Magda García received her BA and MA in English literary and cultural studies from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). She is a first generation student originally from San Benito, Texas, located in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. During her time in San Antonio, Texas, she extensively collaborated on the creation of the El Mundo Zurdo: The Life and Work of Gloria Anzaldúa international conference series--now in its seventh iteration. She also served as the Program Coordinator for UTSA’s Women’s Studies Institute, where she produced and co-chaired an interdisciplinary calendar of events on women, gender, and sexuality for UTSA’s Women’s History Month, the largest Women’s History Month calendar in the nation.

 As a doctoral candidate in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Magda’s research interests are epistemicide, epistemic injustice, populations located at the margins of the margins, and feminist of color representations of and responses to these violences and marginalizations. Witnessing the stark stratifications along class, political and business affiliations to Mexican nationality, un/documented status, and skin color in a seemingly monolithic space such as the predominantly Mexican and Mexican American Rio Grande Valley of South Texas informs her focus on spaces where notions of racial and ethnic community are contested and reshaped. [MOU1] Attentive to how Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of the borderlands is increasingly utilized as an authorizing gesture of the fluidity of identity in its proliferation across traditional humanities disciplines and interdisciplinary area studies, Magda’s dissertation, “‘Bones breaking and speaking’: Affect, Subjectivity, and Geopolitical Location in Contemporary Tejana Cultural Productions,” presents a metacritical understanding of the ways in which historical and material sites imprint upon the conceptual from a differentiated rather than monolithic view of the U.S.-Mexico border through a study of contemporary Tejana cultural productions through the intersecting frameworks of performance theory, affect theory, spatial studies, and Chicana feminism. Additionally, Magda is a UC Regents Special Predoctoral Fellow and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow.

As part of the Global Latinidades Project (GLP), Magda is collaborating on the creation of the GLP’s inaugural “Pro-seminar: Grants and Fellowships Applications Workshop,” which will guide graduate and advanced undergraduate students through the production of the documents needed to apply to graduate school, research grants, dissertation fellowships, and postdoctoral fellowships. Garcia will also co-facilitate the workshop alongside Professor Ben Olguín and Department of English doctoral candidate Roberto Macías. Furthermore, as a GLP Research Assistant, Magda is assisting in the development of an UC-HBCU initiative grant proposal to fund the Juan Flores AfroLatinx Literary and Cultural Studies Scholars Program—a three-year initiative that expands AfroLatinidades scholarship by recruiting and training 10 undergraduate students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the African roots of Latinx history, culture, and identity over time, place, and communities.