By Rus Bradburd
After Alvaro Garcia had the staggering misfortune of witnessing his father’s execution in 2020, he found comfort in Lucky Charms, the high-in-sugar, highly processed breakfast cereal.
Luck had been hard to come by for Alvaro. His mother wasn’t around much in those days, and besides, she’d started a new family a half hour north of Las Cruces, where Alvaro lived. After his father’s murder, Alvaro, not yet 18, had to figure out how to take care of himself and his special-needs younger brother, Ivan.
Alvaro soon fell into the bad habit of knocking out four big bowls of Lucky Charms each day, and that wasn’t the only time he found comfort in food. Really, any sweets would do. Fast food meant instant gratification. With the COVID pandemic raging, and the paranoia about the unknown raging through the community, what else could he do but eat?
Team sports weren’t on the table. Back in junior high school they’d been a turnoff — for one thing, he wasn’t very fast, and he was always a bit heavy, which didn’t help. Mostly, he didn’t like relying on teammates. The PAL Boxing Club, where he’d dabbled in training for three years prior to losing his father, was temporarily closed due to the pandemic.
When Alvaro was just 11, he’d seen maybe the most important fight in the history of Las Cruces, the 2013 unifying championship showdown between world middleweight champion, Canelo Alvarez and Las Cruces native Austin Trout, a product of the PAL Boxing Gym.
In front of 40,000 fans in San Antonio and a record Showtime audience, Trout lost a close decision, but Alvaro was still enraptured with the local lefty. Soon after that championship bout, Alvaro’s parents got a divorce, and he and his younger brother, Ivan, moved in with his grandmother, where he’d stay all through junior high and high school.
Alvaro was bullied throughout middle school, but the abuse was mostly verbal. “I was always heavy as a kid,” he says, “200 pounds in middle school, and I guess I was insecure. I wanted to be successful so I wouldn’t be insecure anymore.”
Alvaro had a complicated relationship with his father. “My dad wasn’t the nicest person,” he said. “I was verbally abused, and my comfort was from food. He called me fat.”
His father was born in Ciudad Juárez, and he came to the United States when he was very young. He was a hard worker, Alvaro says, who once decided to run 10 miles each morning and shed his own considerable pounds. Alvaro says this was the best thing he inherited from his dad. “He showed me what work ethic was, and he always did what he said he was going to do,” he said.
The running, Alvaro is convinced, improved his parenting for a while. “You’re going to be better than me,” the father began to tell him.
While he was attending Sierra Middle School, on a local field trip focused on preparing for college, Alvaro had an odd premonition. He approached a teacher named Julie Wojtko and asked if it was too late to join her class geared for kids who were determined to attend college.
Wojtko would soon have a profound influence on his life. Today, in retrospect, she says that influence worked both ways. Soon, it was obvious to her that Alvaro was bright, a good reader, curious about the world, and interested in books.
Near the end of Alvaro’s time as an eighth-grader at Sierra, he learned about a college prep-focused school in Las Cruces called Arrowhead Park Early College High School, and he was accepted there.
Around that time, Alvaro says, his father got into abusing methamphetamine. Then, his mother did as well.
“My mom wasn’t really the best mom,” said Alvaro, who is prone to vast understatement. “But her drug use stopped soon after. She had a boyfriend then who was abusive, and he didn’t like for our mom to see us.”
The instability of his home life was unsettling, but Arrowhead seemed to offer a new path, especially when he learned his favorite teacher would be going there, too.
“Alvaro once told me at first that he wanted to be rich someday,” Wojtko said. She understood that to mean that he no longer wanted to be poor.
Arrowhead represented an important new chapter in Alvaro’s life, where academic achievement became hugely important. The intensely demanding high school sat on the edge of the New Mexico State University campus, which also held a certain allure. At Arrowhead, he was surrounded by overachievers and motivated students, and he could get lost in books and the advanced coursework.
“I liked debates and science, too,” he said. “And I liked math, until it got to calculus.”
He liked social studies best with Wojtko.
Once, in an essay for her class, Alvaro wrote, “I want to make a difference in life, and not fall into generational curses and stay in the same place, I don’t want to live my life in poverty so I have to make a way for myself.”
