Category: Chiapas

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

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It has been seven months since I left Boston, following the unfortunate episode of academic censorship and the growing risk of criminalizing university research in the Trump era.

Upon returning to my homeland, I had the good fortune to stay for several months at the Dominican house located in a hipster neighborhood of Mexico City. The liturgical atmosphere of Holy Week deepened the process of mourning and resurrection that such a loss entailed, creating a pause to allow my emotions to settle and prepare me for the next stage of life. The Easter Triduum helped me feel how divine Life flows in the depths of my heart. This perception grew in the following months, thanks to the company of extraordinary people and communities I was able to visit during the summer in various parts of the world as part of my theological service.

Extraordinary scenes from that journey come to mind, like the gaze of a refugee pleading for empathy, or the sound of the waves crashing against the South African cliffs. I carry in my heart the image of the modest altar—true in its prayerful simplicity and closeness to others—of the Jesuit community in Mapuche territory. The conversations in Turkey with a handful of friars and sisters of the Dominican Order still resonate in my ears, as we searched for signs where today we might recognize the messianic times that are slow in coming. Each morning, the rituals of women healers from Malaysia, Dakota, India, and Kenya, gathered in Guadalajara, rise powerfully from the depths of my heart, with scenes that remain etched in the documentary Re-Existing 2025, lingering like flashes in the middle of the night.

During several months spent in Mexico City, I was able to glimpse the changes taking place due to gentrification in an urban neighborhood, brought about by mobile populations—in this case, the “digital nomads” from the Global North who displace impoverished inhabitants in the South, while simultaneously enriching the local culture with new flavors and knowledge. In religious terms, as I mentioned earlier, I became aware of the fragmentation of the world of human interiority, which some call spirituality, but which designates a wellspring of transcendence that flows in every person as it evokes Lanza del Vasto in his poetry A Holy Source often desiccated by the vulgar marketing of religion. I was surprised to find in the temples a revival of popular Catholicism of devotions among young people who cling to piety without much interest in the prophetic spirit of Christianity of the conciliar renewal of more than half a century ago that placed justice linked to the experience of faith at the center of Latin American Christianity.

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And finally, after a wait filled with days and nights of uncertainty, I was able to travel to Chiapas to put down roots and build connections in those Mayan lands in the years to come. I was looking for a “place” to inhabit, or, as the beloved master of the Dominican order, Friar Timothy, now Cardinal Radcliffe, said in his book The fountain of hope, an “ecological niche where we can flourish”, amidst the diversity of flora and fauna of the human condition, another way of describing our similarities and oddities when it comes to living in community.

Jovel, either land of wetlands and pastures, the valley where the colonial city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas was established, as the indigenous peoples called it, had received the Dominican novices in 1980 when we visited these lands, accompanied by our teacher, Friar Raúl Vera, who even then showed a pastoral zeal for the peasants in Amecameca and for the mayan villages from Chiapas and Guatemala. Since then, a little piece of my heart has remained here, revived by the annual visits to San Cristóbal and Ocosingo with my university classmates from Servandus Missions of the University Parish animated by the Dominicans in Mexico City.

My several-month stay in Ocosingo in 1994, following the EZLN uprising, is an experience that has left an indelible mark on my connection to the indigenous liberation movement and the mystique that sustains it. This insurrectionary movement had found fertile ground in the work of jTatik Samuel Ruiz, the Wanderer, accompanying the indigenous and mestizo peoples of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas since 1961. His conversion to the poor, inspired by the The Pact of the Catacombs. During the Second Vatican Council, his commitment was further solidified by his active participation in the Latin American episcopal conferences in Medellín, Puebla, Santo Domingo, and Aparecida. The Indigenous Congress of 1974 —where the Dominican friar Enrique Ruiz Maldonado actively collaborated on the occasion of the fourth centenary of the death of Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, the first diocesan bishop of San Cristóbal— a watershed moment would be marked in the adoption of the indigenous cause as the backbone of the preferential option for the poor made by the diocese located in the Highlands of Chiapas and the Cañadas of the Lacandon Jungle. As a corollary to this path, the Third Diocesan Synod which concluded in 1999, as one of its participants, Sister Celia Rojas recounts, would ratify four decades of opting for the poor and promoting an Indian Mayan theology as the most complete expression of the inculturation of the Gospel according to the conciliar spirit.

