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Gabriela Soriano | Underground Memories | San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas | 2026

Peace as a path to messianic insurrection About the Frayba Agenda 2026 Underground Memories

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

Last Wednesday, the presentation of the fifteenth edition of the Frayba Agenda Titled “Underground Memories,” it was prepared by the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center in Chiapas. This annual publication, since 2011, preserves the living memory of the actions carried out in the promotion and defense of the human rights of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, as well as of people in forced migration and refugees, who have been supported by this civil society organization over several decades. Frayba -as this organization is affectionately called- was born inspired by the winds of conciliar renewal of the diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and the social processes that emerged as an expression of the indigenous movement of the second half of the twentieth century.

Three articles reflecting on the local, regional, and national context—by Jorge Santiago, founder of several ecclesial and civil organizations, Susana Montes de la Commission for Support of Community Reconciliation (Coreco) and an interview with Carlos González, a member of the Coordination of National Indigenous Congress of Government Created by Pedro Faro, these are accompanied by a valuable graphic record of the key moments of three decades of peacebuilding in Chiapas. The editorial design and illustrations by Gabriela Soriano Segoviano reflect, with beautiful strokes of contemporary folk art, the connections of the underground memories of resistance that inspire the indigenous peoples of today, as well as civil society and the churches that walk with them.

Below, I transcribe my participation in the round table discussion, on that rainy afternoon in San Cristóbal de Las Casas.

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“There is no path to peace, peace is the path”

Mahatma Gandhi

This year we are commemorating three decades of peacebuilding in Chiapas: Frayba, Coreco, Sipaz, the National Indigenous Congress, the Zapatista Movement, the San Andrés Accords, and many other initiatives of civil society, churches, and social movements. These networks emerged from the fertile soil of Chiapas, prepared more than six decades ago by the pastoral plan of the Diocese of San Cristóbal with the arrival of Bishop [name missing]. jTatik Samuel Ruiz, who, after an arduous and patient conversation and journey with the native peoples, led to the birth of an indigenous Church.

A decade later, the Indigenous Congress of 1974 fostered the emergence of a collective consciousness among Indigenous peoples as historical subjects. And finally, the rise of the Zapatista movement, with its support bases and militias, proposed a different way of living and creating the political sphere as a shared endeavor. All these processes were accompanied by a vibrant and creative current of critical thought, which arose in the Highlands of Chiapas and the canyons of the Lacandon Jungle throughout the second half of the 20th century.

The San Cristóbal School, so named by Pablo Romo, along with the Cuernavaca School, analyzed by Humberto Bech, have been, in my opinion, the two main Mexican contributions to critical thought in the second half of the 20th century. Both provide us today with a precise direction for confronting with clarity the growing spiral of systemic violence that, with the Puerto Rican decolonial thinker Nelson Maldonado-Torres, we call here the Great Catastropheand.

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Jorge Santiago's reflection on the Frayba Agenda 2026. Underground Memories The work we present today rightly underscores the centrality of the San Andrés Accords as a crucible of decades of struggle for peace with justice and dignity. The thinker from San Cristóbal points out that the historical demands of Indigenous peoples remain relevant, and that the Mexican state still owes a debt for honoring these historic accords.

Two pastoral letters from jTatik Samuel Ruiz and Don Raúl Vera prepared the celebration of the Third Diocesan Synod, which took place from 1995 to 1999. This process allowed the diocese to reap the harvest of half a century of pastoral life and thus give a clear path of synodality to the life and commitments of this diocese. Both letters arose in a context of uncertainty due to the animosity and conflict on the part of Vatican authorities of that time, fueled by the Club of Rome, or a group of Mexican bishops who were declared enemies of liberation theology in Mexico and Latin America.

The first pastoral letter So that justice and peace may meet (1996) is an ecclesial response to the armed uprising of 1994. It reflects the struggle for land by indigenous peoples, as well as the commitment to justice and peace made by this diocese, following the impetus of the Second Vatican Council and the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín. The second pastoral letter From pain to hope, The agreement, signed by both bishops in 1998, after the Acteal massacre, is a commitment to hope amid the pain of the survivors and a pledge to continue seeking peace with justice and dignity.

The Vatican's violence against this pastoral project would later be unleashed against Don Raúl Vera, who was transferred to the Diocese of Saltillo on December 30, 1999, in a failed attempt to dismantle the synodal process. What his detractors never imagined was that this perverse decision would become the opportunity to sow the seeds of a liberating Church, now in lands of mining extraction and gender violence, which Don Raúl would embrace with fidelity to his mission as a pastor in those desert lands of northern Mexico.

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Finally, I would like to make two final comments to continue the conversation.

