Category: Cultural pluralism

Roberto Mamani | Ari Kepay | Tarija, Bolivia, 2020

Where the Pacific Desert begins On the intersections of Mutual Spiritual and Theological Accompaniment

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The “Huaca Mach'ay” is the ancestral sacred cave carved from sillar, the name given to ignimbrite, a volcanic rock found in the highlands of Arequipa, Peru. For thousands of years, pilgrims have venerated these places as the womb of Mother Earth, coming here to experience the birth of new life. As a community of friends, we have traveled from the north and south to Arequipa, the Castilian name for Ari Kepay, which in Quechua means “here we stay.”.

That cosmic womb welcomes us one sunny morning in the Andean highlands, accompanied by Fiorella as our guide. With her activism in defense of the Chili River and its valley, threatened by the hydroelectric and real estate industries, she listens to our questions and other ways of being visitors in her territory. We are a group of companions from the Mutual Spiritual and Theological Accompaniment who, over the course of eleven years, have shared the emotion of telling our stories of vulnerability, righteous anger, and hope, learning from individuals and collectives resisting diverse forms of violence in Oregon and Chiapas, Arequipa and Barcelona, Monterrey and Lima.

As the start of our annual in-person gathering, Belissa welcomes us to her hometown, “the white city,” so named for the volcanic stone that adorns its houses with facades sculpted with baroque flourishes, a reminder of its colonial and racist past, as it was a city built for Spanish colonizers. We didn't come for cultural tourism or to kayak the rapids of the Chili River. We arrived here after monthly meetings in “virtual homes” over a four-month cycle, where we shared our stories of vulnerability and resilience, of awakening with diverse commitments to life. Each of us was invited by a loved one who had already experienced the power of a spirituality rooted in our own wounds, open to those of other individuals and groups, with whom it is possible to weave threads of hope. Adrián, as a companion to young day laborers and queer people on the West Coast of the United States; Bosque, as an activist for deliberative democracy on environmental justice issues in Monterrey; Belissa as a doctor walking with health collectives for the care of neurodivergent children in vulnerable situations in Arequipa; Rachel as a pastor exploring new pastoral ministries for queer communities in Oregon.

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The Apus are the guardian mountains of the memory of this place where the Pacific Desert begins, stretching from Arequipa in Peru to Atacama in Chile. Misti, Chachani, and Pichu Pichu are the three silent witnesses to the stories of the Inca and mestizo peoples who coexist with the creatures of the ravines: birds, reptiles, and endemic cacti of this remarkable ecological niche. Modern exploitation is causing the glaciers to melt, and the rivers are being turned into irrigation ditches. We witness the socio-environmental devastation accelerated by the impoverishment of the lives of internally migrating peasant communities from remote provinces in the Andes Mountains, drawn by the mirage of the modern city that expels them from the highlands to the outskirts of beautiful Arequipa.

The river is the lifeblood of the Andean spine, formed by rocks that descend from the volcano, explains Jorge, an anthropologist from Arequipa who calls himself a “Renaissance man” as he recounts his struggle to defend the territory as a member, along with Fiorella, of the citizen initiative “Save the Chilina Valley.” His aspiration as a young ecotourism entrepreneur is centered on protecting the legacy of his ancestors, confronting the mafias that seek to control the territory with their tentacles extended into the real estate industry, local and regional governments, and the indifference of the local population. A coalition of several civil society organizations has so far managed to halt the construction of a sixth hydroelectric plant in the river canyon, a project that lacks environmental planning and is the spearhead of a land-use change across the entire valley to build resorts for extreme sports tourism. The value of this civil society initiative lies in the recovery of the social fabric of the Arequipa community to mobilize it to take charge of the care of its territory, with the tremendous challenge of weaving a common cause amidst perverse private interests.

At the end of the visit, we perform our traditional ritual of gratitude for what we have learned from our hosts. The veneration of the sacred place and its ancestors is followed by a blessing from everyone gathered in a circle around those who opened their hearts and shared their struggles with us, thus connecting who we are with our hosts and supporting each other in our resistance and new ways of re-existing.

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“Mothering” is an intimate act, but also a collective one. It represents a new dimension for me, ever since Kochurani helped me perceive in my own life the reality of giving birth to life. It's a capacity we rarely acknowledge, yet it's a source of life and dignity. It's not an experience exclusive to women when they conceive the offspring of the human species. It's an act of conceiving and giving birth that celibate women also experience through processes and acts of bringing life into the world in any of its forms: caring for our grandparents, for example; or protecting a territory from extractive mining companies; and even giving birth to new forms of communal governance in small pockets of resistance. That's why men are also called to “mother,” thus empowering the feminine dimension of our deepest being.

Fiorella shuddered when, in the ritual of gratitude, I thanked her for her diverse motherhood, which ranges from caring for her young son to the community care of the threatened river.

May these encounters where the Pacific desert begins, with the Apus as guardians of our intersecting paths, be a propitious occasion to be reborn wherever we find ourselves, putting down roots to stay wherever we arrive.

Ari Kepay, October 3, 2026

October 3, 2026
Freepik | Digital art, AI-generated resource | 2026

AI: threat or partner? On the challenges of the digital world and the 500th anniversary of the Chiapas Open Air Movement

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

In recent days, the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) has gone viral on social media due to Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical letter. Ironically, in this age of systems—as Ivan Illich termed this new social paradigm that should be considered when analyzing the digital world—the pontiff's warnings have already been devoured by algorithms and accounts on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook (for the older generation of the digital world). Memes of Pope Leo battling AI have flooded social media, such as the one of the pontiff with his staff firmly warning Palantir: "You shall not pass." And to top it all off, thousands, perhaps millions of people have used AI to create a summary of the encyclical, mostly out of curiosity, sometimes with the aim of criticizing the Pope or the power of the companies that produce and control it. A slow, personal reading of the encyclical letter would be worthwhile to analyze its content.

