García, Héctor Pérez (1914-1996), was a Mexican-born American physician and social activist who fought for the rights of Mexican Americans. He won national recognition as the founder of the American GI Forum of the United States, an organization that promotes civil rights and helps Mexican American military veterans. GI, an abbreviation for government issue or general issue, is a common term for members of the U.S. armed forces.
García was born on Jan. 17, 1914, in the town of Llera, near Ciudad Victoria, in east-central Mexico. García’s parents left Mexico while he was a boy and settled in southern Texas. In 1936, García graduated from the University of Texas in Austin with a bachelor’s degree in zoology. He completed his medical degree at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1940 and then served a two-year internship in Omaha, Nebraska. García joined the U.S. Army during World War II (1939-1945) and earned a Bronze Star Medal while serving as a medical officer.
After the war, García set up a private practice in Corpus Christi, Texas. He was troubled by the lack of medical care and other benefits for Mexican American veterans, many of whom were denied treatment at the local veterans hospital. In 1948, García and other veterans organized the American GI Forum to aid veterans and fight discrimination. In 1949, an undertaker in Three Rivers, Texas, refused to allow funeral services in his chapel for the reburial of Felix Longoria, a Mexican-American GI who had been killed during the war and buried overseas. García, as the leader of the American GI Forum, contacted then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who arranged for Longoria to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
García later worked with the GI Forum and other civil rights organizations to improve the situation of Latinos in the United States. Johnson, who became president of the United States in 1963, named García an alternate ambassador to the United Nations in 1967 and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1968. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan awarded Garcia the Presidential Medal of Freedom. García died July 26, 1996, in Corpus Christi.