The challenges of moving forward, after three decades of peacebuilding, are now unprecedented, as we find ourselves in the uncertain moment of civilizational collapse. A commitment to justice for Indigenous peoples is no longer enough; it is essential to integrate other forms of justice, such as gender justice (sexual diversity) and ecological justice, to understand the rebellions. transmodern that build individuals and collectives of survivors in contexts of global violence. The historical strength of the poor, which the first generation of liberation theology envisioned, is giving way to the unsubmissive reason of social and ecclesial movements that are already weaving networks of mutual support, dignity, resistance and diverse re-existences.

It is also time to reformulate the theoretical framework for thinking about systemic violence. Liberation theology requires a radicalization that arises from dialogue with decolonial thought and theory. queer/cuir /queer and intersectionality to continue supporting peace processes, transitional justice, and diverse spiritualities of life that face the ongoing Great Catastrophe.

Let us not forget that it is our task to honor the legacy of the ancestors of the liberating Church, but from the new subjectivities, bodies and territories in resistance, with the fruits of thought, art and spirituality that emerge as messianic insurrections anticipating other worlds, of dignity and life for everyone.

The spirituality of messianic time is an interruption of the linear time of that Chronos that devours its children on altars of bloody sacrifices. Such a messianic force arises as an insurrection. peaceful In the face of systemic violence, that is, as a break from the vicious cycle of rivalry and violence, to establish processes of mutual recognition, beyond the violence that produces poverty, exclusion, and subjugation to hegemonic powers. It is a spirituality of life in the midst of death. Another time that (in)emerges as an anticipation of other possible worlds from the survivors of yesterday and today.

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Next Wednesday, March 25, at 6 p.m., we will continue our discussion on critical thinking emerging from Chiapas, with reflections by Pablo Romo on the San Cristóbal School and experiences of a spirituality of mutual support amidst violence, presented by our friend and Peruvian colleague Juan Carlos La Puente. Both reflections will be followed by a dance performance by Martha Elena Welsh.

See you at the restaurant Belil, in the historic center of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, where with Ricardo and Carmen as hosts, along with Angélica and Abraham, we will continue opening dining spaces, where resistances and spiritualities emerge as a commitment to permanent dialogue and mutual support in the care of life.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, March 7, 2026

March 7, 2026
Carlos Mendoza Álvarez | Prayer in the hills with Jilol Pedro | Sot's Leb, 2026

We are earth, we are wind The teachings of Jilol Pedro

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The rocky base of the mountain - through which the Ts'ajalsul or river of salt water - is the center of the world during the prayer of Peter, the young man Jilol or the healer of the Tsotsil people. Dressed in his black wool poncho, with two red crosses embroidered on the shoulders like the dalmatic of Saint Lawrence the Martyr, patron saint of Sots'leb -land of bats in Tsotsil, or Zinacantán- Pedro plants the candles and places the flowers already blessed before dawn.

In a long ceremony held in the parish hall, on the eve of Ash Wednesday, the six gathered Jiloletic With dozens of catechists and some of the friars who walk with them, we were preparing to accompany them to six sacred sites in the Zinacanteco region to bring offerings to the hills that protect us from wars and evils, invoking God and the saints at every spring, rock at the bottom of the ravine, or hilltop where we would stop to pray after an exhausting sacred walk.

Three times a year, according to ancestral tradition, prayers rise to the heavens from the hills of this region in the Chiapas Highlands, inhabited by the Tsotsil people of Zinacantán, to venerate Mother Earth in her sacred places and acknowledge the God of Life, who ceaselessly shelters all creatures that live here with the forests and springs. Jiloletic They are the ones who hold sacred power in these ceremonies. They have received the mandate—in dreams and through extraordinary signs throughout their lives, sometimes since childhood—to heal the community of its many ailments, illnesses, and the violence inflicted upon their bodies and crops. Healers of ancestral tradition, their spiritual authority is revered by the communities at pivotal moments, such as prayers on the hills to ask for bountiful harvests, abundant rains, and protection from war and other evils that threaten the people and creatures who inhabit these lands.

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Pedro is a young man from Jilol who led one of the six pilgrimage routes through the hills of Zinacantán earlier this year. His gentle nature, with a deep gaze and kind smile, becomes powerful when he begins to pray in Tsotsil, his voice strong and mantra-like, chanting invocations to the hills, the saints, and the... Ch'ul Spirit, with Jesus Christ and Mary as guides of protection and divine strength. We all kneel behind him, on the rushes carefully scattered by the catechists, to "plant the candles," already blessed, before the three Zinacanteco green crosses that mark this place as a sacred space, visited by other pilgrims throughout the year. The crosses are also venerated with white and yellow flowers that were also blessed and incensed before dawn.

