Rep. Robert Garcia captivated an audience of high school seniors as he recounted his life story from growing up poor in Peru, to being a gay man raised in a conservative Catholic family, to being an undocumented immigrant with uncertain futures, to now being a member of Congress.

Students in his advanced political science class at Ernest S. McBride High School in Long Beach peppered him with pointed questions, particularly about whether his origins and background ever made him feel like a fraud among his classmates.

“I've had imposter syndrome my whole life. I've always had imposter syndrome,” Garcia told the students, many of whom were Latino. “And you'll have imposter syndrome too. I've never felt prepared, never felt prepared enough to step into any situation I've ever been in.”

His parents brought him to the United States when he was five to escape terrorism and economic instability in Peru, but overstayed their visa. He learned English by reading comic books, and Superman later became something of a role model.

Garcia grew up watching her mother clean houses and work at a thrift store before starting work at a health clinic. Garcia, who became a citizen when he was a college student, struggled to tell his religious family that he was gay.

The 46-year-old freshman congressman, who represents a district centered around Long Beach, has quickly risen through the ranks within the Democratic Party.

Garcia will serve as mayor of Long Beach, a city with roughly the same population as Miami and a LGBTQ+ stronghold, from 2014 to 2022. Prior to that, he served five years on the City Council. He is the city's youngest mayor, its first openly gay mayor, and its first Latino mayor. He was then elected to the House of Representatives in 2022 and was named chairman of the Newcomer Democratic Caucus.

Garcia was reminded of the fears he felt as an undergraduate during a recent visit to his alma mater, California State University, Long Beach.

“I'm low-income, I'm first-generation, no one in my family went to college,” Garcia said, admiring a pantry stocked with pasta, fruit and cereal for food-insecure students. “Most of my time in college we barely had anything to eat. When I was a student here, we didn't have any of this.”

Garcia then jogged upstairs to the student union building where she once served as student body president. She greeted the incoming student body president, Nikki Majidi of Mission Viejo, and then crawled under a desk in a tradition for student body presidents at Cal State Long Beach. “We all signed the bottom of the desk,” Garcia said.

He was a college student at a turbulent time in his life; a motivated student, yet undocumented and anxious about his future.

“Most of my life, I wanted to be an American, I wanted to be a citizen,” Garcia told high school students in May. “And I think when you're an immigrant, you're really thinking, 'Am I going to get a job? Am I going to get assistance?' I remember being in college and being in class and thinking, 'Oh my God, I don't have a green card, I don't have citizenship. How am I going to get a job in the future, how am I going to have the same access as my other classmates?'”

Garcia said he and his family eventually received citizenship thanks to an amnesty law signed by President Reagan, which he said is one of the reasons they all registered as Republicans – a point critics often make.

He served as California youth coordinator for George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign and founded the Long Beach Young Republicans in 2005. He later registered as a state opt-out voter and changed his party affiliation to Democrat in 2007, two years before he was elected to the city council, according to the Los Angeles County voter registration database.

He says his change in thinking reflects a political evolution: His background has shaped his ideology, and it's especially pronounced at a moment in the country's history when the communities he is a part of — Latinos, immigrants and LGBTQ+ people — feel increasingly threatened.

“Our community is under direct attack right now,” Garcia said at a drag brunch fundraiser at Hamburger Mary's in Long Beach last year. “As everyone enjoys and celebrates this wonderful day, I want everyone to remember that we haven't been in a situation like this in probably decades.”

Garcia pointed to Republican efforts to restrict content in public school libraries, ban LGBTQ+ couples from adopting, enact new abortion restrictions and weaken labor unions.

“This is a moment for our community to remember our roots… and that we are in a position to speak up to help those who are marginalized and in need,” he concluded.

Garcia recalled that when he ran for mayor, he doubted voters would support him because of his youth, sexual orientation, ethnicity and working-class background.

“My first day at City Hall, I thought, 'Oh my God, what am I doing here?' You know, I'm the mayor of this great city,” Garcia told the high school students. “It just stayed with me because of the environment we grew up in. And the fact is, I was up to the job, and I did it to the best of my ability, and I'm very proud of the job we've done.”

