Tag: Mother Earth

Anonymous | Watercolor of the Montesinos monument | Dominican Republic, 2020

The cry of the (post)human

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

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In 1511, Friar Antón de Montesinos, along with a handful of Dominican friars who had recently landed in Quisqueya, the Taíno word for the mother of all lands, uttered a cry that still resonates in the Western conscience: “Are these not men?” He was referring to the original inhabitants of that Caribbean island—later known as Hispaniola, where the modern states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic were established—who had been subjected by Spanish soldiers in the name of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon to harsh servitude and slavery. In the sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent on December 21 of that year, with the central figure of John the Baptist announcing the urgency of preparing the way for the coming Messiah, Friar Antón became a prophetic voice to counterbalance the nascent coloniality of power. According to this concept of the Peruvian Aníbal Quijano (Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin AmericaIt is possible to explain from our time the logic of power that led Europe to dominate the modern world, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, with its later avatars of American and Russian imperialism that we know today.

More than five centuries have passed. Now, this enterprise of coloniality is acquiring global dimensions in our time with the extractive capitalist model that is expanding across the world, like a many-headed hydra, according to the Zapatista narrative that emerged in 1994 in southeastern Mexico. Three decades later, new ways of naming the diverse resistances to this lethal force that dominates the world will be heard in the seedbed « Of pyramids, of stories, of love and, of course, heartbreak » which will take place at CIDECI-Unitierra at the end of December.

The question surrounding humanity may seem rhetorical, but it becomes more urgent when we consider the landscape of exclusion based on class, gender, ethnicity, and cultural identity that entire nations suffer today. The collapse of the international order we knew in modern times leaves us exposed. The foundations of that shared world were laid by the School of Salamanca with the Ius Gentium or the law of nations in the 16th century, with Friar Francisco de Vitoria at the forefront in dialogue with Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas from Chiapas and Guatemala, as analyzed by Enrique Dussel. It was one of the cornerstones of the model of Christendom created to justify the expansion of the earthly city in the image of the City of God under the tutelage of the Spanish Crown. Subsequently, this interpretation was transformed into an internationalist model, beginning with the Enlightenment, with a rationalist foundation of a contractual nature, making international law a pact between sovereign states, without an ultimate foundation in a metaphysical order that had its sustenance in God (Ancient and contemporary law of nations).

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Beyond the theoretical discussions about the transition from the Salamanca model to the Germanic model of international law, what is important to highlight here are the internal contradictions of the modern social contract that is collapsing before our eyes. Today we are witnessing the return of authoritarian regimes based on religious fundamentalisms with messianic pretensions (The United States is a messianic state), as is the case with US imperialism and Israeli Zionism. In the name of what ethical-political principle or source do today's powers justify their mechanisms of domination, neocolonialism, and the elimination of entire peoples? What limits are there to the power deployed by this unbridled new geopolitical “order”?

But it is necessary to go beyond the catastrophic scenario described so far to recognize the role of peoples and the spiritual traditions of humanity in strengthening communal life among nations. How can we understand and promote the autonomy of individuals, peoples, and territories today in order to preserve what is human How can we cope with the threats of the system that already dominates us, encompassing both traditional and digital territories?

In this context, Montesinos' sermon acquires remarkable relevance since it expands the question of mutual recognition of the human and the creature to all the victims of systemic violence that is leading humanity and the entire planet to the precipice (International treaties on biodiversity (SCJN)Are the nations and species that inhabit the face of the Earth not creatures with rights? In the post-human world, as it is called today, it is essential to develop a critical way of thinking that affirms the dignity of every creature in the cosmos in its profound dignity linked to the loving mystery of reality.

It is no longer just about reaffirming the historical strength of indigenous peoples confronting the Eurocentric colonialism of five hundred years ago, but about the subaltern peoples who are disposable in the planetary war economy of the Trump Era, as he comments Leonardo Boff. Latin America and the Caribbean, as evidenced by the US invasion of international waters in the Caribbean Sea, are now a battleground for the war waged by the Southern Command of that neighboring country. Unfortunately, we will soon witness the full extent of this new model of imperial interventionism through the selective occupation of territories, the control of local governments aligned with the interests of the necrostate, and surgical strikes against the “enemies” of US national security.

