Meet Robert Garcia
Latino staffers at NPR share their family stories of perseverance, sacrifice, and hard work to achieve the American Dream. These stories are defined by universal values of pride, hope, and an endless determination to help shape the new American landscape.
I am a first generation American — the only child of Colombian parents. My father’s uncle, Roberto, whom I am named after, was the Publisher of El Tiempo for 50 years, the largest newspaper in Colombia. My folks left Colombia, spent some time in Canada, and I was born in New York City about a year after they left Bogotá in 1956.
My father, Alvaro, worked for the Associated Press and then for a demographic think-tank called the Population Reference Bureau before eventually returning to Colombia, where he passed away 20 years ago. When I was just 8, he had me write a paragraph or two every single day on some subject that had to do with “current events.” I still have those notebooks and, I have to say, it is no accident that I would develop an interest in current events and a love of writing, which became the pillars of what is currently a 40-year career in journalism.
My mother, Stella, worked for two decades for the Organization of American States. She, too, moved back to Colombia, but it was the height of Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror. Shortly after the narco-terrorists took over the Colombian Supreme Court building and killed half the justices, an Avianca airliner was bombed (killing 107), and the offices of the newspaper El Espectador were bombed (killing one and injuring 83), we decided to move Stella to the states, where she lived with me for the final few years of her life.
“Some six months after her passing, my mother received a summons to appear in court for deportation.”
She applied for American citizenship but the process was so long, bureaucratic, and convoluted that it outlasted her and she died in 1999 before she was fully naturalized. Some six months after her passing, Stella received a summons to appear in court for deportation, despite the fact that the INS had been mailed her death certificate. We patiently explained that neither her court appearance nor her deportation would be physically possible, and after receiving two more increasingly threatening notices of impending deportation, the U.S. government eventually relented and finally let her rest in peace. For the record, you don’t get the $700 application fee reimbursed.
