Category: Youth

  • (Trans)modernidades indianasJuan Chawuk | Cosmic Connection | San Cristóbal de Las Casas | 2000

    (Trans)modernities of India

    By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

    The line of cars waiting to reach Apaz stretches for several kilometers along the narrow dirt road that winds through the hills. The sounds of the festival can be heard from afar, even from Navenchauc, with its polluted lagoon, once surrounded by wooded slopes and now overrun with unfinished brick houses. The hamlet is a specter of grayish desolation, like something you might see in the poor suburbs of any modern city.

    More than 140 people, mostly young, accompanied by their families and communities, patiently await the bishop and the friars for the celebration of the sacrament of Confirmation. A crowd of more than 500 people, adorned for the occasion, solemnly celebrates the liturgy of anointing with holy chrism, while the monumental choir sings invocations to the Holy Spirit in Tsotsil. Don Rodrigo delegates the three friars present to perform the rite of Confirmation with him, divided into four groups of confirmands. It consists of the laying on of hands, the anointing with holy chrism, and the slap on the face to call them to live with audacity.parrhesia, (in Greek) proper to following Christ in the midst of an increasingly violent world. We reverently pronounce the words in Tsotsil following the liturgical phrase: Ich'bo li skélobil li'e + ja' matanal yu'un Ch'ul Spirit: Ta j'ch'un | Li jun o'onale teyuk ta ajotol: Xchi'uk vo'ot (Receive this symbol, which is the gift of the Holy Spirit. I believe it | Peace be with you. And with you.).

    The Mass continues, and after the consecration of the bread and wine as the body and blood of Jesus, three traditional musicians sing the ancestral chant, which the congregation mostly accompanies with ritual dance. Unfortunately, some members of the community no longer include these traditional symbols in their celebrations. The parish's large choir and media team participate in the festivities with their youthful talent, dressed in traditional attire and singing in Tsotsil, but also embracing the technology that has transformed their minds and ways of life. Modernity Indiana —to paraphrase the expression of chroniclers from colonial Mexico in a new context— of a generation deeply rooted in tradition, yet simultaneously passionate about new lifestyles mediated by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Thus, today's youth explore their evolving identities.

    ∂

    What has caused these changes in the Highlands of Chiapas, which I first visited almost half a century ago, a region then plagued by extreme poverty and now experiencing an economic boom reflected in concrete houses and all-terrain vehicles? That modernity of the counter-productivity -analyzed in its historical genesis by Ivan Illich and conceived by Jean Robert as a perversion of place– it forcefully entered the territory of the Tsotsil nation.

    In recent decades, the Zinacanteco economy has experienced exponential growth, thanks to the hard work of the Tsotsil people in flower cultivation and the excellence of their textiles. In particular, greenhouses have transformed the landscape of the stately hills into a mosaic of metal and plastic, with greenhouses protecting the crops of the flowers of Zinacantán. Roses, gladiolas, anthuriums, birds of paradise, hibiscus, bromeliads, desert roses and wallflowers are the most popular in the local market, from where they are exported to the neighboring states of Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, also to Mexico City.

    Similar effects are visible in the surrounding areas. The houses of Tsotsil families in Chamula express this economic boom through a new indigenous architecture that blends traditional colors with forms kitsch, similar to that of Freddy Mamani, The Bolivian creator of the so-called “neo-Andean architecture.” These houses reflect the new economic status of their inhabitants, generated by local commerce, remittances from fellow countrymen, and, according to studies from 2001 to the present, some criminal enterprises, among which the most prominent is… human trafficking.

    Something similar regarding housing is happening in Zinacantán, with new forms of housing, foreign to vernacular architecture, that are developing in imitation of other municipalities that have recently experienced economic prosperity. This phenomenon has produced a fissure in the  kuxlejal, or the integral way of life, which the Zinacanteca communities developed for centuries, but which is now collapsing due to the degraded management of the forests.

    At first glance, the deforestation of the hills, which has given way to greenhouses, is readily apparent. This phenomenon is already producing devastating effects on the rainfall cycle and the impoverishment of the soil. The use of toxic fertilizers and pesticides, This phenomenon, already analyzed by scientific studies, persists despite agroecology promotion campaigns carried out by civil society organizations and the Catholic Church through its ministries. guardians of Mother Earth. The relentless logic of the market is dragging flower producers into that environmental hell already seen in other parts of the world.