Nor is the cry for the dignity of humanity enough if it is dissociated from the cry of the Earth, “the poorest of the poor,” as Leonardo Boff also called it. That “escalation to extremes” conceived by Girard in 2007 based on the phenomenon of terrorism seems like child’s play today in the face of current wars whose objective is the blatant domination of entire populations in order to control their territories as objects of predatory enrichment of ecosystems.

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For this reason, it is more urgent than ever to recognize the new Montesinos who, with their outcry, appeal to the common humanity that unites us as individuals and peoples, with its mystical source that gives strength and opens horizons of life for all, in order to reverse those processes of necropower that claim more and more victims every day.

But today it is urgent to move beyond the anthropocentric paradigm, transitioning towards an "ecocentric" one (Anthropocentrism and ecocentrism in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights) that promotes the dignity of Mother Earth, who is also subjugated by the dominant model of extractive society and economy. «Rethinking as a human species,» according to the proposal of political ecology promoted by Víctor Toledo and a significant network of scientists worldwide (Political ecology is here to stay) is a key step to regain our course as humanity inhabiting the Common Home that has been given to us by the Giver of Life.

The green martyrs, the searching mothers, and the indigenous peoples in rebellion are some of the voices that have sounded the alarm about the devastating situation that has already reached us. Listening to their denunciations is a beginning of ethical and mystical conversion, but it is not enough. We must join those processes of subjective, territorial, and spiritual autonomy carried out by those who have said enough to necropower.

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Perhaps the most inspiring way for believing communities to celebrate the approaching Christmas is by honoring the memory of Montesinos and all the prophetic voices of yesterday and today.

Preparing the way for the arrival of the messiah is not, after all, an act of Christmas folklore, but a change of course in our ways of life with ethical-political, practical and mystical decisions, such as recycling garbage, reforesting forests, and including the vulnerable at our tables as gestures of celebrating life amidst the ruins of the present world.

As I mentioned some years ago (Messianic time and narrative for a theological interpretation of the narrative practices of victims) it is urgent and a priority that we pave the way to messianic times through our acts of resistance to necropower, promoting communities where we learn to spell anew, with imagination and vigor, the humanity and creatureliness that unites us, all drinking from the inexhaustible source of Life.

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Jobel, December 20, 2025

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Note: I would like to read your comments in the final section of this page.

December 20, 2025
Carlos Mendoza | Re-exists 2025 | Opening Ritual 23 IX 25

A compost flower Or about re-existences in the midst of catastrophe

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

At the end of September, more than eighty people from survivor groups around the world gathered for a meeting of mutual listening, deepened by attentive dialogues with university students and nourished by provocations from artist groups. We were received with the magnificent hospitality of the Jorge Manzano Chair from ITESO that became home for a few days.

We began by celebrating the resistances that transform what seems like waste through love, inspired during the opening ceremony by the renowned Catalan singer Lídia Pujol who whispered that “from the compost that is rottenness, the flower can emerge” (Babel). She had discovered this wisdom in the poetry of her 12th-century countryman Ramon Llull, who recounted that “having found a friend who was dying without love, when he asked him why he was dying without love, he replied that no one had made him know about love or had taught him to be a lover.”

Angelica, from the lands of Malaysia, scattered grains of rice and Himalayan salt as an offering during the inaugural ritual, during which we prepared to listen attentively to the otherness that welcomes us as Mother Earth and inhabits us as Divinity that animates us with its ineffable breath of life.

