Category: Otherness

Alex Serpas | Re-exists: A Leap of Life | Acrylic paint on paper | El Salvador, 2025

From resistance to re-existence On the decolonial learnings of the last decade

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

I return to the story of the river of waters of life and thought that has been formed thanks to shared learning experiences with friends with whom I discover an inspiring way to live spirituality and to weave a theological and philosophical thought that is meaningful and mobilizing for the times we live in our era of global uncertainty.

Mutual Spiritual and Theological Accompaniment was the first stream that began to flow, irrigating the lands of my theological work, which I cultivated with people on the margins of society. I sought a spirituality of life that flourishes amidst the cracks of power, first in Mexico and the United States, then throughout the continent, and now reaching Europe and Africa. Thus, little by little, I explored spaces of great vitality, diverse spiritualities with their own theological knowledge outside the university, such as the public square, pastoral service, and social activism. These were spiritualities I had sensed since my youth, but which I now listened to with greater attention, both heart and mind.

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The other tributary of the valley of decolonial practices and knowledge was one I began to navigate with Pablo Reyna, Araceli Téllez, Eduardo Velasco, and several colleagues from the Ibero-American University of Mexico City more than a decade ago. It was during the time of the #YoSoy132 student movement, which rose up against the corruption of the Mexican political system; also during the protests over the forced disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students; and, later, during the #MeToo movement, ignited by feminist comrades in public squares around the world to dismantle the age-old patriarchy.

I joined the learning process to “decolonize the university,” to which David Fernández—who began his rectorship at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City inspired by the thought and martyrdom of his Jesuit colleague Ignacio Ellacuría of the Central American University of El Salvador, and advised by the sharp intellect of the great Mexican thinker Gustavo Esteva—had called us, from my position as an academic and administrator. In my capacity as Divisional Director of Humanities and Communication at Ibero Mexico City, I proposed holding a colloquium in 2016 called “For a Change of World,” where we invited students, faculty, researchers, administrative staff, and university service personnel to raise the most urgent social problems of our time and discuss ways to address them, considering their root causes as part of our university vocation, and making the crucial “epistemological” shift to learn from the knowledge of the peoples and social movements that creatively and hopefully confronted these forms of violence. The keynote address given by Leonardo Boff on the challenges of our time was memorable at that colloquium.

From that auspicious moment, a series of talks, workshops, and academic colloquia followed, each bringing together three diverse and complementary perspectives and analyses: social movements resisting various forms of violence; academics learning and researching alongside these movements; and artists' collectives creating performances, choreographies, music, paintings, sculptures, plays, and literature to tell and recreate the life stories emerging from the cracks of a violent world. Over time, it proved to be a fascinating formula, full of cognitive, social, cultural, and spiritual challenges, revealing itself as a specific path to "decolonizing" the university, thus opening it to other processes of knowledge and transformation of reality arising from the peripheries of the hegemonic world.

The 2017 colloquium “At the Crossroads of North and South” on the poetic and academic work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos was another memorable moment. Rappers, singing and dancing to the poetry of the Portuguese author's INKZ (Incapable) writing, interacted with Searching Mothers from Mexico and Argentina, with young women from the Community Guards of Cherán in Michoacán, and with healers from Bojayá in Colombia, healing the trauma of the massacre perpetrated by paramilitaries and the army, among many other experiences of victims turned survivors. In this way, we explored new paths of the “ecology of knowledges”—a barely explored territory that we will have to traverse in the years to come.

