Dr. Victor Garcia was appointed as assistant director of Research for Cultural and Ethnic Studies at MARTI in the Fall semester of 1997. Dr. Garcia is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor of anthropology and teaches courses on Latin America, peasant societies and economies, and Latinos in the United States. His research interests include economic anthropology, peasant studies, the political economy of agriculture and farm work in the United States, and, lately, alcohol abuse among transnational migrants. Dr. Garcia’s research experience on Mexican farm worker populations and rural enclaves in California and Pennsylvania has brought him recognition as a leading researcher on these subjects. His findings have been published in book chapters and research reports, put forth in working papers, and presented in numerous papers given at national and international conferences.
As assistant director of Research for Cultural and Ethnic Studies, Dr. Garcia is responsible for developing and carrying out research on problem drinking among Latino farmworkers, particularly among transnational migrants from Mexico working in Pennsylvania. In designing alcohol projects, he has collaborated with colleagues at the School of Social Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, and the Centro de Investigaciones en Ciencias Sociales y Administrativas, Universidad de Guanajuato in Guanajuato, México. Together, they have conducted ethnographic research on the subject in both the United States and Mexico. Under the auspices of these projects, Dr. Garcia and his collaborators also have trained undergraduate and graduate students from a number of U.S. and Mexican universities in the ethnographic method. The students were provided instruction and, under the close supervision of their instructors, gathered field data on alcohol use and other practices in U.S. Latino neighborhoods and peasant communities in Guanajuato. Over the last two years, this field training has taken place at the Casa Angel Palerm, a field school located in Oak Cliff, one of the largest Mexican and Mexican American barrios in Dallas, Texas.
To date, Dr. Garcia and his colleagues have successfully developed two research projects on problem drinking and transnational migrant farmworkers. In conjunction with each other, the two studies are designed to explore factors that contribute to problem drinking in this population in a binational (U.S.–Mexico) setting. One of the studies, carried out a couple of years ago, “Problem Drinking and Transnational Mexican Farmworkers: Exploring Predisposing Factors in Their Homeland,” addresses family drinking history and community norms associated to drinking in the home base of the migrants. The other study, “Problem Drinking among Mexican Migrant Farmworkers,” currently being conducted, examines situational factors such as social isolation, working conditions, and weak social networks prevalent in the work sites of the migrants in the United States.
