In 1975, his doctorate nearly completed, Alejandro Toledo made his most important discovery at Stanford -- his future wife, Eliane Karp.
They met at a party in Palo Alto where Karp, MA '75, a graduate student in French, impressed Toledo with her knowledge of Peru. (She was even reading books by his favorite author, Jose Maria Arguedes.) Born in Paris and reared in France and Belgium, Karp had come to Stanford from Hebrew University in Israel, but she was fluent in Spanish and immersing herself in Latin American culture when she met Toledo.
Toledo invited her to dinner at his Escondido Village apartment. Eager to impress, he splurged at Safeway, using a whole month's spending money to buy a ham, corn on the cob, candles, a bottle of Almaden wine, ingredients for a salad and a strawberry cake. He proudly presented the meal to Karp, but she ate only the salad.
"You didn't like what I did?" he asked, trying to hide his disappointment.
"Yes, I did," she replied. "But I'm a Jew. I don't eat ham. And in Europe, we give corn to the pigs."
They married in 1979 over the objections of Karp's family, who were upset that her spouse would be a poor, Peruvian Indian. "They said they would cut me off," says Karp. On the day of their wedding, recalls Lois Blair, a friend who hosted the event at her Sunnyvale home, Karp's mother phoned several times beseeching her daughter not to go through with it. (She has since come around, Karp says.)
According to Toledo, Karp has been a huge asset in his presidential campaign. Although she has red hair and pale skin and speaks accented Spanish, she has helped him win favor with Peru's Andean Indians, he says. She converses in Quechua, a native Peruvian language, and knows Indian dances from her days as an agricultural aid specialist. "She's more Peruvian than some Peruvians," says Toledo.
But Karp, a 47-year-old banker, has faced criticism similar to that leveled at Hillary Rodham Clinton during her husband's first campaign for president -- that she attracts too much attention and speaks her mind too often. "It is said that she has to remove her 'president's' pants and slip on her first lady's skirt," says Manuel Torrado, who has done polling for Toledo.
"This is a very traditional society," Toledo says. "They condemn her for having a mind of her own."
But Toledo says he has no intention of bowing to such sentiment. "She will not assume a subservient role. She is my partner and my adviser."
