Garcia was also intimately familiar with the cycle of poverty and violence that plagues so many low income neighborhoods. She had arrived in the U.S. from a well regarded Catholic school in Venezuela straight into the horror of Brooklyn’s Sarah J. Hale High School in the 1990s. Her high school was constantly on lock down, they were searched everyday for weapons as they walked through metal detectors, classmates would threaten to cut each other’s faces with razor blades or set people’s hair on fire. Garcia was threatened constantly and so she filed down a metal ruler as a weapon to take to school.
