Tag: Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Mayan transfigurations Cultural event of the 500 OP Chiapas
Welcome remarks

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

Good afternoon, dear brothers and sisters:

This cultural event in the public square of the municipality of Zinacantán is a symbol of the dialogue between faith and reason that has been at the heart of the preaching of the Gospel, from its origins in the lands of Palestine with Jesus of Nazareth, two thousand years ago, to the present day in the Highlands of Chiapas.

Jesus of Galilee was a preacher of good news for humanity, standing up to the powerful of his time, and accompanied by his messianic community even though he was betrayed by an angry mob.

Jesus' loving sacrifice for a humanity reconciled with itself and with Mother Earth acquires a cosmic force with his resurrection from the dead, which is the most radical good news of all time.

God is not a God of the dead, but of the living. And that is why the God of life is always on the side of the poor, the excluded, and the vulnerable, so that from there he may call everyone—victims and executioners alike—to heal humanity's mortal wounds and lead us to his fullness of life.

On the occasion of the arrival of the first Dominican friars to the mainland of Abya Yala of the native peoples, five centuries ago on the coasts of Veracruz in 1526, we Dominican friars of today long to make a joyful, yet critical, memory of those five centuries of encounters and disagreements with the peoples of Mexico, especially those of Chiapas.

The dialogue between faith and reason, we Dominican friars have promoted for eight centuries in spirituality, thought and the arts, always accompanied by the promotion of human dignity and its inalienable human rights, through justice and peace for all peoples and creatures, as did the first bishop of Chiapas, our brother Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, through peaceful evangelization, and later followed in his footsteps by Friar Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada in the lands of the Pochutlas and the Lacandones, as can be seen in the mural that is about to be unveiled.

The cultural event that brings us together today is a movement in three moments: image, word and music.

The image

Through murals, the Mayan peoples have long preserved their ancestral memory, the culmination of which are the murals of Bonampak. This tradition is renewed in contemporary Mayan art, such as that of the great master Antún Kojtom, a Tseltal artist from Tenejapa, who accepted the invitation of the Dominican friars to conceive, design, and paint the mural that will be unveiled in a few moments by the Provincial Prior of the Dominicans in Mexico, Friar Luis Javier Rubio Guerrero, the guest artist Antún Kojtom, and a friar representing the authorities of the San Lorenzo Mártir church.

Next, nine paintings by young people from Zinacantán who participated in the introductory acrylic painting workshop offered by Master Antún last week will be exhibited. Their works reflect the ch'ulel, or spiritual strength, that accompanies them in their inner lives. We will then present them with certificates of recognition for their commitment.

The word

Since ancient times, human words have been a reflection of the divine word, especially poetry. In the second part of this cultural event, we will hear poetry from Xun Betan, a Tsotsil writer from Venustiano Carranza, and from the young people who participated in the workshop he led for several weeks in Zinacantán. We will also present certificates of recognition for their commitment.

The music

And to conclude, traditional music, that ancestral sound memory, will inspire us to look closely at the monumental mural by the master Antún Kojtom and the acrylics of his students. The sound waves of the traditional musicians from the Parish of San Lorenzo Mártir de Sots'leb will reach throughout the plaza, echoing in the sacred hills inhabited by the ch'ulelal, who also watch over us and accompany us today.

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We, the Dominican friars, offer this gift to the people of Zinacanteco. It was made possible thanks to the agreement of the three community authorities: the municipality, the churches, and the pastoral plan.

A special word of gratitude to the Sertull Foundation of Mexico City for its generous support in funding this initiative, as well as to the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center for its support in educating about historical memory and the human rights of indigenous peoples.

In conclusion, I invite the Dominican family (friars, sisters, and laity) to continue deepening, with rigor and hope, the historical memory of that complex past of the Dominicans in Chiapas, considering the challenges that lie ahead in our time:
- to make visible the stories of women knowledgeable in ancestral Mayan spirituality and their current positions in the communities, as well as the people of the
sexual diversity in its dignity, its rights and its community responsibility;
- and to accompany children and young people in their processes as they passionately embrace technological modernity, with its opportunities and its serious risks of ecological, social and political devastation, in times of algorithms and artificial intelligence.
May the contemporary Tsotsil and Tseltal art that we will contemplate in the mural and the acrylics, hear in the poems and celebrate with the traditional music allow us to celebrate the dialogue of knowledge between the peoples, with their diverse ancestral and contemporary spiritualities.

