Category: Resistances

Jorge González Camarena | The Mountain | Encaustic on Masonite | BBVA Mexico Collection | ca. 1980

On the volcanic slopes of the Mexican plateau About life that endures and flourishes in the cracks of the world

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The fumarole of the Popocatépetl volcano is perceived from afar as a powerful sign of sacred land, venerated by the ancient Mexicans and later by the "graniceros" of today, who preserve the prayer with offerings to the ancestral mountains of the Cholula valley, heart of the volcanic axis of the Mexican highlands.

Returning to the landscape of childhood, scanning for signs to sow dreams of words and true encounters, brought to my memory surprising episodes of life.

The first was the campsite on the slopes of Iztaccíhuatl, or the Sleeping Woman, which we, the colleagues from the Emiliano Zapata Preparatory School, organized fifty years ago. The camaraderie of Raúl, Arturo, Adrián, Juan, and Alfredo, among other dear friends, forged a sacred friendship in that place that endures to this day. The youthful rituals of student camping were enlivened by periods of silence, games, cooking, and celebration, listening in the heart of the forest to the progressive rock music of our generation, from Pink Floyd and Queen to Emerson, Lake & Palmer and other British bands that populated our collective imagination.

Another memorable moment in volcanic lands was the ascent to the Popocatépetl crater, with Friar Raúl Vera as our novice master, guided by Güero, a young, expert mountaineer from Amecameca, in the State of Mexico, one early morning in the spring of 1980. After a great effort in the final part of the climb, well-equipped with ice axes, mountain boots, and goggles for the glare of the snow, the group of ten novices and their master reached the crater. We found the volcano's chimney exhaling sulfurous vapors, still silent, as Don Goyo—as Popocatépetl is called because of March 12, the day of Saint Gregory, on which, since ancient times, its feast day has been celebrated with offerings to ask for rain—would not reactivate its active cycle until December 21, 1994, after seventy years of volcanic inactivity. Peering towards the inner cone from the crater's ridge, amidst an astonishing silence, we celebrated "the Mass on the world," according to that phrase by Teilhard de Chardin, that remarkable scientist and Jesuit mystic of the cosmic Christ, Alpha and Omega of the evolution of the cosmos.

As a sacred place, this land of volcanoes has also suffered the siege of evil, but with the triumph of life, leaving scars on the wounded social body.

I remember the harrowing experience of four friars who volunteered to mediate, for humanitarian and evangelical reasons, the ransom payment for a kidnapping victim. It happened in 1994, that fateful year for Mexico, when disparate worlds collided like tectonic plates: the modernity of President Salinas, marked by the greed and corruption of the Mexican political system, clashed head-on with the guerrilla movements that still survived in the country after their persecution by the Mexican state since the Dirty War of the 1970s. Living through the experience of mediating the ransom payment for a kidnapped person was a profound experience, bringing me face to face with the fragility of human life in the face of the abyss of evil. The cursed money of that thirty-million-dollar ransom symbolized, on the one hand, the perversion of the powerful members of the Mexican elite who amassed such wealth, and on the other, the wickedness of those who used human life as a banner of justice for dubious social causes. As part of the ransom delivery route, the kidnappers, who were guiding us by satellite phones—very rare even then—made us cross the Paso de Cortés, right between the two sacred volcanoes, to reach Puebla and deliver the cursed briefcases there. This wasn't possible because, according to those manipulating us, we were being followed by the government. After a few days of uncertainty, we were able to deliver the ransom in a working-class neighborhood of Mexico City, and the person was released hours later. The four friars who volunteered to be mediators will never forget that experience of humanitarian assistance amidst a wave of criminal violence, with perpetrators on both sides. Violence that, unfortunately, persists to this day in new forms of necropower.

Years later, I returned to that area through Tlamacas, a mountain refuge also located in Paso de Cortés, during a dramatic moment for a community there on a spiritual retreat led by Friar Ricardo Villarreal at the Hermitage of Silence. In the middle of the night, after a day of meditation, the community was attacked by bandits. Their collective trauma did not prevent this contemplative meditation community from continuing on its path of inner healing and strengthening of its communal life, uniting body, mind, and spirit in a journey of spirituality in motion, through sacred walks, Christian and Buddhist mantras, and service to the community. The silence of the forest, with its human and other inhabitants, had been desecrated by criminal gangs.

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In recent decades, the plume of Don Goyo (Goyo's volcano) has persisted, sometimes exhaling sulfurous vapors and volcanic ash accompanied by lava. Thus, it presides over the dawns of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley, with its history of earthquakes and social movements of indigenous peoples, of youth demanding democracy, and of collectives dedicated to the spirituality of the land.

Popocatépetl is the guardian of Iztaccíhuatl, also called "La Volcana" (The Volcano) by the farming communities that live on its slopes, or Rosita because its August festival gratefully celebrates the rains and the fertility of the crops. She is the beloved Sleeping Woman of Mexica mythology, reimagined in recent times as the guardian of the planet's chakras, according to the mythology of Regina created by Antonio Velasco Piña.

