Dr. Leticia Garza-Falcón
Dr. Garza-Falcon’s accomplishments and contributions to Texas State and her promotion of women have been enduring. She founded the Gender and Ethnic studies program at the University and organized conferences and events to which she invited notable Latinas and other women. She stepped aside for the woman and for the program so as to provide the students maximum benefit of the event. Her book, Gente Decente (UT Press, 1998), published while she was at Texas State, chronicles the lives and contributions of three early Twentieth Century Latinas and remain today the seminal scholarly work in the area.
Dr. Garza-Falcon worked on the Texas State University System’s centennial publication—A Texas State of Mind (Huntsville, Texas: Texas Review Press, 2011). She served as project manager on the undertaking from June through November of 2010, working with many authors on revisions to their essays as well as making significant contributions as a writer and editor.
She interviewed the present and two past chancellors of the System and made them comfortable (and talkative), as reflected in her insightful and sensitive biographical essays on the three individuals. Starting with a skeletal list of former members of the board of regents, she produced a more comprehensive list so that posterity will know something of the leadership of the System during its first 100 years. Her beautiful essay on the normal school movement in Texas is prologue to the events of the Twentieth Century which were the focus of the book.
Circa 2016, Dr. Garza-Falcon translated, from English to Spanish, a significant legal contract, creating an important affiliation agreement between Texas State University and Cuenca University in Spain. Even in such a technical area, her use of language is impressive, at once expressive and eloquent. Very few people have, not just mastery, but truly artistic command of one language, much less two.
Leticia has a powerful message to women scholars and students, especially Chicanas. She was a non-traditional student raising a family during graduate school; she gave birth to her last child shortly after her dissertation defense. Her accomplishments are extraordinary, but she had endowed such strength because she has never separated herself from her community. In more recent years, Leticia Garza-Falcón has faced new odds—battling cancer. Her patient testimonial—as she rebuilds her strength after surgery with swimming therapy, rings true to the messages she brings to her teaching, service and scholarship. She claims a positive approach as a foundation to regain and build our strength. In the classroom and the world, she calls out what is exclusionary and harmful, and recognizes the merit of those who may have been marginalized, sometimes before they see it, themselves. Her powerful message to recognize and build on the positive within, is just the message we need in today’s world, as we attempt to heal and reconstruct our better selves.
She continues to write essays and poetry because she is a person of letters. Generating ideas, analyzing their meaning and import and committing them to writing is what she does. She is a magnificent writer and thinker, whose work and example will be an inspiration to future generations of students.
