Autor: mendocinomx

Diedrick Brackens | The Cup is a Cloud | Los Angeles, 2018

Unlearning efficiency to inhabit uncertainty

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

It has been seven months since I left Boston, after five years of academic life in the frenetic gears of American efficiency, with a special challenge in the background that consisted of translating the master ideas of modern Latin American and European theology to multicultural groups of white students from the United States, and others who came mostly from Korea, China and Japan, plus some from Turkey, El Salvador, Colombia and Chile.

The initial courtesy of colleagues, both students and professors, gradually gave way with a few of them to a genuine conversation, always with respect for individual work prevailing and few exchanges about the meaning of our work as an academic community.

I cherish the best moments of those encounters, such as the colloquiums to which we gave the decolonial tone of “conversations” (Beyond Global Violence Initiative ), where we were able to open windows so that colleagues from the north and south could listen to each other, with certain difficulties in moving between both worlds, not only because of the differences in language but also because of the diverse experiences that sustain the body, thought and the word.

What we all enjoyed most were the gatherings in the warmth of Valentina and Domingo's Chilean-Bostonian home, exceptional hosts to both our hearts and our palates. There, we could share, with greater intimacy and freedom, the ideas and intuitions that had lingered in the auditoriums of the Chestnut Hill campus. Sometimes, with Francis's Italian flair, assisted by Martín, and in the warmth of Neto's affability in his home, always ready to welcome us like a true Salvadoran, each of us found our place in the ebb and flow of conversation, wine, and song. In those welcoming homes, we received friends from Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Spain, Ohio, Illinois, New York, Indiana, and California, passing through Massachusetts. And there, new projects for colloquiums, books, and trips were born, projects that continue to surprise and inspire us all to this day.

But everything was interrupted by my sudden departure from US territory in the Trump era, leaving that seed of cordial intelligence sown in living memory.

In the following months, back home and with interwoven journeys between South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, and Chile, I faced the challenge of seeing diverse worlds with new eyes, paying special attention to "those who dwell in the shadows of the shadows of the shadows." Thus, I was led—by the pure gift of my hosts during those travels—to experience moments of devastating and beautiful simplicity, such as accompanying Lance from the University of Pretoria to the Congolese refugee farm on the outskirts of the city. There, the pain of being homeless for more than five years was evident in his eyes, but within them also shone a glimmer of dignity that I still carry in my heart and spirit as a call to closeness.

I vividly remember the walk along the cliffs of Cape Town with Grant and his team, where on a sunny but cold South African winter morning we contemplated how the two great oceans, the Atlantic and the Indian, meet, sometimes with fury and other times with tenderness. A metaphor for intertwined worlds.

I also recall with emotion the ecumenical Taizé-style prayer led by my Dominican brother Claudio, along with Eda, a resident of Istanbul, and a group of African and Ukrainian students living there. Interspersing mantras for peace in various languages, they gathered in the dim light of the Church of the Preachers, located near the Galata Tower. It was a glimpse of what Pentecost means, albeit only as a bastion of spirituality amidst a vibrant, modern Muslim culture that looks with curiosity at what happens within these Christian enclaves.

I treasure in my memory the simple and brief Eucharist in the small wooden chapel of the Jesuits in Tirúa, on a small altar covered with a Mapuche textile and adorned with an oriental-style oil lamp that created a luminous twilight, on a spring morning in Wallmapu, in the far south of Chile. I had the grace to share with them for a few days their joyful dispossession, as travelers accompanying the Mapuche people in defense of their territory, their language, and their ancestral spirituality.

In each of those experiences, the question of how to build bridges to share spiritual intimacy between people and communities of diverse traditions lingered for me. And I remembered the rituals we have explored at Re-existe, precisely seeking new languages to celebrate together our precarious lives, open to hope, according to diverse ancestral traditions, from indigenous peoples to Abrahamic religions and the secular inner lives of those who are individuals or groups without religion.

