Gustavo Arturo ALFARO

ALFARO, Gustavo Arturo 1931 - 2025

Passed away peacefully, at 94, on April 12, 2025, in Cambridge. He was born in Bogota, Colombia to Elisa and Anibal Alfaro, a writer, in a large bookish family with five brothers and a sister. Moving to New York City for high school, he received his B.A. from Columbia University, his M.A. from Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Harvard.

Gustavo taught at Stanford and Dalhousie before becoming a professor in the Department of Romance Languages at Tufts University, where he taught for 23 years before his retirement in 2000. He chaired the Romance Languages Department for many years and published two books, the first on Cervantes and the picaresque novel and the second on Garcia Marquez. Teaching came naturally to him with his generosity and his love of literature.

Gustavo enjoyed telling stories of his childhood in Magdalena to friends and their small children. He remembered canoeing in swamps with snakes dangling above him from the trees and sailing in a riverboat at night, seeing the bright eyes of crocodiles along the shore. As an adult, he loved both his family trips abroad and his daily walks with his wife from their house at the edge of Harvard Square, where they lived the last 50 years of his life. He particularly enjoyed lunches out with friends.

He married Rosanna Yamagiwa, a playwright, in 1963. They have two children, Anna, an artist and designer and Pablo, a valuation consultant. Anna has a daughter, Juliana Montoro, who graduated from Tufts last year. Pablo and his wife, Marie, have a son, Michio Alfaro, a high school sophomore at Trinity School. Gustavo is also survived by Alfonso and Patricia, his beloved brother and sister in Colombia.