At some of the Stations of the Cross, Peter tells us a story about the holy place. Like that one about Lachikin, On the rocky hill beside the river, a group of soldiers are summoned who remained there after a past attempt to attack a woman bathing in the river, a criminal impulse that led them to the current where they drowned. But the hills rescued them and transformed them into guardians of these lands, protecting their inhabitants from war. That is why every year we must come to remind them of this duty, because they still dwell here. Many creatures inhabit the hills, and Jiloletic They have received the gift of seeing them and communicating with them in order to ask for protection for the communities.

After hearing that brief story, the group continues along the path, advancing single file along a steep, rocky trail to climb the hillside and reach another ravine where another prayer will take place. But before setting off, the walkers each receive a small cup of soda, passed from mouth to mouth, like a ritual act of shared strength. Alejandro, the catechist coordinator, invites us to pick up the trash left behind by other careless pilgrims, especially bottles and plastic wrappers, as a sign of caring for the sacred place we have just venerated. A small symbol of the work of caring for Mother Earth that the diocese is painstakingly promoting as part of its spirituality and ecotheology.

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For several decades now, the Parish of Zinacantán—re-entrusted to the Dominican friars in 1975 after an absence of more than a century, in harmony with the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in its commitment to the poor and indigenous peoples, along with the hundreds of catechists and lay ministers who support the communities—has been fostering the encounter between the ancestral spirituality of the Zinacantán people and the Christian spirituality of the Gospel of Christ, embodied in the life and culture of the Zinacantán communities. The prayer on the hills, for example, which they continue to practice, is a testament to this tradition. Jiloletic While celebrated independently, it is also an integral part of the parish's activities. Each of these key moments of the year culminates in a Eucharist where both traditions converge in a shared intention to care for the life of the community and venerate Mother Earth as the primordial gift of the God of Life, who nourishes us with his body that is earth and wind, water and fire, and in the height of love becomes the body of Christ to nourish the praying community.

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“We are earth, we are wind” was the mantra that arose in my heart as I silently accompanied the prayers of Jilol Pedro in each of the sacred sites we visited one cold morning with radiant sunshine in the hills of Zinacantán.

Land that is nourished by springs, streams and rivers that flow between its rocky canyons.

Wind that sways the treetops and carries in its chariot the birds that live there. Wind that fans the fire that humanized the ancestors.

“We are earth, we are wind,” according to the wisdom of the prayer of the hills. That full awareness, embodied in breath, prayer, and shared words these days with the Jiloletic of Zinacantán, will endure in my memory like a spark of life that other traditions also receive in their own language.

Perhaps not by chance, this week we received ashes on our heads, according to the symbolism of the Hebrew and later Christian people: we are earth prepared by God like an ancient potter. This gesture is accompanied by a call to conversion. But we are also the wind of God who breathes his own spirit into us. Ruah divine to make us living beings.

Sots'leb, February 22, 2026

Note: How do we connect today with our earth and wind selves?

February 22, 2026
Comet Ludo | The struggle doesn't continue, it's ongoing | 2014

Non-patriarchal loves

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

“The patriarchy is a judge that judges us for being born | and our punishment is the violence you see […] And it wasn’t my fault, not how I walked, not how I dressed | and it wasn’t my fault, not how I walked, not how I dressed…” Thus began the performance by the Chilean collective Las Tesis at the height of the #MeToo movement, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic that would later ravage humanity. I remember how, in 2020, protests spread across the world like a rising tide: gatherings in public squares, clotheslines denouncing sexual harassment in universities, companies, government offices, and public parks. A green-and-black wave of women’s collective action confronting patriarchy.

At that time, colleagues at Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico City denounced fellow students, professors, and administrators through the clothesline for acts of sexual harassment. Thanks to these protests, a formal institutional protocol for reporting harassment was later established at the university, managed by various institutional committees and commissions. A human rights culture was also promoted to combat gender violence, integrating this issue into the curriculum and establishing the Center for Critical Gender Studies and Feminisms. Years earlier, a doctoral program had been created to investigate this phenomenon in contemporary society from an interdisciplinary perspective, thus contributing to the strengthening of feminist and LGBTQ+ collectives, while also designing proposals for the establishment of public policies on gender equality. I was tasked, along with feminist and queer colleagues, with exploring the best ways to support this initiative from the Division of Humanities and Communication, where I worked as a divisional coordinator at that time with a formidable team of young colleagues, experts in philosophy, communication, graphic arts, administration, and academic management.

