Tag: collective healing

Antún Kojtom | Guardian of Mirrors | Tenejapa, Chiapas | 2021

Rejoice, desolate humanity

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

In the era of the Monroe Doctrine 2.0, launched last week for the “Western Hemisphere” by the global despot as National Security Strategy From the United States, it seems foolish to talk about joy.

Some analysts, such as Michel Ignatieff, predict the end of the West along with the the civilizational erasure of Europe. Today, something is at stake. global geopolitical strategy With areas of power divided among the three dominant military and economic powers—the United States, China, and Russia—each brazenly administering a region of the planet for its own benefit, the military intelligence apparatuses of the United States and the other powers are already in operation to control entire populations and their territories through a vast military-digital system, subjugating individuals and nations that choose to oppose the might of the Maga empire and its counterparts.

The creation of Western Hemisphere Command The deployment of the U.S. military, announced by the Trump administration this week, is part of a geopolitical strategy that has already declared war on mass immigration within its borders. It is also worth highlighting the war already underway against drug cartels, which are portrayed as terrorist groups threatening U.S. security, regardless of the civilian "collateral damage" that this new colonialism will cause, as the Israeli state has already demonstrated in Palestine before the astonished eyes of the world. The strategy of constantly threatening new tariffs that Trump has used in his first year in office has been another attempt to promote a new mode of deglobalization which seeks to subordinate the economies of its "backyard" now called the "western hemisphere" to the interests of the transnational corporations that sustain its wealth.

The nations that for centuries were swallowed up in the Western Hemisphere during early modernity will now be trapped in the web of the voracious monster's hegemonic power. But that giant has feet of clay and one day it will fall. Until then, the destruction it leaves in its wake will be a cause of desolation on a planetary scale. Such a scenario is what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls the Great Catastrophe —a concept I develop in a collective book on political philosophy and theology that I am currently preparing for an American publisher— seems unrelated to a reflection on the joy What could humanity expect in this hour of global misfortune? But it is precisely the only place where it is possible to speak of a meaning that transcends the apparent immeasurability of the evil that stalks us.

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Tomorrow, Christian communities will celebrate the third Sunday of Advent, known as Gaudete. The name comes from a poem by an anonymous disciple of the prophet Isaiah in Babylon, announcing to Jerusalem, the desolate city, that the time of its liberation after the exile had arrived: Gaudete Ierusalem,Rejoice, Jerusalem! (Isaiah 66:10). Like echoes of that ancient voice of resistance, the same song could also resonate in today's exiles, with new melodies according to the genius of each era and culture, as in the case of the Palestinian people, whom we will evoke at the end of these lines.

Christianity discovered centuries later the radical motive and scope of the joy of the messianic proclamation, extending God's closeness not only to the desolate Hebrew city, but to all. messianic communities scattered throughout the Roman diaspora of that time, who have now entered the new era thanks to faith in the redeeming God, according to the words of the apostle Paul (Philippians 4:4-7):

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!

Let your kindness be evident to all.

The Lord is near.

Don't worry about anything […].

And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,

He will guard their hearts and their thoughts in the Messiah Jesus.

It is about God's consolation for the little ones of the Kingdom of Heaven. They live in the interrupted time Precisely at the heart of the catastrophe. A way of existing that the dispossessed of the earth experience in their lives in a way messianic, That is, as a power to untie the knots of hatred and resentment in their bodies and territories. It is possible to perceive that murmur of a peaceful present amidst desolation in the Gregorian chant antiphon for this third Sunday of Advent, which is known precisely as Rejoice in the Lord.

But let's turn to our own time. Who can proclaim such hope today amidst global desolation? Paradoxically, it is the victims themselves who possess that hope. power. Something that executioners will never have because their hearts have been paralyzed and are incapable of opening to joy until they reach the depths of their own desolation and annihilation. This is how Daniela Rea and Pablo Ferri describe it in the book The Troop: Why Does a Soldier Kill? by interviewing hitmen in Mexico who have come to terms with their crimes. In a collective way, the Houses of Memory which promoted in recent years in Colombia the Truth Commission They bear witness to that complex process of moving from violence to peace, based on the strength of the victims summoning the perpetrators, in order to open paths to transitional justice in a country that suffered more than thirty years of war, with four hundred and fifty thousand dead and almost eight hundred thousand internally displaced persons.

