Category: Decolonial thought

Pablo de la Fuente | Diablo Rojo Graphics | Letting Go | Santiago, Chile, 2022

Water Stories On the cries of a lake and a basin of valleys in Mexico

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

“Un Salto por la Vida” (A Leap for Life) is a civil society collective from El Salto, a municipality in the state of Jalisco, which we visited a year ago as participants in the Re-existe festival at ITESO University in Guadalajara, Mexico. Its residents and activists had foreseen the contaminated water crisis that erupted last Sunday in Guadalajara for years. The brutal pollution and growing shortages have been caused by the industrial mirage of the so-called Mexican Silicon Valley, an environmental aberration continued to be promoted by governments and companies in the region, leaving a trail of environmental and social destruction that has been documented by residents, organized civil society, and universities in Western Mexico.

Gradually, the outcry from families—with children and the elderly sickened by the devastating impact of chemicals in "drinking" water—gave way to resistance from civil society. Scientific studies provided the foundation for social activism to promote the right to water as a priority in the struggle for human rights at a time when modern society seems unwilling to awaken from the nightmare of development.

“The wars of the future will be wars over water,” I recall a historian predicting at the beginning of the millennium. And what seemed like a distant dystopia a quarter of a century ago has become everyday reality in every corner of the planet, from Gaza and the West Bank in Palestine to Wallmapu in the southern tip of the American continent.

In Mexico, Lake Texcoco and the Lerma-Santiago River basin have become a painful thorn in the side, especially due to the voraciousness of the megacities that devour everything in their path. But at the same time, both territories have become breeding grounds for rebellion when their inhabitants put their finger on the wound and begin a painful but hopeful path of socio-environmental intervention to save a lake with an ancient history and a vital basin in the central-western part of Mexico.

The “Charter of Lake Texcoco” was an initiative proposed a decade ago by the People’s Front in Defense of the Land and the residents of Atenco, along with their students, activists, and artists, to sing an elegy to water that would give voice to their struggle and make their vision of the territory visible. The poet, academic, and activist Al-Dabi Olvera paved the way for me years ago to understand this poetic-political resistance through the narrative practices we carried out under his guidance at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City with the research project called Narratives of Resistance. That Charter begins by saying:

“I’ve known about the lake since I was born; it’s my parents’ legacy,

It's the life we have, the one we want our grandchildren to live.

Anáhuac is to be between waters,

fish, frogs and axolotls, ducks, chichicuilotes and swallows.

There was no shortage of quelites, quintoniles, and purslane.

The people knew how to live with the waters,

collecting the ahuautle, the tequesquite.

That lake is called freedom.”.

It was an elegy to lost water and a song to water regained. Years later, that lake has finally been declared a nature reserve by the federal government, and its wetlands are being restored thanks to the arduous and constant work of the community, in partnership with the current government, which we hope will continue in the years to come, beyond today's partisan political interests.

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In our age of Artificial Intelligence, water is being transformed into a coveted commodity. An indispensable "product" for the digital industry because data centers require it: a single standard data center consumes 25 million liters of this vital liquid annually to cool the computers that power "the cloud." A cloud that is more of a hellscape of semiconductors and digital networks at the service of the powerful. Indeed, ecological devastation is already occurring alarmingly in areas of Texas and Ohio, and is multiplying from China to Argentina, wherever the lords of the digital super-industry need it to establish their data businesses where water is plentiful. In these territories, Israeli power is strategically expanding to sell technology, replicating its voracious business and its power over local governments in the name of supposed progress and water security.

The water sequestered by fracking is yet another contradiction of this extractive economy. To extract gas from increasingly deeper underground regions, it is necessary to inject unprecedented quantities of water. The life force of water is transformed into a weapon of death at the service of the devastating oil and gas energy industry, which is currently controlled by the United States, China, and Russia across the globe.

And to make matters worse, the water used by the soft drink industry is another head of the capitalist hydra, as the Zapatistas call it, which transforms a precious resource into poison with every soda placed on the tables of the poor. Mexico is the world's largest consumer of soft drinks, and, as a sad example, Chiapas, the state with the highest poverty rate, is also where soft drink consumption is highest, leading to malnutrition and disease. This is a lamentable example of the Illichian principle of counterproductivity: it takes wasting two hundred liters of water—in the entire water chain, from sugarcane or corn cultivation for processing to the production of the soft drink—to put a single bottle of Coca-Cola on the market. The city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas carries water in its soul, with its Tsotsil name Jobel or land of wetlands: bodies of water that still survive despite the exploitation of springs and the terrible public administration that privatizes wells, monopolized today by Coca Cola, and urbanizes those bodies of water inhabited by reeds, birds and increasingly rare amphibians.

