Stories of Resistance

On Thanksgiving morning before dawn, the ferries run every 15 minutes, taking people to a sunrise gathering. An Indigenous People’s Alcatraz Thanksgiving ceremony. 

The boats arrive to the island in the middle of the bay. People get off. Climb on to the island. They huddle against the chilly air and the cold winds that whip across San Francisco Bay. Lights from the cities across the water flicker in the distance. A ceremonial fire is lit. Drums beat as the sun rises. Songs are sung. Words are said. Dances danced. Prayers spoken. Stories told. Resistance remembered. This event is sacr...

Nov. 20 is Black Consciousness Day in Brazil. A day celebrating the struggle of Black organizations, people, and movements in Brazil. Celebrating the ongoing fight against racism. And, above all, celebrating the history of Brazil’s most historic Black leader: Zumbi dos Palmares.
He was leader of the great Palmares Quilombo, present-day Alagoas, an autonomous state built by escaped slaves in the 1600s.

Palmares would last for roughly a century. It would grow to a population of tens of thousands of people spread out over 11 towns in the forested mountains and hillsides of northeastern Brazil. And they would de...

It was the Great Depression. Early 1930s. United States. More than a thousand mortgages a day were being foreclosed on. Hundreds of thousands of families were losing their homes each year. 
Times were hard for everyone. Especially hard for farmers. But neighbors found a way to push back and help their friends in a very creative way. They called it a penny auction.

BIG NEWS! This podcast has won Gold in this year’s Signal Awards for best history podcast! It’s a huge honor. Thank you so much to everyone who voted and supported. 

And pl...

In the late 1700s, Indigenous peoples in the Spanish colonies of the Andes were forced to work for the Spanish. They tilled the land, worked in the textile mills and the mines. Those that didn’t faced heavy taxes. But in early November 1780, Indigenous Incan leader Tupac Amaru II led an uprising against the Spanish that he hoped would end it all.

It was the largest revolt against colonial Spain. Thousands would join the months-long rebellion. It would inspire uprisings elsewhere across the continent, and independence leaders. South America would gain its freedom from Spain just 40 years later.

Just a year ago almost no one had ever heard of him. Just a name in a crowd. A fairly obscure member of the New York State Assembly. Just one in a packed pool of Democratic candidates running for mayor of New York City. A longshot. Now he is the leading candidate in the city’s mayoral race next Tuesday, November 4. A \Democratic socialist who has ignited a movement. A glimmer of hope amid dark days. Hope for not just New York City, but elsewhere around the country, and a road map for other progressive candidates.

BIG NEWS! Th...

ICE agents are detaining thousands of people a day from communities across the country. But people are resisting. And it’s having an impact. Millions have protested in recent weeks, from the #NoKings rally to demonstrations in front of immigration detention centers, and protests against ICE in their communities. Neighbors in one Chicago suburb pushed back by yelling and honking car horns when ICE agents descended on their community. Elsewhere they’ve handed out thousands of whistles to neighbors at risk. And people are lifting up their cell phone cameras and their voices, and putting their bodies on the line to f...

On October 18, 2019, protests erupted in Santiago, Chile, over a hike in the cost of public transportation. But the demonstrations quickly grew into more than that. Those in the streets demanded change—real change. They demanded more rights. They demanded a new Constitution.

Police cracked down with impunity. Videos went viral of riot police beating people in the streets. Chemical water guns. Shooting rubber bullets at point blank range. The number of the dead and wounded skyrocketed.

Throughout the protests, which would ripple on for almost 6 months, Chilean state security forces would cause more than 400 eye injuries to...

It was once called Columbus Day, and it still is in many parts. A day to celebrate the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who supposedly “discovered” America. But America was there long before Columbus came. And so were millions of people up and down the continent. Experts estimate that there were anywhere from 60–90 million people in the Americas at the time. Possibly even more people in the Americas than in Europe at the time. 

But disease and successive wars by waves of invading Europeans decimated the local Indigenous populations. Over the next century, roughly 90% of Indigenous peoples in the Western...

Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in recent days. They've marched in dozens of cities. They're demanding respect and safety for the flotilla passengers kidnapped and detained by Israeli forces. They're demanding an end to the violence in Gaza and an end to their countries’ complicity in the genocide in Palestine. 

BIG NEWS! This podcast is a finalist for this year’s Signal Awards for best history podcast. It's a huge honor just to get this far. And you can help us win. Your vote can make a difference. Anyone can vote. Here’s the link: https...