Alvaro was nearly done with his sophomore year at Arrowhead when he began training at the Sammy Burke Police Athletic League Boxing Club on Solano Drive near his grandmother’s home. This meant he got a very late start in the sport for competitive boxing, putting him at a disadvantage almost immediately.
As much as Alvaro was put off by team sports, something about the individual responsibility in the ring resonated with him. His father, however, wasn’t wild about Alvaro participating in the sport.
“My dad didn’t want me to get hit,” Alvaro recalls. “I started going pretty often, sometimes every day, and working pretty hard. But not nearly as hard as I would work later.”
The scruffy-but-spacious PAL gym had two full-sized boxing rings and was populated with mostly teenage boys and girls. Many local youth, surely numbering in the thousands over the years, had come through the doors to exercise or train, as part of the gym’s open door policy.
From these scores of youth, with many hopefuls among them, some have gone on to win Golden Glove awards at the state level. Alvaro was lucky that the gym also had a remarkable coaching staff that would rival Arrowhead’s.
The main trainer was Louie Burke, son of the gym’s namesake. Burke had once been world ranked, was the ESPN champion, and he finished his pro career with a stellar 19-3 record. He also worked Austin Trout’s corner as trainer during the Showtime bout that captivated Alvaro four years earlier.
A firefighter by trade, Burke had a wealth of knowledge and was an elite teacher of technical aspects of the sport like footwork, balance, angles and counter-punching.
Burke had a quiet confidence and understated assuredness. He never shouted at the kids, never cursed or pressured them, and that was appealing to Alvaro. Burke’s patient approach stood in stark contrast to what Alvaro had been through at home.
He found Alvaro perplexing at first.
“He couldn’t do much,” Burke said, “and he was a bit frustrating to work with because he was uncoordinated. At first, it was somewhat annoying, and I didn’t know if he’d stick with it.”
Early on, Burke tried to show Alvaro the basic weaving motion, the twisting of the torso and bending the knees, crucial for a fighter to avoid being hit.
“He couldn’t do it,” Burke recalls. “I remember grabbing him by the shoulders to try to move him. He had a hard time grasping the basics.”
With as many as 40 girls and boys on any given day, Burke and his assistant trainers — all volunteers — have to spread out and help wherever they can, particularly when beginners come into the gym. One of Burke’s assistants, Henry Cabrera, worked hard with Alvaro on his woeful conditioning.
Another assistant trainer was a former amateur boxer named Gary Sanchez. He had trained under Burke two decades prior, and he won nearly 40 amateur fights to be nationally ranked at age 16. Now a firefighter like Burke, Sanchez was able to connect with Alvaro in his first months at the gym. Sanchez walked Alvaro through the basics, stressing the left jab, then the classic one-two, left-right combination.
“He was really overweight,” Sanchez recalls, “maybe 220, and I remember thinking that I wasn’t sure what might happen with this kid.”
Like Burke, Sanchez often wondered if Alvaro would return the next day. “I didn’t know how long Alvaro would stick with it,” he said, “but from the start he possessed a certain grit.”
One thing stood out to Sanchez initially.
“Alvaro immediately wanted to spar,” he said, “to get in the ring the first day!”
Most kids would be afraid to step into the ring against a live opponent before they were ready, so this was a very unusual desire. The potential beat-down of a novice fighter is a genuine fear among trainers. An experienced boxing lifer like Louie Burke or Sanchez would never allow anyone into the ring to spar who hadn’t been drilled for a few months at least in the basics of defense, the blocking, weaving, and parrying necessary to survive.
Sanchez told Alvaro that his progress would be gradual, he had to be patient, that sparring too soon was dangerous. Not to be deterred, Alvaro insisted again on sparring his second day at the gym.
“In those first years,” Sanchez said, “Alvaro really fell in love with the sport. He was anxious to improve right away, and that’s what would distinguish him, he was determined to get better at all costs.”
Despite training a few days each week at the PAL boxing gym, Alvaro’s diet and weight were becoming more of an issue.
“At one point, I got up to 240 pounds in high school,” he said.
Boxing was more of a hobby, and he wasn’t totally committed. His weight fluctuated, as did his dedication and eating habits.