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Back in the land of my ancestors, now free from the daily pressure of the classroom and the unbearable academic meetings, I'm beginning to understand what it means to unlearn efficiency. To enjoy the free time of otium, beyond the negotium, as I told you here a few weeks ago.

But it's about more than just slowing down. Something compels me today to live in the moment. otherwise as a renewed inner life and the place as my homeland. I seek an external rhythm between morning walks, religious duties, attentive reading of books piled on my desk for years, and more creative writing, loosening my pen and exploring new literary genres. But it's not enough. There's something more I sense on the horizon, the search for a "place" to put down roots, grow slowly, and blossom, following that creative intuition of Ivan Illich and Jean Robert (The place in the space age). The place and time where inspiration flows will gradually become clearer in the coming months.

Now that I have time to “do nothing,” I feel invited to reinvent myself every day. I am certainly working in the present on wonderful intellectual projects, such as the collaborative book on political theology—with the introduction I am writing, inviting fifteen contributors from eight different countries to the table of words to reflect on “the common good” in times of great catastrophe—whose manuscript I am revising with the support of Francis and Nathan, dear colleagues I met at Boston College, and which will be published next year by a prestigious publisher in the United States.

I am delighted to review the scripts for the documentary and the comic book – by Juan and Katsumi respectively – which will commemorate the past meeting Re-exists 2025. The Spirit connecting the peripheries which we will soon share in the digital world to continue strengthening our resistance against the evil that surrounds us today as systemic violence. This initiative has been creating a multifaceted space-time where we learn to re-exist, reinventing ourselves alongside other survivors.

And with excitement, I also imagine—along with some Dominicans who are seeking new expressions of the charism of preaching in our unprecedented context—what will emerge from our meeting on Nicaea last October in Istanbul. Situated in today's cities and villages, which are like laboratories, we seek how to communicate to humanity the joy of being inhabited by the divine and human Word that redeems us, whether rooted in the secularized world or amidst diverse spiritual traditions.

Encouraged by these vivid memories and by the ongoing work that connects with my deepest desire, I now face the challenge of "stopping" the whirlwind of efficiency, unlearning to live and think only in terms of production. It is a journey in reverse, but above all, an implosion of a dizzying desire, to return to the still center of body, desire, thought, and spirit from which it flows another mode of existence.

And then I will learn to let myself be inhabited and moved – as I discussed with my friend Juan Carlos La Puente in the heart of the pandemic (Mutual accompaniment in the divine Ruah)– because of the uncertainty as a gift and surprise of the fluttering of Life that encourages us all.

Mexico City, November 15, 2025

Note: I would appreciate your feedback at the end of this page.

November 15, 2025
Marlon Puac | Decolonial Weaving | Sololá, Guatemala, 2022

When the truth does matter

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

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The assassination of the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, on November 1st, is an atrocious example of the “pedagogy of terror” whose objective, according to Rita Segato, is to “show that there are powers that are sovereign in the most absolute impunity, as a pedagogy of territorial control of sovereignty” (Counter-pedagogies of crueltyThis is a strategy used by criminal organizations to paralyze the population, eliminate politicians who disobey them, and control their territories. The crime was committed in a public square on the eve of the Day of the Dead, when the community was celebrating, according to the tradition of candles, the passage of the souls of the departed. Accompanied by his wife Grecia and their two young children, the founder of the “Hat Movement” was gunned down by a minor, apparently in collusion with two other individuals, entangled in the machinery of drug cartels that are destroying the lives of young people worldwide with the mirage of power and money that they kill.

