Deja vu in Quito

I had an invitation to speak at an Ecuadorian studies meeting that took me to Quito for six days at the end of the summer. The papers were the usual mélange of subjects, with highly-varying degrees of experience and expertise, but the theme that ran continuously through the week was how small the world is. I made at least half a dozen unexpected encounters, (almost)all of them pleasant.

The Facultad de Ciencias Sociales was my gracious host, providing airfare and accommodations at Hotel Quito. My wife and I have warm memories of this place from my Fulbright lectureship 1992 when we would take the kids to the hotel’s Sunday brunch and avail ourselves of their facilities. Otherwise I managed only a minimum of nostalgic events between the conference, a visit to Ecuador’s excellent military mapping facility, the new National Museum and the used book shops in the old city.

Before the conference even began, I spoke with Will Waters, one of the organizers, and learned that he had graduated from Cornell in 1981 and worked with the late Fred Buttle whose ex-wife is a friend of my current one. All right, that’s two degrees of separation, but it gets closer. No sooner had Will and I parted than I spotted Nelly Gonzalez, my counterpart at the University of Illinois, who was in Quito buying books. She plans to retire in the fall, so this is her last trip on Illinois’ dime. Nelly offered up memories of her long career over coffee and pastries.

After attending a session on Ecuadorian migration, a phenomenon that experts believe has moved 20% of Ecuadorians overseas in the last ten years, a young woman came up to me and introduced herself as a Cornell graduate in sociology. She went on to reveal that she is the daughter of an Ecuadorian mother and a Peace Corps volunteer and was en route to visit her grandmother in Ambato. In the course of our brief conversation, she told me that she had three children and an engineer for husband. It only later occurred to me that the engineer must be Raul Casas, whom Peggy and I sponsored in the mid 1980s. We went to their wedding in New Jersey.

On the second day I gave my paper and a radio interview. At the talk, I was pleased to notice some familiar faces in the front row, half-a-dozen of my former students from the Fulbright lectures I gave fifteen years ago. We adjourned directly to La Choza, Quito’s canonical Ecuadorian-food restaurant (lapingachos, seco de chivo, locro de papa-- the whole nine yards), where another ten or so alumni joined the group. I was delighted to learn that they have battened. Many head university libraries in the city and one is Ecuador’s Librarian of Congress. I realized a long time ago that the thing I most regret about my career choice is not having the opportunity to contribute substantially to student’s intellectual growth.

And if all this weren’t enough, on my last day in the city I ran into Juan Jauriegui of the University of San Andres in La Paz, Bolivia. Both of us were browsing the shelves of an antiquarian bookstore in the old city. The last time I saw Juan, he had asked me for a reference to FLACSO’s PhD program. He’s now half way through, with the thesis to go.

I ended the trip with an unpleasant encounter, a rendezvous with one of Quito’s many thieves. He managed to make off with my backpack as I insouciantly worked away at an Internet café. The fingersmith (whom I never saw) got neither my passport nor much money-- hope he wasn’t too disappointed.