Name: Lisa Paravisini-Gebert

Position: Professor of Environmental Studies, Hispanic Studies

Years at Vassar: 1991-present

Hometown: Salinas, Puerto Rico

Current City: New York, New York

A Small Coastal Town

I grew up in a small town in southern Puerto Rico, a town called Salinas. Its population right now is probably about 10,000, but when I was growing up it was about 700. So it was rather a small, small town. It is a coastal town, right on the Caribbean Sea shore. Artisanal fishing was one of two important economic activities, so a lot of the population were fishermen. The main part of town was about a mile from the beach, and then right on the water there was (still is) a smaller village, part of the main town but separated from it by fields of sugar cane. They called it “la playita,” “the little beach,” and most people there were artisanal  fishermen.

The village was famous for its seafood restaurants, where people from the capital, San Juan, came for lunch on Saturdays and Sundays. Salinas was a gorgeous place, with a coastline full of little cays totally covered in mangrove forests. On the other side, north of the town, and almost surrounding it on all sides were cane fields. When I was growing up in the fifties, it was still a very active sugar producing area. The town was so small, and we lived a very provincial life that revolved around the central square, where all our institutions were centered: the Catholic church, the mayor’s office, the town hall, and the houses of those who had a lot of money. 

In Many Ways I’m Still There

Growing up in Puerto Rico greatly shaped my interests. Oh God, as far as my interests are concerned, I might as well have never left, and in many ways I’m still there. It’s really quite interesting to me how my research and interests have always focused on my hometown – like my interests in coastal environments, my love affair with mangroves. I think there’s nothing more beautiful than a mangrove forest. And on the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything uglier in the world than a sugar cane plantation. I started getting interested in environmental studies in the early 1990s, and it was because I read this urban history of the city of San Juan by a Puerto Rican poet and novelist, a memoir of growing up in San Juan titled San Juan, ciudad soñada (San Juan: Dreamt City, by Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá). I remember it started with a line that haunted me, “all the landscapes of my childhood have disappeared.” Just reading that, I remember thinking “God, so have mine.” 

The sea has been eating away at the main roads around my hometown, and the beaches where I used to go as a kid don’t exist anymore. They’ve been eroded away. The amazingly beautiful mangroves that I used to love to go to with my father or my sister to explore and look for little crabs and baby sea animals are just gone. I would say probably about ten percent of the mangroves still remain. The artisanal fishing has been greatly reduced as larger boats come and take fish away and the sea around us continues to be depleted. I’ve written a lot about the damage that depletion has done to environments around the Caribbean, and that is all because I have watched this firsthand. 

My father worked for the sugar cane plantation as a sort of paymaster. He would prepare the pay packets for the field workers and after school on Fridays my sister and I would go on horseback with him to distribute the pay packets. My father had an eighth grade education and he was fortunate to have a job that kept him away from the brutal work of the cane fields. Some of the workers he went to pay were my cousins and uncles or friends of my parents, parents of my schoolmates. In so many ways I feel I am still there, suspended between those two places, between the damage to the mangroves that I loved and the damage of the plantation that I hate, I’m still there. 

What Is There To Go Back To?

But I wouldn’t go back to live there for anything you could offer me. I don’t want to live there. One reason I don’t want to go back is environmental – the landscapes of my childhood have disappeared. So what is there to go back to? I cannot go back to the disappeared beaches; we can’t explore the mangroves and coves. I mean, we can still go in some of the outer cays by boat and explore the mangroves, but it’s not quite the same thing. And the place where I grew up, the house of my paternal grandparents, is gone. And now, after Hurricane Maria, the house my parents built with their own hands and lived in after their retirement is also gone.

But more than anything, the place it has become reminds me of the unwelcome changes I witnessed as I grew up and of my feelings of alienation from provincial life. I was a very serious child and just about everybody thought that I was a little strange. And that’s simply because I wanted more than anything to read. There was no bookstore in my hometown, the only place where you could get something to read was the drugstore, where you could get a kind of dime store romance novel published by the thousands in Spain or Mexican graphic novels. So I think of my hometown socially as a place that was very apprehensive of the kinds of things that I was interested in. My parents loved me and they were truly wonderful. I had tons of cousins I was very close to, I think probably half of the town was related to me in one way or the other, but I always felt a little misunderstood. Not that I necessarily was, but people would say “Oh my God, what’s wrong with her? She’s always reading.” I didn’t fit there and I don’t fit there anymore, and my life has taken a completely different trajectory. Actually, most of the people I left behind are still there and are doing the same things we did back then. I have tons of relatives still there–my sister and my nieces are there, so I go back a lot. But I just don’t think it is a place where I would be happy. 

