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