To complete this picture of the environmental horror that has water held hostage in our time, it is necessary to mention the sewage from the drains of the world's metropolises, which have transformed rivers and basins—once home to wetlands, streams, and rivers—into channels of chemical, organic, and energy waste from the plastics, steel, and semiconductor industries. But the most macabre aspect of these flows is that they have also become receptacles for the human remains of people disappeared by criminal organizations, thus becoming rivers of iniquity.

Thus we find ourselves thrown into socio-environmental chaos by the machine civilization, now disguised as an algorithm of voracious power.

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And amidst so many painful splinters in the body of Mother Earth and our people, where are there signs of comfort and hope to rescue and heal this wounded socio-environmental body?

The resistance of the people of Atenco in Texcoco and El Salto in Jalisco is like spores spreading through valleys and canyons around the world, giving rise to new organisms in their wake. They do so on a small scale, but a real one. Their methods of organization, their protest marches, their rituals of caring for Mother Earth and the most vulnerable people and creatures in the community are already signs of another way of being, one that transcends greed.

Without romanticizing these movements, knowing that they also experience tensions over power, control of the narrative, and obtaining resources from the state and international solidarity funds, we recognize that other languages are being babbled there with their decolonial verbs: eating, learning, organizing… and waiting.

Now it's up to each of us, individuals and communities, to live and tell our own stories of resistance. What is your water story?

Jobel, October 17, 2026

October 17, 2026
Antún Kojtom Lam | Ch'ulel Mural | City Theater, San Cristóbal de Las Casas 2012 | Photo: Carlos Mendoza

Weaving a political theology for times of Great Catastrophe Some progress on the collective book currently being published in New York

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The renowned Canadian author Naomi Klein, along with Astra Taylor, has just published a provocative book on end-time fascism. In the introduction alone—the book is predicted to be a bestseller in the English-speaking world—the authors realistically lay out, with journalistic flair, the threads of fascism as an expression of minority capitalism trapped in its own contradiction: on the one hand, driven by ever-increasing wealth, and on the other, threatened by majorities staging protests in the streets in increasingly prevalent dystopian scenarios.

My friend Pablo Reyna sent me the book from Colombia with a brief message that I read as a provocation to engage with the authors in an alternative reading of the underlying theological framework, which, in my view, lies in the mobilizing role of spiritualities of resistance. Certainly, these thinkers see in the return to place, or "hereness," the key to recovering the vision of a humanity that cares for life in the here and now, contrary to the hegemonic narrative. From what I can see so far, however, they haven't yet explored the vast current of decolonial practices and thought from the epistemic South that we have been describing in our work for several years.

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Such is the central theme of the book that is currently in the editorial process at the prestigious publishing house Orbis Books in New York, which, for six decades, has presented the foundational works of liberation theology to the English-speaking public, publishing its main authors such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jon Sobrino, Leonardo Boff and their creative readers in the American context and in other latitudes such as South Africa, Korea and Palestine.

This is a collaborative work, the fruit of the colloquia I organized over five years at Boston College, under the auspices of the "Beyond Global Violence" initiative, which I proposed as a platform for my personal research in my capacity as a senior professor at that institution. From there, I was able to invite colleagues from Brazil, Mexico, England, Spain, Japan, Puerto Rico, and the United States to participate in various discussions on emerging social, philosophical, and theological thought following the collapse of the modern dream. In my previous research conducted in Mexico, Switzerland, France, and Brazil, I had been connecting the analysis of late modern phenomenology with René Girard's mimetic theory to explore subjectivity collapsed by the dream of the technoscientific ego. But it was missing the decolonial analysis inspired by Frantz Fanon and Aníbal Quijano that continued the path of Latin American liberation thought, incorporating new theoretical and practical categories to think about “coloniality” as a modern process of five centuries of extractivism of the labor, knowledge and ways of life of the subjugated peoples.

Thus arose the question of the supplanting of the divine promoted by modernity through the deification of reason, technology, the market, patriarchy, and the will to power, to mention only a few of the control mechanisms implemented by Western technoscientific rationality. Hence the need to postulate the "apophatic wellspring" of the political, appealing to "nothingness" as that which we have in common, in Matthew Kruger's apt expression, in the "here and now" of our identities of social class, race, gender, religion, and culture.