Five tables, each with representatives from six collectives, divided into Spanish and English language groups, were the place where we listened to each other each morning, exchanging experiences to awaken, heal, and embrace each other, drawing on the inner vulnerability of each person and collective. Each table had two listeners, who identified the similarities and differences between the experiences described, thus weaving together a mutual accompaniment of solidarity and hope to confront the local and global horror we were describing. Raúl, a young Mayan popular educator through hip hop in Chiapas, commented that "no one had ever sat at a table to listen to my knowledge." Nancy, a Latina feminist theologian from the United States, along with Bosque, a biologist and environmental-spiritual activist from Cuernavaca, were tasked, like other members of academia and organized civil society present at the meeting, with cultivating this attentive listening to weave a common narrative amidst the differences of each experience and context.

Thus, we respectfully explored the sacred ground of resistance and re-existence. First, by approaching the horror, which we named according to the stories each person told. Sofía, for example, shared her experience as a young Ecuadorian migrant lawyer in Barcelona, where for several years she has worked with undocumented domestic workers in a feminist "coalition" that led them to form a union to strengthen them in the fight for their rights as migrant women while allowing them to develop artisanal skills to support their cause. Sofía's reflection echoed that of Alex, a graphic designer and popular artist who accompanies the Ecclesial Base Communities of El Salvador in the face of President Bukele's state of emergency. Now in its fourth year under an authoritarian leader, this regime of exception produces a filthy life for poor youth in the Salvadoran peripheries accused of criminality to whitewash a regime that has been colluding with criminal mafias for years. The resistance of both groups, in Catalonia and El Salvador, exuded an "interiority" that inspires them in their daily struggles. Christian spirituality in the Salvadoran case and feminist sorority in the Catalan case.

But it wasn't just about sharing the spoken word; it was about exploring other languages through workshops on body language and sound expression, or through the Jauja dance in the Peruvian Andean highlands as a path of resistance for a people, thus discovering other modes of communication between the seeking mothers and the healing companions who came from South Dakota or Malaysia. These other languages allowed us to overcome language barriers and helped us create powerful nonverbal communication bonds.

And to tie knots in the fabric of the threads intertwined in each day, the performances, like the one prepared with much love and talent by a Portland collective to celebrate the water that makes us up, thus helping us feel that we are water. To the rhythm of hip hop and rap as an alternative urban art proposal, the Mayan collectives of Chiapas that educate children threatened by drug cartels in the outskirts of cities in the mountains of southeastern Mexico, turned out to be a balm to heal wounds still open from other violence. Like that narrated by Vero looking for her son Diego, missing for ten years, or the violence against girls in Pakistan that Sabine recounted in her Support work in working-class neighborhoods of Faisalabad, in the Punjab region of PakistanThanks to this rapper performance, we all joined in the dance, while drawing symbols on the mural painted by Yara as part of a performance also dedicated to the water being killed in the planet's rivers, lakes, and seas.

We concluded each day with a harvest moment, where the popular narrative of Blessed Mixture, formed by young people from the Ecclesial Base Communities of Our America, helped us celebrate what we heard and shared through symbols, songs, and rituals. The guiding figures were the bees, a symbol of Mother Earth's resilience, which we welcomed with a wax candle produced by them, burning their flame in the palm of our hand to feel the pain of endangered species. This gesture was accompanied by a drop of honey poured into the other hand to give us a taste of their sweetness as survivors.

Then came the little house of Acteal, which was placed in the center of the circle of participants to remind us of the martyrdom of some human bees. pacifist collective of Las Abejas linked to the Zapatista bases, opting for the path of active non-violence in their shared struggle with justice and dignity for the indigenous peoples, suffered the murder of 45 of its members, among them four pregnant women, who were massacred on December 22, 1997 in Chiapas in the community hermitage while they were praying for peace, a crime perpetrated by paramilitaries with the complicity of the federal army (Acteal Massacre, Chiapas. Serious human rights violations by the Mexican State in 1997). His memory continues to sting like a splinter that hurts the lives of the indigenous peoples who seek other possible worlds.

We closed those moments of harvest by making kites with messages of peace for women violated by patriarchy and for the Palestinian people resisting the ongoing genocide by the Israeli state. These artifacts helped us direct our hearts and gaze toward a future with dignity and hope for the people in resistance.