Later, the conference on decolonial theologies organized in 2019 by the international theology journal Concilium in Mexico City—a publishing initiative I was part of as an editorial advisor and later as a director, which kept the flame of the Second Vatican Council alive—in collaboration with the Ibero-American University and the Dominican Catholic University Center (CUC) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), brought together several of these threads into a master knot. An ecumenical prayer service in the Santo Domingo Church in Mexico City, co-led by a Dominican Catholic bishop and an Afro-Puerto Rican queer bishop, opened the event, which then brought together social movements from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina on the Santa Fe campus of the university. There, they engaged in inspiring conversations with investigative journalists, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians in roundtables of mutual listening. Each day was accompanied by three-way discussions, following the format that had revealed to us a new model of university in its infancy. Other times we organize round tables with renowned figures, such as that extraordinary conversation between Rita Segato, Raúl Zibechi and Amador Fernández Savater about the spiritualities that animate resistances, a topic for the three figures outside of their usual reflections on critical theory that they agreed to explore, carried out at the CUC of the University Parish of the Dominicans, to close the event with provocative intuitions about “political hope”.

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Up until then, we called these conversations “Resist” until, in dialogue with Nelson Maldonado-Torres during a colloquium in Boston in the spring of 2022, I realized the need to name this deeper phase of the decolonization of life and thought with a new expression. It was crucial to focus on the “re-existences” created by Afro-diasporic peoples, women in their struggle against patriarchy, queer collectives, mothers searching for their missing children in Argentina and Mexico, collectives of people in forced migration, people with disabilities (or different abilities, depending on the desired emphasis) creating living spaces, and so many other communities in resistance that invent, day after day, new ways of life, communal organization, and spiritualities of Buen Vivir (Good Living).

Inspired by this intuition, together with Elías González and Juan Carlos La Puente, we organized two festival-meetings at ITESO in Guadalajara, both titled “Re-existe” (Re-exists), the first in 2023 and the second in 2025. Thanks to the vision of its rector, Alexander Zatyrka, and the creative imagination of a handful of theologians from Peru, Kenya, Nigeria, Catalonia, India, and Mexico, we were able to bring together eighty invited guests and hundreds of students and faculty at both events. The heart of both discussions and festivals beat with a focus on the spiritualities that sustain, with “combative hope,” the people and communities located on the fringes of the hegemonic world. Mining extractivism was analyzed in its connections to white supremacist racism and xenophobic immigration policies, with their strategies of ethnic cleansing and extermination focused on controlling territories and subjectivities through new settler colonialisms, such as those that gave rise to countries like the United States, South Africa, and Israel. There, we sought to unravel the processes of awakening, healing, and self-empowerment deployed by communities in resistance. Histories that, little by little, transform into re-existences.

The harvest of these wonderful encounters was also expressed as a celebratory ritual thanks to the support of Fran, Diego, Glenda, and Lau, popular educators from the Bendita Mezcla collective, formed by the younger generations of the Base Ecclesial Communities of Our America. And so, these conversations reached their aesthetic climax with the comic book talent of Katsumi Lemus, the rap and hip hop of the comrades from Psicolexia and Semillero 259 from Chiapas, the performances of the Portland, Oregon, artists' collective, the dancers of Jauja in the Andean highlands, and so many other people who create glimmers of beauty in the cracks of necropower.

We now dream of reuniting in Mother Africa in 2028, where we can honor the living memory of those peoples who teach us so much today about the power of their recovered ancestral heritage. Peoples who are living testaments to the creativity of the diaspora and the profound thought that arises from centuries-old wounds transformed into bodies and territories of dignity and hope, as in South Africa and Kenya, South Sudan and the Congo.

In the context of the great catastrophe (Nakba) that we face today—whether as “war against humanity” according to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, as genocide in Palestine denounced in its ideological apparatuses of Jewish and evangelical Zionism by Silvana Rabinovich and Mitri Raheb, or as technofascism throughout the world according to decolonial thought—these encounters are more urgent than ever to weave networks of mutual recognition and political hope, promoting a sharp analysis of the complexity of the catastrophe.

But perhaps the greatest challenge lies in sharing the initiatives for caring for territories and the processes of autonomy cultivated by many groups located in the cracks of the hegemonic world, where the life of the peoples is preserved and enhanced as a seed of hope for humanity and for the Common Home that welcomes us into its bosom.