Returning to these lands permanently, forty-five years later, now means being prepared to face new challenges that were unforeseen in the last century. One of these is perhaps the situation of migrant Indigenous children and youth in symbiosis with urban culture and digital media, which is generating new Indigenous subjectivities caught between tradition and modernity. Thanks to dear friends like Geovanni Nájera of Semillero 259 Yara and Sebsor of Psicolexia,For example, I'm beginning to enjoy and understand a little more those other expressions of contemporary indigenous urban tribes. Through urban gardens, hip hop and rap, street art and graffiti, among other aesthetic and social expressions, the initiatives they promote are the seeds of something new.

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An immersion bath in the Tsotsil ecclesial community took place these days in the Parish of Saint Lawrence the Martyr, Founded by Dominican friars in 1545, this community, nearly five centuries later, boasts forty-five villages with sixty churches and chapels, a testament to the vitality of the faithful in these highlands of Chiapas. Here, catechists, extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, and traditional authorities coexist with youth choirs and women's groups, accompanied by Dominican friars and sisters. This presence was renewed in 1961 when the Dominicans returned to this community after a long hiatus following the Reform Laws of 1857, the Revolution, and its aftermath in the first half of the 20th century, as vividly recounted by Friar Pablo Iribarren..

A couple of days were enough to immerse myself in another world, with its vibrant symbolic and linguistic tradition. Although I had already glimpsed it as a visitor, a new horizon now opened before me, a chance to learn how to be present as part of the community of friars accompanying these communities. I felt it was a call to continue my journey in diverse ways. It is about embarking on a new path alongside these peoples, with their own unique character, their intergenerational tensions, their expressions of Catholic religious tradition, yet also ancestral, all of it shaped by the tensions between capitalist modernity and visions of other ways of life, governance, and spirituality.

A major challenge for me will be learning the Tsotsil language and navigating amidst the powerful traditional symbols of the Zinacanteca culture, while listening with empathy to those generations of young people who are transforming the tradition of their ancestors with new ways of life.

Another significant challenge will be the cultural life in the city of San Cristóbal, cosmopolitan and provincial at the same time, with centers of critical thought of international stature such as the Colegio de la Frontera Sur, the Universidad de la Tierra-Cideci, the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Chair in the Faculty of Law of the Autonomous University of Chiapas, and several centers of culture and arts.

Some novel ideas are emerging, like sparks, to begin a dialogue with the cultures present in Jovel and Zinacantán. The traditional radio program run by the friars in recent decades reached a specific, more religiously oriented audience. But an online portal with podcasts and video clips featuring content on the mysticism of religions, their similarities and differences, or on political theology in today's world that abuses religion to justify genocide, would reach a younger and more diverse segment of the population.

For now, the content is yet to be defined within the community to achieve the right tone and approach for a theology that is grounded in the street and born from the street,developed through dialogue with people both inside and outside of churches who are willing to discuss their deepest concerns and intuitions regarding the meaning of life, social justice, beauty in so many traditions, cultural pluralism, and the survival of our common home. I hope to soon share some of the first steps on this new path here.

What will give strength to these dreams is undoubtedly the vitality of today's Mayan communities, in their interaction with other urban and digital cultures. Therein lies the fertile ground for them to flourish in these lands.

The calls of itinerancy will always be uncertain, but from here I travel them confident in the knowledge of ancestral and modern peoples who will be a light on the path.

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Jovel, December 6, 2025

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