Quick Take
After spending two summers doing fieldwork alongside her immigrant parents, Zaida Lesly Garcia earned a scholarship that will help her pursue her dream of becoming an immigration lawyer. Driven by her family's sacrifices and her own determination, she plans to return to her hometown to fight for the rights of immigrant families like hers.
For two summers as a teen, Zaida Lesly Garcia spent six hours a day, five days a week doing grass cleanup in the fields where her parents picked berries. It was back-breaking work for the Watsonville High School student, but also “eye-opening” to experience what her parents, both immigrant farmworkers, had done for years to help provide for their family.
Recently, Lesly Garcia learned she was the recipient of a Burton Scholarship, which pays $5,000 annually over four years, from Community Foundation Santa Cruz County, one of 47 local seniors who earned either one-time or annually renewable scholarships ranging from $600 to $20,000. The award is given to graduating seniors who are U.S. citizens, maintain a 3.0 GPA for at least two consecutive years and demonstrate financial need.
The scholarship will help Lesly Garcia, 18, as she heads to UC Davis this fall, where she’ll study political science and start her journey to become an immigration lawyer to support immigrant families like hers who have worked hard to make ends meet.
“I just see all these first-generation students trying to go to college, and their hard-working parents waking up at dawn, going to work, and I feel like they deserve an opportunity to be citizens and give the opportunity to their children to succeed in life,” she said.
Lesly Garcia is one of many students in Santa Cruz County who have foreign-born family members who often don’t speak English as a first language. In Watsonville, about 37% of residents are foreign-born, and 72% speak Spanish as their primary language.
Both of Lesly Garcia’s parents are from Oaxaca, Mexico, and came to the United States to leave a life of poverty, she said.
More than 20 years ago, they followed family members to Watsonville, where they had Lesly Garcia, her twin brother and their older brother, and found work picking berries in the surrounding agricultural fields.
About a year after Lesly Garcia and her brother were born, her mother, Violeta Santiago, was diagnosed with a disabling lung disease called LAM (lymphangioleiomyomatosis). In 2009, she got a double lung transplant and is vulnerable to getting respiratory illnesses.
To support her family, Lesly Garcia is her mother’s caregiver when she gets sick, helping to feed and bathe her. As her mother’s disability prevented her from working full-time jobs, Lesly Garcia offered to work to pay for her school supplies and college savings, all while participating in clubs, volunteering and working hard in school.
For two summers, in 2021 and 2023, Lesly Garcia worked alongside her dad doing grass cleanup in the berry fields. Lesly Garcia said the work is very difficult, especially on her back.
“The first week is always the hardest. The back pain is really bad,” she said. “I remember I would just come home and sleep, shower, sleep, eat dinner, and that would be like my routine.”
Throughout her childhood, Lesly Garcia said, her parents instilled in her the importance of education and going to college. She, in turn, worked hard to succeed in school despite the challenges she faced.
Santiago, Lesly Garcia’s mother, told Lookout that her daughter is sensible and generous and has worked very hard to get to where she is now. She added that she’s a very good daughter, often taking care of her when she gets sick.
“I feel very happy for everything that she’s accomplished,” Santiago said in Spanish. “I feel so proud that she’s going to university.”
Watsonville High agriculture teacher Paulina Correia has also watched closely as Lesly Garcia has put in the long hours in school and in extracurriculars. She said she’s a very diligent student.
“Zaida is a really intellectual student, and she’s very academically rigorous,” Correia said. “She is soft-spoken, but her soft-spoken nature definitely doesn’t take away from her dynamic and powerful leadership skills.”
Correia has gotten to know Lesly Garcia over the past three years through the high school’s Business Agriculture Technology Academy (BATA). Students in that program are also members of the school’s Future Farmers of America (FFA) organization. BATA students get coaching from the program’s advisors, who help prepare them for jobs by going on field trips and industry tours for jobs in a broad range of industries from agriculture and food production to manufacturing.
Correia coached Lesly Garcia as she competed in the FFA’s mock interview competition, for which Lesly Garcia earned second place among schools on the Central Coast, including in Gonzales, King City and Salinas. She placed third in the regional contest, which stretched from San Jose to Los Angeles, and then competed at the state competition. Lesly Garcia was the only FFA student from Watsonville High to qualify and compete at the state level.
Correia added that Lesly Garcia’s goal to become an immigration lawyer is very fitting.
“I think it really shows her dedication to the community,” she said. “That’s a great path for her to take, and I can see her using her innovative thoughts and her methodical thinking in that future career, and really wanting to have everyone have a fair chance at what they’re trying to do.”
Lesly Garcia said it was this past year, under President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport undocumented immigrants, that she realized that she wants to become an immigration lawyer to support the immigrant families like those living in the Pajaro Valley.
“He doesn’t really see what the immigrant community does for the United States and for the economy,” she said about Trump, adding that, as a lawyer, she wants to help immigrants access work permits and to ultimately obtain citizenship.
Lesly Garcia is preparing to graduate from Watsonville High School next month with a 3.6 GPA and head to UC Davis in the fall. She hopes to one day go to Stanford Law School before returning to Watsonville to open a center focused on legal services for immigrants.
“I know there’s some students who are undocumented, and they’re afraid because they might be deported and not be able to get their higher education so I want to support them, too,” she said. “Because I believe that education is really important in someone’s life. Being educated, no one can take that away from you.”
FOR THE RECORD: This story was updated to correct information about scholarships from the Community Foundation Santa Cruz County.
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