    These are some of the modernities Indianas which appear as mirages to the Tsotsil people of today, where the illusion of economic prosperity is hiding the devastating effects on Mother Earth.

    There are other modernities to explore, following, among others, the model proposed by the political ecology of Víctor Toledo and his scientific colleagues around the world, proposing the bioculturality as a new way of understanding our relationship with our common home as a human species to avoid the Great Catastrophe. Other models emphasize the importance of returning to cultivating and inhabiting from the vernacular, without abandoning modern science and technology, but orienting them towards the sustainability of peoples' ways of life.

    Perhaps in that path of alternative, other, moving modernities - and that's why trans-modernities As proposed by Enrique Dussel, the new generations of Zinacantecans will be able to find their new identity to become part of the regional economy and universal culture, preserving and promoting their own ways of life, of communality and of ancient and new spirituality.

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    What are the best ways to accompany communities in their struggle for life from the heart of their spirituality? With this question in mind, we are moving forward in the mutual accompaniment between the Dominican friars and the people of the Chiapas Highlands.

    “Let the people who welcomed the friars celebrate their arrival,” Elena Poniatowska told me in an interview last December at her home in Chimalistac, Mexico City. And she was right about remembering a five-hundred-year historical process, with its highs and lows, where the evangelization of these lands of Chiapas was initially marked by a profound respect for the indigenous nations on the part of friars like Bartolomé de Las Casas, renowned as a defender of the indigenous peoples, and Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada, who, defiantly confronting the closed-mindedness of his brethren, ventured into the jungle to encounter the Zendales, Pochutlas, and Lacandones peoples of the 16th century. Unfortunately, with the passage of time, that impetus for peaceful evangelization turned into greed, with the accumulation of wealth in the estates and haciendas of Dominican priories that controlled and subjugated entire communities in the following centuries.

    Therefore, the commemorative narrative of these five hundred years that we are preparing in San Cristóbal de Las Casas and in Zinacantán will revolve around the mutual accompaniment between the Dominican friars and the peoples of the Highlands of Chiapas: remembering the apostolic zeal of the first missionaries, while recognizing the ancestral legacy that persists in the spiritual life of the native peoples who have inhabited these lands since ancient times.

    Guided by a young Tsotsil poet and a renowned Tseltal master painter, the youth of Zinacanteco will weave this collective memory from their present perspective. Tsotsil poetry and Tseltal painting will be at the heart of the cultural celebrations commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the Dominicans' arrival in Mexico, which we are preparing for this year in Chiapas. In this way, next June we can joyfully and gratefully celebrate this shared journey of half a millennium, with our gaze fixed on the legacy of our ancestors, both Maya and Christian, in the manner of the Dominican friars and the people of the Chiapas Highlands. We will soon share the 500 OP – Chiapas program that we are currently preparing to celebrate the life that flourishes in these lands.

    San Cristóbal de Las Casas, January 31, 2026

    Note: I hope we can continue the conversation with your comments.

  • Las flechas de San Sebastián Luces y sombras de una fiesta zinacantecaCarlos Mendoza Alvarez | San Sebastian | Sot'sleb, Chiapas | 2026

    The arrows of Saint Sebastian Lights and shadows of a Zinacantecan festival

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

    One of the emblematic martyrs of the time of Roman persecution in the beginnings of Christianity, pierced by arrows in his naked and vulnerable body, has been venerated for seventeen hundred years by diverse peoples who recognize in Saint Sebastian humanity mortally wounded by empires that supplant divine glory.

    In the Highlands of Chiapas, the saints are adorned with flowery cloaks, colorful ribbons, and mirrors that reflect alternate worlds where the Ch'ulel It dwells, with its avatars that protect or threaten those who approach its spheres of power. In Chamula, according to oral history, the saints can be punished for a time if they do not respond to the pleas of their faithful devotees: they are placed against a wall for a while, until their grace manifests itself. I have not found that custom in the lands of Sot'sleb, or place of bats, known as Zinacantán, a name documented by the famous anthropologist and linguist Robert Laughlin. But I have been surprised by the profusion of life in the garments with which they adorn the images of the saints: the Christ of Esquipulas, the Guadalupana, Saint Jude, Saint Lawrence and Saint Sebastian are the images that increase their clothing for their annual festival, in an overabundance of colors and textures that leave their faces and hands exposed, with their bodies imperceptible before such a profusion of life.

