The text details Cuban influence on foreign policy and electoral outcomes, how they reshaped the cultural landscape of the Southern United States, and redefined American assimilation in the 20th century.
Her second book, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada (University of California Press) is a comparative study of the international responses to the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Nicaraguan refugee crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.
Garcia details the role non-governmental organizations and transnational advocacy networks played in prompting nationwide debates about U.S. immigration; such efforts are attributed with creating a more responsive refugee policy.
Collectively, domestic and transnational advocacy networks documented the abuses of states, pressured for changes in policy, provided representation to the displaced and the excluded, and ultimately re-framed national debates about immigration.
A second anthology, coedited with Madeline Hsu and Maddalena Marinari, entitled A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: The U.S. in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 was published by the University of Illinois Press in the fall of 2018.