Six months after he began training as a boxer, Alvaro had his first amateur fight in Roswell, New Mexico. On Dec. 3, 2019, he fought as a 203-pound heavyweight, and he won.
But a few months later the COVID virus changed his streak of good luck. The PAL Boxing Club closed, and Alvaro, still living with his grandmother, went looking for work to fill his time and help her with bills. He landed a job at Wendy’s, which took the place of boxing training and accelerated his tendency to eat unwisely.
He was the closer at Wendy’s, a lonely and bleak job for a teen.
“I’d be there from 5 p.m. until 3 a.m.,” he said, “then, I’d sleep for a while until it was time to go back to Arrowhead.”
With his training regime at the boxing gym on hold, and the tempting scent of French fries pervading the air with false promise, his weight started to go back up.
Trauma and tragedy land a blow
Aug. 23, 2020, was a Sunday, and Alvaro’s senior year at Arrowhead had just gotten underway. That evening, his father asked Alvaro to accompany him to an apartment complex at 1900 S. Solano Drive in Las Cruces because he had some business to attend to.
“Let me drive,” his father said. “You don’t know where I’m going.”
Why his father would want a teenager to go along on this late night errand — like a lot of things about that night — remains a mystery.
Alvaro waited in the car, 20 yards from the front door where his father disappeared. A few minutes later, a man burst out of the apartment, turned back towards the open door, and opened fire with a handgun. Soon, two other people ran out of the apartment and pulled the door shut.
Alvaro’s father was still inside.
Panicked and thinking he might be shot next, Alvaro scooted, took the steering wheel and squealed tires as he drove away. Rather than return to his grandmother’s place, he parked on a side street a few hundred yards away, got out of the car, and went running back to the apartment to find his father.
In crisis, we do strange things, and how driving away and running back would help the situation is still unclear to Alvaro. He needed to tell somebody what happened, but who could he call? Not his brother Ivan, who would flip. Not his mother. Instead he phoned his aunt Mayra. Soon, sirens were blaring, and the police arrived.
“I think my dad’s inside there,” Alvaro told a policeman and pointed. “I think he might have been shot.”
The apartment door was now locked, but the police quickly knocked the door down. That’s when Alvaro saw his father, bloody and on the ground, struggling to breathe. The officers struggled to revive him, while Alvaro was whisked off to a police station to give a statement about what he saw.
The Las Cruces police officers he dealt with were exceedingly kind, he said.
“That’s when they told me he’d died,” Alvaro said. “I think it was a drug deal gone wrong. My dad caught the other guy stealing, and he punched him.”
A warrant would go out for Antonio Perez, a convicted felon, and soon he’d be arrested and charged with murder.
By the time Alvaro got home from the police station, it was nearly sunrise on a Monday. What does a teenager do on the day after his father was murdered when he’s gone with no sleep?
“Alvaro still attended classes the day after his father was killed,” Wojtko recalls, “and that really stuck out to me. I think our school was his safe space.”
The gym as trauma therapy
The PAL Boxing Club was another safe space, but one that was still shuttered due to the pandemic. Soon after his father’s murder, Alvaro called Louie Burke’s girlfriend, asking for help. He told her his father had been killed.
“Can you have Louie open the gym so I can train?” he asked.
Burke recalls, “Alvaro wanted Gary Sanchez to come in and train him. That really impressed me and showed how much love he had for the sport.”
Alvaro continued to live with his grandmother. Ivan, two years younger, had previously moved in with his mother in Hatch, 40 miles north of Las Cruces. But, that year, his mother began struggling badly again.
“She went to jail,” Alvaro said, “and Ivan wound up living for three months at My Friend’s Place, a home for at-risk teens.”
My Friend’s Place, Alvaro learned, is often the last step before foster care.
Alvaro was still 17 years old, but he’d turn 18 on Aug. 27, 2021, almost exactly a year after his father was gunned down. Having Ivan and Alvaro both living with her would have been too much for their grandmother.
“We were running out of options,” Alvaro said, “but I felt then that it was my obligation to my dad not to let Ivan go to foster care. I was about to turn 18, and my mom wasn’t around to take care of Ivan, and nobody in the family wanted to.”
Unsure of what to do to save his brother, Alvaro relied on a tool he’d picked up at Arrowhead: research. He typed “How to obtain legal guardianship of a New Mexico minor” into his computer’s search engine.