Leaving Puerto Rico

I left Puerto Rico when I went to graduate school. I went to the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, the Río Piedras Campus, and did my undergraduate degree there. And then I left. I wanted to get out, I had never traveled anywhere. I had the feeling that I couldn’t stay there and do what I wanted to do. I wanted to go to graduate school or law school and in the field of my undergraduate degree, comparative literature, there was no graduate program in Puerto Rico. So it was time to go. Puerto Rico is an island one hundred miles long and twenty-five miles wide, it’s just a very, very small space. And to tell you the truth, I was totally fixated on coming to New York because in all the movies that I saw in the fifties and sixties, all young women ended up going to New York and having careers. I wanted to just come to New York and do something different. Salinas being such a small town, I had gotten used to going to the movies almost every night. There was a little provincial kind of cinema, a little theater in my hometown, and at night that’s what we did. The women went to the movies, and the men went to the square to chat. When the movie ended, the men would come and gather their families and go home. My mother, my sister, and I went to the movies almost every day for most of my childhood. I got these ideas about what I wanted to do from watching movies.When I was young I wanted to be Gilda, I don’t know if you have ever seen the movie, but it starred Rita Hayworth and I was besotted. We develop ambitions, we mimic what we see, and I saw movies that took me to New York City, where I could live all sorts of adventures. 

I went to NYU for graduate school, I got a Masters and PhD in New York City. And then I stayed in New York City afterwards for ten years and taught at Lehman College, part of City University of New York before I came to Vassar. 

Seeing How The Other Half Lives

I came to Vassar in ’91. It was really interesting, Vassar had advertised for a visiting position for two years, so I had no intention of leaving Lehman. I just thought, you know, it’s a visiting position and I can take a leave of absence from my job at Lehman and essentially literally see how the other half lived. Because when I went to graduate school at NYU, there were two types of graduate students. There were the graduate students who had the normal graduate student life, which meant they did nothing else. They had fellowships and they went to school full time and devoted themselves entirely to their studies. And then there were students like me who were working full time and took night classes. My parents had nothing, they couldn’t help, so night school it was. 

My father had very little education but was really, really smart, very good in math. He worked as an accounting clerk for a variety of companies, and that was way above his educational level. It was a good job, and maybe by his 40s or 50s he had reached the lower middle class. I was enormously proud of him. And my mother was a seamstress–a wonderfully talented one. She had the most difficult job in the family, as she did factory work. So they were in no position to help with my education. I never had that experience of being a graduate student dedicated to academic life: I worked 9 to 5 and then I went to school in the evening. When I taught at Lehman College, the student body was in many cases older than me but a lot of them had the same kind of experience as students I had, going to work at night or coming out of jobs overnight where they worked a 12am-8am shift and then they came to school. So I was really curious about teaching at Vassar for a couple of years, curious about what this other world where people did nothing but go to school was like. Even as an undergraduate student in Puerto Rico, I never had the experience of simply going  to school.  All my classes needed to end by 3pm because from 4pm-12am I worked for the telephone company as a telephone operator. So it was really interesting to me to enter a world where people actually just went to school, nothing that I had ever, ever experienced. It was a combination of curiosity and opportunity. Like, why not? Let’s go see how the other half lives. 

What motivated me to stay at Vassar was simply that they asked me to. It’s an easier life, the way that a Vassar faculty member lives and operates. For starters, I almost halved my teaching load by coming to Vassar, so I was teaching a lot less. But it was a very hard decision. I always think of working on people’s education as something that is deeply engaged with offering opportunities to people. I always thought that the students at Lehman needed me more than the students at Vassar–although that is not necessarily true.

No Real Relationship With New York Nature

Interestingly, I’m always yearning for spaces that are lost, like the mangroves, and since I can’t find them around me anymore, I prefer interior spaces with views. I like to be inside and cozy and look at the world through the window. My favorite places are always places where I can sit and watch the outside. It’s not that I don’t like the outside, I love the outside; but I have never really developed a relationship with the “American” outside.

I don’t know if it’s because my identity is so attached to particular trees, animals, and temperatures, but I have never really understood New York nature. I don’t know the names of plants around me. I remember the first time I was director of environmental studies in maybe 2007, a beloved professor of biology who died not too long ago, Marshall Pregnall, asked me to go look at some trees at risk at the farm. Of course I arrive not suitably dressed in a skirt and flip flops, typical attire for Caribbean nature. So he sort of chuckled and then pointed to some oak trees and was amused to find that I didn’t know what an oak looks like. So I looked at him and said, “Marshall, mangoes. I know mangoes.” He had to tell me exactly what I was looking at because I don’t recognize the vegetation – I don’t know what anything is called. So I’m safer when I’m looking at it through a window, because then it’s just these massive things that I don’t have to recognize. In the Caribbean, you have to be careful about nature. There is a tree that is very common on the beaches called Manchineel, and it’s very poisonous. If you’re sitting under the tree and it starts to rain the poison actually burns your skin. So you need to recognize these things to avoid them. You have to proceed with caution. 

