Dr. Clotilde Perez Garcia Delivered over 10,000 Babies, Then Became the Historian Who Refused to Let Texas Rewrite Her People

If you grew up in Texas, you probably learned the names of generals, governors, and oilmen. You probably did not learn the name of a Mexican-American doctor who delivered thousands of South Texas babies. A doctor who fought discrimination in her own hospital, and spent decades preserving the very history the state tends to sand down.

Her name was Dr. Clotilde “Cleo” Pérez García. And the wild part is how easy it is to miss her, unless you know where to look.

Meet Clotilde Perez Garcia, the doctor South Texas still calls Cleo

Clotilde Pérez García was born on January 9, 1917, in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico, according to the Texas State Historical Association. She came from a family that treated education like a nightly ritual. TSHA reports that her father, José García, taught his children advanced subjects after school, and six of the seven García siblings later earned advanced medical degrees.

The family also carried the Mexican Revolution in their suitcase. According to TSHA, they fled the violence and instability and settled in Mercedes, Texas, in 1918, where they opened a dry goods store.

She crossed a border as a baby and grew up with history at the kitchen table

Clotilde was the fourth of seven children, born to a college professor and a schoolteacher. In other words, she grew up in a house where learning never stayed inside the classroom.

Her father steered the kids toward medicine for a practical reason. García recalled that her father said it was “the only way you could be independent and serve humanity.”

And independence was not just a cute aspiration for Mexican Americans in early 20th-century Texas.

Clotilde Perez Garcia kept teaching because the Depression delayed med school

After graduating from Mercedes High School in 1934, García earned an associate degree in 1936 from Edinburg Junior College, now part of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She then attended the University of Texas at Austin and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1938.

She wanted medical school next. The Great Depression had other plans. According to TSHA, she returned home to support her family and taught in South Texas communities through the late 1930s and 1940s, including Tienditas, Benavides, Hebbronville, and Mercedes.

During those years, she became a naturalized citizen in 1940. She also married Hipólito Canales in 1943, divorced shortly afterward, and had one child, José Antonio Canales. Her son later became one of the first Tejanos appointed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Then she circled back to UT Austin. She studied Latin American literature under George I. Sánchez and earned a master’s in education in 1950.

UTMB in 1954: seven women, one Mexican American, and a future pioneer

From there, she went to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. She graduated in 1954 as one of only seven women and the only Mexican-American woman in her class.

She completed her internship at Corpus Christi Memorial Hospital in 1955 and opened a private practice in Corpus Christi.

Now, a Mexican-American woman doctor in the 1950s should be a headline in any state history book. Instead, her story often lives in archives, local memory, and the names people whisper with gratitude.

Clotilde Perez Garcia delivered nearly 10,000 babies and still made house calls

García delivered nearly 10,000 babies over a forty-year career. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times also described her as someone who “had people to see and babies to deliver,” and reported that she charged $3 for an office visit early on, with deliveries costing $25, including prenatal and postnatal care, later rising to $100 by the 1960s.

In a 1994 Caller-Times interview, García said: “We did everything from bones to brains,” adding, “Children, men, women, geriatrics. There was no distinction. I did a lot of surgery because we didn’t have enough surgeons.”

She educated patients on preventive medicine, hygiene, nutrition, and infant care, and she regularly attended the funerals of deceased patients.

When segregation tried to box her in, she pushed back

Perez Garcia was a pioneer physician, yes. But she also fought against discrimination. She protested after hospital staff denied her access to the doctors’ cafeteria because of her race. Similarly, a property owner refused to sell her a lakefront house in Corpus Christi because of her race, and she responded by building nearby instead.

Clotilde Perez Garcia went from medicine to memory work

By the mid-1970s, TSHA reports that García began promoting local history and Hispanic genealogy, publishing a translated account of the 1812 Siege of Camargo in 1975, later expanding it into a monograph. She followed that work with eight additional volumes on local historical figures, including José Nicolás Ballí, Blas María de la Garza Falcón, and Enrique Villarreal.

Then she built infrastructure for other researchers. She co-founded the Spanish American Genealogical Association in 1987 and served as its first president, with the group focused on developing genealogical data on early Spanish and Mexican settlers of South Texas.

And she did something quietly radical: she gave away her materials. The Caller-Times reported that in 1986, she donated a large collection of personal books and materials on Hispanic genealogy to the Corpus Christi Public Library system so that other researchers could access them.

After her death, the Caller-Times quoted library director Herb Canales saying, “She gave many of us our history. She gave us roots, and that’s no small task.”

Texas did honor her, eventually, but her legacy never needed permission

Her résumé reads like someone who lived several lifetimes at once.

Clotilde Perez Garcia served on the Del Mar College board of regents from 1960 to 1982 and founded the Carmelite Day Nursery Parents and Friends Club in 1968 to support children of working poor families. She advocated for public school desegregation, bilingual education, and federally funded school breakfast programs.

Similarly, she worked closely with her brother, Dr. Héctor P. García, through the American G.I. Forum Women’s Auxiliary, participated in the Valley Farm Workers Minimum Wage March of 1966, and served as national health director for LULAC in 1966. She helped organise Viva Kennedy and Viva Johnson efforts in South Texas and served on multiple state and national commissions, TSHA says, including the Texas Constitutional Revision Commission and the Task Force to Evaluate Medicaid in Texas.

Recognition did come. King Juan Carlos I of Spain awarded her the Royal American Order of Isabella the Catholic in 1990 for her work promoting South Texas’s Hispanic past. She also joined the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame. A Texas A&M University Corpus Christi exhibit about her 1984 Hall of Fame induction preserves that moment, including an audio recording of her induction speech.

But even the awards feel secondary to the receipts she left behind. After a stroke in 1994, she retired from medicine and reduced her public involvement. She died in Corpus Christi on May 23, 2003, and her papers and research materials later went to Special Collections and Archives at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi.

Perez Garcia’s work refuses to disappear. It sits in archives. It sits in libraries. It sits in the lives of people who entered the world because she showed up, washed her hands, and got to work.