Linda García was at a Christmas party this past December—Saturday night, Moscow Mule in hand—when she received a text message from an unfamiliar number.
The sender was from the office of Victoria Neave Criado, the state representative for Texas House District 107, which includes parts of Dallas, Garland, and Mesquite, where García lives. Neave Criado had decided to give up the seat she had held since 2017 to make a surprise bid for fellow Democrat Nathan Johnson’s spot in the Texas Senate. She wanted García to replace her, sight unseen. They had never met or even spoken. “She had come highly recommended,” Neave Criado says, “and I had heard about how extraordinary she was.”
It wasn’t the first time that García, a self-made financial educator with a background in the entertainment industry, had been approached to run for office. She remembers, not long after college, a friend taking her out to dinner to sell her on the idea of becoming a “great Latina Republican politician.” (“I was like, No. First of all, I’m a Democrat.”) When she moved back to Dallas from California in 2019, her sister-in-law, Carmen Ayala, now a constituent outreach advocate for U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, tried to recruit her. “She was with a group of people, and I was like, ‘You guys need to go. I’m not going to do this.’ ”
I’m not deleting anything off my Instagram. I’m not changing anything from my website. I’m not going to change the way I talk or the way I dress. I’m not doing anything.
She brushed off Neave Criado, too—at first. What did she need to get into politics for? She was in her early 40s and had created a lane for herself as a round-the-way-girl version of Warren Buffett, Suze Orman in a Coogi sweater and gold chain, demystifying the financial world for people who felt excluded from it. Her first book, Wealth Warrior: 8 Steps for Communities of Color to Conquer the Stock Market, which grew out of a popular online course she created, hit shelves earlier in the year. She was doing just fine.
The next day, though, there were more texts and then a phone call: “Victoria would like to meet with you.” When that happens, García says, “you show up.” But she did have some ground rules.
“Before you say anything to me,” García told Neave Criado when she arrived for their Sunday evening sit-down, “I’m going to tell you right now that I’m not deleting anything off my Instagram. I’m not changing anything from my website. I’m not going to change the way I talk or the way I dress. I’m not doing anything. Is that OK or are we done here?” Neave Criado told her to take a seat.
The deal was, the job was essentially hers if she wanted it; she would face no opponents in the Democratic primary in May or the general election in November. García wouldn’t be entering a race so much as she would be escorted to the finish line, where someone was waiting to break the tape for her. Which, perhaps, made the decision more difficult: at least in a campaign there is the chance that you might lose and not have to go through with it.
Still, it was difficult to ignore the opportunity she was being presented with, the scope of which extended beyond her own future. Perhaps she could do for politics what she had set out to do for finance. Give the gate codes to people who were locked out, or maybe show them what was really going on, that there wasn’t a code or even a gate. Anyone could come in.
“One of the things I told Victoria is that I felt like the culture overall is losing faith in democracy,” García says. “I think it’s because we are not seeing ourselves reflected in spaces. When we do see ourselves, we’re seeing ourselves as an assimilated version that looks and sounds like a version that we can’t relate to. It’s really important for me that if I’m going to be a representative, that I indeed represent exactly who I am.”
She didn’t have long to consider any of this. At most, she could sleep on it. The filing deadline was the next day.
García says it was like an episode of Scandal. She called an emergency family meeting. “Because the family has been involved via my sister-in-law in politics, on a grassroots, boots-on-the-ground level, they really encouraged me,” she says. “I, on the other hand, was very apprehensive and fearful—fear of, what is this going to mean for me? And not being interested in politics. Doesn’t someone have to be interested in it?”
What did interest her, what convinced her to say yes, was the salary. The lack of one, really. The position pays only a little over $7,000 a year, and each session lasts 140 days, meaning many people couldn’t afford to do it, especially in a district, she says, where the per capita income is just north of $24,000. Learning the salary “helped me understand how the system is not meant to put someone that lives in my district in these positions.”
But she could be that someone. She could go to Austin without leaving anyone behind. And while García’s political experience is limited to student government, she is more than qualified to look after her people. She’s been doing it for years.