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The visit to the community of El Salto, in the suburbs of Guadalajara, led us to cross the abysmal line of the ongoing ecocide that the environmental collective that received us on the “Tour of Horror” (A Leap of Life) describes itself as “an industrial paradise with an environmental hell.” The Lerma-Santiago River basin, which runs 708 kilometers across western Mexico, is an open wound for Mexican territory and for the animal and plant species and people who inhabit it. Since the post-war industrial boom of the last century, polluting industry has spread across this vast region like a social and environmental virus. To date, more than 90 highly toxic pollutants have been identified, many of them carcinogenic, of which only a few, more visible, are treated with a couple of treatment plants. Sofía and Pedro, young environmentalists from the area, tell us that the transnational corporations established in this basin, such as Nestlé, Toyota, IBM, and many others, claim to be green companies today, when in reality, their local parts suppliers are the ones producing the most pollution because they do not comply with current national and international regulations.15 transnational corporations pollute the Santiago River, according to an international report.). ITESO is part of a network of universities in the region that study the water problem (Industry and nature in conflict: will there be a
future for water in Lerma-Chapala?) in constant collaboration with the collectives of residents and environmentalists who seek to save the watershed with its inhabitants of diverse species.

Among the members of the group welcoming us is Emmanuel, a little boy of barely ten years old. Wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, he leads his mother's hand as they show us the polluted wetlands, filled with the fetid odor of the city's sewage and the invasive species that inhabit them, such as tilapia, a contaminated fish sold in many markets across the country. The ecological present for this little boy from Guadalajara is catastrophic, but a possible future is beginning to emerge with community organizing.

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One of the morning rituals was presided over by Cecelia Firethunder, a Lakota grandmother who told us about her people's long journey of healing their wounds in resistance in the United States. Her experience as a child in a sunflower field that welcomed her in a dance of dignity and strength when she faced discrimination at school has continued to inspire her ever since, as she accompanies her people in awakening from centuries-old segregation, to heal their wounded memories by recovering their language, their knowledge, and their ancestral rituals. It is then possible to walk forward creating new ways of eating, like the initiative shared by her compatriot Nick Hernández to recover lands and methods of communal organization and indigenous Lakota agriculture (Makoce. Agricultural Development) in the heart of the Indian reservations, which have been territories controlled by the US government for two hundred and fifty years.

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From the compost that is rotten, the flower can emerge, as Lídia Pujol said.

But for that moment to arrive in our time of environmental collapse, it is necessary to first recycle the waste produced by extractive, racist, and patriarchal capitalism to recover the organic essence of the resistance of communities of survivors, including Mother Earth.

At the end of the meeting, we each returned to our places of origin and life choices, certain that as long as there is resistance, there will be hope, because there, in the midst of catastrophe, the lilies of re-existence sprout.

Guadalajara, September 28, 2025

October 10, 2025
Detail of a mural, Caracol de Oventic. Sosa, J., Rivero, E., and Wolkovicz, P. (2015)

Between water and land: from Soweto to Caracol Morelia

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

This weekend concludes in Chiapas the International meeting of resistance and rebellions "Some parts of the whole" Organized by the Zapatista bases of young EZLN militia members and their leadership, a new generation has expressed—through plays, concerts, workshops, and dance—the self-criticism of their decades-old movement to reaffirm their worldview and their struggle to build other possible worlds.

This new generation was born in autonomous territories, after the armed and media uprising of 1994, where their perspective on life and understanding of the world below has enabled them to develop a creative imagination about the human and the cosmic. As Raúl Zibechi astutely points out (Zapatista self-criticism), the meeting represents a valuable innovation in the Latin American left of the last half-century due to its capacity for self-criticism and its persistence over more than three decades in defending its territory, its ways of life, and learning a mode of governance where one “commands by obeying.”

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After my stay in South Africa this summer, I returned to Mexico with a clearer awareness of the connections that exist between the resistances of “those below,” from the refugees on the outskirts of Pretoria and the artists of “combative decolonality” in Soweto, to the Palestinian resistance of the Sumud in Gaza, the West Bank, and everywhere else the clamor to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people emerges from public squares and digital campaigns.