Maturity and brotherly love
Alvaro was 18 when he was awarded custody of his younger brother Ivan, and they moved into a rental unit at a Las Cruces mobile home park. Ivan enrolled at Centennial High School, while Alvaro began classes at New Mexico State University with a focus on business. They still had the trial for their father’s alleged killer looming over them.
The trial got delayed a few times, which is not untypical. When it finally took place, it ended in a mistrial. Alvaro would have to go through the entire process again — the testifying under oath, the reliving of the murder.
“I just wanted to get it over with by then,” he said.
The two people who fled the apartment that night were subpoenaed, but the woman was a no-show. The other, a man, had already been sentenced to a prison term in Arizona. Before the trial began, both had insisted that they hadn’t been eyewitnesses and were somewhere else in the apartment when Alvaro’s father was killed. That increased the pressure on Alvaro, and his testimony would be crucial.
The second trial ended with an acquittal of the accused shooter, a devastating turn for Alvaro.
“I was scared for a few weeks after,” Alvaro said. “I thought Antonio Perez might be coming for revenge.”
Wojtko worried about the opposite happening.
“I was afraid Alvaro might do something crazy and try to get even,” she said.
Alvaro, however, doesn’t think like that. Revenge, he knew, would ultimately be pointless.
Soon, Alvaro morphed into an unhappy teenager. “Why do I feel this void inside me?” he thought. Mostly he filled the void with Lucky Charms and fast food, and he ballooned up to 311 pounds.
“I would look in the mirror and hate myself,” he said. “I wanted to prove to myself that I could lose the weight. That’s when I began thinking that, one day, I was going to box again.”
In November 2022, Alvaro finally realized, “If I’m going to do this, I have to do it now.”
He returned to the PAL Boxing Club and dedicated himself to the training, while at the same time immersing himself in his college classes. He also had to care for Ivan, and he took part-time work at a local T-Mobile shop.
Slowly, the weight started to fall off him, and that improved his balance, speed and endurance in the ring. He dropped down to 280, then a few months later he weighed 250. He took on some fights as a heavyweight, which he won, but at 5-foot-9, was he too short to really excel?
The wins piled up, but Burke could see a pattern in all of Alvaro’s fights. With only three rounds to impress the judges, it was crucial to get off to a fast start.
“Alvaro never did,” Burke said. “Invariably he lost the first round and had to stage a comeback.”
Defying the odds and mounting a comeback were, by then, second nature to Alvaro. Despite his intense schedule of parenting, studying, working and boxing, he found he had more energy. The first one in the gym and the last to leave, the pounds were disappearing. It felt to him like a desert storm had passed, and the sky was clearing.
The Golden Gloves tournament
In March of 2024, Alvaro reached heights that seemed unattainable a few short years earlier when he was crowned New Mexico’s Golden Gloves light-heavyweight champion in Roswell. He’d lost a staggering 140 pounds in about 16 months.
He’d reached the highest statewide level an amateur fighter can reach and was invited to compete in the national tournament. Now, he could pause to look in the rearview mirror, to consider his own journey — and how he’d arrived. He admits there has always been some negative motivation in his quest.
“I have a fear of being embarrassed,” he said, something that comes from being teased as a young boy. “Maybe I have a chip on my shoulder, but I have to keep going when I’m exhausted. That means training for an extra hour. Or studying for an extra hour.”
That mindset paid off for him in the classroom, too. He graduated with honors as a Crimson Scholar from New Mexico State University business department in May 2024.
His luck had changed, and maybe that’s why today he’s willing to forgive his troubled father for his imperfections.
“I wouldn’t be who I am without my dad,” he said. “But, I still think about all the life I didn’t get to experience with him. I never even got to drink a beer with my dad, and he never saw me graduate from high school.”
Alvaro is giving himself a few years to see how his impending transition from amateur boxer to the professional ranks might work out. He’s well aware of what a meat grinder boxing at the professional level can be — the gloves for competition are smaller, there’s no protective headgear, and the length of the fights would go from three rounds of three minutes to five or more rounds.
But he wants to give it a try.
