In early 2019, I launched the Rewriting the West series in partnership with Guernica magazine. After the 2016, the need to understand the west, the symbolism of the border and its mythology became especially urgent. I assembled a team of award-winning team of contributors for a series that explores the origins of the American West […]
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My three-part series about the border appeared in The Baffler. Part I | The Border and the American Imagination Listen to me discuss the piece The Brian Lehrer Show/WNYC, the NPR station in NYC here. Border and the American Imagination was later cited in The Nation and featured in Longreads. With roots in the Native […]
This was, undoubtedly, my most controversial piece. Writing for CNN.com about the recent “border wall deal,” I argued that Democrats had caved to a dangerous and violent ideology and, in doing so, betrayed a core constituency. Some three months later, Pew Research Center estimated that Latinos were expected to become the largest non-white voting group […]
In April I contributed a piece to the Antiracism and America series, a collaboration between the Guardian and American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center. In the piece, I explore the U.S.-Mexico border as a solution, not a problematic site, and challenge to the nation’s long history of white supremacy. In the popular imagination and political […]
I am delighted to share that Carolina Miranda, an art critic for the Los Angeles Times, reviewed my piece, Mexico’s City of dogs, which appeared in Al Jazeera America for Nieman Storyboard. In her critique, “How Michelle Garcia told the story of Juárez, a city lost to violence, through its dogs,” Miranda writes: It is a […]
Five days before the 2016 election I proposed to Eliza Borné, my editor at the Oxford American, that in 2016 we, as a nation, had experienced a long-delayed realization of the 1967 Summer of Love, a spiritual awakening made possible through the struggle for racial justice. Whereas in the post 2016 election analysis, some insisted racial politics needed to […]
In Feb. 2017, The New York Times’ Michael Powell selected my reported essay, “My Name is Alex” for the Times’ feature, “What We’re Reading,” which highlights “great stories from around the web.” The piece appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of the Oxford American and was later included in the magazine’s picks of Best Essays in […]
The NYTimes’ Room for Debate recently posed this question: Is Criticism of Identity Politics Racist or Long Overdue? Some complain of being unfairly accused of bigotry. Others say discrimination needs to be directly addressed. I was invited to participate on the panel of debaters. Below is my contribution which you can also access here. The attack on political […]
This piece took ten years to place. I first drafted some of the arguments found in my new piece, Trumpworld, in 2006 while I was working at The Washington Post. Then, as now, political chatter centered on border security issues, an “invasion” via the U.S. Mexico border. Politicians and the press considered the function of the border […]
In the Spring I was invited to speak at the Power of Narrative conference in Boston. I remember attending the conference years ago, admiring the speakers and imagining–hoping for–the opportunity to write long form narrative pieces. To be invited to speak was huge honor. The conference was also the setting where famed writer Gay Talese […]
Michelle García 