In such experiences of transforming systemic violence from the margins of society, thanks to the persistence of individuals and communities of survivors, it is possible to receive the good news of Sunday. Gaudete from Christian liturgy as a call to learn to live an ethic of care and a summons to cultivate a spirituality of mutual accompaniment among survivors, both processes enriching each other to pave the way for fighting hope.

Therefore, there is a change in tone in the hopelessness. From the purple of Advent, which symbolizes desolation, we move today to pink, the luminosity of consolation that emerges from the shadows like a small but real spark, illuminating everyone, like the painting by the Mayan artist Antún Kojtom that accompanies this post. other tonality, typical of messianic times, arises thanks to the victims who establish the sorry, That is, the overabundance of the gift. A realistic hope that does not mean blindness to evil and its perpetrators, nor a renunciation of accountability and justice, but rather a reinvention of violent history based on the overabundance of love that recreates the world.

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A new way of existing which is no longer just desolation. Nor mere resistance. But the creation of something new, Amid the ruins, from the scars left by violence, but which are transfigured as a glimmer of hope and joy: “After two hundred and fifty years of the occupation of the white settlers we are still here and that is why there is hope,” said smiling Cecelia Firethunder, shaman and historian of the Lakota people, at the past Re-existe 2025 meeting in Guadalajara.

It is a joy that also arises as rebellious imagination from the rubble turned into a home by the Sumud or the creative resistance experienced by the Palestinian people who never tire of waiting, as the Tunisian artist sings. Emel Mathlouthi walking through the streets of an occupied Palestine:

Broken hope

deep

furious

friendly

deceptive

that penetrates arduous times

eternal

happy

unwavering

new

A hope that fills my life and renews it.

Thanks to the acts of resistance of the victims to the violence of today's global power, we can say with profound joy, without triumphalism, and with great courage: Rejoice, Gaza! Rejoice, desolate humanity! For the day of our liberation is near.

Zinacantán, December 13, 2025

Note: I look forward to reading your comments about possible hope today in the section below this post.

December 13, 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
Jane Tully Heath, Still Life. National Gallery of South Africa, 1998

Voices from the southern tip of Africa

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

Nora is a migrant woman from eSwatini, the former kingdom of Swaziland, which was a British protectorate until 1968 for the "legalized" exploitation of minerals, and later became a post-colonial kingdom. She had to flee her homeland after leaving her husband, who humiliated her. Due to the tradition of the Swazi people, once she separated, her family abandoned her to her fate, and she would be unable to remarry if she ever wanted to return to her homeland. Her only option would be to return to her husband and ask for his forgiveness. Nora represents hundreds of thousands of refugees in South Africa fleeing a variety of forms of violence; in her case, it wasn't war or famine, but what they call "domestic violence" here. In our brief but intense conversation, I told her something I learned from the African-American poet and musician Mykki Blanco (Queer black french dance empowerment feat. poetry by Mykki Blanco) about how queer communities live vulnerability with dignity and hope, beginning each day singing: “I am strong because I have no choice, but I am fragile.” Nora cries inconsolably because, in addition to the pain of having lost her baby a few months ago, her sorrow is even deeper because she hasn't been able to bury her in her homeland, as is the custom of the Suasi people. In the middle of our conversation, I share some bread with her, and she sobs in thanks. I tell her to take it on behalf of the people of Mexico, who also know about this and other forms of violence. And I say goodbye with a hug, telling her that something good will come from that open wound in her heart, especially if it opens to the wounds of other women, who for thousands of years have woven networks of mutual care.

A different story in today's world, coming from refugees who, in the shadows of the shadows of the shadows, reinvent their lives.

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During that same visit to the Suasi kingdom, ruled by a king with many wives and numerous children, a custom persisted that left me speechless. Women must serve food by kneeling before their husbands while serving at the table. A middle-aged woman I met during a meal, a spiritual leader in the community that hosted us, told us that sometimes she herself has to play this role when visiting her husband's family, because if she betrayed this custom, it would be perceived as contempt and would exclude her from the family. During our conversation, I noticed that another younger woman remained silent, smiling skeptically, but without saying a word. And then another diner commented that there is a social movement in the Suasi nation seeking to transition to a republic, to overcome these and other customs that denigrate people, but it has suffered repression. At that same table, I perceived three different perspectives on domestic traditions. Perspectives that are also political and spiritual. Everyone survives as best they can, and there are some forms of resistance that persist without changing the age-old patriarchy, while others resist by overcoming fear and dreaming of other "possible worlds." I then think of our America and its resistances of yesterday and today.