May we continue to practice mutual listening in our times to promote the full life of the native peoples of the Highlands of Chiapas, especially the Zinacantec people.

Welcome to this celebration of life for the people of Zinacanteco, past and present!

Sots'leb, June 6, 2026

Friar Carlos Mendoza Álvarez, OP

Coordinator of cultural activities 500 OP Chiapas
June 6, 2026
Comet Ludo | The struggle doesn't continue, it's ongoing | 2014

Non-patriarchal loves

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

“The patriarchy is a judge that judges us for being born | and our punishment is the violence you see […] And it wasn’t my fault, not how I walked, not how I dressed | and it wasn’t my fault, not how I walked, not how I dressed…” Thus began the performance by the Chilean collective Las Tesis at the height of the #MeToo movement, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic that would later ravage humanity. I remember how, in 2020, protests spread across the world like a rising tide: gatherings in public squares, clotheslines denouncing sexual harassment in universities, companies, government offices, and public parks. A green-and-black wave of women’s collective action confronting patriarchy.

At that time, colleagues at Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico City denounced fellow students, professors, and administrators through the clothesline for acts of sexual harassment. Thanks to these protests, a formal institutional protocol for reporting harassment was later established at the university, managed by various institutional committees and commissions. A human rights culture was also promoted to combat gender violence, integrating this issue into the curriculum and establishing the Center for Critical Gender Studies and Feminisms. Years earlier, a doctoral program had been created to investigate this phenomenon in contemporary society from an interdisciplinary perspective, thus contributing to the strengthening of feminist and LGBTQ+ collectives, while also designing proposals for the establishment of public policies on gender equality. I was tasked, along with feminist and queer colleagues, with exploring the best ways to support this initiative from the Division of Humanities and Communication, where I worked as a divisional coordinator at that time with a formidable team of young colleagues, experts in philosophy, communication, graphic arts, administration, and academic management.

During those years, there was also a surge in denunciations from public figures emerging in diverse cultural spheres, such as the artistic, academic, and religious communities, expressing the outcry of more than half the world's population, fed up with gender-based violence, primarily against women, but also against queer individuals and groups. Thanks to this collective awakening, I discovered the admirable work of the Indian theologian Kochurani Abraham with women victims of gender-based violence inflicted against them by male leaders of three traditional Indian religions: Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Their work consisted of making this age-old violence visible and accompanying women on their path to liberation from the patriarchal burden by inventing new forms of belonging to their spiritual tradition, nurtured by mutual care and creativity in their commitment to intertwining spirituality with social justice and gender equality.

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But there were also excesses, such as cancel culture, which destroyed, with a click, the lives and careers of people accused without evidence, sometimes as a settling of scores, other times as the rotten fruit of rivalry, and still others with sufficient grounds for an anonymous denunciation out of fear of the corruption networks that kept the patriarchal pact intact, a political phenomenon analyzed by Rita Segato as a mandate of masculinity in her work Counter-pedagogies of cruelty.

The case of Boaventura de Sousa Santos touched me very personally because years earlier I had organized, together with my dear colleague and friend Pablo Reyna, a colloquium on his scientific and poetic work, to frame the Honorary Doctorate through which he was awarded five degrees from universities within the Jesuit University System of Mexico for his notable contributions to epistemologies of the South, the World Social Forum, and the ecology of knowledges. A group of colleagues from the Center for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra accused him of sexual harassment in a British publication, which was later retracted. The accusation abruptly ended his career. This crisis, at the same time, brought to light a hidden problem of rivalry within Portuguese academia and its global connections. Now, five years later, we know that the accusations have not been proven, although the damage has already been done, according to the recent account of the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chaui. As part of this sad story, Maria Paula Meneses, the Mozambican academic, who was one of the people accused of covering up for the Portuguese author, has just passed away, and a farewell message she made public last July before her death can be read.

