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Carlos Mendoza Álvarez | Black Christ | Elambó Esquipulas, Chiapas | 2026

The Black Christs of Zinacantán

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

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The patron saint festival of Elambó Esquipulas in the Highlands of Chiapas opens with the resounding music of a band whose cymbals, clarinet, trumpets, and drum enliven the community's procession. We walk from the entrance of the village to the chapel of the Black Christ, draped in a pink mantle embroidered with colorful flowers and adorned with a curly wig of jet-black hair. The darkness of his skin stands out even more against the flowery backdrop and reflects, with a few glimmers in his arms outstretched on the cross, the candles. sown on the floor, burning amidst the incense that fills the altar.

Once the initial greeting is given, the community kneels to pray the invocation of mercy in the Tsotsil language, under the guidance of Mariano, the catechist in charge, all imploring God for forgiveness for the world, in a murmur that begins like raging waves and then becomes a whisper and caress, like waves brushing against the sand of the beach, a sign of a pacified communal conscience.

The Mass continues with biblical readings in Tsotsil focusing on the cross of Galilee, followed by a brief meditation that I lead for the community in Spanish. I summarize three key thoughts for the catechist-interpreter to develop with endless eloquence. I center on the biblical meaning of Jesus' cross as a result of his commitment to the excluded of his time. Then, I briefly recount the story of the Lord of Esquipulas in Guatemala, quoting my brother. jTotik Alfonso, though adding my own commentary, points out that its black color symbolizes the sufferings of the people that Christ bears. I see the image adorned with flowers and realize that the Crucified One offers us a loving embrace in the last breath of his life. It comes spontaneously to me to say this to the community, who listen attentively, and I see them receive that embrace with grateful expressions. And I conclude by inviting us all to celebrate the Lord of Esquipulas with our own commitment of love, caring, as he did in life, for those who suffer most in the community, beginning with children whose health is threatened by the soft drink and junk food industries, young people drawn to money, drugs, and alcohol, and women who suffer violence in their own homes and communities.

The consecration of the bread and wine is experienced with profound devotion by the kneeling community. But this sacred moment of adoration of the body and blood of Jesus, the anointed of God, suddenly becomes an even deeper reverence thanks to the traditional song and dance of the Bolom Chon o jaguar song which expresses the deepest soul of the Tsotsil, Tseltal, and Tojolabal peoples, the Mayan peoples of the Chiapas Highlands. Traditional musicians play the harp, violin, and guitar with a slow, measured rhythm, like a mantra growing in a sonic spiral of infinite tenderness, lulling the incarnate God and Mother Earth, whom our feet touch with their dance. For it is worth remembering that, for the Mayan peoples, in the rites of ancestral tradition—such as those of the Tseltal people studied by the Jesuit— Eugenio Maurer In Bachajón, the dance has a religious meaning, because with the feet one caresses Mother Earth, the primordial gift of the Giver of Life.

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The Christ of Esquipulas, which originated in Guatemala, is a powerful representation of the diverse faces of faith of the ancient Mayan peoples, celebrating Tezcatlipoca under Mexica influence, according to the Dominican chronicler. Friar Diego Durán, to ask for rain:

[…] it was made of a very shiny and jet-black stone [obsidian], the stone from which they make razors and knives for cutting. In the other cities it was made of wood carved in the figure of a man, all black from the temples down, with a white forehead, nose, and mouth, the color of an Indian, dressed in some fine attire in his Indian style. First, he had gold ear ornaments and others of silver. On his lower lip, he had a lip plug of crystalline beryl in which was inserted a green feather, and sometimes a blue one, which from the outside looked like an emerald or ruby. This lip plug was about a gem long, above a ponytail of hair that he had on his head (Durán, II, 1995: 47).