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On this urgent topic, a book on decolonial political theology has been in the works for a year. It is a decolonial analysis because it arises from the cracks in necropower during the great catastrophe. But such an approach is insufficient if it is not enriched by the anthropological analysis of mimetic desire, which explains the violence within subjectivity in relation to the otherness of one's neighbor and the other God. This decolonial political theology remains open to ongoing critique thanks to the horizon of apophatic thought, which warns us against any usurpation of the divine. It is a collective work that I gradually developed, together with colleagues who participated in the colloquia I organized with the support of Martin, Matthew, and Francis, enthusiastic doctoral students at Boston College, during the five years I lived in Massachusetts. The New York-based publisher Orbis Books is the home that welcomes us for the publication of this work, where we will give an account of our feelings and thoughts of re-existence in times of necropower.

I will share more details about this book, which is in the final stage of the publishing process, in future posts.

Jobel, September 12, 2026

September 12, 2026
Antún Kojtom | Mural 500 OP Chiapas | Detail: sketch of Friar Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada with Lacandon Sage | Sots´leb, 2026

The Feast of the Divine Ruah Reflections on the living memory of peoples on the move

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

Fifty days after Easter, Christian communities around the world celebrate the overabundance of divine love, reaping the fruits of the messianic age, gathered with joy in the midst of suffering, as the Hebrew poet says: “Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy” (Psalm 126:5).

Two thousand years ago, after mourning the brutal execution of Jesus, the Galilean, by the Roman Empire—in collusion with the Temple authorities of Jerusalem and the enraged mob as part of the infernal mimetic cycle—a period of mourning was necessary for his community of friends and companions to grasp the senselessness of the innocent's death. This question still arises today in the grieving hearts of those who have survived lynchings, both ancient and modern. It is a questioning of the meaning of absence that also beats in the hearts of the Mothers Searching for their disappeared children in Mexico today, a cry that becomes a plea to find their offspring and help them "come home.".

Celebrate that Love is as strong as death and, even more, that Love conquers hate or that Life resists and re-exists At first glance, it seems like an evasion that ignores the suffering of the victims and the urgency of justice. On the contrary, it seems to me that precisely in that hopeful suffering The heart beats with the ethical, political, and spiritual indignation of survivors of so much violence. A cry that is expressed in the public squares of Gaza and Tehran, Beirut and Mexico, Kakuma and Dadaab in Kenya, by those who dedicate their bodies, hearts, and minds to the service of life in the midst of death.

The celebration of Pentecost is rooted in the joy of peoples who, after confronting horror, are able to go further in healing from trauma and quietly cultivating hope. Without denying the painful past, nor the undeniable need to hold the perpetrators accountable, what matters to those who survived is to stand up and live again with hope. This is what I have been learning, step by step, from the collectives queer/cuir who face gender phobias of various kinds, women facing abuse and femicide, as well as indigenous peoples who strengthen their resistance through processes of autonomy of bodies and territories, from the Inuit in Canada to the Mapuche in the far south of our continent.

How can we celebrate the harvest of the divine Ruah in these times of such profound uncertainty? We are witnessing alarming signs of a return to barbarism at the hands of genocidal governments in the Middle East and Africa, as well as in failed states trapped by the complicity of their rulers with transnational criminal organizations, as is the case in Mexico, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. This spiral of genocidal hatred is being transmitted in real time through the attacks of the Israeli Zionist state, which is committing crimes against humanity with the complicity of the United States and the European Union, and the indifference of the international community, against entire populations that stand in the way of its geopolitical power.

Strengthening resistance movements must also confront fundamental debates to find the path to utopia in times of dystopia. Collective memory, which lies at the heart of these processes, is now a battleground. Who tells the story and how they tell it are questions the Zapatistas in Chiapas, like the Sumud Global Flotilla, are asking themselves, attempting to give visibility to those who always remain in the shadows of the power that kills.

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We Dominicans are not exempt from these debates, especially now that we commemorate 500 years since the arrival of the friars to what we now call Veracruz in Mexico, on July 25, 1526. The great feat of evangelization—which undoubtedly brought missionaries inspired by Renaissance utopia and by the zeal for reform of the religious orders to return to their origins of following Christ—was also marked by the libido dominandi of the conquerors who followed that maxim of Western modernity so forcefully expressed by Enrique Dussel: conquiro, ergo sum, that is, "I conquer, therefore I am".

