> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.svlatino.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Eddie Garcia on the History San Jose Left Out: "We Belong" - URL: https://www.svlatino.com/blogs/cafecito/eddie-garcia-on-the-history-san-jose-left-out-we-belong/ - Published: 2026-10-21T15:55:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-21T21:53:03.000Z - Description: Eddie Garcia, author of Mexican Heritage Plaza, on exposure, resilience, and San Jose's Mexican history. Cafecito with Silicon Valley Latino. - Author: Silicon Valley Latino - Tags: Cafecito *CAFECITO WITH SVL, EPISODE 3* ### Publishers Note *Cafecito with SVL is Silicon Valley Latino's conversation series, coffee-style interviews with the Latino voices shaping our comunidad. In Episode 3, SVL CEO Alex Ontiveros sits down with Eddie Garcia, author of "Mexican Heritage Plaza: A Symbol of Resilience and Perseverance," co-founder of the Latino Leadership Alliance, and a former Comcast vice president who began his career in the office of Blanca Alvarado, to talk about opening doors, telling our stories, and the Mexican history of San Jose that too few of us were ever taught.* --- Picture a kid from East San Jose in a congresswoman's office in Washington, DC. Beside him sits the chairman and CEO of one of the biggest companies in the country, in a gray pinstripe suit that fits perfectly. The shoes, Eddie Garcia remembers, cost more than two or three of his own suits combined. The conversation is about policy. Eddie, who is supposed to be the Bay Area expert in the room, has quietly drifted off. All he can think is: "Something's wrong with this picture." Then he lands on the answer. "The moral to that story, Alex, is that we belong." That is where our Cafecito conversation with Eddie begins, and where it keeps returning. ### A Career He Never Plotted Eddie never planned any of it. He wanted to be a teacher and a coach, and he coached high school basketball while going to college later in life. His wife, Sandra, a school administrator and former teacher, had been holding down the fort. Near graduation, Eddie needed a job, not another year and a half for a teaching credential. So he went to the first community event he had ever attended with one goal: introduce himself to a San Jose city council member. When he told him who he was married to, the council member stopped in his tracks. "You married Sandy Peralta?" Then came the business card. "Let's talk." The next thing Eddie knew, he was interviewing with Blanca Alvarado. That was 1993\. He spent four years in her office, managed her 1996 campaign for the Board of Supervisors, and followed her there. "My whole world just completely opened up," he said. He knew nothing about city councils or community development. He got invested anyway. From there he spent 11 years at Comcast, working his way up to vice president. His summary of the path is the kind of advice we wish every young person heard: "I didn't plot any of this out. When one door opens, I said, I'm gonna walk through and see what happens." ### Corporate Dollars, Community Impact Alex and Eddie both worked in corporate roles that carry different names, government affairs, public affairs, government relations, and Eddie is refreshingly direct. "I was a lobbyist." In the 1990s, the cable industry was heavily regulated at the local level, so his job was relationships, then contracts. But the part he found most fulfilling was something else. As a vice president, he could point Comcast dollars toward parts of our community that "never would have got a second look by a company like Comcast." Corporations want to engage with us, Eddie said, but "they don't know how to." Alex knows the feeling from his own years at Citi, where the Community Reinvestment Act pushed financial institutions to reinvest in the neighborhoods they served. Somebody had to know which nonprofits to fund. Somebody who knew the comunidad. That is the job we keep asking our people to take on. Be the person who knows. ### "We Belong." The Only Difference Is Exposure. Both men remember the first time the room felt unreal. For Alex, it was the 41st floor of Citigroup headquarters in Manhattan at sunset, after a car service driver waited with his last name on a sign. For Eddie, it was that meeting in Washington. His conclusion is not about luxury. It is about access. "We have the ability, we have the smarts, and most important, we just have inbred the ganas to succeed. But we need a roadmap to get there, and we need someone to open the door." Eddie shared one of his favorite clips, an interview in which, as he recalls it, President Obama was asked what separated every stage of his career, from organizer to senator to president. The answer, in Eddie's telling: not much, they're just people, and the only difference is exposure. "We need to expose our gente," Eddie said. "If they wanna wear a suit and tie, cool. If they don't, that's cool. But we need to provide that opportunity and open that door." Alex added his piece: access. Let us into the resources, the rooms, the people, and "we can excel. And we have." Eddie added one more piece, looking straight into the camera. "You gotta work hard." In an age of social media, looking like you're doing well is easy. Doing well is not. "We have to work twice as hard to get half as far," he said, and Alex finished the thought: "But once you do, then you have the receipts." ### The History San Jose Left Out Eddie's passion for telling our stories led to his book, "Mexican Heritage Plaza: A Symbol of Resilience and Perseverance." The idea started with the Latino Leadership Alliance, which he co-founded. One class group interviewed founders of the plaza for a project on Latino leadership in Silicon Valley. One of those founders ribbed Eddie: you already wrote a memoir, why not write the book? He did, in two parts. The first is what he calls the Mexican history of San Jose. Eddie, a