Centuries later, in that image, the Christianized Mayan people venerate the Nazarene with new meanings. In every corner of Zinacantán I visited this week, I found new and astonishing alterations to the image and the meanings the community gives it. From the story of a charred black Christ who miraculously survived a fire to the icon that darkens because it absorbs the sins of the world, we encounter stories that recount the anxieties and longings of its faithful devotees, giving the Christ increasingly intense shades according to the skin color or the consciousness of the community that venerates him.

Two scenes remain in my memory from these days exploring the Zinacanteco landscapes. Both hark back to the ancestral rites of the Tsotsil people.

The first is the prayer of forgiveness when the entire community, in a collective surge, with cries, tears, and sighs, raises its prayer kneeling on the sedge –These are the pine needles laid like a green and fragrant carpet on the floor of the hermitage, chapel, or temple, supporting the feet of the community gathered amidst candles—the incense mingled with the scent of pine from the surrounding forests. A vestige of the people of the mist and the forest, as the poet from Tuxtla sings. Juan Bañuelos:

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Dawn breaks. The humidity is like sleep: motionless. Only
ascends
a people with roots in the throats of birds
whose song stirs the fragrant carpet of the rushes
The smoke from the huts rises, mimicking Mayan fretwork patterns.
while the cyclical serum of memory is filtered out

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The second scene that lingers in my heart is the ritual dance of sonic and rhythmic adoration that moves the assembled community, caressing the earth that has borne fruit to the son of Mary, perhaps a jaguar Christ, according to the memory of the Mayan peoples. Bodies transfigured by a radiance of ancestral humanity that opens itself to the loving mystery.

The Black Christs of Zinacantán continue to luminize in every place, with darker or lighter tones, depending on the land that welcomes and venerates them. Black Christ of Esquipulas during the time of the Captaincy General of Guatemala. Black Christ of Tila during the time of Chiapas' independence. Black Christ of Zinacantán during the time of the indigenous uprising. Black Christ of today's communities facing the mirage of prosperity from the flower and textile trade. Black Christs that will come in the troubled times we live in.

What laments and what praises will future generations of the Tsotsil people sing when, half a century from now, the cry of wounded humanity makes the Black Christ even darker?

What laments, praises, and dances do we experience when we realize that time is running out to seek and find solace for a humanity threatened with death by the world of the powerful?

The black Christs of Zinacantán are a great paradox: an embrace of suffering and a promise of life.

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Ts'ajal Nam, January 17, 2026

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Note: I would like to read your comments in the final section of this page.

January 17, 2026
Rutger van der Tas | Absolution | 2023

Time of war and time of peace

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

We began the new year 2026 with the deployment of US military might very close to us in the Caribbean Sea. This was the setup for the extraction in Caracas of the illegitimate president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, kidnapped in the name of foreign justice to be taken to a court in New York where they are accused of criminal conspiracy related to drug trafficking.

This new expression of warfare in today's tripolar world, created after the pandemic by the United States, China, and Russia, was already foreseeable. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China's threat to Taiwan, and the genocide of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel with the tactical support of the United States are all part of this new geopolitical strategy.

But we ignored these signs in the Western Hemisphere. We thought that Latin America and the Caribbean would be safe from Uncle Sam's neocolonialism because they had overcome his political and military interventionism during the era of the military dictatorships of the last century. We believed in party-based democracies, which took the reins of left-wing and right-wing governments throughout the region. Under the illusion of these party-based systems, we were unable to see how networks of corruption were being woven between political parties, business groups, governments in power, increasingly sophisticated criminal organizations, and transnational corporations, forming the very fabric of the extractive society of which we are part as unrestrained consumers of superfluous goods, indifferent to "the political" as everyone's task.

Today it is necessary to recognize that we are also part of the problem of this neocolonial war with various fronts that has already reached our territories and entered our homes.

