Dr. Hector P. Garcia and the American GI Forum
Near Corpus Christi, Texas
On March twenty-sixth, nineteen forty-eight, seven hundred Mexican-American veterans gathered in Corpus Christi and organized a new civil rights group. They called it the American GI Forum. The man who had called the meeting was Dr. Hector P. Garcia, a thirty-four-year-old physician who had opened his medical practice in Corpus Christi two years earlier.
Garcia had served in the Army Medical Corps during World War II. When he came home, he found that the veterans he treated in his clinic were being denied what they had earned. Mexican-American veterans were turned away from VA hospitals or received inferior care. Applications for GI Bill benefits were lost or blocked. Garcia had constant disagreements with the Naval Air Station of Corpus Christi over its refusal to accept sick Latino veterans. He began documenting cases.
The founding meeting in March nineteen forty-eight produced an organization devoted to securing equal rights and equal access for Hispanic Americans, beginning with veterans. Seven hundred people showed up to that first meeting, which was significant. It meant the problem was not one man's complaint. It was a community's.
The Forum's first major national case came the following year. One of Garcia's patients, Beatrice Longoria, came to him about her husband Felix, an Army private who had been killed in the Philippines in World War II. The Rice Funeral Home in Three Rivers, Texas, refused to allow the Longoria family to use its chapel for the funeral, solely because they were of Mexican descent. Garcia organized a public protest and contacted the newly elected Senator from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson arranged for Private Felix Longoria to be buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery in February nineteen forty-nine. The case reached newspapers across the country.
Garcia received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in nineteen eighty-four. The American GI Forum he founded in Corpus Christi now has chapters across the United States. His home here is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