The next day, when I presented my talk on collective healing and possible hope in times of catastrophe to a large and diverse audience, I carried the stories I had heard the day before in my mind and heart. But, in order to avoid passing judgment on a reality I don't understand and only grasped in glimpses, I mentioned the importance of listening to those who live in the shadows today to discover their power, moving from being victims to survivors, as a key criterion for collective healing.

The silence I perceived in the audience regarding the public naming of these acts of violence revealed to me a degree of fear, perhaps prudence and ancient wisdom to resist, but creating paths to freedom in secret. The public comments were general. Then, in private, some attendees pointed out to me that the Suasi people know what they face and what they want for their nation. Others came forward at the end to share personal stories of grievance due to sexual discrimination, like micro-stories of vulnerability and resistance.

Some seeds of hope planted in a small kingdom in the far south of Africa.

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After a month-long stay in South Africa and Swaziland, visiting six cities in both countries, I gradually discovered another face of Mother Africa. Many years earlier, I had visited countries in the north of the continent, with a different demographic profile and social challenges more closely linked to religious violence than interethnic violence. A couple of years ago in Kenya, I met for the first time Black Africans with a living memory of the burden of modern slavery created by European colonial metropolises that built wealthy and powerful empires through genocide and cultural plunder, such as that carried out by the Belgian empire in the Congo.

But these subjugated peoples fought to free themselves in the 20th century until they achieved political independence, but not autonomy from the coloniality of power-knowledge-being that the great Peruvian Aníbal Quijano analyzed (Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America). Unfortunately, many post-colonial states remain subject, as is the case with the rest of the countries in the Global South, to the economic colonialism of the powers in power in their extractive capitalist form.

Thus, in the far south of the African continent, listening to and conversing with heterogeneous groups of people of various ages, made up of Black, white, and "people of color"—as they call what we in Mexico call mestizos, who are a minority in these lands—I have many stories to continue telling in my travel notes. These are communities that still suffer the scourge of segregation, even after their independence. In South Africa, for example, the communities I visited are aware of the challenge of moving from the process that overthrew apartheid to one day achieving nations of coexistence with an independent and pluralistic state.

Internal migration within the subcontinent today is massive, driven by wars, famine, and social, ideological, and religious repression, not to mention gender-based violence against queer people, whose lives remain criminalized. As Achille Mbembe recalled a few years ago in Cologne (Bodies and Borders) when talking about deglobalizationThe challenge of the Africanization of the world lies, among other factors, in helping the planet's youngest population transition to democratic, just, and egalitarian societies.

In my opinion, one of the long-range challenges that Mother Africa gives us today lies in exploring new ways to unite the spiritual tradition of the ancestors and the wisdom of Ubuntu as proposed by Professor Jacob Mokhutso (Ubuntu is under siege: a reflection on the challenges of South Africa then and now) with the predominant Western world. It is about creating other modernities that make room for a ecology of knowledge, according to Boaventura de Sousa Santos's classic decolonial expression. In the midst of these resistances, new forms of Christianity and Islam, Judaism and Hinduism, ancestral religions and queer spiritualities will emerge, beyond their current ideological avatars that produce the annihilation of the different other, such as the Zionism we discussed earlier.

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Following a similar route, next August the Zapatista communities (Call for the meeting of resistances and rebellions "Some parts of the whole") from Chiapas, in southeastern Mexico, call us together to tell each other stories of rebellion against the crumbling hegemonic world system. But above all, to think together about how to build the pyramid of resistance that has homeland, heart, dignified rage, and the imagination of new katuns or cosmic temporality of the Mayan world.

There I will undoubtedly find a challenging moment to continue “weaving voices for the common home”, as we dreamed of with Pablo Reyna, inspired by the vibrant thought of Gustavo Esteva (Weaving voices). Since then, we began to explore the process of decolonizing the university, thanks to the action promoted in those years by David Fernández at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

And next September, I'll tell you other stories from an intercultural and interreligious meeting to be held in Guadalajara. This time, it was organized by a group of colleagues from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas who are working with collectives in resistance and hope amidst contexts of systemic violence against women, people in forced migration, families of missing persons, and indigenous peoples in defense of Mother Earth. The name of the event, “Re-exists: The Spirit connecting peripheries”, summarizes our way of contributing to sowing seeds and reaping fruits of resistance that have been nourished by a powerful spiritual and political background as spiritualities of the peoples.

As I conclude this series on the South African journey, I once again thank you, Mother Africa, for continuing to give birth to new worlds.

Mexico City, July 19, 2025

July 19, 2025

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