Without losing sight of the ethical critique and the international legal regulation that must be promoted for the production and use of AI, it seems to me that it is important to first realize that we are already immersed in that tangle of data driven by individual, corporate and governmental wills, with an ever-increasing “autonomy” of what was called years ago “the internet of things” (IoT)., Internet of ThingsThis network of digital data flow systems is here to stay, monitoring information circulating in the digital environment in an automated way within systems created by humans, but operating with increasing “autonomy” to generate new data and produce unprecedented social, commercial, scientific and cultural effects.

The dystopian science fiction series Black Mirror, Created in Great Britain in 2011, the series depicted fascinating and chilling episodes of a society controlled by technology, where the boundaries between human reality and the virtual world were so porous that they created apocalyptic scenarios. Fifteen years ago, this reality of the algorithm's power seemed like a figment of the imagination. Today, it's already part of our daily lives.

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I am currently preparing a couple of talks on AI. I will be giving the first one this week at the Diocesan House in San Cristóbal de Las Casas to a group of priests from Generations X and Y—both born after 1965, following the generation of the Baby boomers- until 1982 when the Millennials. Of course, this classification, proposed by British and Canadian colonial sociology to designate first a generation without a defined desire, and then the first generation of digital natives, is relevant for describing certain social strata in each country. But it also designates the other side of the coin of globalization, due to the technological impact that television and computers have had on the lives of all people.

Later, with the team of JobeLab We will hold a discussion on AI at the end of June in the Temple of Charity to reflect on the recent Encyclical Letter Magnificent Humanity by Pope Leo XIV, published last Monday, May 24th. We will approach this from an interdisciplinary perspective, first giving voice to colleagues in computer science, education, and philosophy. There, I will offer some reflections on the meaning theological of the problem in question, from a phenomenological and decolonial perspective, deepening an intuition present in the Encyclical Letter, human vulnerability, but unfortunately not developed sufficiently by Pope Leo.

There are many ecclesial, university, and social forums where we must open intelligent conversations, with creative imagination, to think together about the digital reality that has already reached us, with its enormous possibilities for the flow of information and its challenging scenarios of post-human control of production and knowledge processes that we have never imagined.

AI is perceived today as a threat, even though it's already part of our digital-age "customs and practices." Perhaps we should learn to coexist with it as a "creature," that is, as a reality marked by the finiteness of all creation and, therefore, incapable of supplanting our imagination and creativity—much less divine glory—though we must remain vigilant against the danger of its control over our lives and destinies. Today more than ever, the bastion mystical The human condition is presented more clearly as a source of freedom in times of AI.

500 OP Chiapas

This Thursday, June 4th, we begin the commemorative events for the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Dominican friars to Tierra Firme of the American continent, on June 23, 1526 in Villa Rica de la Veracruz, as the first anchor of European colonization and the arrival of the Gospel with its model of Western Christianity.

In Chiapas, the small community of Dominican friars in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, along with friends and colleagues, has prepared cultural and liturgical events to commemorate this historic event. We will begin on Thursday, June 4th, with a concert by the San Cristóbal de Las Casas Symphony Orchestra and Choir at the Santo Domingo Church, where this youth ensemble will perform works of Baroque and modern classical music, with interludes that will briefly recall the friars' arrival in these lands, their evangelizing mission, their heyday during the colonial period, and their subsequent decline in the 19th century, leading up to their gradual resurgence in the 20th century.

On Friday, June 5, an academic colloquium on the Dominicans' contribution to Chiapas culture will take place at the friars' former convent in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, now the Museum of the Highlands of Chiapas. Two historians specializing in Dominican architecture in Chiapas during the colonial period will participate. The event will also feature the presentation of Friar Pablo Iribarren's latest book on the Dominicans in the 20th century, focusing on their evangelization efforts in dialogue with the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. Marimba music by the Díaz Sisters will provide a festive atmosphere.

On Saturday, June 6th, the celebration will take place in Zinacantán, thanks to the generous collaboration of the faithful communities of the Parish of Saint Lawrence the Martyr. A solemn Mass of Thanksgiving at the Church of Saint Lawrence the Martyr, the parish seat, will be followed by the cultural event “Transfigurations: Mayan Spiritualities Today,” which I have had the honor of organizing along with two masters of contemporary Mayan art. We will begin with the unveiling of the mural 500 OP Chiapas, a masterful work by Antún Kojtom, a Tseltal artist from Tenejapa, depicting the encounter between the spiritual traditions of the Tsotsil people and other Mayan communities of the Highlands and Rainforest of Chiapas with the Dominican friars throughout history. Tsotsil poetry by Xun Betán and some of his students from the creative writing workshop, held this month in preparation for this event, will be accompanied by traditional Tsotsil music performed by musicians from the parish church. And in the afternoon, a talk about the Dominicans in Zinacantán will be given by Friar Pablo Iribarren, as a framework for a closing liturgical act in which young people from Zinacantán will make their initial promises as members of the Dominican Youth Movement.

And to conclude the commemorative events, on Sunday, June 7, with a Eucharist presided over by Don Rodrigo Aguilar, current bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, the Dominican family and the faithful of the city will give thanks to the God of Life for this half-millennium of preaching, with its lights and shadows, invoking divine mercy to walk with hope as the people of God in the arduous times we are living through, to bear witness to the Gospel of liberation with justice and peace for all creatures of the cosmos.

We look forward to seeing you soon in Chiapas.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, May 31, 2026

May 31, 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

English