A few days ago, I had the good fortune to visit the territory of San Juan Tianguismanalco and Santiago Xalitzintla, accompanied by Víctor and Carolina, with their young son Emik, who live there and lovingly care for it. For me, this short trip was a reunion with sacred land. I experienced that day as a ritual within the spiral of time, to once again tread that sacred ground of my youth, now with dreams in my heart of returning to the land of my ancestors.

I met a young and talented witness to the communities organized in defense of their land, connected by family ties and choice to the villages, forests and springs, birds and insects, reptiles and rodents, cornfields and greenhouses that inhabit it. A land of volcanoes with lush avocado, apple, peach, and pear trees. A territory of flowers and aromatic plants with healing essences used in traditional therapies. Ancestry and agroecology find in this land a strength deeply rooted in the land, a promise of life in a present lived with hope amidst so many global uncertainties.

The dream of Tabor - another holy mountain that has always accompanied me as a symbolic place of ancient and new transfigurations, from that of Jesus of Galilee to that of the peoples in resistance and re-existence - is now revived with impetuous force in these parts, now in these sacred mountains.

The volcano evokes the virtuous triangle I've been discovering with friends like Juan Carlos from Peru, Kochurani from India, and Laurel from the United States and El Salvador, as well as with collectives from diverse latitudes, to represent our learning process of sowing combative hope where life is threatened. One vertex of the triangle is the practice of mutual support among individuals and collectives resisting systemic violence as a source of life. The other vertex is the creative experiences where we learn to re-exist, reinventing ourselves from the ruins amidst the Great Catastrophe we are experiencing. And the third vertex is the spiritual and theological seedbeds, with ethical and mystical depth, that we can cultivate collectively to learn to care for ourselves and flourish as individuals and creatures of the cosmos. Soon, in this land of volcanoes, we will create a virtual and in-person seedbed on the decolonial theology we are developing in community.

We will see how the breath of the divine Ruah makes us discover, with exquisite respect for the territory and its inhabitants, new calls to inhabit together the sacred land of the Puebla highlands.

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And speaking of resistance to necropower in the territories, we must now also consider the digital realm where artificial intelligence, manipulated by transnational corporations and authoritarian governments, is designing techno-fascism. For this reason, next Thursday, July 9th, the JobeLab collective, formed by friends from San Cristóbal de Las Casas, will hold the discussion “Disarming Power and Rescuing the Human: Readings on Leo XIV’s Encyclical 'Magnifica Humanitas'‘ at La Madriguera bookstore in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. We will have the participation of experts in computer science, communication, anthropology, philosophy, and theology. Chiapas is a prize for its natural resources, coveted by the industry behind AI, so it is crucial to understand what we are facing. We hope to see you there.

San Juan Tianguismanalco, July 2, 2026

July 4, 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
Street Art | In Praise of the Bicycle | Buenos Aires, 2015

Of alternate worlds that touch Commemorating the centenary of Ivan Illich's birth

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

Between postwar Europe and the Latin America and Caribbean of the modern mirage, there were flows of life and thought that went back and forth between both shores of the Atlantic. What was once the frontier of conquest, colonization, and evangelization—with the Creole and mestizo creations that reinvented the West during the colonial period—became in modern times an ocean of whispers of new worlds, sailing against the current of progress and industrialization.

The 1960s saw the emergence in Cuernavaca, Mexico, of a river of thought flowing "north of the future," as Ivan Illich liked to describe the future arriving to us here and now, quoting the poem by Paul Celan, that Romanian-Jewish author who fascinated him so much:

In the rivers, to the north of the future,
I lay the net that you
hesitant loads
writing on stones,
shades.

In my hand autumn eats its leaf: we are friends.
We extract time from nuts and teach it to walk:
time returns to the nut.

It's Sunday in the mirror,
In sleep one sleeps,
The mouth speaks the truth.

My eye ascends to the sex of my beloved:
We looked at each other,
We say dark words to each other,
We love each other as poppies and memory love each other,
we fell asleep like wine in bowls,
like the sea in the bloody ray of the moon.

We stand embraced at the window, they can see us from the street:
It's time this was known.,
It is time for the stone to bloom,
that a heart beats in the restlessness.
It's time for it to be time.

It's time.

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Austrian researcher Isabella Bruckner, a young professor at the Benedictine Athenaeum of Saint Anselm in Rome, who is now moving to Freiburg im Breisgau, organized a European colloquium to delve into the theological legacy of Ivan Illich, tracing the genealogy of his deepest intuitions about the crisis of instrumental modernity, which arose from what he called the perversion of Christianity.

Together with Professor Martin Kirschner of the Catholic University of Eichstätt in Bavaria, I was invited to give a joint presentation comparing the political theology emerging in certain parts of Germany and Mexico, inspired by Illich's intuitions and ideas. The challenge was twofold: to find common ground and an appropriate language to account for experiences of proximity and conviviality in countries so disparate in their political cultures: the German people currently grappling with the European Union's complicity as an ally of Israel and the United States in their geopolitical war in the Middle East, and the Mexican people seduced by the siren song of the Fourth Transformation and the roar of the World Cup, which silences the tragedy of the disappeared and the corruption of the narco-government in a large part of the country's territory.