Garcia enjoys unusual power and public attention for a freshman minority member. His chief of staff previously served in that role under House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). He sits on the Homeland Security Committee, the Oversight and Accountability Committee, and the Subcommittee on Pandemics. His mother and stepfather died from COVID complications early in the pandemic.

Garcia's walking speed around the Capitol is astounding – his spokeswoman, Sara Guerrero, said she broke three pairs of heels trying to keep up with him.

His role as Democratic freshman class president gave him access to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), cabinet members and other top leaders, and he also cultivated friendly relationships with freshman Republicans such as Reps. Russell Frye of South Carolina, Mike Lawler of New York and Kevin Kiley of Rocklin, Northern California. (“I think Kiley's politics are terrible,” he said.)

Asked if those relationships could lead to bipartisan legislation, Garcia denied it.

“We don't know what's going to happen. This is not a time for bipartisan unity in this country,” he said in an interview in his congressional office. “We have to defeat Donald Trump and we have to stop these extremists from destroying our country. So right now, I'm just thinking about how to defeat Mike Lawler, not how to work with Mike Lawler. And I'm telling Mike that.”

That's a stark difference from his time as an independent mayor of an overwhelmingly Democratic city. In Congress, Garcia quickly became battling “what I consider to be the bad guys in D.C..”

His method of operation is to “expose all lies and refute all insane conspiracy theories.”

In committee hearings and in the news, he has attacked Republicans, particularly Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, calling her a “national embarrassment.”

“I make it my job to make their lives miserable because they deserve it,” Garcia said. He criticized Greene for attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci's work on the COVID-19 pandemic. Garcia called Fauci a hero for his work on the disease and on AIDS decades ago.

“I feel it's my responsibility to blame her, and I do,” he said of Green. “She hates me.”

She also condemned Peru after it declared transgender people “mentally disabled” and pulled out of an event at its embassy.

He has faced criticism: In the 2022 House primary, Democratic rivals cited his Republican past and accused him of being overly close to powerful interests such as real estate developers.

These days, the most intense backlash Garcia faces tends to come on social media. During a recent lunch at Hoff's Hut with Long Beach's female elected leaders, Garcia opened her X profile on her phone and found that nearly every post, regardless of content, was met with homophobic or racist responses.

“It doesn't bother me at all,” he says. “Even if we offend these awful people, I know we're doing the right thing, because we're fighting for what we believe in.”

But he also uses social media and pop culture humor to get his message across. When Politico included him on its list of “Most Shamelessly Media-Seeking Congressmen” this year, Garcia posted a GIF of “RuPaul's Drag Race” star Adore Delano sipping a drink and wrote, “Thirsty.”

“We're rooting for our messed up queen, and having one in Congress is the best thing that's happened to Congress in years,” his office said in a press release.

He's made comments about RuPaul and Beyoncé on the House floor and quoted a monologue from “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” during an Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing about Hunter Biden.

Garcia was one of the most junior members of Biden's National Advisory Committee for Re-election before he withdrew from the race and Harris became his candidate. Garcia has a longstanding relationship with Harris, having been sworn in when she was elected mayor in 2014 and initially supporting Garcia in the 2020 presidential election.

Garcia's seat in the House is heavily Democratic, meaning he could hold the position for decades if he chooses, but many in political circles expect him to run for statewide office one day, and Garcia hasn't ruled out the possibility.

“I don't know if I'd run for anything else, so I'm not ruling anything out,” he said over dinner at a Peruvian sushi restaurant in Long Beach.

Nor does he seem to have forgotten his shared roots with his high school students. Garcia's campaign logo has a superhero vibe, paying homage to the comics that taught him English and values ​​social justice. He identifies most with Superman because of his search for truth and goodness, his love of country, and his tagline, “a strange visitor from another planet,” a metaphor for the immigrant experience.

As Garcia was sworn in, he placed his hands on a copy of the Constitution placed on top of his citizenship certificate, photos of his late mother and stepfather and an original copy of the first Superman comic book from 1939 that he had borrowed from the Library of Congress.

Mehta reported from Long Beach and Castillo from Washington, D.C.