She Is Absolutely a Queen.

SIETAR Brasil hosted a workshop this week on O papel das questões étnico-raciais no campo da interculturalidade — the role of ethnic and racial questions in the field of interculturality. Margery Pimentel presented. I had spoken with her before so I went in as a fan already. Fully prepared to be impressed. Was not disappointed.

Two hours later the room was still going and nobody wanted to stop. Which, for anyone who has ever sat through a presentation where you are watching the clock and willing the host to wrap it up — you know how rare that is. I am presenting at SIETAR Valencia next month and I am taking notes. Furiously.

But let me tell you how I found Margery first, because the workshop makes more sense with that context.

I found her through local career consultant, Renata Takacura, on Instagram. Her posts as a racial psychologist and I sent three of them to people before I even finished reading. I am a white immigrant with no religious association. Her work showed me a dimension of the migration experience I was not living and could not access from inside my own position. The way race shifts weight country by country, the identity that gets heavier in certain rooms without warning, the things that were background noise in one place and the only sound in the room somewhere else.

My anxiety-induced lack of ego told me immediately: she would never want to talk to you. She could just flick you away. Why would someone doing this level of work have any interest in what you are building?

I asked anyway. She said yes. And I felt seen and honestly like I had won something I had not entered a competition for.

She sent me studies I forwarded to friends at midnight when they needed them. Conversations that turned into chapters, and points I still send people when they are trying to understand something about their own migration they have no words for yet. That is what her work does.

So if you ask me whether she delivered well at the workshop — she killed it. Of course she did. I already knew she would. I just did not expect the entire room to collectively forget they had other things to do.

Here is one of the passages she contributed to Parenting Unpacked. Read this one slowly.

"Intercultural psychologist Margery Pimentel told me that migration reshapes identity in unexpected ways. In Brazil, she was always aware of her Blackness. In Canada, that awareness grew heavier in certain rooms. One of her Kenyan friends described the opposite — race had never felt central until Canada made it unavoidable. What had always been background noise suddenly demanded to be the only sound in the room." - Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self

That passage is in the book because Margery trusted me enough to have that conversation. The workshop this week reminded me exactly why I sought her out in the first place.

One of the things we touched on — and I say touched on because two hours is apparently nothing when you get a room of people thinking about this stuff — is that migrants are a minority whether they like it or not. That sentence alone could start a very long conversation. It did. And I am bringing the whole thing to the next post because it deserves its own space and I am not the kind of person who buries the interesting bit at the bottom of an already long page.

It is waiting for you right there below. Go read it.

Margery — thank you for saying yes when I asked. Thank you for the studies, the conversations, the thinking. And for killing it again yesterday.

Grateful for the people who say yes,

Jessica Gabrielzyk