Recipient of a BYU Honored Alumni Award, a former athlete and communications star has been chasing dreams her whole life
Recipient of a BYU Honored Alumni Award, a former athlete and communications star has been chasing dreams her whole life.
I did many things in my life that my parents didn’t approve of,” says María Guadalupe “Pitty” García Cardiell (BA ’81, MA ’91). Paradoxically, it was the lessons learned from her parents as a child in Toluca, Mexico—“Do your best, try your best, pursue an education”—that led García Cardiell to defy their wishes. “But later on, they were happy with my choices.”
It wasn’t any indiscretion that worried her parents and four brothers. Rather, it was her dogged pursuit of dreams that ran counter to cultural and familial expectations—from becoming a competitive runner as a girl to attending a university abroad to her eventual marriage choice. Despite her family’s disapproval, García Cardiell worked to keep her family close. She succeeded: When her parents visited BYU years later, she recalls, “they wept as they arrived in Provo.” When García Cardiell asked why, they said, “Because this city and university shaped you in so many nice ways.”
Read the full story here: https://magazine.byu.edu/article/irrepressible-fuerza-femenina/
Full Name: María Guadalupe “Pitty” García Cardiell
Grad Year: BA 1981, MA 1991
College: Fine Arts and Communications
Major: Communications
Post date: May 27, 2020
Author:
Andrew T. Bay (BA ’91, MA ’94)