The Beginning of My Time in Dallas

I have lived in Dallas 11 years, but only in the last year have I felt grounded to being here. When I first moved here from California in 2015 (and before that, I lived in Florida—New York—Dominican Republic), Dallas was a place to have fun and party. My weekends were filled with going out and making new friends and flings while out. This carried me for a few years.

And then I had my first near-death experience in 2017. I was driving from Kansas City after attending my friends/roommate's wedding, and I spun out on the rain while on the highway.

I drove off the side of the highway down a cliff with my then-partner, but not before I heard a voice saying: "It's not your time yet; your purpose isn't complete."

I had no idea what my purpose was, but endeavored to find it. Soon after, I fell into a depression, because I knew I wasn't going to follow the traditional paths of having kids, marriage was up for grabs, and I wasn't interested in climbing the corporate ladder. So what was I to do?

My life the next years went on to answer that. I began completing my Yoga Teacher Certification, and soon after, started a new job at Deloitte. While I worked there, Dallas became home base for my travels. Most months, I'd travel Monday-Thursday, and fill my weekends with catching up with the friends I'd made in the early years. Whether they were aligned or not, I hadn't yet questioned.

Enter the pandemic, where I started questioning everything, including my job, my friendships, and how I related to the city, and what I wanted to contribute. I wanted to know Dallas, not just live here. And it wasn't until the other side of the pandemic that I began exploring it in earnest.

In 2026, I went one step further and decided to root my business, Dr. García Brands, IN Dallas, versus online, and started seeking artistic, literary, and liberation-focused community. As the year has unfolded, I've found myself immersed in community, finally finding the opportunities and kindred spirits who are also exploring their city and themselves through it.

The Last Three Years

There is a particular kind of accounting that happens when you build a resume for a residency and realize, halfway through, that you are no longer listing job titles. You are listing a city. Two weeks ago, I put together a document to apply for a museum residency focused on women's history and liberation. I applied, not because I'm giving up on my business at all, but because it was interesting to me, and I wanted the curators to know who I was and what I've been building.

On the other side of writing my letter of interest and revamping my resume, I got to see the path I've been walking the last three years. What I saw when I listed the work I'd done is a map of everywhere in Dallas I have shown up in three years. The Creative Arts Center. The Dallas Liberation Center. The Dallas Literary Festival. The Latina Voices Institute. Amigahood. The arboretum. The libraries. The community rooms where sometimes only a handful of people gathered and I taught anyway.

Seeing it collected in one place, I understood something I had been too close to see while living it: I did not wait for an institution to make me legitimate. I went into institution after institution and left a mark, and disrupted, and moved on.

Writing the letter of interest forced me to make the case for why an institutional position might expand my reach—more exposure, more collaboration, more budget, more bodies in front of the work. And that case is real. Institutions have always concentrated resources. They gather the money and the audience and the infrastructure, and they hold the power to say yes, you may do this now.

Most people building thought leadership are, in some form, waiting for that yes. I understand the logic completely. I spent a decade inside it.

The Building of Dr. García Brands 

But somewhere in the writing I caught the deeper truth underneath the exercise: I have not been waiting. I have been using every resource actually available to me. The collaborators in and out of the city. The virtual conversations. The coaching, the masterminds, the accelerators, the newsletters, the books, the ancestral guidance I can now finally see, the extensive partnership with AI as a thinking companion. I have never been doing this alone.

And yet when you ask who Dr. García Brands actually stands on—what it stands for and who it comes from—the answer is me. Me, and the lineage behind me.

The reframe that matters is this. If my goal had been to maximize the sheer number of people I touched, I would have stayed at Deloitte. There is no more efficient way to reach scale than to serve billionaire organizations as a billionaire organization. I left precisely because reach was never the point. Impact was. It is entirely possible to stand in front of thousands and change no one, and it is entirely possible to sit with eleven doctoras in a loud restaurant in Irving and watch a room reorganize itself around the words seen, heard, witnessed. I traded the width of my reach for the depth of it.

And depth, unlike width, compounds. It accumulates slowly and then all at once, the way a lake fills, the way a practice ripens, the way three rigorous years of showing up begin to return more than they cost. The way I've always wanted to know a city and a city to know me.

I can feel the shift most clearly in the brand itself. Last year I barely spoke the name Dr. García Brands aloud. The branding was still being built; the visual language did not yet exist; everything was still organized around me as a person rather than the studio as an entity.

This year the collaterals exist. The certainty exists. There is a solidity to the thing now that simply was not there in the first two years, when it was all instinct and vision and no infrastructure. That solidity is not an accident. It is what showing up regardless of the size of the room produces over time.

And then there is the small, specific, delicious proof that landed in my hands this month. The Dallas Literary Festival paid me for an eight-minute Symposium Short—a talk I did not rehearse, did not test, did not agonize over. I simply walked in and delivered the same material I had already forged in the entrepreneurship incubator, the one where I won a thousand dollars just for speaking my truth.

The check was four hundred dollars. Not an egregious sum. I have been paid ten thousand dollars for an hour of my time before—but that ten thousand came wrapped in an aggressive amount of labor, in service of someone else's mission, inside walls with no windows.

This four hundred came from eight minutes of speaking in service of the organization I built with my own hands and my ancestors' blessing. It weighs more. Every dollar of it weighs more, because none of it required me to split myself in two to earn it.

So today, on the third of July, on the weekend this country celebrates a freedom it has never distributed evenly, I am giving myself the flowers. Not for the money, which is still accumulating. Not for the scale, which was never the goal. But for the sovereignty.

For the fact that I left the ivory tower with no map, not knowing who I would serve or what they would look like or which of my many selves they would need, and I built something real anyway. Something rooted in a city. Something that belongs to me and to the people who made me.

The freedom to think what I want, to say what I see, to charge for my life force without apology, and to be paid—in dollars, in barters, in witness—for the exact and undivided truth of who I am.

That is the reverse American dream. And today, I am celebrating that I chose it. 🖤