In this way, thanks to these conversations, we were able to access the wellspring of resistance and re-existence where decolonial political theology flows for times of great catastrophe. This gave rise to the idea of a collective book that would gather the intuitions and narratives we explored over five years in Massachusetts.

When I told Neto Valiente, my dear Salvadoran colleague at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, about the emerging decolonial political theology—going further than the first-generation liberation theology he admires and knows so well—the one that arises from the intersection of phenomenology, mimetic theory, apophatic philosophy, and decolonial thought, he looked at me incredulously. He asked, “And who has written about that?” I simply replied, “No one has until now, but we will.”.

Laurel, Sole, Matthew, Valentina, Maddie, Francis, Juan Miguel, Martín, and Amirah—among many other master's and doctoral students—who were following my postgraduate courses on liberation, decolonial, and queer theologies at Boston College, witnessed how these seemingly disparate threads were woven into a discursive loom with the plot of vulnerability-conviviality-combative hope as a rereading of the coloniality of power-knowledge-being that we analyzed in class and deepened during gatherings at Mingo and Valentina's house with the splendid Chilean hospitality, where commensality made ideas and friendship flow better.

The colleagues I invited to each colloquium on one of the theoretical sources I mentioned above readily agreed to participate, but when I spoke to them about the correlation between these approaches, many expressed skepticism, while others nodded with curiosity. And that's how the book I proposed to the New York publisher came about, after one of its editors invited me to publish some of my work during a talk at the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) convention in Baltimore in June 2024. I told him I had a better idea: to propose a collaborative manuscript on political theology in times of global uncertainty. He curiously accepted the proposal I sent him, after consulting with the colleagues who had participated in the Boston colloquia to see if they would be willing to commit to writing what we had shared in person.

At that moment, we were entering the Great Catastrophe in which we find ourselves trapped today. Thus, the collective work would take shape as a collective narrative of hope amidst the rubble of the genocide in Gaza, the clandestine graves of Mexico, the fissures of the Palestinian and Afro-Brazilian diasporas, and the detention centers for undocumented immigrants in the United States, among other non-places where, paradoxically, “the political” emerges as resistance to necropower.

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The book is titled “Power and Potency,” a commentary on the important work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “Power and Glory,” where he discusses the supplanting of the divine (Glory) by modern economics and politics (power). We want to approach divine Glory, always ineffable and unmanipulable, from the peripheries of the hegemonic world, specifically, from the “potency” of the poor and excluded, as Jean Robert and Majid Rahmena pointed out, or of “the wretched of the earth,” in the words of Frantz Fanon.

The subtitle “Political Theology in Times of Great Catastrophe” reveals the main thesis running through each chapter: that it is possible to experience and think about hope by living “the political” from its reverse side and with eschatological imagination, in its messianic source and amidst the ruins of the Nakba, as the Palestinian people do today. But now it is necessary to do so on the global scale of Great Catastrophe, as the Puerto Rican thinker Nelson Maldonado-Torres proposes in his reflections in this book. The Zapatistas in southeastern Mexico call their way of living and thinking about the political “the commons,” thus recovering their ancestral Mayan tradition of territory, which, in addition to communal lands, belongs to no one privately, but rather to the community.

The book's four sections are presented in the Introduction, which I have written. They explain the intersection of two axes: the phenomenological-anthropological and the decolonial-apophatic. The first section begins with the reflections of Viola Raheb, a Palestinian philosopher of the diaspora, amidst a decolonial political theology approach proposed by Nicolás Panotto from Chile and Argentina, analyzing evangelical Zionism as a mechanism of the coloniality of power. The second section weaves together the anthropological thread, starting with mimetic theory applied to the sacrificial context of Israeli militarism by Silvana Rabinovich, and its effects in the Trump era, analyzed with keen insight by James Alison to trace the possibility of “catholicity” in times of catastrophe; with a mystical chapter by Brian Robinette seeking the essence of “life hidden in God” amidst the extreme polarization of contemporary societies such as the United States.