How to maintain the relevance of a colossal work like that of Boaventura, Maria Paula and Marilena, with their network of conversations about the world with decolonial and anticolonial colleagues such as Silvia Rivera-Cusicanqui and Gladys Tzul Tzul struggling from below, honoring first the memory of the victims of patriarchy, as well as those trapped in the spiral of resentment and hatred that expands in diverse human collectives, while continuing to call for the necessary accountability and the challenge of the communal discovery of truth?

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This week I participated in the Seminar on non-patriarchal practices led by our dear friend and fellow anthropologist Abraham Mena at Ecosur. It was a virtual session that allowed us to include critical theology in the academic conversation in this intercultural and Indigenous city, as an interlocutor with other social sciences and the humanities, in order to reflect on paths for overcoming patriarchy and its toxic masculinities.

In my presentation I emphasized the need for intersectionality as a method to connect the diverse forms of violence suffered by "the wretched of the earth," starting with women, but including people rendered disposable by a hegemonic, patriarchal, capitalist, classist, and white supremacist society.

I was surprised by the online questions that focused on best practices for dismantling patriarchy. My guiding thread in the dialogue was non-patriarchal loves like a compass to escape the entanglement of hegemonic power with its many heads, like the capitalist hydra the Zapatistas warned us about some years ago.

These non-patriarchal loves are dissident loves that dismantle the toxic way of affirming the human condition as power, control, and the mandate of masculinity. Diasporic loves of queer people, but also the love of cisgender people who embrace diversity in their own bodies, minds, and spirits. And as an expression of that love, I also emphasized the importance of ritual that collectives create in their diversity to celebrate life as survivors: the mothers of disappeared persons, the migrants facing the train of horror, not by chance named La Bestia, and the native peoples intertwining ancestral tradition with Christianities of diverse confessional tones.

I recounted, as a reference point for these new forms, the history of feminist liturgies that recreate their own sacramentality from the passage of divinity through lives, the bodies and the struggles of women, as she has explored Marilú Rojas in her research on the feminist ecotheology of liberation. She also brought to heart the queer/cuir liturgies of LGBTQ+ collectives, which never cease to celebrate the queer God as an incarnate divinity. As Ángel Méndez points out, there is nothing more queer than a humanized God.

Non-patriarchal loves are, ultimately, diasporic loves, that is to say, going out towards others in all their diversity. Gender-fluid loves that are constantly being reconceptualized, as analyzed by Sylvia Marcos in the case of Zapatista women. What matters are the people who risk living each human relationship and creature in the context of love that does not control, impose, or kill, but celebrates life in its amazing diversity.

Non-patriarchal loves that must be discovered in each story of those who dare to go out and encounter others (across differences and beyond them) as gift, offering, call, caress, cry, and communion.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, February 14, 2026

Note: How do you weave together non-patriarchal loves?

February 14, 2026
The Spirit connecting the peripheries

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

Since the end of the last century, humanity's religions have updated their mission, realizing the growing poverty and injustice in the world, accompanied by wars promoted by corrupt leaders, where religion was used as a weapon of exclusion and violence.

The Parliament of the World's Religions with the project of a global ethic (Toward a Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration) where the contribution of the Swiss theologian Hans Küng stood out, or the Earth Charter Promoted by, among others, the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, along with several spiritual leaders, they sounded the alarm to mobilize religions to stop the spiral of hatred that is spreading across the planet, turning to the sources of human interiority that religions have cultivated for millennia as a source of peace.

However, many of these initiatives, while they managed to raise awareness among their leaders and communities as well as in the media of the urgent task of building peace with justice and truth, did not always listen to the knowledge and spirituality of people and communities in their daily struggles to defend human life, rivers, forests and mineral, plant and animal species that inhabit the face of the earth but are threatened by the sixth mass extinction underway (What is the sixth mass extinction and what can we do about it?).

