Frieda Garcia papers

Frieda Garcia is a community activist and leader who has worked primarily in Boston's South End and Roxbury neighborhoods since the mid 1960s. She was born in 1932 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to Humberto Garcia and Marina Sanabia. She moved to New York City with her mother and brother at the age of eight. As one of the few bilingual (English and Spanish) people on her block in Upper Manhattan, she was often called upon to translate for neighbors. For this reason, she has said that she had been doing social work since she was 10 years old. She attended Mount Saint Dominic Academy, a college preparatory school in Caldwell, New Jersey, and upon graduation enrolled at Fordham University. After two years, Garcia moved back to the Dominican Republic with her then husband. She returned to New York City several years later, and earned a Bachelor's degree from The New School of Social Research in 1964.

In 1965, Garcia moved to Boston, eventually finding work at the Grove Hall Welfare office, before being hired at the Roxbury Multi-Service Center, whose director, social justice leader Hubie Jones, became her mentor. A few years later, Jones urged her to become involved with a new organization that was forming to meet the needs of Boston's growing Hispanic population. Garcia became founding director of the resulting organization, La Alianza Hispana, 1971-1973.

Garcia then spent 10 months in the Community Fellows program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1973-1974, served as Special Assistant to the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1974-1975, and as Director of Consultation and Education at the Solomon Carter Fuller Mental Health Center, 1975-1981. In 1981, Garcia became the executive director of United South End Settlements (USES), also known as the Harriet Tubman House. During her 20-year tenure at USES, she spearheaded programs centered on adult education and training, children, and affordable housing. Since retiring from USES in 2001, she has continued to be active, including chairing the Planning Committee of the ¡Merengue! Visual Rhythms/Ritmos Visuales traveling exhibition, which took place in 2008.

Advocacy for Black and Hispanic communities in Boston, for bilingual education, for women's rights, and for multicultural media, are several themes that appear throughout her career. Garcia and her partner, former Massachusetts State Representative Byron Rushing, have also been dedicated political activists involved in many social justice movements in Boston. Garcia has also served on several Mayoral commissions dedicated to topics such as violence and mental health, and on the boards of over seventy organizations such as The Boston Foundation, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and The United Way.

Garcia has received numerous awards in recognition of her civic work, including the Massachusetts Legislative Black Caucus Award (1995), the ADELANTE Award from the Hispanic Office of Planning and Evaluation (1996), the Harriet Tubman Community Achievement Award from United South End Settlements (2012), and the Massachusetts Governor's Award in the Humanities (2016). In 2013, a park on Stanhope Street in the South End was named in her honor. Most recently, as of 2023, she was one of 69 civil rights and social justice leaders whose names were engraved in the 1965 Freedom Plaza, beneath The Embrace statue, on the Boston Common.