[3] Adelina Garcia was born in December 1923 in Phoenix, Arizona and moved as a child to Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, where she first expressed interest in becoming a singer.
Garcia spent most of her early childhood in that northern Mexican city, where she started to become famous by singing boleros at the XEP radio station.
[citation needed] In 1937, Garcia returned to Phoenix, but she did not stay there too long, establishing herself in Los Angeles at the age of fifteen.
In Mexico City, she participated at radio shows on the XEW station, which helped cement her fame in that country's non-northern states.
[citation needed] In 1997, her musical and photo collection was bought by the CEMA, a repository of historic documents from California's ethnic history.