Alyssa Luboff, PhD

“You’re one of us,” Nelson said. I looked at my friend, equally surprised by the compliment and bewildered by the spin of his words. I had accepted the epithet, “gringa,” long ago; I knew I wasn’t really one of the Afro-descendant or Indigenous Chachi people, the two ancestral groups living in that region of the Ecuadorian rainforest. But I loved them, and I loved the Chocó, that coastal forest wedged between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It broke my heart every

This picture is from 2004, the year our middle child was born. I am looking forward, and I am looking back. That is the essence of so much of my work: looking forward and looking back. What essential pieces of our humanity have we lost moving forward, and how do we recover them? How do we reconstruct them in new ways, in this society, in this lifetime?