    ∂

    What lies behind so much flowery beauty? How can I approach with devotion those images that transcend the ordinary in such an avalanche of flowers and decorations that sometimes seem to overwhelm those we reverently invoke?

    I found the key in the arrows of San Sebastián during its three days of popular festival in the municipal capital of Zinacantán.

    People from all the surrounding areas and neighboring towns flood the streets of the village and the plaza next to the church of the martyred saint in a lively festival that blends ancestral traditions like the jaguar tree with fleeting horse races. Asking the young catechists about the meaning of these traditions... performances Today, I heard different interpretations, more or less confused, which always concluded with the laconic phrase: “it is the custom”The jaguar climbs the trunk of a tree that was chosen a year in advance in the sacred hills The surrounding area. This tree is visited and venerated three times by those in charge of the tradition before being cut down and taken to the center of the plaza. During the festival, the trunk becomes the center of a ritual that commemorates the three days of darkness spent praying for rain and abundant harvests. From this trunk, standing upright in the ground, a man dressed as a jaguar—wearing a suit of Chinese fabrics crudely imitating the skin of the rain guardian—throws stuffed squirrels and eggs to the crowd gathered around, accompanied by young people dressed in black who play and dance as a troupe during the festival rituals. The horse race runs along the main avenue at the beginning of the day and again in the afternoon, recalling, according to some, the arrival of the Spanish—a memory that marks the time and space of the festival brought by the friars?

    During those days, like stepping back in time, the popular festival blends traditional dance and music—performed with deliberate slowness before the Tsotsil green altar of the Three Crosses, where the image of Saint Sebastian is placed—with the deafening roar of the band in the bandstand, which overwhelms those present but provides the perfect soundtrack for the celebration. And at night, everyone eagerly awaits the Sinaloan band concert, when the thumping drums mingle with the firecrackers and fireworks displays prepared to light up the sky.

    ∂

    Amidst that endless surge of color, sound, and movement, I pause to approach the saint who is the reason for the festivities. I look for him on the altar in the atrium and then inside the church at the main altar. In both places, I can barely make out his face. Through his vestments, an arrow pierces his arm. And there is no way to see his lacerated body.

    Then I recall conversations I've had in past and recent years with young Indigenous people from diverse sexual orientations who have confided in me about their suffering from living in the shadows in their communities. It was unimaginable for them to be able to celebrate San Sebastián as their patron saint, to be part of the celebration, as so many Catholic communities around the world do. They celebrate it only in the silence of their hearts and their prayers. And I realize the arrows that continue to pierce the wounded body of the martyr. The vulnerable bodies of these young people today are adorned with floral fabrics, like everyone else in the community, but those bodies are not recognized in their difference by an ancestral culture to this day.

    I wonder if those bodies that live in the shadows today will one day be able to come into the light, with the love and responsibility that calls us all, as other Indigenous cultures have done for centuries. Years ago, the same question arose in conversations with women from the Zapatista grassroots and civil society who were forging a path in their own personal and communal histories to be recognized as life partners, living together as mothers with their children, and with a clear community and political commitment to defend their peoples. Today, the Zapatista narrative speaks to us of others –as he masterfully recounts Sylvia Marcos by exploring gender fluidity in Mesoamerica - finally making visible the experience of different lives and bodies as valuable and essential voices in the human symphony and the world to come.

    ∂

    With a burning heart I sow a candle in front of San Sebastián in the name of those young people so that they may soon emerge of the shadows of the shadows of the shadows and live their lives joyfully in the midst of the community.

    The lights and shadows of the San Sebastián festival continue to be a revelation and a concealment that calls us to see with wide-open eyes the world around us where divine and human glory bursts forth as a promise of life for all.

    Sots'leb, January 24, 2026

    Note: I look forward to your comments below to continue the conversation.

  • De pirámides y autonomías Sobre la geometría política de “el Común” para el año que comienzaGaudí | 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.

    ∂

    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?

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