UTB VICE PRESIDENT INVITE TO HAIL GARCIA, THE CREATOR

By Juan Montoya
It was 1991.
At the time, a small hamlet on the banks of the Rio Grande fostered a small community college that the community had created way back in the mists of time in 1926. Quaintly, they called it Texas Southmost College. It was after all, on the southernmost tip of Texas and the United States mainland.
It had served the villagers well for all those years. It provided technical and vocational careers to those residents and their children who strove for personal betterment. It served may military veterans under the G.I. Bill and the majority of academics and vocational students from the lower Rio Grande Valley passed under its arches on their way to their future.
The University of Texas System operated a satellite campus under the auspices of UT Pan American in Edinburg. When students finished their core requirements at TSC, they switched to Pan Am classes at the TSC campus. Once they were done with those classes, they commuted to Edinburg to finish their course work and get their degree.
 It worked fine for a while. But there were others who wanted something more. Notably, there was a group of Texas Exes who thought that having a UT Brownsville here would be the best of both worlds. But how to do it?
When they approached the UT System, the Regents then said they were unable (and unwilling) to share the fabulously wealthy Permanent University Fund with a UT facility in Brownsville. Heck, they didn't even share that oil-and-gas pie with Pan Am, much less with the Tamale Tech yokels in backwater Brownsville.
"Here's what we'll do y'all," they told the TSC trustees, Rep. Rene Oliveira, Texas State Sen Eddie Lucio Jr., and their bods. "We'll create a UT-Brownsville, but only if you provide the money for construction and TSC provides annual "transfers" for the university's operation."
They rubes bit the bait. Instead of a regular university, they came up with a bastardized version and called it a "partnership." It was neither a community college nor a full-fledged university. And to the satisfaction of its anointed president Julieta Garcia, Oliveira, Lucio, Mary Rose Cardenas, and others, the community' college taxing district would remain intact. If there was any money needed to construct buildings to house the UT parasites, why, a bond issue by TSC paid by the local yahoos could be tapped. And so they did.
Garcia et al began a frenzy of construction unmatched  since the days of pyramid building by the pharaohs on the banks of the Nile. With the public's money secure, the "partnership" opened its first facility, the Science, Engineering and Technology Building, in November 1997.
After that, they built the Education and Business Complex, the Life and Health Sciences Building, the Casa Bella student housing facility and the Biomedical Research Building. They envisioned a Harvard by the Rio Grande and dedicated the monuments to their sycophants. And of, course, who can forget the Mary Rose Cardenas Building named after that acclaimed academic, slumlord, and seller of cars?
Then – sensing a kind of giver's fatigue on the part of the overburdened villagers – Garcia et al sought to have the trustees transfer all of TSC's assets to the UT System to remove the burden of some $200 million in real estate and college assets from them. They could, of course, keep their district functioning until the bond debt they incurred over the past 21 years to build the monuments to those luminaries was paid.
However, by then a majority of the trustees were of a different mind and (gasp!) told Julieta "no" in no uncertain terms.
They were tired, they told her and her emissaries, of the annual TSC "transfers" to the UT System that amounted to about $1 billion over the course of the "partnership." What's more, they were tired of the 17 percent graduation rate over six years that the "partnership" had achieved. They also complained of the less than 50 percent retention rate for freshmen. And they were weary of their kids – living as they did in the poorest community in the United States paying the highest tuition and student service fees in the State of Texas.
Garcia –earning a salary of $340,000 a year – took umbrage and derided the ingrates.
She launched a campaign of terror upon the four trustees – Adela Garza, Trey Mendez, Kiko Rendon and Rene Torres – to batter them into submission for their unmitigated gall. In Mendez's case, this included her personal confessing priest leading a gaggle of protesters calling for his personal and spiritual destruction. Garza and Rendon's businesses were blacklisted.
But when they voted to secede from the UT System and divorce UTB, the Regents had no choice but to finally give in and bring some of the UT System's resources and shoulder their responsibility and educate those people. They, after all, were also Texans. If not, they feared, they would do what the blacks did in Prarie View when they were denied PUF money; they might sue under the Civil Rights Act.
And so the UT Rio Grande Valley was born.
Now, as the one-year ocelot mascot slinks off into academic extinction, Irv Downing, Julieta's Vice President for Institutional Advancement at UTB, is inviting one and all to give the old girl a send off with the "Celebración"  to honor her and others who were instrumental in the creation of The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
"I hope you can join us at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, August 28, when we gather at El Gran Patio at Main to recognize our alumni's achievements and bid farewell to Dr. García" Downing says in his invite.
It took a while, but finally, as in Egypt, the plague will be gone.
It is 2014.
The UTRGV will be headquartered in McAllen. A UTRGV satellite campus will be installed in Brownsville. Things, even though they have changed, remain pretty much the same as when we were made to follow Garcia's oblique path into the dark monte.
And we will all Hail Julieta come two Thursdays from today!