García had been on her own for a while growing up, maybe not always technically, but what’s the difference when you are searching for a home more than just a place to stay? Someone might be responsible for you, sure. That is not quite the same as being loved, wanted.
Before she was a teenager, her parents split and then got back together and then split again for good. She bounced around Orange County, then back and forth between California and Dallas a couple of times. In Dallas, García lived with her father briefly—just a month or so—until he decided he couldn’t take care of her.
“His apartment got broken into, and he was like, ‘You can’t stay here. I don’t think it’s safe for you to be here,’ ” she says. “Also, my parents were just divorcing, and there was this sense of, my dad didn’t want to be integrated anymore. It was like he was divorcing myself and my sister. It was really hard for me because I was a daddy’s girl and my sister was really close to my mom, so I was left in limbo.” She was 12 years old and would never live with either of her parents again.
Telling me this, on a windy spring morning, García seems closer to that young girl than the brash persona she puts forth in her book-jacket photo and the occasionally rap-inflected prose inside, the images from her In Luz We Trust website of her using a stack of cash like a phone. When I arrived, I didn’t notice her at first, tucked quietly into a nook at the back of the Garland Road coffee shop she chose. She’s in dark, muted colors and almost curled into herself. The boldest thing about García today is her bangs, straight and sharp as a knife’s edge. Her tough Wealth Warrior guise is the armor she developed partly because she had to.
“I went to live with my aunt, and it was not a healthy environment for me there,” she continues. “I got pregnant, and I had my first child at 14 years old, and I lived with [my boyfriend’s] parents, which was—if I thought things were not that great before, it just got even worse. It was really dark. That’s where Miss Ekstrom comes in.”
Miss Ekstrom is Gigi Ekstrom, one of García’s teachers at Thomas Jefferson High School. When her name came up earlier in our conversation, García needed a moment. “She’s the reason why I’m here,” she said finally, wiping away tears.
Ekstrom had her own import business before teaching a class at Richland College led her to becoming a full-time educator. “One day they said, ‘Hey, would you go to Thomas Jefferson and teach this dual-credit course?’” she says. “I was like, ‘High school? Absolutely not.’ But I went over there and just fell in love with the kids.”
She also ran the DECA program at TJ, a club for students interested in careers in business of some sort—marketing, finance, hospitality. (She would later serve as D Magazine’s marketing director for several years, until retiring in 2023.) But Ekstrom’s lessons for her students were about more than just business. She was showing them that there was a different life out there, if they wanted it. She started with the simplest parts.
“She taught us how to eat at a table, which sounds so basic, but she’s like, ‘The [salad] forks are here.’ Then she always pushed us to eat things that were out of our comfort zone—the first time I ever had sushi was because of her. She would take us to nice restaurants,” says García, who was one of Ekstrom’s first students. “Just always pushing us. I traveled a lot with her, went to Florida, New York.”
The New York trip, in November 1998, included a perfect biopic sequence, the type of scene that is almost too on the nose. One morning, Ekstrom split her students into two groups: the first would attend a taping of Sally Jessy Raphael’s tabloid talk show; the second would tour the New York Stock Exchange. García was part of the latter cohort, which made her upset at the time. She really wanted to see Sally Jessy. But the author of a book about the stock market understands why now.
“That is what Miss Ekstrom does: she opens our eyes to the possibility of new spaces and new things,” García says. She still thinks of her as a teacher, which is why she can’t call her Gigi even though they’re both adults. “I sometimes try, and it’s uncomfortable.”
Despite the chaos of high school, García had done more than just get by, thanks to help from Ekstrom and other teachers. She was on the drill team and was senior class vice president. But Ekstrom’s biggest impact didn’t come until after graduation.
After her first year at Northwood University in Cedar Hill, García found herself with nowhere to live, so Ekstrom and her husband, Johan, took her in for the summer. (García’s daughter, Elizabeth, was with family.) The Ekstroms lived near Lower Greenville and didn’t have children of their own, nor did they plan to. They decided that when they got married. Ekstrom’s only experience with kids came from her classes. She didn’t know how to be a mother. “So moving a teenager into the house really was terrifying,” she says. She hit on two rules.