The champion and his town
Las Cruces was devastated by its first mass shooting in decades March 28, 2025. A year had elapsed since Alvaro had won the state Golden Gloves title. On the edge of Young Park, with a couple hundred people gathered to show off their cars, an argument broke out among teenagers. Moments later, the boys pulled out pistols and started shooting. Fifty-four shots were fired.
Three young men were killed — one an innocent bystander who was a baseball player at Ivan’s high school. Another 18 were injured, some of them badly. A few days later, Las Cruces police arrested four young men. Three were juveniles. All were held without bail.
Alvaro was about the same age as the shooters when his own father was murdered. It was impossible not to wonder how he had avoided the terrible turns and devastating decisions that had gotten these four youngsters with pistols so hopelessly lost.
Alvaro and Burke were four hours away, in Roswell, when the shooting happened. The very next day, Alvaro would have to defend his light-heavyweight Golden Gloves title.
The next morning, before the first bouts of the weekend, Burke approached the tournament’s director and suggested a moment of silence for the young men who’d been killed or wounded in Las Cruces. After the moment of silence passed, Burke asked for the microphone.
“Thanks for being here and for supporting this kind of program,” he said to the crowd, “because boxing takes kids off the street and gives them an opportunity.”
Burke knew his fighter well enough to understand that the shootings wouldn’t distract Alvaro. Sure enough, later that weekend, Alvaro won the state title again, beating a Santa Fe rival. That meant he again qualified for the national tournament that sometimes can serve as a springboard to the Olympics.
Burke has studied Alvaro’s transformation, and even after 50 years around boxing, he has trouble believing what he’s witnessed firsthand.
“Alvaro has that mental strength that you rarely see in kids anymore,” he said, “and it’s a mentality more from our parents’ era, where they had to struggle and battle for success.”
This hearkens back to the story of the most well-known New Mexico-based fighter to overcome seemingly insurmountable situational and personal demons to become a world champion – south Albuquerque barrio boy and world-class fighter, Johnny “Mi Vida Loca” Tapia. Like Alvaro, he experienced the murder of a parent as a child and was raised by his grandmother. Unlike Alvaro, Tapia began boxing at a very young age, and had his own personal struggle with substance abuse.
Burke still sees room for improvement in Alvaro.
“His left hook is powerful, it’s his best punch. But, we have to get him to tighten things up, because, at times, he loops his punches,” a tendency that gives his opponents time to duck.
“The boxing gym has become a cornerstone in Alvaro’s life,” Sanchez said, “and in some ways, it’s replaced his family.”
Alvaro concurs.
“Boxing has done too much for me to stop,” he said. “I’ll always have a hand in because it saved my life. I was top in my class, but boxing has given more than academics. I loved learning and going to school, but I love boxing more.”
He recognizes the drawbacks of the sport.
“Boxing is dangerous,” he admits, “but I love it for the adrenaline rush. I like the risk. I want to have a short career. I’d like to become world champion and then quickly retire, but I’ll have to find something to replace it when I get older.”
Meanwhile, Alvaro’s brother Ivan is finishing high school and hoping to one day attend barber college. His fortunes have changed. Recently, their mother took a job at Wendy’s, of all places.
Alvaro can be surprisingly frank about his mother, saying “I forgive her, but it’s hard to forget the trauma.”
Far older than his years, Alvaro seems to be immune to bitterness, and he’s moved past grief. About his father, he said, “I’ve cried enough already. And it’s made me who I am and mentally tough. I forgive him. If all this hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
Through relentless hard work, Alvaro has made his own luck. He has long since decided to give up the Lucky Charms cereal and all the unhealthy food. And he says he doesn’t need therapy. He’s never gone — unless you count his long talks with Wojtko during his senior year of high school. Or his time at the gym working the focus mitts with Burke and Sanchez.
“Boxing is my counseling now,” Alvaro says.
This story was written for an anthology called “Crime & Justice in the Land of Enchantment,” edited by Mike Tapia and Tara López, which is scheduled to be published in 2027. Rus Bradburd has lived mostly in New Mexico since 1994. He coached basketball at New Mexico State University for six seasons, then served as a professor of creative writing for 14 years. His “Basketball in the Barrio” program in El Paso is in its 33rd year. He’s the author of five books, most recently the satirical novel “Big Time.”
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