John A. Garcia is Professor of Political Science at The University of Arizona and has been at the university since 1972. His primary areas of research have been in American politics--minority group politics, especially Latinos, and urban governments, survey research, and public policy. He has published articles and book chapters in these fields for the past twenty-eight years. He was coauthor of Latino Voices: Perspectives of Cubans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans (Westview Press, 1992), and a chapter, "Expanding Disciplinary Boundaries: Black, Latino, and Racial Minority Group Politics in Political Science" in The State of the Discipline II (1993). He is currently completing a book project: Latino Politics: Community Formation and Political Empowerment (Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming, 2000).

He has published articles in Political Science journals as well as journals in Sociology, Health, and Public Policy. He has coedited three other books, as well as lectured extensively on university campuses. He served as one of four co-principal investigators of the Latino National Political Survey (LNPS). Earlier he served on the research staff of the National Chicano Survey (1979) at ISR/University of Michigan in which both projects represented the first national probability surveys of Latinos and Mexican origin populations conducted.

More recently, his research has been focused on coalitional formation between the Latino and African American communities; coalitional efforts within the Latino communities; and alternative voting systems and minority representation. He was Co-Chair for the 1999 American Political Science Association in Atlanta. He has served on the Executive Council of the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research, the American Political Science Association, and recently completed his term on the National Science Foundation Advisory committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate. He is a member and recent past Chair of the U.S. Bureau of the Census 2000 Advisory Committee on Hispanic Populations since 1996. He has been active in local and county government, local school districts by serving on a number of boards and commissions. He serves as a “resource” person for both the local and statewide newspapers, and, other news media on American politics. Finally, he has worked on redistricting plans following the 1980 and 1990 Censuses for several states and jurisdictions.