Luis C. Garza began his artistic career as a photojournalist recording the tumultuous social events of the 1960s and 1970s for La Raza magazine—the journalistic voice of the Chicano movement in Los Angeles. During that time, he was a film and theater arts student at UCLA whose images captured the attention of television executives, leading to his new career as a producer-director for the Emmy-award series Reflecciones/Reflections, and over 50 documentary projects and primetime shows for Los Angeles affiliates of ABC and NBC, including a one-hour special for the exhibition Treasures of Mexico from the Mexican National Museums, which was broadcast live from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1978.