On social media, hateful phrases are increasingly circulating, used to criticize anyone who comments on the corruption occurring in Mexico under the Fourth Transformation, or in Venezuela denouncing Chavismo, or in the United States pointing out the ICE executions in Minneapolis and Chicago as a mercenary power serving the ideology of [the regime/the regime]. Make America Great Again (Maga). It seems that it's all the same to insult someone with a single phrase on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and then justify a deranged mercenary shooting a woman point-blank in the head for driving a car that failed to stop despite police threats on a street in her neighborhood, which was being raided by immigration police. Even in our closest digital conversations, this practice of resolving differences with a single phrase and a click, blocking those who disagree with us as if it were a virtual gunshot, is growing.

Differences worth confronting in a face-to-face dialogue, which we avoid as much as possible because it makes us uncomfortable. Why does this proximity frighten us so much? It seems as if the world of war has been encapsulated within the screens of our cell phones, tablets, or computers, only to then spill out onto the streets with the same necrophilic clinical precision, using pepper spray or an AK-47 rifle. The time of war has already entered those "black mirrors" that devour us mercilessly, shifting from praise to insult with the same speed with which our thumb swipes wildly across the screen. scrolling or swiping on the cell phone screen.

Time of territorial and digital warfare.

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“Everything has its time,” says the book of Ecclesiastes. This beautiful biblical wisdom text is a contemplative meditation on war and peace, addressed to a people seeking their place in the Hellenistic world of their time. “A time to throw stones into the river, and a time to gather them up.” Thus the Qohelet, or Hebrew sage, expresses the inexorable law of life, lived in the ebb and flow of love and hate, a law celebrated by poets of so many cultures. “A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,” he continues, in a more personal tone, speaking of love and heartbreak. And to complete this realism, bordering on self-denial in the face of the inevitable, he concludes with a laconic ending: “A time for war and a time for peace.”.

Will we have to resign ourselves to the imperial military violence that stunned us a few days ago, and at the same time be trapped in the solitude of social media, which exalts and lynches with a click those who dare to dissent in a chat with friends, family, or a digital community? Times of war.

The realism of face-to-face confrontation is perhaps the opportunity to “stop the virtual and territorial war” by recovering the intimate space from the encounter of vulnerable body with vulnerable body, as masterfully presented Emmanuel Levinas. This vital opening immediately places us in a different perspective: the range of the voice with its intonations and accents, movements and pauses, emphasis and irony, glances and silences. It opens another door for us. Perhaps the refuge of peace lies precisely there. In that realm of pause, silence, shadow, the waiting period. A time of peace.

Could that be the narrow gate through which the messiah passes?

These past few weeks I've been discovering new facets of the urban indigenous culture of the Chiapas Highlands, very different from what I knew in past decades. I've had to learn to pause, for example, to interpret a look when a woman addresses me in Tsotsil, a Mayan language I don't understand, during a prayer and reconciliation meeting. But she and I managed to connect by looking into each other's eyes: hers bathed in tears that flowed accompanied by the whisper of her voice, imploring a heavenly blessing to ease her pain. Mine, responding to her gaze with tears that mirrored hers. Even though we don't "understand" each other in terms of phonemes and the signifiers of language, a communication of sense Through gestures and symbols, when we both bow our heads and my hands brush against her hair to communicate human and divine energy, and her hands embrace mine in gratitude and bless me. In that silence that gives way to the wordless embrace, a spark of eternity arises, enveloping us both.

Is that the peace he speaks of? Qohelet in the times of the dominant Hellenism of his era?

Times of peace in the face-to-face experience.

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The first week of the year leaves me with a very clear challenge: to learn to break free from the times of war in a world driven mad by threatening empires, as a gift of times of peace lived in face-to-face encounters. proximity, so dear to Jesus of Nazareth, recovered by Gustavo Gutiérrez e Ivan Illich in our time.

In this way we can move from resignation to the overwhelming military power of our times, reinforced by self-denial in the face of the digital lynchings we experience in a frenzied way, towards the peace of face-to-face encounters, in the discreet but real meeting with the face, body, and soul of the other, however different they may be, when we experience them as a gift.

