Jorge Hernandez Martin "...he makes the faraway immediate."

JORGE HERNANDEZ Martin, assistant professor of Spanish, knows precisely when the rainforest became part of his reality. He was in Ithaca, New York, at Cornell, writing about detective fiction for his doctorate in Romance languages. "In 1987 I was busy writing a dissertation on a theme unrelated to anything tropical," he says. "But that summer Brazilian scientists estimated that the amount of Amazonian forest burned was 77,000 square miles. I recall the commentator of the nature program saying, 'an area one and a half times the size of New York State.' 'There' became very much 'here' for me at that moment. The imaginary superimposition had worked, at least on me; I wrote a note to myself to check how the writers of Latin America had incorporated the rainforest into their concerns, and how they had thematized the forest into the various national literatures."

What took root at Cornell has borne fruit at Dartmouth: Since coming to the College in 1989 Hernandez Martin has not only looked at rainforest literature; he has made it the substance of a freshman seminar in which he makes the faraway immediate.

But then, linking here and there seems to be second nature for Hernandez Martin, who has experienced more than his share of relocations and discontinuities. Raised in Cuba, at age 12 he was sent to Spain, where he stayed for two years. By the time he rejoined his family in their new home in Anaheim, California, in the shadow of Disneyland's Matterhorn, he had already had plenty of time to contemplate place, home, roots, and rootlessness. In Spain he had taken solace in books "books create place," he says and in his friendships with other transplanted Cubans. He found that "the most important places are where you interact with others. Dialogue creates a sense of home."

Even Hernandez Martin's interest in detective fiction, which he'll be teaching next year, brings him face to face with questions of place. In mysteries such as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, "you have to think about time—when you learned what you know," he explains. "You also have to think about what the setting is hiding."