Just five days later, Carlos Manzo's widow took office as mayor of the city with a speech punctuated by anger, desolation and indignation that now places her at the epicenter of a seismic movement shaking Mexican society. Grecia Quiroz in her first speech As mayor, she said something that has resonated in my memory: “Today, Carlos Manzo is stronger than ever. This legacy, this Hat Movement, they did not silence. And they will not silence it because I remain here, firm with the unwavering conviction he taught me […] Let it be heard loud and clear: Carlos Manzo’s legacy will continue. Even though they have silenced his voice. Even though [to] those who gave the order to take his life in the cruellest way, [I say] this will continue, this will go on. The Hat Movement will not stop.” As an independent candidate, her husband defeated the candidate of the ruling party in the last election. After seven years, the ruling party has not only failed to pacify the country, but on the contrary, has been losing more and more control over the national territory. And now Grecia takes up the banner of citizens fed up with the failed state that continues to produce more and more wasteful living conditions.

President Sheinbaum's initial statements were regrettable, as well as belated, blaming "the right wing" for the violence in Michoacán stemming from the war on drugs launched in 2006, almost twenty years ago, by then-President Felipe Calderón, of the right-wing party that governed the country for two six-year terms with disastrous results. But Mexico's path as a sovereign nation remains adrift. The seven years that the current "left-wing" party has governed Mexico represent the failure of the Fourth Transformation initiated by leader López Obrador. The president's pacification plan is late, does not originate from the communities themselves, and fails to address the systemic causes of this spiral of violence. The truth doesn't matter to her or her party. What matters is controlling the narrative in the media to keep pushing forward with the "second tier" of this ill-fated Fourth Transformation.

In this atmosphere of national unrest, organized civil society has an urgent role to play in saving the country from collapse. Initiatives such as Reinsert To rescue children living in precarious conditions caused by violence in the country, there are clues to the projects that can be imagined and created in each region, although many of them depend on the whims of the companies or governments that fund them. Therefore, only the creativity of collectives, communities, and peoples will have the necessary strength to persist in this life-or-death struggle.

Universities are also being called upon by a wounded society to understand the intricacies of the systemic violence that afflicts us. Churches have begun to emerge from their lethargy to participate in collective healing processes, drawing on their spiritual heritage. In recent years, the initiative of [unclear] was born within church circles. National Dialogue for Peace following the murder of the Jesuits of Cerocahui in the Sierra Tarahumara three years ago, and prepares for its second meeting in January 2026 in Guadalajara. It represents an attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to take up the mantle of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, initiated by Javier Sicilia and the victims of violence in Mexico in 2011 (“The peace movement is a moral reference point”: Sicilia), which was first co-opted by the governments of Felipe Calderón of the PAN and Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI, then scorned by the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Morena.

What is the truth of the victims? How is that truth heard and acknowledged in the narrative of society and the current government? What does Grecia Quiroz's outrage in Uruapan tell us as Mexican citizens? How does the monstrosity of Víctor Manuel Ubaldo, the underage hitman killed after committing the crime, challenge us? How can we dismantle the network of necropolitical criminality that controls Mexico today? How did we reach this point of corruption within our nation's social fabric, and what collective processes can we promote in each place to escape this barbarity that is leading us to the abyss?

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While watching the videos in amazement and reading the news about the tragic events in Michoacán, I was able to attend the congress “Heteronomies of Justice” (3rd International Colloquium: Justice of the Other), organized at the Institute of Philological Research of the UNAM by our dear colleague Silvana Rabinovich. The presentations by young researchers revolved around the question of how to decolonize discourse and praxis for justice, based on conversations between diverse cultures, for example, between the Jewish philosophy of Herman Cohen and Emmanuel Levinas in the 20th century with the philosophy of liberation of Enrique Dussel in Latin America and the Caribbean; or between the feminist thought of María Isasi Díaz, a womanist author in the United States, and the historical realism of Ignacio Ellacuría in El Salvador, committed as rector of the UCA to the poor and justice in times of military power.

The university also opened a dialogue to consider the connections and differences between Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope in Germany during the Nazi regime and the thought of Enrique Dussel in Argentina and Mexico during times of dictatorship and resistance. These exchanges took place on the occasion of the second anniversary of the death of the great Argentine-Mexican thinker.