There is always the possibility of a haven of peace that arises like a spark when we allow our vulnerable condition to touch and be touched by the other person, with their own ways of life.

And indeed, our violent world is in need of that peace more than ever.

Jobel, January 10, 2026

January 10, 2026
Gaudí | Sagrada Familia, Barcelona | Hyperboloid, 2025

Of pyramids and autonomies On the political geometry of “the Commons” for the coming year

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

The pyramids above and below

A few days ago, Cideci-Unitierra was the epicenter of the seedbed Of pyramids, of stories, of love and, of course, heartbreak, dedicated to discussing, in my opinion, the old topic of the libido dominandi Or the desire for power that has resided in the human heart since the dawn of recorded history. Although, in reality, the reflections revolved around the recent history of the Mayan peoples of the Chiapas Highlands, who four decades ago decided to put an end to the power of local strongmen, landowners, and the corrupt mestizo government that imposed its rule upon them in modern times.

On the occasion of the 32nd anniversary of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's armed uprising, more than 1,300 participants—first at the Jacinto Canek Caracol, located in a working-class neighborhood in the northern part of the city of Jobel, and later at the Oventik Caracol—gathered to hear trusted figures from the rebel movement speak about the lust for power that opposes "the common good" by constructing pyramids of privilege and domination. The discussions focused, for example, on analyzing with Barbara Zamora The legal strategies of the Mexican state to consolidate private land ownership, dispossessing indigenous peoples of their territories with legal tricks, including the mega-projects of the Fourth Transformation.

But there was also courageous discussion about the small and large pyramids of power built by left-wing revolutionary movements from the second half of the 20th century to the present to protect their privileges once they had seized political power. The persistence of these power pyramids in modern governments and state administrations seems to be a constant, unfolding on different scales in right-wing and left-wing political models, always at the mercy of the tyrannies in power.

The self-criticism that the EZLN has shown regarding its own control and decision-making practices is, in the opinion of Raúl Zibechi, This is unprecedented in modern leftist movements. In a fascinating presentation dedicated to tracing the uses and abuses of power in the Latin American left that won political power—especially in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Bolivia—the Uruguayan sociologist, who has worked alongside guerrilla movements first and social movements later for half a century, posed a crucial question to the Zapatista comrades, as well as to those of us who are attentive to the path they are forging: Are pyramids of power necessary and inevitable? What are their organizational and temporal limits to prevent them from becoming new strongman regimes and tyrannies?

Between avant-gardes and rearguards

I was surprised that this think tank didn't emphasize critical thinking, which half a century ago had already warned us about the risks of leftist revolutions becoming new tyrannies. Specifically, decolonial thought has for years been proposing the urgent need to overcome the complex of the vanguards typical of the left in the last century, who lost their way in the whim of speaking on behalf of the masses. corset Marxist class struggle, with its organic intellectuals, especially in its version of proletarian revolution to overthrow the bourgeois state, has been challenged and surpassed by the voices and practices of subaltern groups who no longer need a privileged caste to speak on their behalf. Indigenous peoples, women's collectives, and LGBTQ+ communities, among other subjectivities in resistance, construct their own thought through their ways of life and organization based on mutual care, imbued with ethical, political, and spiritual strength. Today, it is impossible to deny their knowledge and their forms of communal organization, through which they have resisted diverse forms of oppression for centuries.

It is necessary to dismantle this will to dominate on all fronts where it manifests itself by building pyramids at the top and bottom. It is about going “to the rearguard of social movements,” as Boaventura de Sousa Santos said, to learn from them as experts in the resistance they have faced for centuries, especially Indigenous peoples. Feminisms community like the one from Lorena Cabnal In Guatemala, they emerge as a critical voice against the prominence of academia. extractivist Made by white, urban, and privileged women. These feminisms are linked as an instance of critical reflection alongside women's collectives confronting patriarchy, now opening their networks of care and thought to the mothers of disappeared persons searching for their loved ones, as well as to indigenous women in resistance.

