Rhode Islander finishes third at Miss USA pageant

Many of the contestants in the Miss USA pageant have been modeling, performing, and jet-setting around the world since they were kids. Anea Garcia, a 20-year-old Rhode Islander, doesn’t share this background. Trying out for Miss Rhode Island last September was her first pageant.

Anea Garcia wins Miss Rhode Island title. Credit: Miss USA

“I actually didn’t prepare at all for the Miss Rhode Island pageant. The night before I was eating potato chips that very morning I probably ate like three bowls of cereal, eggs, like a ton of things,” Anea said.

“And my dress was free when I competed for Miss Rhode Island USA. It was seven inches from the ground, it was too short, like it looked like high waters on me. I had heels that were hand-me-downs.”

After Anea won Miss Rhode Island, a coach scouted her out, and used his pocketbook and connections to pay for her flights and wardrobe. With his help, she transformed from a girl with a dress hem at her ankles to a Miss USA contestant with a full-face of makeup and a floor length gown.

Anea is a Dominican and Native American woman who has experienced homelessness first-hand. She says this made the Miss USA pageant a strange space to occupy.

Credit: Miss USA

“Meeting so many people and looking glamorous all the time was really different for me.Coming from sleeping in a car to barely having anything or as much as someone else had it was really hard for me to walk on stage,” Anea said.

“You really bring yourself down when you don’t have as much as someone else does and you don’t think you have that same opportunity so why should you win this title you can’t really relate to her. But slowly but surely I definitely got out of that funk.”

Miss USA  this year was also tinged by pageant co-owner Donald Trump’s hateful remarks about immigrants.Trump’s speech prompted big broadcast networks like Univision and NBC to drop the Miss USA pageant. The judges, hosts, and performers slotted to participate in the show also dropped out as a sign of protest. A small, relatively unknown network REELZChannel agreed to broadcast the pageant, but viewership plummeted, was at an all-time low, according to the Nielsen ratings firm.

Anea, among several other pageant contestants, is speaking out about Trump’s comments.

“It wasn’t easy and I don’t think that it was okay for him to generalize a certain group of individuals because crime is not a problem only at the border it’s a problem nationally,” Anea said.

“And after he said that it really just brought people down and they were not okay with it. So it really affected us a lot because we felt like we weren’t going to be seen. All the hard work that we did it wasn’t going to be seen by the rest of the world.”

The show went on, without an utterance of Trump’s name. The contestants glided through the swimsuit and evening gown competitions, until the top five contestants were asked to speak about controversial national issues during the question round. Anea has received a lot of flak about her answer to question about political correctness. She says the question threw her off, because it’s a complicated one to answer with a time restraint in place.

Anea Garcia at the Miss USA pageant with other top five contestants. Credit: Miss USA

‘I just couldn’t answer that question in 30 seconds. I think it’s just really mean when I see people’s comments on Twitter, on Youtube when they kept replaying my answer it was really embarrassing. That’s why I say wow I didn’t win and it may have been because of that one question, or it may have been my performance who knows,” Anea said.

However, for many viewers, Anea’s flub didn’t water down the raw, personal stories she shared during the pageant. Anea openly talked about challenges that are rarely described on television.

“My mother was raped when she was thirteen years old so I’m a product of rape, or a child of rape. A child can’t take care of a child and my mom was just too young to take care of me. So my grandmother adopted me right from birth,” Anea said.

Anea Garcia as a child. Credit: Miss USA

Anea says her grandmother was able to make ends meet, even though she was a single mom with four kids and had an English barrier. Yet, life changed dramatically when Anea was thirteen and her grandmother lost her job.

“It was like we could afford things and then we couldn’t afford things and we just found ourselves slowly tumbling down. We couldn’t afford the electric bill, and then we couldn’t afford the cable, and then we found ourselves wow we can’t afford the rent, we’re behind. What are we going to do,” Anea said.

Anea and her family were homeless multiple times, once for over eight months. During that time, they slept in her grandmother’s van in the Walmart parking lot in Coventry. Anea tried to maintain a sense of normalcy. She went to school and worked retail jobs at the mall and as a page at the State House. She didn’t tell people about her family’s reality.

 “I didn’t want to be taken away from my grandmother, and I didn’t want anyone’s judgement to impact my grandmother, because she is such a strong woman and she has worked so hard to get us all where we are, and she gave us as much as she could,” Anea said.

“People say, ‘well why didn’t she get a job?’ “Well she tried getting a job she applied to places but when you have an English barrier you can’t communicate with someone and when people don’t care to actually listen and understand what it is she’s trying to say hurts even more, because she tried every single day and she got up every morning with a smile on her face and that just gave me so much strength to go to school and to learn and to want to keep going.”

Anea and her grandmother  were able to find a way out of their situation. Now, they live together at a home in Cranston, but the glamour of winning Miss Rhode Island and becoming a top runner-up at the Miss USA pageant hasn’t translated entirely to the reality of Anea’s life now. Anea got a sash and a TV spot , but not a full-time salary from Miss USA. Modeling agencies and celebrities haven’t been flooding her email inbox with opportunities. Anea and her grandmother are still struggling to pay the rent.

Post-pageant, Anea is pursuing  a double degree in legal studies and philosophy at Roger Williams University on a full-ride scholarship, but she’s thinking of pausing her studies for a while, to pursue modeling in New York City.

Credit: Miss USA

“Before it was like I wanted to show the word but I don’t want to show the world I want to show myself that I can do it, that anyone living in a car or anyone that has the sleep in the street cuddled up with their grandmother with nothing, and having a stomach ache because you haven’t eaten all day. You can do it,” Anea said.