A tasty outcome of this colloquium was focusing on the problem of messianic core of history, where the resistance of the people generates changes in the history of oppression, sowing stories of liberation and ethical and political redemption, with a mystical wellspring. Following the intuitions of Professor Dussel, ethics reveals itself as the primary politics, open to messianic anticipations of transcendence. All these deliberations were not unrelated to the question of hope that arises from the victims in Gaza, or from the Searching Mothers in Mexico, as our hostess reminded us time and again.

We closed the day with the pre-premiere of the documentary “Dussel: Philosophy Is a Gift for a Meaningless World,” by Argentine filmmaker Cecilia Fiel. For over an hour and a half, the documentary explores the life of Dussel, his story of exile, his library, his students, and his vision of the history of colonialism inherent in Eurocentric modernity and the resistance it faced. It highlights the narrative beauty of scenes of the lucid old man, Dussel, walking through emblematic sites of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, such as the Zócalo in the heart of Mexico City and the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, where the liberation theorist, in the twilight of his life, delivers a masterclass on the role of philosophy in the search for meaning. sense of history.

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Those exchanges at UNAM made me think about another version of the truth. When the truth truly matters, it's possible to dismantle the fallacies created by the powerful, whether they be the governments in power, corrupt religions, or criminal organizations.

How can we break free from this growing spiral of hatred in Mexico, Palestine, and Mexico? A first step is to return to the importance of truth. Not as a weapon of war to tell the version of the powerful or the perpetrators, but to listen to the victims and survivors.

Daring to converse with others in order to search together for the meaning of life in the utopia of a “we-others” as the seed of redemption is the beginning of an (im)possible hope.

Because the truth does matter when we want to heal wounded humanity so that one day we can all enjoy Life.

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Mexico City, November 8, 2025

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Note: I look forward to your comments at the end of this page.

November 8, 2025
Gabriel Pozo Menares | Mapuche Calendar | Wallmapu, 2011

Wallmapu News

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

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The light of dusk reaches Tirúa, in Mapuche lands, while Carlos, my Jesuit host who has been here for more than fifteen years (HistoriActiva Jesuit community of Tirúa), drives along the dirt road to visit friends who have opened their homes to share life in the area for years. We arrive and are greeted by the oldest daughter, along with her cats and dogs. She briefly interrupts the work she's preparing for her last semester of high school, as after graduation she plans to enroll in university to study teaching. Life goes on simply among the families who live here. Her father spent the day growing potatoes and then dedicated the afternoon to laying the floor of a new room in the house. They offer us mate as a ritual to accompany their conversation. Before leaving, the friends exchange bird food and make plans to recycle an old wooden door that will be installed in a budding eco-spirituality center.

Wallmapu (Declaration of the Department of History on the term Wallmapu) is the term that refers to the ancestral lands of the Mapuche people (The Indigenous World 2025: Chile). Today, they are dominated by the forestry industry, which has contaminated the territory with invasive species such as eucalyptus and pine to mass-produce cellulose for export to the global packaging market.

The Mapuche people today are divided between the frantic integration into the modern world of consumption on the one hand and, on the other, the defense of their territory, language, and traditional medicine under the leadership of Machi women, healers and spiritual ancestors.

On both sides of the mountain range, divided between Chile and Argentina, the Mapuche people fight for their territorial and cultural survival, in the face of the overwhelming inertia of the modern world (Chile: Resistance to the forestry model in Wallmapu, Mapuche territory). For communities assimilated into today's modern model, it seems better to eat processed foods than seaweed and shellfish as the ancients did; or to drink Coca-Cola instead of herbal teas because it gives them greater status; they prefer to be evangelical Christians or Roman Catholics rather than follow the spirituality and language of their ancestors. Ultimately, it is a matter of "integration" into the modern world, even at the price of cultural assimilation and environmental depredation, which, in its symbolic undertone, is violence against the ancestors and against Mother Earth.

