Tamara writes. She writes in her tiny apartment in bustling Puebla, Mexico, where street vendors hawk vegetables and fruits, clothes, and electronics. Where their calls ring like birdsong and the sound of city traffic bellows low like a bassoon, or a didgeridoo.
Tamara writes beautiful phrases, linking adjective and metaphor. Inventing words, painting pictures of alebrijes and butterflies and magic. But her stories are not fanciful. They are not fast-food fairy tales or strip-mall Coca-Cola Inc.-brand fables meant to lull you to sleep and to buy their products.
Tamara’s stories have an edge. They have a point, chiseled over years. They are stories of grit. They are stories of truth. Where the hero is not an impossibly brawny white uniform-wearing man, but an elderly migrant; a homeless grandmother, fleeing violence, picking her way forward, following the breadcrumbs left by an unjust system made not for her, but for the rich. For the elites. For the wealthy tourists, with their expensive cameras, who speak loudly in foreign languages in countries they only visit to say they’ve visited, and eat their food and buy their trinkets and return home to brag.
But Tamara’s protagonists also have their superpowers. They have magic. They see mystical creatures. They paint their own worlds, just like Tamara’s pen, or keyboard stroke.
Tamara writes of injustice. She writes of inequality. She writes of poverty. Then she volunteers at a migrant shelter. She marches with the Indigenous defending their homeland, fighting foreign water companies or mining corporations. She meets. She organizes. She speaks, softly. In a throng of people, she is often the one behind the lens of a camera. Tamara carries both powerful words and silence, in the same breath. This is her superpower. She knows both when to listen and to speak. A potent potion few heroes wield.
Global inequality is her Lex Luthor. Her Joker. Her Darth Vader. This system that permits some countries, and thereby some people, to hold so much power over the rest. This system that decides who needs to fight to survive and who gets to spend their days binge watching Netflix. Who will be educated. Who should travel. Who should live and who should die. All decided by what side of a fence they were born on. What mountainside. What distant shore. What tiny dot on the planet their mothers birthed and raised them.
This global caste system — that is her greatest antagonist. And she fights it daily the only way she knows how. With the very essence of her soul.
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Tamara Pearson is an Australian-Mexican writer and journalist. You can check out her work on her website ResistanceWords.com. I’ll add a link in the show notes.
Her latest novel, Eyes of the Earth, is a journey of magical realism about a 73-year-old homeless refugee in Mexico. Definitely check it out.
As always, I’m your host Michael Fox. This is Stories of Resistance, a new podcast series co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review.
As always, thanks for listening. See you next time.
This is Stories of Resistance—a new podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.
Check out Tamara Pearson’s original publications for The Real News Network here, and follow her work at resistancewords.com. She tweets at x.com/pajaritaroja.
You can find Tamara Pearson’s latest novel, Eyes of the Earth, at resistancewords.com/novel-the-eyes-of-the-earth/
Written and produced by Michael Fox.
If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting, and support at patreon.com/mfox.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.