I was surprised that the "Of Pyramids, of Stories, of Loves and, of course, Heartbreaks" seedbed didn't put at the center these voices that have been clamoring for other ways of for decades. horizontality of power.

The inevitable shift: from the pyramids of autonomies to the hyperbolic dimension of heteronomies

A significant change in the perception of the construction of "the common" that Commander Moisés put on the table was that of the generational changes that the Zapatista bases experience in their youth.

The insurgent-militiaman-Zapatista base triad that shaped the Zapatista movement four decades ago no longer accounts for the other forms of belonging expressed by the generations born in the Caracoles of the autonomous territories. Now, young Zapatista subjectivities are discovering new ways of building resistance and rebellions of righteous anger in the arts, health, and communications, among other fields. Radiologists, theater artists, dentists, and documentary filmmakers are already actively participating as voices of resistance in the autonomous territories, now surrounded not by the federal army but by other ways of life offered by the government and criminal mafias, each in their own way, to win over and buy the attention of Indigenous youth, including the Zapatistas.

The narrative of the autonomous communities It was of paramount importance in confronting the capitalist hydra thirty-two years ago to underscore the strategy of resistance, creating other processes of caring for life such as eat, learn and live, Following the narrative of Gustavo Esteva's "revolutionary verbs," the Zapatistas are now identifying pyramids at the bottom that require a radical change in narrative.

Within this same framework, critical thinking is currently moving towards... heteronomies, such as the proposal of Silvana Rabinovich Rooted in the Hebrew philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in fruitful dialogue with Enrique Dussel, this approach seeks to understand "the commons" in its genesis, from the asymmetry of intersubjective relations—that is, from the difference of each subjectivity and collective. It is not to deny autonomies but to explain their conditions of possibility. It is a commitment to preventing the dominance of power pyramids in order to give way to relations of diversity where [the concept of "commons" persists]. a surplus of the difference that sustains life.

It is a philosophical concept that has some relation to the scientific theory of baryogenesis that particle physics, along with the Big Bang theory, proposes to explain the asymmetric origin of the universe between matter and antimatter. One of the spatial figures of this primordial cosmological phenomenon would be hyperboloid, like a saddle, where the asymmetry of the expanding universe prevails.

In its philosophical sense, heteronomy is the ethics of otherness. The face of the other is the source of heteronomous ethics, that is, a way of being that has its own nomos or law in the other, especially, the other vulnerable. This relationship of openness to otherness brings with it a critical principle for power relations where the “autonomous” subject, individual or collective, is decentered and the possibility of “the common” as a source of “the political” is opened thanks to the recognition of that otherness which is a clamor or a caress.

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Christian theology has since anciently quenched its thirst for mystery in a loving divine communion with the divinity. triuna. Community in difference It is the oxymoron (or apparent contradiction) of faith in a child messiah who will defy the pyramids of his time, both those of the Roman Empire and those of the sacrificial religion of the Temple of Jerusalem. Perhaps it was not by chance that Gaudí designed the basilica of the Holy Family In Barcelona, his emblematic work, following the hyperboloid shape of the asymmetry in motion, generating a powerful sacred space that brings us into communion in diversity.

Perhaps the new Zapatista subjectivities, born of the autonomies, are now opening up to the horizon of affirming the differences that unite us in the common responsibility of creating those other worlds., where other worlds fit. An alternative space with smaller, provisional pyramids, but with hyperbolic worlds that preserve and enhance "the common good" amidst diverse lifestyles. These young people will also create their own spiritualities to symbolize and celebrate the source of "the common good" that fuels the fire of rebellion and righteous anger.

Many other subjectivities in resistance thus open paths of hope for us from their struggle for "the common" that includes diversity as a route to travel in the year that begins.

The Highlands of Chiapas, January 3, 2026

Note: What do you think about the autonomies and heteronomies to be built in our time?

January 3, 2026

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