Category: Liberating spirituality

JobeLab | San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas | 2026

JobeLab An initiative of critical thinking and diverse spiritualities from San Cristóbal de Las Casas

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

From the second half of the 20th century, Chiapas became a laboratory of new ways of inhabiting and thinking about the world, with the creative confluence of important social, political, cultural and spiritual processes.

Among them, dynamism stands out synodal (or shared path by all the believing people with their diversity of ministries) of six decades, implemented by the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas with jTatik Samuel Ruiz as pastor walker And hundreds of local, regional, and international communities and groups, convened for justice and peace for the Indigenous peoples and other communities of this region of Chiapas. In an astonishing confluence of paths, the Indigenous Congress of 1974 marked the beginning of the public presence of Indigenous peoples with their own voice. Indigenous, mestizo, and international social and cultural movements also emerged, with research projects on the rich Mayan heritage, both ancient and modern, developed by teams of social anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguisticists. Waves of researchers arrived from Latin America, the United States, and Europe, and, with an academic model still largely based on extractive practices, made significant discoveries in the social sciences and humanities. The translation of the Bible into Mayan languages, initially promoted by the Summer School of Bible as part of a U.S. interventionist plan, evolved into intercultural dialogue, continued to this day by various Christian churches, including the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, the Zapatista movement, with its armed and media-driven uprising of 1994, became the watershed moment of a social, political, and cultural insurrection that continues to this day as one of the most radical critiques of the hegemonic system of the multi-headed capitalist hydra, including patriarchy and colonialism.

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The “San Cristóbal School” is a name proposed decades ago by Pablo Romo and others in academia and the arts to evoke the legacy of critical thought, resistance, and spirituality that emerged in Chiapas, as a counterpart to the Cuernavaca School, analyzed by Humberto Beck. In their connections and differences, both represent significant contributions to critical thought that arose in Mexico during the last century.

In this way, recognizing the individuals, groups, organizations, and initiatives of civil society that have been an active part of these processes, as a collective inspired by them, with JobeLab -apocope of Jobel which is the Tsotsil name of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and laboratory To designate this city as a laboratory, we seek to give continuity to such a legacy in a new context, focusing on critical thinking and the spiritualities that have sustained them, such as those of the native peoples, Catholic Christianity, and more recently Buddhism and Islam.

Through the initiative JobeLab. Ongoing dialogues and mutual support for re-existences We will continue to cultivate this heritage in the new scenario of the civilizational crisis that humanity faces in the second quarter of the 21st century, where peaceful coexistence between nations and the balance of planet Earth are at risk and call us to promote processes of resistance and re-existence.

We will nurture this initiative based on two inspiring attitudes that are, at the same time, transversal axes of the talks, meetings and festivals that we will organize in various spaces of the city: hospitality and commensality.

The hospitality It is one of the human gestures that most powerfully expresses our shared human condition, that is, our way of becoming individuals and communities as beings in relation to one another. This radical attitude of openness to otherness is a fundamental ethical and political act, where the religions and spiritualities of humanity celebrate a glimpse of divinity.

The commensality, Like the other side of the moon, it is the nourishing soil where we receive the otherness of Mother Earth, of other humans who become our neighbors, and of Divinity, through food and drink created by the unique genius of each people. We celebrate this gift as an inclusive banquet where Divine Sophia prepares a table for all nations and creatures of the cosmos.

Together with Carmen Reyes and Ricardo Hernández, Angélica Evangelista and Abraham Mena, I am enthusiastically participating in this project, drawing on the Dominican tradition of life and thought. In these exchanges, we seek to discover new expressions of the divine and human Word as a creative fire that redeems, animates, and shelters us in our present circumstances. times of hardship as a human species that puts itself and the Common Home at risk, leading us to the precipice of annihilation.

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This week two events will be the formal presentation of JobeLab, after the first event where the initiative germinated, on January 28, with a presentation on Gaza and Chiapas at the Charity temple in the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas.

On Wednesday, March 25th at 5:30 pm, we will hold the discussion “The School of San Cristóbal,” with the participation of Pablo Romo, who was one of the key figures in the diocesan process of promoting human rights, paving the way for the creation of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center. Martha Elena Welsh, choreographer who animates in Xitla House In Mexico City, workshops were held to support people in situations of extreme vulnerability, facing various forms of violence. And Juan Carlos La Puente, a Peruvian with extensive international experience in providing spiritual support to human rights defenders, has been developing a methodology for this purpose from his base in Oregon, USA. permanent discernment as a path of body for people and communities in re-existence.

And then, on Friday, March 27th at 5 p.m., we will explore another facet of re-existence: forgiveness as a path to reconciliation in contexts of violence. With the Muslim community of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, represented by Shaykh Yahya Rhodus and Shaykh Mudar Abudlghani, we will discuss forgiveness in Christian and Muslim traditions as a common path to peace, at a critical moment of violence in the Middle East. And we will do so accompanied by the extraordinary music and song of Nader Khan, a Canadian Sufi artist.