When I was invited to participate, I suggested to the organizer that she invite people who for years have been inspired by Illich's thought, particularly Javier Sicilia, Sylvia Marcos, Roberto Ochoa, and Rafael Mondragón, who are little known in European academia. So I undertook the task of presenting in my paper the central ideas of this critical dialogue on what Humberto Beck called the Cuernavaca School, with the Hebrew and Christian thinker of proximity and conviviality. I emphasized the new paths emerging in Mexico and other parts of the world. world below and of the peripheries From the centers of hegemonic power, where resistances flow as other ways of eating, healing and educating —as the late Gustavo Esteva said speaking of revolutionary verbs— to promote territorial, epistemic and spiritual autonomies that sustain communities and peoples who face the many-headed hydra that devours the world.

One of the Illichan themes that most impacted colleagues in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic was his critique of the pharmaceutical industry, promoted by Western democratic governments that imposed public health policies without considering the autonomy of individuals and communities in choosing the most appropriate ways to confront the pandemic. My German colleagues, Martin Kirschner and Markus Riedenauer, emphasized the continued relevance of this critique of the state's power to impose mandatory vaccination programs, disregarding the serious scientific objections to the indiscriminate use of vaccines and the effects they caused in the population.

Another recurring theme in the Rome debates was that of the territorial, epistemic, and cultural autonomies that arise from placing face-to-face proximity at the center of life, or, in Illich's words, the conviviality as a mode of existence and the place which is inhabited with the strength of the vernacular. Both in Europe and in Latin America and the Caribbean, these autonomies have been gaining ground in recent decades, with the conquest of bodies and territories by women, indigenous peoples and collectives queer/cuir /queir, among other resistance groups.

European colleagues were surprised by the diverse approaches to the ethical, political, and spiritual implications of the work of the migrant thinker Ivan Illich. From his diaspora from the clerical Church to his return to medieval classics like Hugh of Saint Victor—and through his time living with Puerto Rican communities in New York and later with peasant communities in Cuernavaca—Illich bore witness to these other worlds that intersect. Fabio Milana, editor, along with Giorgio Agamben, of Illich's work in Italian, presented a gem of archival research from the Illich family to recount Ivan's "vocation," as the young son of a Jewish mother and a Christian father, who cultivated from childhood and adolescence a passion for the thought that arose from Christianity as the event of the Incarnation of the Word of God. This core would later remain as an ember in the work of the migrant thinker to this day, in which we now recover Illich's pristine vision of a powerless church.

The proposal to continue exploring Illich's thought from its various perspectives, both European and Latin American, remains open. We hope to organize a meeting in Cuernavaca that will foster these dialogues and new ways of living together in the conviviality of those who resist the era of the system, reclaiming place and vernacular culture as cornerstones of another possible modernity.

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This week, cultural writing and painting workshops begin in Sots'leb, as part of the preparations for the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Chiapas Revolution, which will take place on Saturday, June 6th in Zinacantán.

I have been fortunate to contribute to the organization of these events, led by Antún Kojtom, a Tseltal painter from Tenejapa, and Xun Betán, a Tsotsil anthropologist and poet from Venustiano Carranza. These acts of collective memory seek to explore the enduring presence of the cultures of the Chiapas Highlands and their encounter with the Dominican friars in a dialogue that began five hundred years ago.

A mural on the esplanade outside the San Lorenzo Mártir temple in Zinacantán will depict scenes from the ancestral religion of the Tsotsil people, such as prayers on the hills led by the Jiloletic, The blessing of the grandmothers and the importance of traditional roles as a bond within the community are also depicted. As part of this ancestral history, the mural's center features a scene of an imagined encounter between a Jilol, or Tsotsil seer, and Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, accompanied behind him by other friars who safeguarded the legacy of the Gospel linked to the defense of the people's rights, such as Friar Matías de Córdoba, who contributed to the independence of Chiapas, and, more recently, Friar Raúl Vera. jTatic Samuel Ruiz walking with the Mayan people. And on the far right of the mural, the master Antún created a beautiful scene of the dialogue between the sage of Pochutla. Chan ak'abal or night serpent, and Friar Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada, both sitting under a ceiba tree, the sacred tree of the Maya of the Lacandon Jungle, listening to each other: the friar speaking with eloquence and respect, the wise Maya pointing to the earth and touching his heart.

Those who can attend on Saturday, June 6th in Zinacantán will be able to participate in the unveiling of the mural, accompanied by Tsotsil poetry and traditional music, thus reaffirming the dialogue of knowledge that we seek to continue promoting between friars and Tsotsil communities, and strengthening the life of the people with the vital sap of their ancestral traditions and the prophetic force of the Gospel.

Rome, May 17, 2026

May 17, 2026

English