trained historian, started the way historians do, by reading everything written on the topic. "Sadly," he said, "San Jose has very few historical works." The book many people call the definitive history of the city, he says, runs 535 pages and does not mention Mexicans. Not one. "You would think if you came here for the first time, and you looked in the book, you'd say, when'd they all show up? They're all over. But they're not in the book." Eddie names the author in his book, and he told us he does so on purpose. So he sets the record straight. The Indigenous Ohlone were here first, for 10, 15, maybe 20,000 years. The people who founded the city itself, El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, were 66 people, all born in modern-day Mexico. They were mestizos, which means mixed race, of African and Indigenous descent. Technically the settlement was under the Spanish crown. "But the people themselves were essentially and ethnically Mexican." We have been here, Eddie said, since the very beginning. ### Every Time We Get Knocked Down The second part of the book tells how the Mexican Heritage Plaza came to be, and Eddie calls it a microcosm of who we are as a people. It took a 12-year fight to build a $34 million cultural arts facility that he describes as one of a kind, or close to it, in the country. Over and over, the ball got rolling, and then someone knocked it down. Sometimes it was the city. Sometimes, he writes, it was our own community. "The founders got up, wiped themselves off, and got back and got it done again." He built the story from original research. Blanca Alvarado's personal papers fill about 10 boxes in the San Jose State library. Founding chairman Fernando Zazueta, an attorney who saves everything, keeps file cabinets of documents in his garage. Eddie interviewed about 25 people. And as an aide to Alvarado during those years, he admits with a laugh, he learned how little he had understood. "I thought I was this, if I could say a bad word, badass aide. I was a paper pusher and an organizer. I had no clue what they did and how they did it." ### La Colonia Then Eddie told a story that stopped us. Everyone knows, and he agrees, that East San Jose is the heart and soul of our community. But from the founding until the 1950s, the center of Mexican San Jose was on the west side of Market Street, where the Convention Center, the Tech Museum, and the Children's Discovery Museum stand today. In the mid-20th century, he says, the Mexican American community built its own world there because it was not welcome in the rest of San Jose. City government called it Mexican Town. The neighbors called it La Colonia. It had shopping districts, theaters, about four dance halls, radio shows, and a magazine called El Excéntrico, which Dr. Ramon Martinez compares to the Facebook of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. "This thriving, bustling community." Then downtown began to die, as White families moved out to the suburbs. Eddie put the choice plainly. A clear-minded planner could have built on what was thriving, the way San Antonio did, and built a Mexican American cultural downtown. "Nope. They decided to bulldoze it." Alex remembers the edge of that. His family moved from Mexico to San Jose in 1973, when he was six years old. They lived in apartments near the original House of Pizza and used the downtown public library. Within a year after they moved, it was all gone. "There's no evidence." Through eminent domain, Eddie said, the neighborhoods and the businesses came down. He calls it a form of what the Aspen Institute names structural racism, a harm done through policy and worldview. The first development went up in 1968\. "One of the saddest stories of San Jose history," he said. And then the question that is not in his book but that he asked us anyway: what if San Jose had invested in building that up? "Can you imagine? It would be a different town." We cannot rebuild what was lost. We can make sure it is known. ### Make It Visible That is what Eddie's book is for, and it is why SVL is proud to publish a 12-part series with excerpts from it, about 700 words a week, each with an introduction from Eddie and one from us. "It's not about book sales," Eddie said. "It's so people know." And people are starting to know. Eddie is taking the leadership team of the Foundation for Hispanic Education, which runs three charter schools, on a tour of San Jose and the plaza, so that their students, about 90 percent Latino, learn that our history in this city runs long. "That's what history is all about." Alex put it the way SVL always has. We are here to educate, to promote, and to tell the stories of who we are, how we contribute, where we've been, and what we've done. Eddie told us the online back-and-forth, including the people who argue that Spaniards founded San Jose, does not bother him. He lets people say what they want to say. "That's what history's all about." We invited him back for the next conversation, about San Jose State, the Latino Alumni Network, and his leadership of the Latino Leadership Alliance. He said yes. So here is what we are asking of you. Read the book. Read the series. Tell a young person where La Colonia stood. Take a student to the plaza. We belong. We were here. And we are not going anywhere. --- This conversation is Episode 3 of Cafecito with SVL. Watch the full episode above, and subscribe to Silicon Valley Latino on YouTube so you never miss the next one. --- **Stories like this don't tell themselves.** SVL has spent over a decade making the invisible visible, celebrating Latino excellence, naming hard truths, and calling our comunidad to action. Independent Latino journalism only survives when the community it serves decides it's worth protecting. There are two ways to stand with us: Are you a Latino professional, entrepreneur, or leader ready to be celebrated? 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