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