When recounting the history of the Dominican presence in this region of the continent—called Tierra Firme by Western navigators and Mesoamerica by later geographers—we cannot forget that a fundamental contradiction marked the evangelizing work of the Dominican friars in the 16th century, as rigorously studied by Friar Daniel Ulloa Herrero in his doctoral dissertation at El Colegio de México: an observant current led by Friar Domingo de Betanzos, and a prophetic tendency championed by Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. Undoubtedly, there were many nuances between these two tendencies when it came to evangelizing the colonized lands that later gave rise to the golden age of New Spain, the era of the Baroque churches along the Dominican route from Mexico City to Guatemala, traversing the entire central and southern regions of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.

The splendor of the Baroque art of the convent churches of Puebla, Oaxaca, and Chiapas has shaped a worldview in which Mexico was the axis mundi From that early era of modernity, a meeting point between Asia and Europe, Mexico City was also a laboratory for cosmopolitan culture, as Friar Julián Pablo Fernández liked to say when he was prior of the ruins of the Imperial Convent of Santo Domingo in Mexico City. This era gave birth to a Creole and mestizo culture of universal value, as UNAM historian José Rubén Romero Galván recounts. However, we cannot forget that this Creole culture subjugated and rendered invisible the Indigenous peoples, as contemporary decolonial readings emphasize.

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These reflections come to mind when accompanying a great Tseltal Maya painter, the master Antún Kojtom, who is currently creating a mural commemorating the arrival of the Dominicans in Chiapas, on a wall located in the main square of Sots'leb, between the temple and the market, in the municipal capital of Zinacantán.

For the past six months we have been discussing the narrative of the emerging mural, emphasizing what we now call a "dialogue of knowledge" between the Mayan peoples of Chiapas and the Dominican friars.

We chose a tone conversational The mural depicts scenes that highlight the ancestral religion of the Tsotsil people, particularly their religious roles such as grandmothers, seers, and stewards, with their ritual prayers on the hills, ancestral blessings, and community responsibilities. Through this narrative, we seek to underscore the centuries-old legacy that remains alive today in the pastoral life of the parish of San Lorenzo Mártir in Zinacantán.

In the center of the mural appears the meeting between a Tsotsil steward and a Dominican friar, Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, both standing with the same dignity, exchanging words, each with his symbol of authority, the staff of command for the first, the Bible for the second.

On the right, a third scene brings together the prophetic Church that has flourished in the Highlands of Chiapas and the Lacandon Jungle from the 16th century to the present day: a group of friars, with Friar Matías de Córdoba who promoted the independence of Chiapas in the 19th century and Friar Raúl Vera with jTotik Samuel beside him, bishops of the Church of the poor and excluded in the 20th century. Above their heads, like kites moved by the wind of the divine Ruah, are the martyrs of the San Cristóbal Church of recent decades: Ignacio Pérez López, pre-deacon of Chicomuselo, Father Marcelo Pérez, parish priest of Guadalupe in Jobel, Simón Pedro Pérez López, member of Las Abejas de Acteal, and Guadalupe Vázquez Luna, survivor of the Acteal massacre.