The third section is a polyphony of decolonial voices from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Martinique, and Brazil. Nelson Maldonado-Torres opens with an invitation to consider the coloniality of technofascism as a Great Catastrophe, with Palestine as its epicenter; Donovan Hernández, from Mexico, proposes a “critique of the reason for war” as a leitmotif of coloniality; Andrew Prevot, a young African American theologian of the new generation, recovers the work of the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant as a provocation for thinking about the political; Cleusa Caldeira deepens her proposal of “theoquilombism” as a decolonization of thought and praxis that arises from Afro-diasporic subjectivities in Brazil; Aída Hernández, who invited her colleague Gabriela Juárez as a co-author, proposes a reading of the political from the perspective of accompanying the Searching Mothers in Mexico to explore an embodied spirituality amidst clandestine graves; And finally, Ángel Méndez-Montoya, Mexican “queer” choreographer and theologian, reflects on the queer table as a theological provocation to think about the political as “the common” that arises from the subjectivities of sex-gender dissidences.

And to open critical thinking to its pre-linguistic roots, the fourth section explores the wellspring of life and thought. Raquel Bouso, from Barcelona, recounts the philosophy of nothingness from Meister Eckhart to the Kyoto School, with its implications for thinking about the political. And Matthew Kruger, a young American thinker, delves into the abyssal thought of Nothingness as a wellspring of the political that warns us against ancient and new idolatries in political contexts that manipulate divinity as identity ideologies.

The prologue by Mark Lewis Taylor, renowned professor emeritus at Princeton, announces the urgent deconstruction of the violent sacred in times of Nakba, based on the reflections of the poet Darwish and the Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe, to confront the poetics of despair based on diverse resistances, such as the Palestinian Sumud.

And the Epilogue by M. Shawn Copeland, professor emerita of Boston College and renowned author of black feminist theology in the United States, calls us to “the praxis of humanity” to live amidst the rubble with hope.

The book is scheduled for release in February 2027, but it is already available for pre-order on the portal of Orbis Books. Later I will tell you about the virtual and in-person presentations that we will be organizing, together with my fellow editors and authors, of this great collective volume that wants to contribute, in a collegial and critical way, to thinking about possible hope in times of civilizational collapse.

Jobel, September 19, 2026

September 19, 2026
Coast | The Hour of the Peoples | Jobel, 2025

Back to our roots in times of devastation About witnesses from other worlds

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

A few months ago, we mourned the passing of Diego Irrazábal, a Chilean theologian who dedicated a significant part of his adult life to accompanying Andean indigenous peoples and grassroots communities in "Our America," as the youth of Bendita Mezcla (Blessed Mix) often refer to our continent. Our dear friend Fran Bosch wrote a memorable farewell to Diego in Ameridia from Mar del Plata, recalling his legacy of smiles and warmth as spiritual and theological spaces where we can celebrate the God of Life. Such was the precious gift of this missionary theologian to so many people and communities throughout his life.

I met Diego on the editorial board of the journal Concilium a decade ago, where we briefly coincided in a passing of the torch between Latin American colleagues of both older and newer generations. In that space, we shared the desire to update the vision and mission of an international journal that had been able to read “the signs of the times” in the spirit of the Good Pope, John XXIII, opening new perspectives for Christian theology during the difficult times of the Cold War and the utopian ideals of social change of the 1960s and 70s that were spreading throughout Latin America and other continents.

But the theoretical framework for Catholic theology of those years could not remain the same sixty years later in order to account for the decolonial turn that all theology—not only Christian but also Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and all religious and spiritual traditions—is called to undertake in order to discern the complicity of coloniality that appropriated our religious practices and theological discourses, where the paths of resistance and liberation take on bold and new forms. We were able to make some progress in this new understanding of theology in times of global devastation and the re-existence of people and communities with combative hope, but the processes and work of critical reflection that can emerge in these new theological spaces in times of systemic violence that is rapidly taking over the world remain pending.

Remembering Diego these days at the World Forum for Theology and Liberation (WFTL) held in Cotonou, Benin, Luiz Carlos Suzin - a Brazilian colleague from the generation that founded this theological process to accompany the social movements of the Global South - recalled with gratitude the vision of the Chilean colleague, from long ago, to admire the soul of the peoples in their ancestral religions and their diverse ways of coexisting with the colonial Christianity that marked the first evangelization of America, exploring new ways of dialogue of spiritual knowledge.

I met Diego again at some colloquiums in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Santiago, Chile. He was always a curious man, passionate about knowing how to forge connections with new generations, without losing the impetus of a prophetic and liberating Christianity that could not renounce its spiritual and theological DNA in order to always stand with the poor and the dispossessed of the earth.