Driven by this awareness of the urgency of continuing to learn from these social movements and build bridges, I was preparing to participate in the meeting of resistance groups at the Caracol Morelia, when the chaos generated by the storm that hit Mexico City a week ago prevented me from doing so. A massive urban sludge—created by the amount of rain that fell with a force unseen in 73 years, exacerbated by the garbage accumulated in the streets by an indolent citizenry that clogged urban drainage systems, and worsened by the appalling water policy of governments in modern times of chaotic growth in ancient Tenochtitlan—paralyzed the lives of millions of people. I was stranded for hours at the airport, unable to reach southeastern Mexico due to the chaos that lasted into the following days.

So I had to settle for attending the event virtually, thanks to the online broadcasts made by the organizers (Live broadcast from the Meeting of Resistances and Rebellions "Some Parts of the Whole") and various civil society organizations were present at the Caracol Morelia, near Altamirano, for workshops, plays, and concerts. Among the presentations of resistance to the pyramid of privilege, it is worth highlighting the presence of women's collectives dismantling patriarchy, students creating alternative education networks, farmers resisting extractivism, and settlers confronting gentrification, among many other local, regional, and "intergalactic" initiatives resisting the capitalist and patriarchal hydra.

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However, in my opinion, it remains to be explored in these anti-systemic meetings spiritual resistances of these collectives and peoples. Because it's not enough to expose the strategies of resistance to the many-headed hydra. Nor is it enough to organize networks of solidarity and support between collectives and peoples to dismantle the pyramid of privileges. Rowing against the current often leads to desolation. That's why it's necessary to go to the source from which the fighting hope who does not cease his creative imagination in the midst of catastrophe.

What inner and collective strength enables surviving individuals and communities living amidst increasing systemic violence to resist? How do they experience an awakening from the destiny imposed by the hegemony that kept them subjugated and made them declare that the world had to change? What processes of personal and collective healing have they developed to strengthen their resistance? How do survivors support, accompany, and care for one another? Because we cannot forget that resistance is a way of life that also involves symbols, rituals, and celebrations, as profound expressions of collective memory that allow for a connection with ancestors, with Mother Earth, and with divinity celebrated in so many ways. This dimension has been cultivated for millennia by the religions and spiritualities of humanity, from shamanism in Mongolia to monotheistic religions and their diverse ways of nurturing peoples to live with dignity and hope.

As we mentioned a few weeks ago here, in order to explore this spiritual and political source of resistance, a meeting called “Re-exists: The Spirit connecting the peripheries”. A group of sixty people from social and religious movements in Asia, Africa, Europe and our America, together with university people and artists located in the interstices of hegemonic power, will meet to share these and other questions, analyzing the reality we face and nourishing ourselves with ethical-political ideals and ancestral knowledge. We will seek to listen to individuals and collectives of survivors, through words, rituals and workshops, to “heart” what we have learned, crowning each day with an urban performance that will tie up loose ends to recognize the Ruah divine that gives life to the people.

In every neighborhood and city, in every network of people and communities, the urgency to do something concrete to dismantle the systemic violence that plagues us has awakened. There we can open our imaginations, our hearts, and our intelligence to propose collaborative projects. Community gardens, soup kitchens, meditation groups, performances in public squares, interactive classrooms, research projects in a dialogue of knowledge, and so many other ways of weaving networks of shared care flourish today in the cracks in the walls of the world-system of privilege and greed.

The storms that create floods and ecological chaos in the city represent a world crumbling. The water that flows down from the mountains to irrigate the land, on the other hand, is like the web of care woven by the survivors of yesterday and today. Let us listen to those who say, "We are the earth growing autonomy," as the Caracol de Oventic mural that accompanies these lines tells us.

Let us trust in our imaginative capacity to navigate the living waters with their underground rivers that connect Soweto with Gaza, with the Caracol Morelia, and with so many other places of survival, resistance, and re-existence.

Mexico City, August 16, 2025

August 16, 2025

English