We invite you to be a part of JobeLab From wherever we may be, whether attending talks and meetings, or imagining and creating similar spaces where we can come together and flourish as individuals and communities in resistance and re-existence, going beyond the spiral of violence that surrounds us, towards a world another world of hospitality and commensality.

Jobel, March 23, 2026

March 23, 2026
Pilar Emitxin | Embodied poetics | 2019

The House of the Incarnate Word A commitment to social and cultural dialogue in Chiapas in the style of the Dominicans

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

A few days ago, we opened a new space for dialogue in the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas on the feast day of Saint Thomas Aquinas. This was the first event in a year-long celebration of the fifth centenary of the arrival of the Dominican friars to Tierra Firme, as the American continent was then called. Abya Yala. Next June we will be holding various cultural and religious events, both in San Cristóbal and in Zinacantán, with the program 500-OP Chiapas which we will announce soon.

Together with Abraham and Angélica, dear friends from Ecosur with whom we worked in university ministry at CUC years ago in Mexico City, and with Carmen and Ricardo, friends involved in social and cultural activism in the city, we have been imagining together a project to continue cultivating the great legacy of the School of San Cristóbal, as it is called Pablo Romo to critical thinking and inculturated liberation theology that has developed in the Highlands of Chiapas for more than half a century, with the specific contribution of the Dominicans in these lands. There are many cultural forums that currently exist here—such as CIDECI and Dialectics in the Museum. jTatik Samuel, El Paliacate, Galería MUY and many more – where it is possible to talk about urgent and important issues for the cosmopolitan society that lives here – a microcosm of Mayan, mestizo and foreign peoples – with its many local, regional and global connections.

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Since the 1970s, San Cristóbal de Las Casas has been the scene of important meetings such as the First Indigenous Congress convened by Bishop Samuel Ruiz and leaders of indigenous communities in 1974, it proved to be a watershed moment in the indigenous consciousness of Mexico, as it refers Fabiola Ramírez in her Master of Arts thesis at Tulane University. She also highlights the First International Symposium of Lascasistas, The event, organized by Manuel Velasco Suárez, Agustín Yáñez, and the Dominican friar Enrique Ruiz, was held in 1974. Both events shared a common thread—starting with the fifth centenary of the birth of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas—the search for paths to promote justice for the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, subjected for almost five hundred years to a racist system, marked by centuries of social injustice and the suppression of their collective imaginaries in their cultural and religious expressions. The spirit of liberation theology, as a creative reception of the Second Vatican Council, was mediated by the prophetic force of the Second General Assembly of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops in Medellín in 1968, ecclesial events in which they participated. jTatik Samuel Ruiz, made their presence felt with vigor and creative imagination in these lands.

Two decades of sowing the Gospel in the diocese, with its message of liberation for oppressed peoples, allowed that seed to germinate into a diocesan synod, intimately connected with the indigenous cause, which found in the Zapatista movement one of its most relevant expressions for promoting the autonomy of native peoples. There were other fruitful fruits, such as indigenous theology, which, not without difficulty with Vatican authorities, also expressed the vitality of a profound ecclesial process that continues to this day.

But the old Royal City of the colonial era, inhabited by a mestizo and Creole population that called itself intercultural, He had become accustomed to living with the "Indians" in modern times with a normalized racism, which was expressed as paternalistic assistance from the caxlanes or Creole chieftains towards the Indians, as Rosario Castellanos masterfully recounted in her collection of short stories Ciudad Real.

The Zapatista uprising, in addition to its political effects—with the 1996 San Andrés Accords betrayed by the federal government and the creation of the Caracoles or Zapatista autonomous municipalities—had a cultural impact on the city, which suddenly became more cosmopolitan in its daily life, as they tell university students Immigrants in the Highlands of Chiapas since the years surrounding the uprising. As early as the 1950s, Harvard anthropologists and linguists from the Summer School of the Bible had arrived in the Jobel Valley to settle in the colonial city, turning it into a base for their research trips to the indigenous communities they studied, mostly using an extractive academic or religious model.

But over time, the gentrification of the city of traditional neighborhoods It grew in an unusual way as a result of the rebellion of the canyons that impacted the Highlands of Chiapas in the last three decades.

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Today, more than fifty years after that Indigenous Congress of 1974, and thirty-two years after the Zapatista uprising of 1994, much has changed in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Indigenous communities have achieved diverse forms of autonomy in the political, social, and cultural spheres, including religious matters, surpassing the vision of their initial proponents. These communities are no longer under the tutelage of political parties, churches, universities, or civil society organizations. The cultural fusion of Indigenous peoples with hip-hop music, audiovisual culture, and contemporary art will surprise many. Indigenous identity now transcends even revolutionary movements.

