Impact Stories
Nursing
A Calling Answered: How PACE Nurse Margarita Garcia Lives Her Purpose Every Day
PACE Manager of Nursing Practice Margarita Garcia, RN, BSN, PHN, MSN, exemplifies a caregiver who lives her calling daily. Through skill, empathy, and genuine kindness, she embodies the compassionate spirit at the heart of AltaMed's mission.
In Mexico, back in the day, many people in small towns practiced nursing without being nurses. I remember people would seek out my mother in the middle of the night to attend to someone who was sick. She would provide care that sometimes included injections and take care of sick people in my hometown.
Margarita Garcia
AltaMed PACE Manager of Nursing Practice
Margarita Garcia was amazed by her mother. Around the age of nine, when her mother died, her father put her and her three sisters in an orphanage because he could not care for them. Her two oldest sisters were maybe 14 and 16 years old when they left the orphanage to work at Guadalajara’s Hospital Civil to clean the wards or the operating room. They were called enfermeritas, little nurses, and their payment was lodging and food.
Her oldest aunt pleaded with the director to allow her youngest sisters to stay and work with them. On the days they did not work, she would sneak her mother and her other sister into the hospital since they really did not have a place to live. Nursing saved them from being homeless.
Her mother is her inspiration. She remembers often listening to her for hours about her time in the hospital, imagining herself in her place. Since she was five years old, all she wanted to be was a nurse — to take care of sick people, just like her mother did.
She is proud that she listened to the people God put in her path — they gave her advice and told her she could be somebody. She has loved nursing since she was five, but she didn't know how to go about it. She didn't even know the difference between colleges or what they offered. She went to school in Los Angeles, but she didn't have a counselor or a teacher guiding her; she just knew she wanted to be a nurse.
Soon after graduating from high school, she was in line to enroll in the nursing program at Trade-Tech — Los Angeles Trade-Technical College — when a girl in front of her said the line was for the LVN program and asked, “Why don't you go to an RN program?”
Without knowing the difference between the two, she listened and switched to the RN program. She took a few classes at Trade-Tech and transferred to East Los Angeles College, where she met with the chair and director of the nursing program — someone who was instrumental in her success as a student, guiding and motivating her, and sometimes babysitting her daughter so she could attend classes.
I started as a volunteer at the LA General Hospital. As I entered the hospital, I would take a deep breath and just the smell would give me happiness—I could not wait to see the patients. Nursing is amazing! You teach, you care for patients, and yet it is teaching and caring for you, too. It is our calling to help people, to do good as women, and as human beings.
Margarita Garcia
AltaMed PACE Manager of Nursing Practice
The more you talk about your goals, the more nurses listen and step up to help. She remembers an evening charge nurse she worked with who gave her money in an envelope to pay for her books. She was a certified nurse assistant at the hospital when the nurse said, “You are going to be a good nurse. Here's $500.”
Thirty-five years ago, that was a lot of money. The nurse simply said, “You need to pay it forward.“ She didn't know what that meant, so she asked. The nurse replied, “You need to help someone struggling like you are.” So she pays it forward any chance she gets — encouraging and motivating others, and helping them the way other nurses helped her.
The AltaMed Nursing School Collaborative is part of a vision to bring medical education to historically underserved communities, building a future where we can uplift nurses like Margarita with the support they need to pursue their education.