In Ecuador, the country's largest Indigenous movement has been leading mass protests in the streets for nearly two weeks against President Daniel Noboa’s lifting of diesel subsidies. Gas prices have spiked. They say it will impact the price of food.

They’re calling their protests an “indefinite national strike.” The country is now on fire. They have faced repression. But they have vowed to continue in the streets, demanding justice. Demanding their rights. Standing in defense of their communities, their lives, and their future.

This is Stories of Resistance—a podcast produced by The Real News. Each...

Harriet Tubman is an icon for freedom. She first fled slavery with two brothers on September 17, 1849. By the following year, she was returning to save others. She traveled by night, from safe house to safe house, supported by a network of abolitionists known as the Underground Railroad. Walking north to Pennsylvania—a free state. She would make 13 trips back and forth throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. She rescued roughly 70 people from enslavement. But she didn’t stop there.
This is episode 68 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast produced by The Real News. Each week, we’ll bring yo...

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire inspired and he resisted. He was imprisoned and exiled during the Brazilian dictatorship and he carried his teachings around the world. He believed literacy and learning could be tools to empower. He helped people learn to read and write, but also understand their place of oppression and rise above it.

He wrote, “Education doesn’t transform the world. Education changes people. People transform the world.”

This is episode 67 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast produced by The Real News. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times...

High school students are still marching in Argentina to remember the disappeared—kids like them who were kidnapped, detained, tortured and disappeared nearly a half century ago during the country’s military dictatorship. Kidnapped during an operation known as the Night of the Pencils—carried out on September 16, 1976. 

This is episode 66 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast produced by The Real News. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

You can check out Michael's exclusive pictures of this student march here, on his Patreon.
Michael's Panamerican Dispatch podcast epi...

On September 11, 1973, tanks rumbled over the streets of Santiago, Chile. Planes bombed La Moneda, the presidential palace, as US-backed General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. It was a dark, dark moment in Chile’s history. Pinochet would unleash a bloody regime that would grip power until 1990. During his rule, thousands were rounded up, detained, tortured, and executed.

But there was resistance.

In this special bonus episode of Stories of Resistance, we showcase four different vignettes of people standing up to the evil in which Pinochet enveloped the country in the early 1970s, and...

It’s past midnight on September 6, 1971. 

Across the prison, dozens of men slip out of their beds. Bricks slide out from the walls of their cells. Bodies slip out silently. They move into a tunnel that has been chiseled and dug slowly and silently for eight months, and they creep one by one underneath the prison.

It is the stuff of movies. Or of legends. Or of cartoons. The only sound is the ruffle of their prison uniforms and the occasional scrape of knees and hands on the ground.

A total of 111 men escape fro...

In August 1791, slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue revolted, rising up by the thousands. Within ten days they've taken over the whole northern province. By the following year, they controlled a third of the colony. It was the spark that would ignite the Haitian revolution — a 13-year-long endeavour. Independence would finally come on January 1, 1804. But they would have to defeat three European countries to get there.

This is episode 64 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast produced by The Real News. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Please c...

The 1980s were a time of war El Salvador. The government openly attacked its citizens. Repression. Murder. Massacres.

Radio Venceremos broadcasted twice a day. And it was a voice of truth. A voice of reason. A voice of resistance amid the violence and the government repression and the military bloodshed. They spoke truth to power. They offered hope to the masses—the people praying for change. Praying that El Salvador could be different. That one day they would not have to live in fear.

This is episode 63 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast produced by The Real...

It is not a pretty bridge. Four lanes of busy traffic rush across Puente Bulnes during most hours. To the North, it buttresses against two overpasses that lead to a bustling highway. Below it, run the milky grey waters of the Mapocho River, after passing through downtown Santiago, Chile. 

50 years ago, in another time, this bridge was a favorite execution site for the military and police of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Today, Aquiles Cordova will not let it be forgotten—ever.

This is episode 62 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast produced by The Real News...

There is a place, tucked into the mountains and hills near the border between the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Puebla, where local campesinos continue to practice an ancestral tradition. They are salt farmers. And they are the last of their kind. But they are holding on. Holding on to the past in the present. Holding on to their tradition, culture and livelihood. Resisting amid the ancient salt pools in the cactus-studded hills of Mexico.

This is episode 61 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast produced by The Real News. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like...

