
Desirée J. Garcia
Associate Professor
Appointments
Chair, Department of Latin American, Latino, & Caribbean Studies
Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies
Affiliate, Film and Media Studies
Area of Expertise
Film Genres,
Race, Ethnicity, Migration,
American Popular Culture,
Space and Place,
Videogrpahic Criticism
Biography
Desirée Garcia is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, trained in American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Film and Media Studies. Her areas of specialization include the musical film and race and ethnicity in American culture. Her publications range from monographs to scholarly journal articles and online essays about musicals and mediated representations of immigrants, race, gender, and ethnicity. She has also produced historical documentaries for American Experience/PBS, including Zoot Suit Riots (2002) and Remember the Alamo (2004).
Garcia received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University and her B.A. in History from Wellesley College. She has taught at institutions large and small, including Mount Holyoke College, Ursinus College, and Arizona State University.
Her most recent book, The Dressing Room: Backstage Stories and American Film, is about race and gender in backstage film narratives. A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imaginations of filmmakers and audiences for over a century. In The Dressing Room, the only book-length study of the space, author Desirée J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed. Garcia analyzes the backstage film, which spans film history, modes, and genre, to show how dressing rooms have been a useful space for filmmakers to examine the performativity of American life. From the Black maid to the wife and mother to the leading man, dressing rooms navigate, shape, and challenge society's norms. The stakes are high in dressing rooms, Garcia argues, because they rehearse larger questions about identity and its performance, negotiating who can succeed and who cannot, and on what terms.
Garcia has also written The Movie Musical for Rutgers' Quick Takes (Movies and Popular Culture) Series in which she explores the musical as a socially-relevant, adaptable, and mediating transnational genre.
In her first book, The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream (Rutgers University Press, 2014), Garcia traces the history of early sound era musicals from the makers of African American films and the transnational networks of Yiddish and Mexican cinema. As such, the book is also the first to document the role of immigrants and migrants in the making of the genre, both inside and outside of Hollywood. Challenging notions that the genre is merely escapist entertainment, The Migration of Musical Film shows the musical to be a significant cultural product that has withstood the test of time precisely because it has ministered to peoples of different backgrounds as they negotiated their position within American society. Musicals made by marginalized communities were resonant and influential cultural products that developed a formal language in response to the concerns of their communities, a language that was ultimately incorporated into what we consider to be the Hollywood musical. The book destabilizes the notion of film genre as a nation-bound concept and instead, positions the musical film as a site of multiple points of cultural convergence, social conflict, and artistic creation.
Desirée Garcia's teaching at Dartmouth includes courses on Videographic Criticism, The Musical, Mexican Cinema, Race and Gender in American Film, and the Latinx Stage and Screen.
Education
B.A. Wellesley College
Ph.D. Boston University
Taught Courses
Publications
The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film (Rutgers University Press, 2025)
"What Happened in the Dressing Room," InTransition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies. 11.1(2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.15423
The Movie Musical (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021 )
The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014)
"Operation Amigos: The Original Amateur Hour Goes to Mexico," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 36.7 (2019), 554-572. DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2019.1593014.
"Toil Behind the Footlights: The Spectacle of Female Suffering and the Rise of Musical Comedy," Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 40.1 (May 2019), 122-145.
"Bisbee '17: The Performance of History," The American Historical Review 124.3 (June 2019).
"Invisible Immigrants: A Better Life and the Cinematic Undocumented" in Frederick Luis Aldama, ed. Latinx Ciné: Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the 21st Century (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, August 2019), 171-185.
"Ramona in the City: Mexican Los Angeles, Dolores Del Rio, and the Remaking of a Mythic Story" in Jan-Christopher Horak, Lisa Jarvinen and Colin Gunckel, eds. Cinema Between Latin America and Los Angeles: Origins to 1960 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 51-63.
"There's No Place Like Home: The Hollywood Folk Musical" in Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon, eds., The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, 4 vols. (Walden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 318-338.
"The Soul of a People: Mexican Spectatorship and the Transnational Comedia Ranchera," The Journal of American Ethnic History 30.1 (2010), 72-98.
"Subversive Sounds: Ethnic Spectatorship and Boston's Nickelodeon Theatres, 1907-1914," Film History: An International Journal 19.3 (2007), 213-227.
Speaking Engagements
Keynote address, Stagestruck! 5: Nostalgia and the Hollywood Musical, The Great American Songbook Foundation, May 15-17, 2024
Selected Works & Activities
Actress ("Madeline"), Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, dir. Damien Chazelle (Variance Films, 2009)
Associate Producer, Remember the Alamo (American Experience/WGBH, 2004)
Associate Producer, Zoot Suit Riots (American Experience/WGBH, 2002)
Guest, Filmspotting Podcast, WBEZ Chicago, "#614 Top 5 Musical Numbers" (Dec. 7, 2016).
Consultant, Filmspotting Podcast, WBEZ Chicago, "Minnelli Marathon #1: Cabin in the Sky" (Feb. 28, 2018).
Public Scholarship
<p><a href="http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2017/02/14/la-la-lands-debt-ethnic-mu… La Land’s Debt to Ethnic Musicals of Yore</a>.” <i>Zócalo Public Square </i>(Feb. 14, 2017)</p>
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