The first: García had to be home for dinner every night, which was a little more involved than it sounds. “Dinner” meant deciding what to have, walking down to the old Whole Foods on Greenville to pick up what they needed, cooking, eating and lingering at the table on the deck for hours, talking about their days, and then finally cleaning it all up. Every step done together.
“That’s always what I had done as a kid,” Ekstrom says, “and we just kept it up. We were just winging everything.”
Over those dinners, García became part of the family: “We call her First Daughter,” Ekstrom says, “like we’re an old Chinese family or something.” And once García was part of the family, the Ekstroms decided that having another kid, one with their DNA, wouldn’t be so bad. “She always talks about, ‘You did so much for me.’ I’m like, ‘Anders basically owes his life to you.’ It just made everything OK and made us not scared anymore.”
García still leans on the memories made during that time to keep her going whenever the darkness starts to creep in again. “Miss Ekstrom has the most rich life,” she says. “She’s so present in every single moment. Dinner was an entire experience, the entire evening. It really edified me. It gave me something that I didn’t know existed. It gave me something that I knew I wanted for myself in the future. To this day, that’s something that I carry that’s mine, that she gifted me in terms of how we conduct dinner in our home and things like that.”
The second rule was more straightforward but no less effective: García and Ekstrom had to pick one book a week, it didn’t matter which, and read it.
“She told me she hated to read, and I couldn’t imagine,” Ekstrom says. “We had walls and walls of bookshelves. We have a whole room in the house now that’s a library. We’re big readers. That was so sad to me, and I thought, ‘You’re dealing with all these things, and reading takes you away from that, at least temporarily.’” Ekstrom initially recalls the first book that García read as being the racy Nicci French thriller Killing Me Softly—which she still has—but emails me later to clarify that was actually the second book.
“The first was one I bought for her: Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts,” she writes. “It was the story of a pregnant 17-year-old girl who finds ‘home’ and ‘family’ in unlikely places. It also had some not-so-subtle plugs for education and reading, as well as for letting other people help you. … I guess the first one was more important to her, but the second one stuck out to me—it wasn’t just a one-time thing to humor me, it was becoming a habit.”
“That was another really rich experience,” García says. “Just having—and I told them this—that getting to write my own book and become a published author was amazing, but I truly mean it when I say that the most amazing part of it”—she pauses, her eyes welling up again—“was getting to have my book in her library.”
It’s on the shelf next to that old dog-eared paperback copy of Killing Me Softly.
To get on that shelf, to write a book about the stock market, García had to learn about it herself. That process began only a decade or so ago.
After college, García moved back to California to make her way in the entertainment industry, even taking a huge pay cut at one point to take a career-advancing internship. By 2012, she worked her way up to a job at Netflix. She was working in operations, managing Latin America. “I was making sure all of the assets like subtitles, dubs, and all of the content was coming in.”
At Netflix, she started to heal what she calls in her book “money wounds,” the scarcity mindset that had mostly been in place since she was a preschooler rotating through the only two outfits in her closet, both of which were hand-me-downs. By 2012, when García joined the company, she had learned how to make money. The salary bump would allow her to move in with her partner, Alfonso Ayala. But now she would learn how to make it work for her.
She befriended a coworker, a German immigrant named Nadine Dennis, who helped her get the hang of things around the office and also pushed her to set her first long-term financial goal: having $10,000 in her savings account. “You just have to imagine the amount like it’s no big deal,” Dennis told her. García reached her goal in about a year, using a high-yield savings account.
Problem was, once she got there, she became, as she puts it, “obsessed” with that figure. “I couldn’t even stand seeing it at $9,999.”
Dennis became another Miss Ekstrom to García, showing her a different life that was out there. She booked an all-inclusive vacation to a high-end resort in Mexico and encouraged her friend to do something similar for herself. “You have to stop being so restrictive, Linda. You can’t save all this money only for emergencies.”