And like a boomerang effect, the mixed-race and foreign population living in the city also blends into this landscape of identities. An event about Gaza primarily draws university students and members of civil society, but attracts few of the displaced Indigenous people who live in the northern part of the city. A hip-hop concert, on the other hand, fills plazas. And then there's the Sinaloan band invited to the Zinacantán festival, which will keep the Tsotsil youth on tenterhooks for hours, mesmerized by a professional stage that rivals any pop or ranchera music festival in any major city in the country—and, incidentally, managed by a young entrepreneur from Zinacantán.

How can we participate in these ongoing cultural changes using the Dominican word itself, not only from the past but also from the present, in its diverse forms of life with friars, sisters, and lay people inspired by the charism of preaching? What signs of the times... deglobalization It is necessary to interpret in order to scrutinize the passage of the God of Life, As the Dominican friar Gustavo Gutiérrez said in Peru, what is needed for a humanity bewildered by global violence?

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The roaming This is a vital attitude of the Dominicans since their founding by Dominic of Guzmán in the 13th century, a time of transition from feudal to urban society. "Holy preaching," the initial name of Dominic's apostolic project conceived with Bishop Diego de Osma, the layman Peter Seila of Toulouse, and Wilhelmina and Raymonda Claret, sisters from Prouille in southern France, expresses the original inspiration of a spiritual tradition that has dedicated itself for eight centuries to seeking truth in every age, trusting in the power of the Word made flesh. Therefore, it is not just any truth that is being sought, but the truth that liberates, saves, and redeems humankind, humanity, and the cosmos from the bonds of evil, as did the Galilean.

The Dominican-style study is, therefore, the spring of hope According to that beautiful reflection by Friar Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Order of Preachers, this spirit led the friars to disperse throughout Europe from the beginning, going to universities "to study and found monasteries," that is, communities of life centered on the Incarnate Word. This impetus took them as far as Mongolia in search of Genghis Khan. This itinerancy was described by Matthew of Paris, the staunch enemy of the new friars at the Sorbonne in the 13th century, who scornfully declared: "Their cloister is the oceans and their cell the world," thus defining for posterity the daemon or the genius of the religious order that was emerging in the medieval towns, as Father Chenu repeatedly reminded us doctoral students in Paris.

Centuries later, already in Chiapas, that same itinerant journey led Friar Pedro Lorenzo to the Jataté canyons and the Lacandon Jungle to search there, “in the middle of nowhere,” as the prior of Santo Domingo de Ciudad Real admonished him for his rebellion, for the people who lived there. That is why from then on he decided to call himself Friar Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada, according to Jan de Vos.

In our times of the Great Catastrophe—begun in Gaza and now spread throughout the world in the Trump era—itinerantness leads us to new territories to be created as places of conviviality of the Word. Here in the Highlands of Chiapas, we'll do it like new. itinerant space, where we can foster creative dialogues in search of the truth that saves.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, February 7, 2026

Note: Let's continue the conversation with any comments you'd like to post below.

February 7, 2026
Anonymous | Watercolor of the Montesinos monument | Dominican Republic, 2020

The cry of the (post)human

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

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In 1511, Friar Antón de Montesinos, along with a handful of Dominican friars who had recently landed in Quisqueya, the Taíno word for the mother of all lands, uttered a cry that still resonates in the Western conscience: “Are these not men?” He was referring to the original inhabitants of that Caribbean island—later known as Hispaniola, where the modern states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic were established—who had been subjected by Spanish soldiers in the name of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon to harsh servitude and slavery. In the sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent on December 21 of that year, with the central figure of John the Baptist announcing the urgency of preparing the way for the coming Messiah, Friar Antón became a prophetic voice to counterbalance the nascent coloniality of power. According to this concept of the Peruvian Aníbal Quijano (Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin AmericaIt is possible to explain from our time the logic of power that led Europe to dominate the modern world, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, with its later avatars of American and Russian imperialism that we know today.

More than five centuries have passed. Now, this enterprise of coloniality is acquiring global dimensions in our time with the extractive capitalist model that is expanding across the world, like a many-headed hydra, according to the Zapatista narrative that emerged in 1994 in southeastern Mexico. Three decades later, new ways of naming the diverse resistances to this lethal force that dominates the world will be heard in the seedbed « Of pyramids, of stories, of love and, of course, heartbreak » which will take place at CIDECI-Unitierra at the end of December.