Participating these days in the World Forum on Theology and Liberation, I see its influence also in this process of accompanying social movements that cultivate, in each territory, the world change we yearn for, and that build diverse collectives from the margins of the hegemonic world. Ultimately, we seek to build the “other possible world” of the World Social Forum, one “where many worlds fit,” as the Zapatista communities propose today.

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In its current edition, uncertainty gripped the participants in the World Social Forum upon receiving the unexpected news that it would be postponed, partly due to the difficult relationship with the Beninese government, as well as the political instability of the West African region in an international context aseptic to social internationalism, and some confusion on the part of the organizing committee in following the process that followed the forum held in 2024 in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Faced with this situation, the international delegation invited to the World Forum on Theology and Liberation was called to a last-minute assembly to decide how to host the two panels that the FMTL had offered to the World Social Forum: one on feminisms as theological voices of change and innovation confronting patriarchy, and the other on the resistance of peoples to the devastation of Mother Earth. An intense day allowed us to hear voices from social movements that are a sign of hope, such as the Ecolojah initiative with its Center for the Valorization of Agroecology, Sciences, and Endogenous Techniques (Cevaste), opened by Père Jah and Mère Jah in the interior of Benin, where it is possible to explore the connections between caring for the land and the spiritualities of the God of life.

In order to keep alive “the spirit of Porto Alegre” that gave birth to the World Social Forum, Silvia Regina de Lima Silva, Nicolas Panotto, and I proposed to the coordination team a day of work as the international delegation of the FMTL to creatively reflect together on the current challenges of liberation theology in a context of escalating global violence. We reformulated the traditional see-think-act steps of liberation theology with a decolonial emphasis, to make visible, problematize, and articulate our political, epistemic, and spiritual options where today we weave theology with social movements. It was a rich and intense day of reflection, accompanied by symbols of resistance and re-existence where we see glimpses of the Kingdom of God emerging in our present time.

We finally decided to spend a day at the World Social Forum to explore its current edition in an African country. The difficult negotiations between the organizing committee and the government, as well as the limited time for many international delegations to reach the event, raised doubts about the future of this space for autonomous social movements that share the vision of another possible world that gave rise to the WSF. The relevance of this model, now twenty-five years old and facing a crisis of internationalism and alter-globalization in times of global technofascism, will have to be evaluated.

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Today, August 8th, is the feast of Dominic of Guzman who—along with Diego de Osma, a bishop troubled by the uncertainty of his time in 13th-century Castile, a group of women from Prouille in southern France seeking to return to the roots of the Gospel in community, poverty, and prayer, and Peter Ceyla, a layman from Languedoc who offered his house to host the initiative of “holy preaching”—shared “the charism of preaching” to return to the roots of the Christian faith through apostolic preaching.

This is an opportunity to celebrate, without triumphalism and with a critical eye, a constantly evolving lifestyle that has borne rich fruit for the Church and for humanity. A charism of seeking truth, wherever it may be found, as lived by Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Meister Eckhart in the Middle Ages. A drive for justice, beginning with the forgotten of society, as exemplified by the School of Salamanca and Bartolomé de Las Casas in Chiapas in the 16th century, and in our times by Albert Nolan in Apartheid-era South Africa and Gustavo Gutiérrez in Shining Path-era Peru. A passion for beauty, which is the splendor of divinity, from Fra Angelico in Florence to Father Couturier in France, and Julián Pablo in Mexico. A yearning for spirituality from the unfathomable mystery of the living God, like Meister Eckhart on the banks of the Rhine, or the laywoman Catherine of Siena in medieval Tuscany, or the layman Piergiorgio Frassati in the 20th century, a mystical tradition never trapped by any feeling, idea or institution, but seduced by the loving divinity that is always unattainable and yet close.

Today I celebrate this feast with the Dominican friars and the Dominican family of Cotonou, enlivened by a youth choir with powerful voices and African rhythms, even amidst a Roman ritual that shows no sign of inculturation of the faith of the Beninese people. I hope that one day preaching, theology, and spirituality will reach that “decolonial stage” that will allow us, as peoples, to quench our thirst for the divine in the polyphony of spiritual traditions that weave us together as a human and divine creation in the heart of our communities.

Happy Feast of Domingo, the seeker and preacher of the saving truth.

Cotonou, August 8, 2026

August 8, 2026

English