But it was another colleague, a higher-up named Nick Levin, who really opened up her world, pushing her to get involved in the stock market. At that point, she wasn’t even contributing to a 401(k), which the company would have matched. García was scared of any risk. As she writes in Wealth Warrior, “I still had to deal with the fearmongering voices in my head: the stock market is for White people. You are not smart or White. You are going to lose it all.”
After a quarterly earnings call, Levin asked García if she had started investing in Netflix yet. No, she told him. “Stocks shot up after yesterday’s call, and we all made a killing,” he said. “You need to get in on this, Linda.” He didn’t leave it at that. The next day, he came back with his portfolio, showing her the charts and graphs, how the stock was performing. “This is where you should have started.” He pointed to his phone. “Why didn’t you start here? We’ve wasted all these months.” Levin wasn’t chastising her for being stupid. He was reminding her she was smart. She knew the business, knew where it was headed. She needed to use that to her advantage.
So she did. García started studying, spending the rest of 2012 listening to old earnings calls, reading books such as Benjamin Graham’s 1949 financial bible, The Intelligent Investor (which had inspired a young Warren Buffett), and anything else she could get her hands on. She googled the terms she didn’t know, then googled the terms in those explanations. Once the door opened, she ran through it.
“Little by little, I started to understand what all the terminology is, because it’s like an entire language,” she says. “I became so passionate about it. I was really shocked by my interest in it. Then slowly, that turned into an interest in economics overall and understanding the economy and the triggers of the economy.” She pauses. “I also understood I wanted to be wealthy. I was like, ‘I want to be rich.’ ”
In 2013, García made her move. She calculated that she could afford to lose $2,500 a year, so she began putting $208 each month into purchasing Netflix stock. After the first year, the price jumped from $13 to $52. She upped her spend to $416 a month. Over three years, she invested a total of $9,000, then let it go to work. It was nerve-racking at times watching the stock rise and fall, hearing those fearmongering voices whispering to her again, feeling the ache of her money wound scars.
But she left it alone, determined to keep it in the market for the full 10 years that she had planned, even after she and Ayala were both laid off within weeks of each other in 2015. Even after she found out, a couple of weeks after that, she was pregnant with her son, Benicio.
It eventually turned into $500,000.
All that studying of the markets helped more than just her portfolio. García noticed the patterns, how every eight or 10 or 12 years there was an inflection point, a crisis to some and an opportunity to those prepared to act on it. “Ideas are born,” she says. “Millionaires are born.” She missed the last one in 2008, during the housing market crash. But she knew another was due. She waited. She got ready.
Then came 2020. The pandemic. She and Ayala had moved back to Texas, settling in Mesquite a year earlier. Benicio was ready for school, and they had been priced out of all the good districts in Los Angeles. In January 2020, García was still figuring out her next moves when the first whispers of “coronavirus” were coming out of China.
“I immediately knew: This is going to come to the United States,” she says. “But my messaging, what I was focusing on, is there’s going to be a massive opportunity in the stock market. I start to call my friends and family, and my family is like, ‘Have you slept?’ ”
She turned to her Instagram Stories instead, where she found a surprisingly willing audience. “All this time, I was afraid to share my knowledge on the market because for the Latino community and in the spaces that I was in, there’s a lot of hate towards capitalism. There’s a lot of hate towards money. It’s looked at as greedy, and there’s all these perceptions that I was afraid to share.”
Viewers sent her DMs, wondering what books they should get, what resources were available. But she couldn’t think of anything “that wouldn’t absolutely scare them away.” She began to build her own course, distilling all that she had learned for herself into a how-to that was easy to digest. “It just came pouring out of me,” she says. So much so that when she was done, the course was a robust 10 hours. Originally, she had planned to give it away, but given what she had put into it, and the hunger for something like it, she realized its value. Her value. She decided to charge for it.
“When I woke up the next morning, it had made $20,000,” she says. It was only the beginning. The course went viral. Over the next 10 months, she says, it generated $682,000 in revenue. That is in addition to what she made from following her own advice. She had taken a third of her stock—about $100,000 at the time—that was originally earmarked for a down payment on a house and aggressively reinvested when the market bottomed out on March 23, 2020.
