongoing projects include a second book examining Hollywood film representations of Latina/Latino and Black high school students since 1954.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Literature
• Art
• Pedagogy
• Gender studies
• Aesthetics
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• In Pursuit of “Equality of Opportunity”: Ernesto and Karla Galarza Challenge School Segregation, Washington, DC, 1947

  Journal of American Ethnic History · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law

  Abstract This article examines the case of Karla Galarza v. Washington, DC Board of Education. On April 3, 1947, Karla Galarza refused to accept the board's directive to withdraw from the Black segregated Margaret Murray Washington Vocational School. Her father, Dr. Ernesto Galarza, supported her decision and worked to challenge the expulsion, and the system of segregation, as unconstitutional. The authors analyze materials from regional and national archives, oral accounts, legal documents, and personal collections, focusing on Dr. Galarza's voice in over one hundred pages of correspondence. Dr. Galarza brought together an interracial legal team, including Charles Hamilton Houston, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Congress, and the National Lawyers Guild. Dr. Galarza lauded the pedagogy of a Black teacher and the pluralism cultivated in a Black school community as evidence of democracy in action. The legal team proposed that Karla's expulsion constituted a violation of the Fifth Amendment, naming education as a property right. However, after extensive research and discussion across ten months, the organizations determined they should not pursue the case in court. The authors assert that this attempted legal intervention is an unnamed forerunner in the attack on Plessy v. Ferguson and complicates previous narratives of the long struggle to end school segregation.

  DOI

• Carving out a legal narrative from<i>Galarza</i>to<i>Soria</i>: Accounting for the complexities of history, race, and place in educational research

  International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education · 2021 · 4 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  In this article, the authors reflect on the methodological tools they used to recover hidden perspectives within two desegregation cases, Karla Galarza v. The Board of Education of Washington D.C., 1947 and Debbie and Doreen Soria, et al. v. Oxnard School Board of Trustees, 1974. Placing these two narratives in conversation and excavating the stories behind their creation, they add depth and dimension to our understanding of the long struggle for educational equality. They renew calls for educational researchers to consider the utility of a critical historical lens to more fully account for the complexities of race across time and place.

  DOI

• Recovering Our Past: A Methodological Reflection

  History of Education Quarterly · 2020 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • History

  What process of change can come from a people who do not know who they are, or where they come from? If they do not know who they are, how can they know what they deserve to be? In 1976, after being imprisoned and forced into exile from his home country, Uruguay, Eduardo Galeano defiantly wrote “Defensa De La Palabra” (In Defense of the Word). In it, he argued that denying people access to their histories obstructs their vision of themselves as a people connected across time, and therefore restricts their ability to envision change for their future. He believed contributions to the revelation of the past depended on “the intensity level of the writer's responsiveness to his or her people—their roots, their vicissitudes, their destiny.” Forty-four years later, Galeano's reflections remain timely and methodologically instructive for those working at the nexus of history and education: Our authentic collective identity is born out of the past and nourished by it—our feet tread where others trod before us; the steps we take were prefigured—but this identity is not frozen in nostalgia. … We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are : our identity resides in action and in struggle [emphasis in original].

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tara J. Yosso

  9 shared

• Emily Russell-Slife

  1 shared

• Rubén Donato

  University of Colorado Boulder

  1 shared

• Jarrod Hanson

  University of Colorado Denver

  1 shared

• Renato J. Aguilera

  1 shared

• Philis M. Barragán Goetz

  Texas A&M University – San Antonio

  1 shared

• Ryan E. Santos

  1 shared

• Julia Bader

  Freie Universität Berlin

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2024 Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Trans…
• 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Awa…
• 2019 American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choic…
• 2019 American Educational Research Association Division F Ne…
• 2014-15 Nomination, UCLA Department of Education Distinguish…

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