During those years, there was also a surge in denunciations from public figures emerging in diverse cultural spheres, such as the artistic, academic, and religious communities, expressing the outcry of more than half the world's population, fed up with gender-based violence, primarily against women, but also against queer individuals and groups. Thanks to this collective awakening, I discovered the admirable work of the Indian theologian Kochurani Abraham with women victims of gender-based violence inflicted against them by male leaders of three traditional Indian religions: Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Their work consisted of making this age-old violence visible and accompanying women on their path to liberation from the patriarchal burden by inventing new forms of belonging to their spiritual tradition, nurtured by mutual care and creativity in their commitment to intertwining spirituality with social justice and gender equality.

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But there were also excesses, such as cancel culture, which destroyed, with a click, the lives and careers of people accused without evidence, sometimes as a settling of scores, other times as the rotten fruit of rivalry, and still others with sufficient grounds for an anonymous denunciation out of fear of the corruption networks that kept the patriarchal pact intact, a political phenomenon analyzed by Rita Segato as a mandate of masculinity in her work Counter-pedagogies of cruelty.

The case of Boaventura de Sousa Santos touched me very personally because years earlier I had organized, together with my dear colleague and friend Pablo Reyna, a colloquium on his scientific and poetic work, to frame the Honorary Doctorate through which he was awarded five degrees from universities within the Jesuit University System of Mexico for his notable contributions to epistemologies of the South, the World Social Forum, and the ecology of knowledges. A group of colleagues from the Center for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra accused him of sexual harassment in a British publication, which was later retracted. The accusation abruptly ended his career. This crisis, at the same time, brought to light a hidden problem of rivalry within Portuguese academia and its global connections. Now, five years later, we know that the accusations have not been proven, although the damage has already been done, according to the recent account of the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chaui. As part of this sad story, Maria Paula Meneses, the Mozambican academic, who was one of the people accused of covering up for the Portuguese author, has just passed away, and a farewell message she made public last July before her death can be read.

How to maintain the relevance of a colossal work like that of Boaventura, Maria Paula and Marilena, with their network of conversations about the world with decolonial and anticolonial colleagues such as Silvia Rivera-Cusicanqui and Gladys Tzul Tzul struggling from below, honoring first the memory of the victims of patriarchy, as well as those trapped in the spiral of resentment and hatred that expands in diverse human collectives, while continuing to call for the necessary accountability and the challenge of the communal discovery of truth?

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This week I participated in the Seminar on non-patriarchal practices led by our dear friend and fellow anthropologist Abraham Mena at Ecosur. It was a virtual session that allowed us to include critical theology in the academic conversation in this intercultural and Indigenous city, as an interlocutor with other social sciences and the humanities, in order to reflect on paths for overcoming patriarchy and its toxic masculinities.

In my presentation I emphasized the need for intersectionality as a method to connect the diverse forms of violence suffered by "the wretched of the earth," starting with women, but including people rendered disposable by a hegemonic, patriarchal, capitalist, classist, and white supremacist society.

I was surprised by the online questions that focused on best practices for dismantling patriarchy. My guiding thread in the dialogue was non-patriarchal loves like a compass to escape the entanglement of hegemonic power with its many heads, like the capitalist hydra the Zapatistas warned us about some years ago.

These non-patriarchal loves are dissident loves that dismantle the toxic way of affirming the human condition as power, control, and the mandate of masculinity. Diasporic loves of queer people, but also the love of cisgender people who embrace diversity in their own bodies, minds, and spirits. And as an expression of that love, I also emphasized the importance of ritual that collectives create in their diversity to celebrate life as survivors: the mothers of disappeared persons, the migrants facing the train of horror, not by chance named La Bestia, and the native peoples intertwining ancestral tradition with Christianities of diverse confessional tones.

I recounted, as a reference point for these new forms, the history of feminist liturgies that recreate their own sacramentality from the passage of divinity through lives, the bodies and the struggles of women, as she has explored Marilú Rojas in her research on the feminist ecotheology of liberation. She also brought to heart the queer/cuir liturgies of LGBTQ+ collectives, which never cease to celebrate the queer God as an incarnate divinity. As Ángel Méndez points out, there is nothing more queer than a humanized God.

Non-patriarchal loves are, ultimately, diasporic loves, that is to say, going out towards others in all their diversity. Gender-fluid loves that are constantly being reconceptualized, as analyzed by Sylvia Marcos in the case of Zapatista women. What matters are the people who risk living each human relationship and creature in the context of love that does not control, impose, or kill, but celebrates life in its amazing diversity.

Non-patriarchal loves that must be discovered in each story of those who dare to go out and encounter others (across differences and beyond them) as gift, offering, call, caress, cry, and communion.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, February 14, 2026

Note: How do you weave together non-patriarchal loves?

February 14, 2026

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