Civil society networks such as “Churches and Mining”, or the initiatives for intercultural dialogue on ancient and modern astronomy promoted by some universities in the region, are modest attempts to accompany a people torn apart by internal contradictions between modernity and tradition.

Perhaps eco-spirituality is being an "articulation," among others of a more social and political nature, that allows for these intersections. Carlos told me the anecdote of a grandmother who, attending a workshop on traditional medicine and eco-spirituality, said she didn't understand anything about the intersections of the three bodies (personal, communal, and territorial) that the workshop presented, because she had been thinking throughout the entire meeting about the meaning of that strange word written on the invitation: "articulation." A term that the grandmother kept thinking about until she finally realized that it surely referred to the articulations of bones, when she felt something in her body was out of alignment, impeding her mobility and causing pain. So she concluded that the workshop was a path to healing her joints. And ultimately, that was the objective of the workshop! That grandmother had followed it in her own way, even though she was absent from the rest of the talks.

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Before arriving in Mapuche lands, I was able to speak with university students at two forums in Santiago, Chile. The first was about the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the fathers of liberation theology, on the occasion of the first anniversary of his death (Gustavo Gutiérrez International Congress). In a traditional academic format with keynote lectures and presentations, over the course of a couple of days a clearer awareness emerged among attendees about the importance of style Latin American to speak of God, intimately connected to the experience of the poor and oppressed. A wisdom that is already part of the way some Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian communities understand their faith in a liberating God and promote the transformative role of victims in their own liberation processes, leaving behind lands of slavery and embarking on paths of new life.

But we also began to see, not without some attendees' surprise, that it is necessary to open our hearts and our eyes to other exclusions, such as those experienced by women, queer/cuir people, undocumented migrants, relatives of missing persons, Afro-diasporic peoples, and indigenous peoples, to mention those who represent today's resistance to the violence that afflicts us in so many ways, with the Palestinian people today facing the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government and its accomplices at heart.

During the colloquium, several initiatives emerged to keep the memory of the great Peruvian theologian's work alive, through the work of the archives that house the recordings of the summer courses Gutiérrez offered in Lima for several years, a valuable resource that will reveal another angle of the author's thinking. Likewise, some of us proposed to investigate the relationship between Gustavo's thought and the work of Aníbal Quijano, his compatriot, who represents one of the most important sources of decolonial thought today, along with Frantz Fanon. The confluence of both thought styles, along with Black, feminist, queer/cuir and Palestinian liberation theology, will provide us with a more pertinent theoretical framework for understanding the intersectionality of violence and ongoing resistance in order to create alternative ways of life, governance, and spirituality that inspire communities located at the fractures of humanity.

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The other meeting, held with colleagues from the Chilean Society of Theology (UCSC hosted the Annual Conference of the Chilean Theological Society), was an opportunity to think together about possible paths to hope for communities facing systemic violence.

My contribution to that annual event brought to the table the question of thinking about hope from a perspective of "combative decoloniality," like the dignified rage practiced by the Zapatista communities, or the indignation of women who face sexual or spiritual abuse in their respective religions. Because, from my perspective, it's about dismantling a vision of hope as a flight from the world in anticipation of consolation in the afterlife of eternal life.

Rather, it's about discovering and strengthening the hope that "emerges" from the fractures of humanity. It's where survivors paddle against the current of the history of oppression and privilege, inhabiting the world with practices of mutual care, in the pedagogy of embodiment, and collective healing with memory, truth, and justice, as we explored at the recent Re-existe 2025 gathering.

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The sky of Wallmapu, with the crescent moon shining brightly, is today a living metaphor for the hope that surrounds us when we hear the heartbeat of the lands and stars of the South.

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Tirúa, October 25, 2025

October 25, 2025

English