Saudi Garcia is an Afro-Caribbean, queer, first generation immigrant with a deep passion for justice and liberation for her home, the island of Ayiti (Dominican Republic and Haiti), its people and its diasporas. Grounded in an equity, abolitionist and healing ethic, she expresses that passion through my work in academia, racial equity facilitation, and film. Her deep concern with Black subjects’ relationships to land, ecology and environmental health has led her to research the history, health impacts and contemporary forms of resistance to gold mining in the Dominican Republic and Haiti for her Ph.D. in Anthropology at New York University. Adopting a bio-social perspective that centers theories of racialization, toxicity, collective trauma, and links between human and non-human health and healing, her work is an entry point to examine how Black Caribbean communities construct alternative visions of human relations to the region’s climate-vulnerable and toxic ecologies. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Unearthing Blackness: Race, Health and Anti-Mining Activism in the Dominican Republic,” analyzes how the forms of activism and everyday survival of rural Black Dominicans impacted by gold mining reveals the gap between the project of Hispanic Caribbean racialization and the anti-colonial and maroon imaginations, philosophies and bio-cultural practices of the rural people of Ayiti. She teaches courses in bio-social anthropology, anthropology of race, Afro-Latin America and Afro-Latinx studies and Dominican Studies and she is a Mellon Graduate Fellow at the NYU Hemispheric Institute.
She loves to read science fiction, film and edit, spend time with her family and go to the beach with her friends. Book suggestions very much welcomed!