Professor Cruz-Saco, Leader of SATA Peru

“If you want to wear a lettuce on your head, just do it!”

As a Study Away Teach Away family, we received a lot of advice from Professor Maria Cruz-Saco during our semester traversing Peru. This was one of the first things she told us on a bus between the ruins of Ollantaytambo and the city of Cusco on the final leg of a week-long trip through the Andes during our first month together. No, Professor Cruz-Saco was not encouraging us to steal goods from a local vendor; she was just telling us to enjoy being ourselves, regardless as to what others may think. In the moment (and in retrospect) it was kind of a silly comment, but it still held true and we repeated it many times throughout the last four months.

Aside from giving us sound life advice, we were also given the chance to get to know Professor Cruz-Saco a little bit better. During our first days, she stopped us at a house in Miraflores, Lima and asked for a picture with it; it was the house she had grown up in with her parents and three brothers. Her father, Cesar Cruz-Saco, was an intellectual who studied law, math, physics and was a part of the Cruz-Saco school systems in Peru. She spent many hours discussing literature and politics with her family. “There were always, always books in the house,” she recalls. A self-proclaimmed tomboy, she loved to read and play outside with her brothers at some of the local country clubs her parents frequented. “It was like having three groups of friends, one at the club, one at my [German] school, and later one at the university.”

The university she refers to is the Universidad del Pacífico in Jesus María. Despite her earlier interests in literature, she began her studies in economics at this new, fledgling business school. At the time, her entire class was only eighty students and there were few choices of careers to pursue. Unsurprisingly, she excelled in her area of study and graduated second in her class. From there, she went to the University of Pittsburg to earn her Masters and Ph.D. certificates in economics, as well as a graduate certificate in Latin American Studies in three years before returning to her native Peru. Earning a Ph.D. is difficult enough, but at that point in the 1970s, only six women had ever earned that degree in economics.

It would be a few years before she returned to the United States, but she certainly kept herself busy while she was away. While teaching at her alma mater, she also held the Vice Presidency at the Development Bank in Peru. During her years back in Peru she reconnected with a fellow Universidad del Pacífico student, now her husband, and had her first son.

However, this was also during a period when Peru was in an unmistakable economic and political downswing that limited career possibilities and generally made life difficult and dangerous. “I heard of a position as a visiting professor at Mount Holyoke College, I applied, and I took it.” And so it began. She arrived back to the States with just two suitcases and her then-one-year-old son in August of 1981. She had been away from the states for five years.

“Teaching in English was the first challenge. I had spent almost all of my time studying during my three years in the States. I would spend four to five hours typing out each hour of classes in English so I would have notes,” she recalls of her first year of teaching in the States. “It was very different. Liberal arts? What was that!”

It wasn’t until 1991 that Professor Cruz-Saco found herself at Connecticut College teaching in the economics department. “It was all survival in the beginning,” she confided. Along with the struggle of teaching in her second language, being the only female professor in a department and field of study mostly dominated by men created some stress. Despite the professional challenges, during the course of her twenty-three years at Connecticut College, she did some exceptional things. If one looks at her profile on the Economics department website, her credentials go on for nearly a page and include books, papers, serving as a Dean at both Conn and Wesleyan and a Fulbright Scholarship.

Aside from an obvious talent for economics, Professor Cruz-Saco is also an avid reader and tennis player. Most of her favorite books are by Latin American authors, such as 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and, of course, Mario Vegas Llosa.

During her time in the States, the Sendero Luminoso insurgency rose and fell with the election of President Fujimori in 1992. Cruz-Saco remembers it being strange not to be there while most of her friends and family endured hard times under a corrupt government. She and her husband would talk about going back to Peru through the years, but they both had built lives in Connecticut, with two more sons, and for Professor Cruz-Saco, increasing prestige within the College. Peru was their home, but then so was Connecticut. “If someone were to ask me to pick one place, I don’t think I could. I’m happy in both places. It’s… different, but still happy.”
While the rest of us (now commonly referred to as her “sobrinos” or “kiddos”) spent the semester exploring Lima for the first time, it was a semester of rediscovery for Professor Cruz-Saco. “It was like meeting an old friend after not seeing them for a very long time.” The city changed substantially while she was away, but in many ways it stayed the same.

Reading this back, it feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface of this wonderful professor’s life. We got a lot of advice from her: don’t drink the water; don’t eat lettuce the first few weeks; never eat ceviche after noon; and if being who we are entails wearing lettuce as a hat, so be it. I am glad to have gotten to explore what Lima and life has to offer with Tia Maria. •