On the far right appears a highly symbolic scene for the recreation of the historical memory of the Dominican friars in Chiapas, recounting stories of creative rebellion: Friar Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada conversing with a Lacandon sage, both seated on rocks in the shade of a large ceiba tree, the sacred tree of the Maya, with the glyphs of the flowery word emerging from their mouths. The friar moves his hands, signifying eloquence, as he listens. The Lacandon sage touches his heart with one hand and points to Mother Earth with the other. One is dressed in his white habit and black cape; the other, adorned with a jade necklace and white loincloth. They are accompanied by a group of Lacandon women, young people, and children, attentive to the dialogue. This scene seeks to represent the apostolic adventure undertaken by a friar who wanted to go beyond the limits of Christian norms, as Jan de Vos masterfully recounts in his biography of Friar Pedro Lorenzo. What we felt was most important to highlight about the founder of modern Palenque was the audacity of the rebellious friar who "went into nowhere," as the prior of the Santo Domingo de San Cristóbal convent told him when Friar Pedro Lorenzo insisted on going into the jungle to find its inhabitants and announce the Good News. Escaping from the convent, he was lost for several years, later reappearing in the land of the Tsendal people, where he founded Palenque. During his apostolic journey, he reached Pochutla and Lake Lacam-Tum, now known as Miramar, a sacred center for the Lacandon people. From that time, some baptismal records are preserved in the diocesan archives, bearing his new name: Friar Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada (Friar Pedro Lorenzo of Nothingness).

When sharing the sketches of the mural in progress with friends, there has been no shortage of praise for the initiative, especially since it was the result of a long dialogue with civil and religious authorities in Zinacantán. Others have appreciated that the invited artist is a renowned master of contemporary Mayan art. Some critical voices have pointed out the underrepresentation of women, or the prominence of the friars in the images. For my part, once I had agreed with Maestro Antún on the tone From the narrative with the importance of the symbols of the two traditions to be represented in the mural, I received with respect and great admiration the visual proposal of the artist who, with his own genius, will undoubtedly leave us a pictorial legacy that is the gift of the Dominican friars to the people of Zinacantán in this commemoration.

In a couple of weeks we will be celebrating this event in San Cristóbal de Las Casas and Zinacantán.

I'll tell you about the new seeds being sown on this path of living memory.

Jobel, May 22, 2026

May 23, 2026
Carlos Mendoza | Malbork Castle, Pomerania, Poland | 2026

The other Europe Stories between Bavaria and the Baltic Sea coast

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

I am in Europe for a few weeks, enjoying time to read and write, fundamental acts of culture, so sorely missed in Boston and now in Chiapas. I am able to enjoy this time thanks to the hospitality of a good colleague and friend, Professor Martin Kirschner, and this space of studium, which offers me the opportunity to give some classes and lectures at this university in the interior of Bavaria.

For years, my friend Piotr, originally from Silesia in southern Poland, had invited me to visit him and his family in Pomerania. I had no idea where this place was, with a name that reminded me of the novel The Lord of the Rings, until a few weeks ago when I was preparing my trip from Eichstätt.

A long weekend during the German stay provided the perfect opportunity to travel to the Baltic Sea coast, landing in Gdansk, a port that symbolizes the modern-day labor movement. Solidarność led by Lech Walesa, which initiated the collapse of the Iron Curtain, with the manipulation of the famous Wojtyla-Regan-Thatcher trinity, which took advantage of that historical juncture of the crack opened by the Polish working class to advance its geopolitical agenda.

Having just arrived in this coastal land, a stroll through the historic center was a must. Piotr took great care in recounting the history of the Teutonic Knights who ruled and administered these lands from the 13th century, as a precursor to the Prussian Empire which, later, in modern times, would command its armies to extend its power over all the Slavic nations, from Poland and the Czech Republic to Hungary. After the failure of their mission to guard the Holy Land, this militia of medieval and early modern Christendom transitioned to a far-reaching territorial power until the beginning of the 15th century, when it moved to Königsberg and then to Austria during the Prussian era. Europe's largest castle is located in Pomerania, in the city of Malbork, with its red bricks typical of Baltic Gothic architecture that, at sunset in spring, shine like fire on the banks of the Nogat River, a tributary of the Vistula, which runs from south to north through all of Poland, from Silesia to the Baltic.

For Poles today, those Gothic roots are part of their cultural identity, although they maintain a distance from neighboring and wealthy Germany, as well as from Imperial Russia, which is once again a real threat of war and invasion in the region.

