Inspired by a story about an immigrant mother who walked the desert from Mexico to the USA with the dead body of her baby strapped to her own, Adriana Páramo immersed herself in the underground world of undocumented women toiling in the Florida fields. This fieldwork and the anonymous voices of the women she encountered while looking for the mother in the story are captured in Looking for Esperanza, winner of the 2011 Social Justice and Equity Award in creative nonfiction.
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My Mother’s Funeral is a combination of Mother and Homeland, a sometimes lively and funny and sometimes sad and macabre tale of family life in Colombia. Looking backward and forward in time, the author uses vignettes and anecdotes to evoke the quality of life of a country that transcends political violence and social turmoil; of a Colombia unknown to outsiders that offers a rare glimpse into its cuisine, its mythology, the realm of women's talk, and views on sex and religion, exploring thus what it means to be a woman in this country.
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In Keeping Quiet, Páramo has collected essays addressing what it is like to live in a world of silence or the absence thereof. This collection covers a wide range of angles and experiences, from an exploration of IBM’s anechoic chamber—the world’s quietest place— to stories of incest, marriage, sexual harassment, social justice, and first-person accounts of life in the emirate of Qatar. Páramo crosses the borders between art (Mozart, Monet, Beethoven, Sheila Chandra, Neruda) and yoga, between research and drunkenness, between despair and triumph, weaving the intimate and personal with what is upsetting in women’s health industry. In “Belated Comebacks,” Páramo is full of righteous anger; in “Teaching Mom Long Division,” she explores the oceanic depths of longing; in “Writers of Color,” she examines the complexities of being brown and speaking accented English; in “Three Women,” she exposes the social underbelly of Qatar during the pandemic, then mixes it all with personal reckonings.
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