Second and third generation liberation theologies, as we have already analyzed in the Mexican context (Liberation Theology in Mexico: Creative Reception of the Second Vatican Council), have shifted the perspective by placing the victims of global violence themselves at the center as "knowers," that is, experts in humanity thanks to the resilience that has transformed into resistance. Above all, it must be emphasized that, from this experience of vulnerability, these survivors have recognized themselves as privileged interlocutors of Divinity. Indeed, the victims seek to re-exist with new modes of communal organization, agroecological work, and diverse spiritualities. These practices emerge precisely from the people and communities themselves who are threatened by systems of domination.

Feminist ecotheology, developed by Ivonne Gebara (Ecofeminism: A Latin American Perspective) in Brazil and Marilú Rojas (The relevance of ecofeminist theology and its political impact on current femicide and ecocide) in Mexico, took a radical turn in thinking about the interconnections between the faith of excluded women, their violated bodies and territories, as well as their ancestral knowledge of care and resistance as the beginning of a world change where a new face of divine Sophia is revealed.

Thus, an increasingly clear awareness emerged among religions and social movements to listen to those who live on the peripheries of the world of wealth and privilege, to explore how "another world is possible" from those social and religious margins.

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Since 2015, a group of university students, along with artists and social movements in defense of the territory in Mexico – with the advice of Gustavo Esteva (Center for Intercultural Meetings and Dialogues) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos with his Conversations of the World With several authors from the epistemic South such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui – we began to explore ways to decolonize the university and learn to “weave voices for the common home” (Weaving voices). Thus, we learned the demands of attentive listening to those living on the peripheries, who are not only victims but individuals and collectives who create processes of awakening, healing, and embodying together, and thus weave together knowledge that expresses their ways of life, community organization, and their profound spirituality of life.

In 2019, we continued this path by analyzing various voices of decolonial theology at a conference (Congress on resistance and spiritualities) organized jointly by the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, the international journal of theology Concilium, and the Dominican University Cultural Center of Mexico to explore together the common features of resistance to systemic violence and the spiritualities that arise from it.

In 2023, a group of university colleagues, with the support of Mexican civil society organizations and ITESO, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara in Mexico, managed to bring together more than thirty groups from Latin America (Re-Exists! The spirit crossing peripheries) with the aim of understanding the new forms of life, subjectivity, and communality that individuals and communities of survivors are weaving together. We sought a way to glimpse hope amidst the horror of clandestine graves in Mexico, discrimination based on gender, race, and social status, the devastation of Mother Earth, as well as to explore the rituals that emerge from these practices of resistance. graphic memory of that congress, with his documentary that includes some interviews, can give an idea of what we experienced at that meeting.

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Now comes the time for the next phase of Re-exist that will emphasize the connections survivors make and the strength that animates them.

This time, it is a meeting-festival with two novel and challenging features: interculturality as a way of existence and thought, to "rethink as a species," according to the call of the scientific community, closely linked to interreligious dialogue as the only viable way to approach the sacred.

We propose to explore together the paths of re-existence in this hour of collapse of the modern civilizational model, where the genocide in Gaza has put humanity in jeopardy and becomes a touchstone for human civilization.

Through three steps we will explore the wake up in the face of the horror that each collective has faced. We will continue analyzing the heal as personal and collective actions of memory, truth and justice that allow victims to rebuild their lives. Then we will be able to access the moment of support each other with new forms of communality.

Collectives of women from India facing patriarchal violence in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian religions will enter into mutual accompaniment with mothers of the disappeared in Mexico. Caretakers of Mother Earth from the Jesuit mission of Bachajón in Chiapas will dialogue with leaders of the Lakota people who work on collective memory to heal from the colonial past, while recovering their ancestral forms of agriculture through traditional diets, the cultivation of local plants, and the rediscovery of rituals such as the Inipi or ritual bathing which is a creation of communality, or the buffalo dance as one of the main symbols of the sacredness of earth and sky.

Stay tuned on social media Re-exists 2025 where brief informative capsules, interviews, and graphic memories of these moments will be published, which we hope will be like glimpses of life that resists and re-exists, because the strength of the survivors is animated by the divine Ruah that flutters over chaos to bring forth life in the midst of death.

Guadalajara, September 20, 2025

September 20, 2025

English