Framed Through A Window

When I think of Vassar and spaces, they’re always framed through a window, but now my favorite view is gone – it was the former office of environmental studies in New England. We had this beautiful green office that had been redesigned just for us. It was all glass  inside and everywhere I looked there was nothing but the sight of the landscape through the window. So I could sit at my desk and work and I could see the creek, the Bridge building wasn’t yet there. I also love to sit in the library and look at some of the trees from there. 

I also once had a chance to spend an hour in the tower of Main, at the very top. I had never realized how much you can see from there. I got this sense of what it must have looked like at some point before the town was founded. So there are things like that, places where you can sit and imagine what things would have looked like before we came and spoiled them. 

By the same token, for the same reason, I hate the golf course. If somebody were to say to me, “eliminate a space, change it,” I would reforest the golf course. I would just go on a planting spree, and pretend that the place never existed. 

At Vassar I’m very, very drawn to places that are cozy, places where I can be alone and look out and see a tree. I love trees, and the fact that I can watch them through the  window even if I don’t know what they are called. This is one of the things I feel about a sense of home–that I am now separate from the vegetation, particularly the trees of my home. I  love ceibas, the huge silk-cotton trees that feel like home. My separation from my home island has always felt like an amputation, and there’s this resistance in me to even engage with other trees. They’re not my trees. In the backyard of the house where I grew up there were avocado trees, lemon trees, orange trees, kumquat trees, mango trees, tamarind trees. I can still smell them, I have a connection with them. I admire the trees at Vassar, some of them are incredibly beautiful. But I never feel like I want to go hug them. Most of the trees that I love cannot be planted here, I can’t reproduce the garden of my childhood home. 

The Students

When I think of Vassar I think of the students as my Vassar. I don’t know exactly how to explain that. Maybe it’s because I came to Vassar when I already had tenure elsewhere, and I know a lot of people come to Vassar and start their career here and I didn’t. I kind of got grafted into a place that was already functioning. So I wasn’t formed as a faculty member at Vassar, and I didn’t go through the experience of tenure with a cohort. And for me, the students both past and present are the core of why I’m there. They are the home of Vassar. I’ve been director of Vassar in Madrid a couple of times and I directed the program in London once. In London I had a group of seven and we had a really good time. I remember after we came back, during the spring of their senior year, I came one evening and took them out to dinner. We went to Babycakes, which is no longer there, and at dinner a student said, “my best semester at Vassar I spent in London,” which I thought was very, very touching. But it also touched upon something that was really important to me, which is that I felt when I was in London that I was at Vassar. And when I’m in Spain, I’m at Vassar. It’s because of the students, I just feel that the community of students is what the college is to me. Right now, I haven’t been to campus since March except for driving very briefly sometime in July to pick up some books. Somebody had left the books outside, so I was on campus maybe three minutes. Other than that, I haven’t been on campus since March. And I don’t miss the campus, but I do miss the exchanges with students. It doesn’t matter where we are: as long as I’m with students, I’m at Vassar.

I Would Love to Return to The Mangroves of My Childhood

My definition of home varies. Of course, it’s always whenever I’m with my family – my husband, the kids, the grandkids, the friends who are like siblings, their kids who are like nieces and nephews, and the extended family. Puerto Ricans have extended biological and adopted families. So home is that, but in terms of home as a location, it’s the kind of home that doesn’t exist in Puerto Rico anymore. I still talk about my hometown in Puerto Rico as home all the time with my sister. The house where my parents lived after they retired was destroyed by Hurricane Maria, so now we have the land, and a cottage that was also on the land that is still standing. I still feel like that is home, but for a long time I have also thought that my home, whether I lived in it or not, was near a city, concretely New York City and Harlem, where I lived when I was going to school here. I lived in East Harlem, “El Barrio,” as they called it. Now I’m back in Harlem, but not quite in the same neighborhood, and in many ways this has become home. I’ve been living now in New York City for four years. We still have a house in Poughkeepsie, and my husband and I are always talking about returning to the house, but I feel like New York City is home. It’s really interesting because when you’re a couple, you have different ideas as to what constitutes a home and what is a proper home in terms of a place to live. So we’re looking at what is home between the two of us. We imagine that we will retire sometime, I don’t know how soon, but I’m 67. He’s 79. Nobody’s talking about retirement, but we have been talking about what will be home, and it’s really hard to say. 

I would love to just go to a place where I can smell the sea, and there are mangroves. In an idealized way, I would love to return to the mangroves of my childhood. But the landscapes of my childhood have disappeared. So where do you make a home? Wherever there are mangroves, people are ripping them out to make hotels, so the land has become so incredibly expensive that I could never afford it. I would love to have a space where I could just replant mangroves, plant mangoes, and feel like it is close to home, but that’s just not possible. So an apartment in New York City with a beautiful view of trees might have to do, even if I don’t recognize the trees.