María Trinidad Garcia y Lopes

María Trinidad "Maritrini" Garcia y Lopes (born 4 September 1938) is an American nurse, and the namesake of Trini Kwan.

Biography
Maritrini was born in Mexico City, Mexico on 4 September 1938. Her father, Manuel Garcia y Cortez, was a second-generation Spanish American who had lost his family farm in Texas in the Great Depression while her mother, Magdalena Cortes, was Portuguese-American, from the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey.

The Garcia family moved back to Texas in early 1942 so that Maritrini's parents could help with the war effort (and make a decent living doing so), and Manuel managed to secure a modest but comfortable existence for his family, which included Maritrini and her three younger brothers, in San Antonio.

Dark-haired, olive-complexioned, bearing Spanish first and last names, bilingual in English and Spanish and residing in Texas, Maritrini was self-conscious that people often mistakenly thought her Mexican-American. At school she felt she didn't quite fit in with either the white or the Mexican girls, but she always felt at peace when she was in Church. During high school she contemplated cloistered life but by graduation began to have doubts about religious doctrine. Wanting to serve somehow, she attended Texas A&M nursing school.

Shy but very caring and kind, Maritrini plunged herself wholeheartedly into her work as hospice nurse: "I want to be the one that makes them smile," she said to one of her colleagues. She never married but once had a brief affair with a doctor from another wing of the Bryan hospital where she interned, horrified at the resulting catastrophe the affair wrecked on the man's family and with herself for her complicity. After that, she transferred to Houston and rebuffed attempts to woo her.

Although she struggled with Catholic belief and practice, the Church of her childhood always held held a special place in her heart and she worked at Catholic hospitals and regularly donated to the nearby parish and to monasteries and other Catholic charities in the region.

The Namesake
Maritrini was a nurse in the delivery ward of a hospital in Houston, Texas in 1979, when Mingxia Kwan was admitted in labor. Mingxia was having a particularly painful time and felt sure she'd doe; Maritrini knew she wouldn't but C-section might be necessary. Ultimately it wasn't, but she stayed with Mingxia until the birth. Mingxia, sure that the presence of this nurse had brought her good fortune and saved her from the knife, decided to name her baby Trini.