I also sensed that fear of war in my conversations with colleagues in Eichstätt, both because of the Russian threat and Trump's unbridled power. The complicit silence of the European Union and NATO in supporting the US and Israeli arms industries during this time of genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, the invasion of Lebanon, and the war with Iran will soon bear bitter fruit for Europe. What worries those most aware of the current civilizational crisis is the dismantling of international law being carried out by that "handful of tyrants," as Pope Leo XIV called them, who control the world through global war.

Once in Pomerania, I had the opportunity to visit some inland villages which, according to my hosts Piotr and Aga, are in the poorest region of present-day Poland. Peasant farms are scattered across rolling hills, where grains, potatoes, and fodder for livestock are grown in spring and summer. There are also small towns with good roads and urban planning. A strong agricultural culture is evident, blended with a rural atmosphere, where the arts and sports are integral to the daily lives of families.

Aga is a painter who has opened her studio-gallery, Ligo, in the barn of the old farmhouse, where she presents exhibitions of her paintings once a year. These exhibitions primarily feature nudes and portraits with a somewhat Impressionist, colorful, and naive style. When we visited the beach in the famous resort town of Sopot, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, I could see how much the whole family, including her three intelligent and beautiful daughters, enjoyed the sea in springtime. I sensed there a kind of poetic recreation that springs from the Baltic soul.

During a conversation with friends of Piotr and Aga, particularly with a psychotherapist from Gdansk, the topic arose of the vulnerability of rural Polish youth to the uncertainty of work and war, which contributes to a growing social isolation, with the inability to form personal bonds beyond their virtual circle.

I perceived other faces of Europe in Pomerania, today marked by uncertainty and the still-present trauma of the war.

I've been discussing this other Europe with my friend Martin for at least five years, ever since he first invited me to Eichstätt in 2021 to talk about political theology for Europe in times of increasing polarization. In that discussion, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conversation revolved around how to improve the conditions for democratic life in this region of the world, with the unquestionable value, at that time, of international law and human rights as a universal framework for coexistence among nations. Five years later, politics seems to be playing out on an even more fundamental level: that of survival in a context of global war, facing lethal transnational networks.

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Next week I will participate, together with my German friend, in an international colloquium organized by my Austrian colleague Isabella Bruckner, at the Anselmian Athenaeum of the Benedictines in Rome, on the theological legacy of Ivan Illich, on the centenary of his birth.

As in many places around the world, people from academia and social movements are now rereading his work to find light in the darkness of this civilizational crisis that we are going through as humanity.

I became acquainted with Illich's work thanks to Javier Sicilia and Jean Robert, who, since 1996 in the Bajo el Volcán bookstore, were discussing my doctoral thesis Deus Liberans —where I traced a genealogy of modernity as a denial of the other, the Indian, following Las Casas and Dussel in discussion with Levinas and Ricoeur—both mentioned the urgency of returning to Illich because of his devastating critique of the era of systems. Since then, I have continued reading the Austrian thinker, participated in colloquia in Cuernavaca, and organized roundtables on his legacy, first at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and later at Boston College.

Illich is almost always read as a critical thinker of instrumental reason, but without considering his theological background. This was the astute approach of Gustavo Esteva, for whom Illich's contribution stood on its own as a philosophy of proximity and critique of systems, but without its connection to Christianity. Gustavo disagreed with this approach during our conversations in Santa Fe.

That is why the Rome colloquium seems so relevant to me today, because it is about seeking the source. theological From Illich's critique of modernity, to enrich the analysis arising from secularized thought. In this way, it will be possible, in my view, to contribute to making visible and promoting the spiritualities of resistance, those woven by the victims of the systems age as survivors of the logic of the machine and the algorithm. We will discuss experiences of conviviality in Germany during COVID-19, resistances of autonomy of bodies and territories in Mexico, as well as forms of proximity, the recovery of the vernacular, and the radical nature of care as clues to confronting the systemic violence that often overwhelms us.

In the next post I will tell you my impressions about that meeting that will take place on the Aventine Hill in Rome.

Koślinka and Eichstätt, May 8, 2026

May 8, 2026

English