Anthropologist and Author Adriana Páramo Examines the World Through Exploratory, Concerned Lens

Colombian-born author Adriana Páramo left her native country 23 years ago. Since, she's lived in numerous nations, danced with individuals of all walks, and eaten food she never knew existed. Geographical exploration and global wandering shaped the way she sees the world and the way she describes it, and this has been made abundantly clear by her books, "My Mother's Funeral" and "Looking for Esperanza."

Colombia, specifically Páramo's mother's home in Colombia, was always home for the author. So, when her mother passed, she felt that she became homeless, producing a "migrant" condition that would influence her writing. But, before the rootlessness, when she was a 6-year-old in Medellín, Páramo wanted to run a dry cleaner when she grew up. She wanted to count garments and issue itemized receipts. Those dreams wandered a bit, and she progressed toward a desire to be a missionary, an actress, or a world traveler.

As fate would have it, Páramo became a petroleum engineer who quickly became resistant the corporate world. She walked away from her position as a geophysicist for BP. Instead, she moved to Alaska to pursue a degree in anthropology; gained her graduate degree and a career as a cultural anthropologist; and moved to Kuwait, where she worked as a high school teacher, and conducted fieldwork among Indian maids for her doctoral dissertation. This was the first time she'd written in English.

Scientific lingo marked her writing, but she quieted that serious tone, softened hard data, and converted facts into compelling narrative so that she could share the results of her dissertation with Amnesty International and the Antislavery Organization. It was at that time that she was bitten by the writing bug. She then moved to write reflective works that examines inherent femininity and female identity.

"I can't escape this condition of being a woman," Páramo said to Latin Post. "My daughter is married, lives her own life, and needs very little guidance from me; I'm an orphan, yet, I find myself writing about either being a mother or being a daughter almost compulsively. Women's lives permeate in my writing. In fact, most of my published material is inherently feminine and feminist, terms that, in my book, are synonyms for the word 'woman.' I write a mixture of social memoir, literary journalism, women's issues and travel. Women experience and portray travel differently, gender matters. Traveling while woman affects my work, the narrative I use to describe my journeys, and those of women in foreign environs, the nuances of which I've been privy to because of my gender."

"Looking for Esperanza," Páramo's debut book, began when the author ventured to track down a desperately poor Mexican woman, Esperanza, after reading about her in a Florida newspaper. Esperanza had crossed the U.S./Mexico border on foot with her four children. The dreaded journey caused her young daughter to die from dehydration halfway through the trek, forcing Esperanza to attempt to smuggle her daughter's dead body into the U.S.

When searching for Esperanza, Páramo hadn't intended to write a book when she began her adventure to find Esperanza. Nonetheless, she created a work that would chronicle her fieldwork with undocumented farmworkers and the unheard voices of women she encountered when searching for Esperanza.

"I guess that being an immigrant, a woman, and a mother myself, created a gnawing connection that was hard to ignore. All I ever wanted to achieve was to find her. But there were so many Esperanzas, so many poor, immigrant mothers crossing the border with identical dreams and similar compelling stories, that by the time I found Esperanza, I had, unknowingly, taken an oral X-Ray of their subculture," said Páramo. "I had amassed too many testimonies, seen too many tears, shared with them too many hours in the field, for me just to go home and forget about them."

The author's second book, "My Mother's Funeral," captured her life after the loss of her mother and addressed the meaning of being a mother and a daughter. The author shared that she grew up attempting to balance the gamut of feeling she experienced toward her mother, attempting to find the happy medium between blind devotion and the burning desire to rebel against everything her mother stood for. Both emotions burned with ravaging intensity, so she removed herself from her home and then the country as she awaited understanding, not healing.

"I wanted 'My Mother's Funeral' to be a celebration of life and womanhood. I wanted to pay tribute to women's strength, their ability to gang up against poverty and abandonment, and come out triumphant and unscathed. I also wanted to humanize, which is to say, to demystify death," said Páramo. "I wanted the guts, and the skeletons, and the attempted abortions, and the rigor mortis, and the act of cremating one's mother, and the hit-man's funeral next door to mom's; facing all of these gritty, ugly bits was... is... fundamental to my personal mourning, and in the process of living the grit of life without Mom, it became necessary to write about it."

"You're Not My Sister," the tentative title of Páramo's third work, will map the author's experiences in Kuwait. With the skills of an anthropologist and the eye of a storyteller, it will highlight seldom-explored paths in journalism and literature. That's the story of the expat woman in Kuwait, the female border-crosser and the triumph and tragedy that's associated with that journey. It will offer a glance into a hidden culture where slavery thrives, and back-street abortions, alcoholism, drug smuggling, prostitution, domestic violence and social inequality are pervasive and entrenched, much like any nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Today, Páramo lives in Arab nation Qatar, where she works as a Zumba instructor at numerous gyms and spas. At the edge of the city and far from the desert, she spends many hours behind the wheel, listening to hours of Latin music for work as well as pleasure. Learn more about Páramo, her writing and her extensive traveling by visiting her travel blog.