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Sarah Rafael García is an award-winning author and multimedia artist, community educator, curator, and performance ethnographer born in Brownsville, Tejas and raised in Santa Ana, California. She’s author of Las Niñas and SanTana’s Fairy Tales and coeditor of the anthologies Pariahs and Speculative Fiction for Dreamers. García has over 13 years of experience as an Arts Leader and is founder of Barrio Writers, LibroMobile, and Crear Studio — all art programs initiated as a response to build cultural relevance and equity for BIPOC folks in Orange County.

Sarah Rafael García Captures Santa Ana’s History and Gentrification Through Fairy Tales

García has returned periodically to Santa Ana, often witnessing attempts by developers to gentrify the city. In 2016, she went back again, this time as artist-in-residence at Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center in the Artists Village — where she became a modern-day Brother Grimm, transforming the community’s stories into fairy tale format. A multimedia installation based on her Santa Ana fairy tales was on view at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana in May 2017.

Writing has been a fixture in her life, ever since her father died unexpectedly of an aneurysm in 1988 when she was just 14. At the time she, her Mexican immigrant parents and her sisters, Suzanne and Nydia, were living in Santa Ana. García describes the city as, “the largest border town without a border, with its 80 percent Mexican-American population.” Here, the writer became steeped in the joys and race-inflicted sorrows that come with living in such a community. Issues like gentrification weren’t just headlines, but were reality living outside her window. 

After her father’s death, her mother Sara received a life insurance settlement and moved the family to the mostly white community of Rancho Santa Margarita. They relocated there so that García and her sisters could attend better schools, her mother asserted. Yet this move became a culture shock for the girl of color who was surrounded by perfect blonde classmates.

Last year, she began transforming her childhood memories and desires into fairy tales. Reaching this epiphany followed decades of study, moving many times, extensive travel and a variety of jobs.

García’s nomadic life began when she moved out of her home right after high school to live on her own and attend Irvine Valley College. At IVC, she studied creative writing, sociology and Spanish, while paying her own tuition. “I didn’t even have a computer and there were semesters when I took classes without purchasing the required books. I wonder how I survived it all,” recalls García. Through her fierce determination, she transferred to Texas State University in Austin while working full-time at a center for at-risk youth. After graduating in 1998 with a sociology degree, she worked in high-end marketing jobs in Los Angeles (one with a window overlooking the Hollywood sign). In 2004, a neighbor began stalking her. Unable to resolve this problem, she fled L.A. for a job teaching English in Beijing, China. She lived and worked there for 18 months.

During her stay there, she began composing stories of her family life in Santa Ana. By 2006, she had completed 20 stories. she compiled them into “Las Niñas.” She then left China, and researched an appropriate publisher for her book.

She returned to Santa Ana in 2008, discovering to her dismay that the place was drastically changed. She worked at tutoring jobs, promoting her book, and giving back to her community by starting the non-profit Barrio Writers (BW) program. BW counsels teens from underserved communities through spontaneous reading, grammar, creative writing, higher education and cultural arts. The program now has eight chapters in California and Texas.  

García moved to Austin, Texas in 2010. Two years later, she returned to Texas State for graduate studies. 

“I started writing feminist short stories incorporating some of the characteristics of fairy tales and fables in order to offer a counter narrative to female narratives, as a way to turn the male gaze back on society, making society accountable for sculpting our stereotypes.” She received her MFA in creative writing from Texas State in 2015.

García soon started writing a new collection of fairy tales, inspired by her Santa Ana childhood memories. She crafted a proposal based on these stories in a bid to become artist-in-residence at Grand Central Art Center, which caught the eye of its director. “It was wonderful to see Sarah’s stories written from the perspective of someone who spent her youth in this city,” he says. “Her innovative approach shares community histories, past and present.” Her proposal won her a one-year arts residency at the Center, where she lives what she calls a “fairy goddess” life. Without having to worry about paying the rent or utilities, she gained the peace of mind to concentrate on her stories of Santa Ana.

There are six stories in “SanTana’s Fairy Tales” (in English and Spanish). These include “The Carousel’s Lullaby,” expressing longing for a carousel. She also tells cautionary tales about what might occur in Santa Ana with the threat of deportation. In “Hector & Graciela,” she writes, “Police held heavy batons, threatening gente (people) to return where they came from, while piercing sirens foreshadowed an immigrant’s worse nightmare.”

Using words to paint pictures, García is chronicling in “SanTana’s Fairy Tales” the land that was once filled with a vibrant culture. “Where once Mexican culture was celebrated on Calle Cuatro, she explains, “today white-walled coffee shops and trendy barbers are replacing quinceañera stores and chasing away fruteros (fruit vendors).”

In the story “The Wishing Well,” García also describes her own experience as a writer: “So on this new day when La Fuente [fountain] flowed water again, she knew what was to come, it was up to her to separate the realities from the city’s past lives, she knew she had to write it all down to let la gente decide what is true.” 

 Grand Central Art Center’s director remarks, “Sarah brings an amazing energy and passion to her work. Her sense of community, deep connections and especially her writing project open greater dialogue.”

As a Latina artist herself who has long admired Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, García visited Santa Ana’s Bowers Museum in April 2017 to view its “Frida Kahlo: Her Photos” exhibition. 

“I realize as women we forget to celebrate our life journeys simply because we are still navigating through them,” she remarked, “and sometimes we forget to look back. How many times have we thought, I wonder if Frida ever knew that this would be her life now?”