The question surrounding humanity may seem rhetorical, but it becomes more urgent when we consider the landscape of exclusion based on class, gender, ethnicity, and cultural identity that entire nations suffer today. The collapse of the international order we knew in modern times leaves us exposed. The foundations of that shared world were laid by the School of Salamanca with the Ius Gentium or the law of nations in the 16th century, with Friar Francisco de Vitoria at the forefront in dialogue with Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas from Chiapas and Guatemala, as analyzed by Enrique Dussel. It was one of the cornerstones of the model of Christendom created to justify the expansion of the earthly city in the image of the City of God under the tutelage of the Spanish Crown. Subsequently, this interpretation was transformed into an internationalist model, beginning with the Enlightenment, with a rationalist foundation of a contractual nature, making international law a pact between sovereign states, without an ultimate foundation in a metaphysical order that had its sustenance in God (Ancient and contemporary law of nations).

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Beyond the theoretical discussions about the transition from the Salamanca model to the Germanic model of international law, what is important to highlight here are the internal contradictions of the modern social contract that is collapsing before our eyes. Today we are witnessing the return of authoritarian regimes based on religious fundamentalisms with messianic pretensions (The United States is a messianic state), as is the case with US imperialism and Israeli Zionism. In the name of what ethical-political principle or source do today's powers justify their mechanisms of domination, neocolonialism, and the elimination of entire peoples? What limits are there to the power deployed by this unbridled new geopolitical “order”?

But it is necessary to go beyond the catastrophic scenario described so far to recognize the role of peoples and the spiritual traditions of humanity in strengthening communal life among nations. How can we understand and promote the autonomy of individuals, peoples, and territories today in order to preserve what is human How can we cope with the threats of the system that already dominates us, encompassing both traditional and digital territories?

In this context, Montesinos' sermon acquires remarkable relevance since it expands the question of mutual recognition of the human and the creature to all the victims of systemic violence that is leading humanity and the entire planet to the precipice (International treaties on biodiversity (SCJN)Are the nations and species that inhabit the face of the Earth not creatures with rights? In the post-human world, as it is called today, it is essential to develop a critical way of thinking that affirms the dignity of every creature in the cosmos in its profound dignity linked to the loving mystery of reality.

It is no longer just about reaffirming the historical strength of indigenous peoples confronting the Eurocentric colonialism of five hundred years ago, but about the subaltern peoples who are disposable in the planetary war economy of the Trump Era, as he comments Leonardo Boff. Latin America and the Caribbean, as evidenced by the US invasion of international waters in the Caribbean Sea, are now a battleground for the war waged by the Southern Command of that neighboring country. Unfortunately, we will soon witness the full extent of this new model of imperial interventionism through the selective occupation of territories, the control of local governments aligned with the interests of the necrostate, and surgical strikes against the “enemies” of US national security.

Nor is the cry for the dignity of humanity enough if it is dissociated from the cry of the Earth, “the poorest of the poor,” as Leonardo Boff also called it. That “escalation to extremes” conceived by Girard in 2007 based on the phenomenon of terrorism seems like child’s play today in the face of current wars whose objective is the blatant domination of entire populations in order to control their territories as objects of predatory enrichment of ecosystems.

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For this reason, it is more urgent than ever to recognize the new Montesinos who, with their outcry, appeal to the common humanity that unites us as individuals and peoples, with its mystical source that gives strength and opens horizons of life for all, in order to reverse those processes of necropower that claim more and more victims every day.

But today it is urgent to move beyond the anthropocentric paradigm, transitioning towards an "ecocentric" one (Anthropocentrism and ecocentrism in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights) that promotes the dignity of Mother Earth, who is also subjugated by the dominant model of extractive society and economy. «Rethinking as a human species,» according to the proposal of political ecology promoted by Víctor Toledo and a significant network of scientists worldwide (Political ecology is here to stay) is a key step to regain our course as humanity inhabiting the Common Home that has been given to us by the Giver of Life.

The green martyrs, the searching mothers, and the indigenous peoples in rebellion are some of the voices that have sounded the alarm about the devastating situation that has already reached us. Listening to their denunciations is a beginning of ethical and mystical conversion, but it is not enough. We must join those processes of subjective, territorial, and spiritual autonomy carried out by those who have said enough to necropower.

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Perhaps the most inspiring way for believing communities to celebrate the approaching Christmas is by honoring the memory of Montesinos and all the prophetic voices of yesterday and today.

Preparing the way for the arrival of the messiah is not, after all, an act of Christmas folklore, but a change of course in our ways of life with ethical-political, practical and mystical decisions, such as recycling garbage, reforesting forests, and including the vulnerable at our tables as gestures of celebrating life amidst the ruins of the present world.

As I mentioned some years ago (Messianic time and narrative for a theological interpretation of the narrative practices of victims) it is urgent and a priority that we pave the way to messianic times through our acts of resistance to necropower, promoting communities where we learn to spell anew, with imagination and vigor, the humanity and creatureliness that unites us, all drinking from the inexhaustible source of Life.

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Jobel, December 20, 2025

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

December 20, 2025

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