In the land of the Condor, near the base of the tallest mountain in the Western hemisphere, an Incan community lived. The people hunted, along the sheer hillsides, they farmed, they collected water from the river gushing from snowmelt. They had children, built families, and passed on traditions to generations of descendants.

The land was cold, inhospitable, but their village grew and their community thrived at the far Southern reaches of the vast Incan empire, in present-day Argentina. Today, centuries have passed, the people are gone, but the stones and dirt that made their homes remain. The stories...

On the Northeastern Brazilian coast, in the region of Alcântara, Maranhão, there are dozens of traditional villages of Black communities. Their families have lived here for generations — farming and fishing. They are known as quilombos. These villages were founded by their ancestors, who were either freed or who escaped enslavement on the plantations of Brazil.

There are thousands of quilombos across Brazil. But only a small number have the titles to their lands. And many are under threat from development projects, resource extraction, Big Ag, and real estate. This was the story in Alcântara, where these...

On July 17, 1936, the Nazi-backed Spanish General Federico Franco led an armed rebellion against the Spanish government. It began a bloody civil war that would last for years. 

Thousands of people left their homes and traveled to Spain to stand up and defend its democratically elected government against Franco and fascism. Roughly 35,000 people from more than 50 countries would join the Spanish International Brigade. Of those internacionalistas, roughly 3,000 men and women came from the United States and volunteered to fight. They founded the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. 

This is episode 58 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real...

Thousands on the streets of Brazil, Sao Paulo’s Paulista Avenue packed, angry and protesting US President Donald Trump and his imposition of 50% tariffs on Brazilian products. Trump’s new tariffs on Brazil are in response to the country’s trial against Trump ally, former far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 

Bolsonaro is accused of leading a “criminal organization” that looked to stop his successor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from assuming the presidency after he won the 2022 elections. The Brazilian courts will decide. Trump has other plans. But Brazilian leaders say they won’t back down. 

“If there's one t...

There are less than a hundred members of the Karipuna tribe. They live on their land in the Brazilian state of Rondonia. Their territory is demarcated, which means that it’s legally theirs.But many outsiders don’t care. Land invaders have been pushing in, hauling off hardwood and big trees and carving out pieces of their land, and dividing them up to sell.

The Karipuna are resisting.

This is episode 56 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange's Human Rights in Action progra...

Over the last two and a half centuries people in the US have used July 4 to make their stand against injustice, inequality, and oppression, and demand their rights. From an infamous speech by Frederick Douglass to women suffragists demanding the right to vote, civil rights protests, and a historic farm workers’ march, today we look at moments of July 4 resistance.

This is episode 55 of Stories of Resistance—a 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 t...

Chile’s Indigenous Mapuche people have played their own version of field hockey for countless generations. Roughly 2 million Mapuche Indigenous people live across Chile and Argentina. Many have moved from their ancestral lands to the city. But they have not forgotten their past. They are using their ancestral sport, palín, to breathe life into their culture and traditions. Using their sport as a type of resistance. 

This is episode 54 of Stories of Resistance—a 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...

Stonewall. They say it was the spark that set the fire ablaze. The start of the modern LGBTQ movement. Protests and riots that lasted for days in defense of gay rights. And from it, came gay pride parades, gay pride months, days, and celebrations far from the United States, in cities around the world. 

This is episode 53 of Stories of Resistance—a 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.
...

On June 28, 2009, Honduras exploded and the people took to the streets after the president was overthrown in a coup. One radio show followed them, reported from the protests, and became the voice of the resistance: Felix Molina’s Resistencia—Resistance.

This is episode 52 of Stories of Resistance—a 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. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. <...

The year is 1968. Summertime. Washington, DC. And covering the National Mall are endless rows of shacks built by hundreds of poor families from across the United States. It’s called Resurrection City, and they have come to Washington to demand an end to poverty and a new economic bill of rights… for the poor.

This was Martin Luther King Jr’s dream. The Poor People’s Campaign is what he’d been working for in the months before he was killed in April 1968. 

The city would last for six weeks. It would inspire thousands. Its legacy would last...

For hundreds of years, the Spanish banned the Incan Festival of the Sun—the Andean New Year. But since the middle of the 20th century, Inti Raymi has been back. Today, communities, cities, towns and even universities hold Inti Raymi celebrations. They make offerings, light fires and incense. They say prayers to Pachamama and Inti, the sun. They sing and dance. 

And it’s not just a celebration. It is an act of resistance.

This is episode 50 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global...