Two of the people who bought her course—a couple of times, as it turns out—were a book agent and an editor from Legacy Lit, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, one of the “Big Five” publishers. They emailed her to say they thought she had a book. Though García had always imagined that her first book would be on a different topic, she agreed. Legacy Lit published Wealth Warrior in April 2023.
“There’s a void that needs to be met,” she says. “There’s so many books on the market, but there isn’t a book on the market that starts from our perspective, from our level, our understanding.” (It’s also in Spanish now, after HarperCollins Espanol bought the translation rights.) “We’re so comfortable being the first in line to get an Apple product,” she says, “but yet we are afraid to just buy a share of Apple. It doesn’t make sense.”
She’s right. No one else was talking about money wounds or the scarcity mindset, and certainly no one else would use Bad Bunny and Snow Tha Product lyrics as chapter-heading epigraphs, as Wealth Warrior does. Woven through with her personal narrative, which is refreshingly honest about mistakes she’s made since becoming an investor, the book doesn’t go into as much detail as the course. But there is more than enough to give readers a solid foothold to build on, not to mention the encouragement to do so.
And maybe there was an unexpected side effect that emerged from the book. Perhaps all that time spent thinking and writing about risk put her in the mindset to say yes when Victoria Neave Criado reached out a couple of months later to ask her to run for her seat in the Texas House.
Neave Criado knows she made the right choice when she landed on García as her successor.
“This district, it’s over 60 percent Latino. It’s over 76 percent Black and Latino. And so knowing that she’s already been a champion—she has a record of advocating for communities of color—she’s the perfect person to represent the district,” says Neave Criado, one of just six Latinas in the state’s history to chair a committee. “We know that all last year there were attacks by the governor, the lieutenant governor, the speaker—everything ranging from attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion to immigration policy and so many other things. It’s really important to have a woman, a Latina, representing this incredibly diverse district.”
As expected, García won the Democratic primary in May without really campaigning. With help from her sister-in-law and volunteers, she’s doing more now, though again she won’t face a challenger in the November general. Mostly she’s focused on fundraising so she can supplement the meager budget state representatives are given to run the required district office. “I didn’t realize that,” she says. “I think had I realized that, I probably would’ve been more generous in donating. Maybe not a lot, but more frequently what I could.”
(Meanwhile, her work as a financial educator continues. In early May, People’s Self-Help Housing, a nonprofit affordable housing organization founded in 1970 in California’s Central Coast, received a $50,000 grant from Wells Fargo to fund the three-month Wealth Warrior: 2024 Financial Health and Housing course for 25 USDA farmworker households, with García as program facilitator.)
As for her legislative agenda, she says that at least some of her focus will be on helping public schools, as a proud product and continuing success story. It is more than a personal connection, however.
“It’s just so hard to wrap my head around why we keep removing resources from public school systems when these children, whether folks like it or not, will eventually be the infrastructure of Texas,” she says. “If we’re not investing into these students, into their education, then what can we expect from the state of Texas in 10, 15, or 20 years?”
But what she really wants is to effect change in other ways. Not through any specific policy, but just by being there, by being proud of who she is, who she’s always been. Moving between California and Texas as a young girl and later as an adult, she has seen the difference between Latinas in the two states. Women here, she has noticed, still feel the need to assimilate. They don’t speak Spanish. They hide in conservative suits and accessories. They feel they have to be a certain way to get what they want. García knows that’s not true, but she understands. She’s sympathetic.
“I have an amazing friend who went to SMU—we went to high school together—very, very intelligent,” she says. “Just recently, she went to a meeting at her workplace, and she’s in a high-up executive position. She’s like, ‘I wore my hoops and my lipstick,’ and it was such an accomplishment for her.”
And so, in January, when García is sworn in, she will do so in her own big gold hoop earrings and bright red lipstick. Because, she says, “I don’t give a fuck. This is who I am.” She laughs. “I’ve been done showing up this way.”
This story originally appeared in the August issue of D Magazine with the headline “Dollars and Sense.” Write to feedback@dmagazine.com.
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