A collection that explores the space between personal loss and collective crisis

The essays in Between What Was and What Is address timely questions of power, identity, history, and resilience. Ranging from intimate personal reflection to global crisis, Adriana Páramo examines the contradictions and tensions that define how we live—and how we make sense of what we’ve lived through.

Grounded in the present moment, Páramo engages directly with current events: the death of Pope Francis and the debates about reform his passing has reopened, and the ongoing devastation of the war in Ukraine. She grapples with the lasting weight of colonial, familial, and national trauma, and with the experience of returning to a homeland that no longer matches memory. These essays enter a broader conversation about the liberation of brown and Latina women—voices frequently pushed to the margins of predominantly white feminist spaces. She asks what drives people to persist in the face of systemic inequality. An encounter with a Kumari Devi in Nepal becomes an occasion to examine faith, ritual, and the assumptions we bring to spiritual experience. Throughout, Páramo moves between the everyday and the sacred to interrogate how culture and identity are lived and inherited.

From personal reflections on age, feminism, and rebuilding after failure to larger examinations of race and systemic oppression, Between What Was and What Is asks readers to engage seriously with difficult realities. It takes stock of what we inherit, what we survive, and what we carry forward.