Angela Garcia: A businesswoman who started life at the bottom

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4 p.m. Thursday, May 8.

Las Cruces businesswoman Angela Garcia’s family built a successful business around helping young children learn and grow.

But life for Garcia didn’t start out easy.

Garcia, 37, grew up not in Las Cruces but in a neighborhood in downtown Albuquerque she calls “a war zone.” She was a product of generational poverty.

“I’ve been there,” she said. “I know how bad it can be.”

But she attributes her success to her parents. Garcia said her parents decided to change the narrative by moving to Las Cruces to open a business in 2001. Garcia’s parents became the first business owners in their family when her mother opened a daycare called the Toy Box Early Learning and Childcare Center.

“I saw her fall in love with early childhood and the impact she had in supporting families,” Garcia said.

Garcia’s father also opened a new business by obtaining a commercial driver’s license. This enabled him to become a courier and deliver lab work and equipment for pharmacies and hospitals across the state.

“Watching what my parents did changed my future,” Garcia said. “They made a whole lot of something out of nothing. They gave me the opportunity.”

Garcia was the first in her family to earn a college degree. She then became chief executive officer of the Toy Box in 2010 and expanded the business by opening Toy Box Too at 2551 Sonora Springs Blvd., in 2019. She said the business has continued to grow and she now has more than 300 clients and 80 employees.

“If you have happy children, you have happy families, and then the village is taken care of,” she said.

Garcia, who is a single mother of two, said that is why it is so important to “center our community around our children.”

Garcia is also passionate about giving back to the community. She started a nonprofit advocacy group called Full Circle which advocates for early childhood education and childhood wellbeing. She has served on a steering committee called the Early Learning Nation Collective, which advocates for equitable access to early learning opportunities. She has advocated at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe for the importance of early childhood education and for a state-level trust fund to provide funding for early childhood education into the future.

“We are an amazing state,” said Garcia. “We have so much other places don’t have. We’re all going to have to lean into each other to create an early childhood community, state and nation. It will fix everything.”