If you walk down the street in Paraguay, you will hear people speaking Spanish, the official language of most of the countries of Latin America. But, particularly if you are in the countryside, you will also hear something else: Guaraní.

It’s one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the Americas; a mother tongue of roughly six and half million people. In particular, in Paraguay.

There, most Paraguayans speak Guaraní or a mixture of Guaraní and Spanish, regardless of whether or not they are Indigenous Guaraní, mestizo, or white. When Paraguay was invaded in the mid-1...

Q’eswachaka is the last Incan rope bridge. It’s located down in a valley in the Andes mountains of Peru. And in early June, the residents of four Quechua communities hold a three-day-long festival, where they rebuild the bridge from scratch.

This is not just a task to be done, but an ancestral ceremony. A means of holding on to their traditions and the story—resisting modernity and the passage of time, by preserving this piece of their history and their culture.

The bridge itself is a symbol of the community’s connection to their past, to...

Bruce Springsteen has never shied away from expressing his political views. And he’s not gonna back down now.

“In my home, the America I love. The America I’ve written about. That has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration,” he told a crowd at a concert in Europe, in May. Donald Trump responded over Truth Social, calling him a “pushy, obnoxious jerk” and a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker.”

In dark times, music and song gives us hope. Bruce Springsteen, like Pet...

You might think that Ernesto “Che” Guevara's resistance came with the Cuban revolution. When he sailed on the yacht known as the Granma, picked up arms, fought alongside Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra, and liberated the island of Cuba. Or when he denounced US intervention at the United Nations, or when he helped to lead Cuba and make it self-sufficient, despite the US embargo that still exists today. Or when he left it all behind to try and spark a revolution in Bolivia.

But Ernesto Guevara's resistance began long before all of that. It began when he trav...

Independent journalists say they are under threat in El Salvador. At least 15 journalists have fled the country in recent weeks. Roughly a dozen more are in hiding out of fear for their safety.

“There's an atmosphere of fear, of anxiety. Of insecurity,” says Oscar Orellana, the head of the community media association ARPAS.

But many continue to report. They continue to denounce the unjust detention of human rights
defenders. They continue to tell the stories that need to be told. Resisting… despite everything.

This is episode 45 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The R...

Protesters have taken to the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco. They’re protesting the detention and arrest of thousands of immigrants by Donald Trump’s immigration officials. 

Protests have carried on for days. They’ve shut down highways. They've shouted, “No.” Trump has responded, calling in the national guard, despite objections from local state officials. It’s the first time a president has unilaterally called in the national guard in 60 years. 

California governor Gavin Newsom says he’s suing Trump for illegally deploying federal troops and “flaming the fires.” 

People have promised to resist. More prote...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, his spoke novels. He was Steinbeck, Tolstoy, and Tolkien, all in one. His images capture the spirit of the poor and working classes. And they grip the viewer. Refusing to let your eyes peal from the picture before you. Pictures in black and white. Pictures that seem to have been painted by brush strokes, but which are as real as the camera equipment he used.

Sebastião Salgado was an artist. And he was a documentarian. Capturing the plight of the downtrodden, but also their soul. Their beauty.

S...

There is a boat sailing to Gaza right now. It carries aid for the people of Palestine. And it is called the Freedom Flotilla. It is a sign of solidarity. A sign of international resistance against Israel's war on the people of Palestine. Against the death, and destruction, and pain. Against the genocide.

The goal is to break Israel's siege of Gaza. And deliver much needed humanitarian aid.

The Freedom Flotilla left Sicily on June 1. It’s a seven-day voyage. 

If all goes as planned, it will arrive in Gaza this weekend.

This i...

The Chinchorro mummies are considered the oldest mummies in the world. Thousands of years older than the Egyptian mummies. And these were not pharaohs. They were everyday folks looking to hold on to what was most dear to them: The people they loved.

An embrace from the past that would last for thousands upon thousands of years. That would last until today. And, hopefully, far into the future.

This is episode 41 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange's Human Rights in Action pr...

Chile’s Club Deportivo Palestino is a soccer team founded more than a century ago by Palestinian immigrants in Santiago, Chile. Chile is home to the largest Palestinian community outside of the Middle East: half a million people.

The team wears the country’s colors: white, green and red. In the stands, fans wear them too, as well as keffiyehs, the black-and-white scarves that represent Palestinian identity and resistance. Their slogan is: “More than a team, it is an entire people.”

The team, the players, and the fans have remained outspoken in defense of Palestine. And outspoke...