Q: You must write until three in the morning — your publication record is extraordinary!
A: I am a little bit of a workaholic. When I started working, particularly on women writers from the Caribbean, there was just nothing. The field didn't exist. Over the last 10 years, I've done translations and I've published anthologies and annotated bibliographies — the kind of basic work that enables other scholars and students to get interested in the field. For example, I published a collection of short stories with a friend — Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam, 27 stories by women from all over the Caribbean — and that has become the textbook for the field. Now dissertations are being written about those writers.
Q: Do you ever wish that you could focus exclusively on your work, that you didn't have to teach?
A: Not teach? Why would I do the scholarship if not for the teaching? Teaching is a blast! I ask myself, can I be the one who lights the fire? I want to be the one who helps someone discover what they want to do with their lives, the one who sparks a passion — so at the very least, my own passion should be clear. I do the scholarship and the writing because it allows me to bring my passion into the classroom.
Q: What happens to students in their four years at Vassar?
A: It's almost miraculous. I'm thinking of one student — she took intermediate Spanish as a freshman, and she was struggling with it. Four years later, there she was, graduating — this incredible young woman, with an absolute passion for medical anthropology. She had discovered the work of an epidemiologist in Latin America and had spent a semester with the Mapuche Indians in Chile. I know she's going to do fantastic things. But between her freshman and senior years, I saw her getting discouraged at times, and not knowing exactly what she wanted to do.
Q: But what makes that particularly Vassar?
A: Well, okay — transformation occurs elsewhere. Where I taught previously, I'm sure it was happening — but you don't get to see it when you have 75 students in a class, and you're teaching four classes. But there is something that stands out as sort of quintessentially Vassar. For example, I had a student doing a thesis on Chicano murals in the streets of LA, and this was a student who didn't have any money. And the college was willing to send her — money was found for her to go to LA. They were willing to trust in her as a student, and in me as her mentor. She's at UC-Santa Cruz now, getting her PhD. So there's a lot of trust in the faculty being able to organize experiences for students that will make a difference.
Q: What’s your favorite course?
A: I team-taught an American culture course with Deborah Dash Moore — she’s a religion professor — called Miami in the American Imagination, and it was terrific. She had written a book, To the Golden Cities, about the Jewish communities in California and Miami. And I was interested in Miami because it’s such a Pan-American city, the gateway to Latin America. So we designed this course, where we dealt with everything from literature, to history, to migration patterns, to police relations with the community, to art and architecture — the works. And then we took the students there for a week over spring break. We were invited to the home of Morris Lapidus, the architect who designed some of the really swank hotels in the ‘50s. He’s in his nineties now. And the students were perfect. They brought up questions that were amazing, nuanced, smart — questions that showed how they had read, and learned, and absorbed all kinds of materials from the class. And the papers they wrote, especially the final papers, were very impressive. It was incredible, an only-at-Vassar kind of experience.
