Tag: Xun Betan

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
Freepik | Digital art, AI-generated resource | 2026

AI: threat or partner? On the challenges of the digital world and the 500th anniversary of the Chiapas Open Air Movement

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

In recent days, the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) has gone viral on social media due to Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical letter. Ironically, in this age of systems—as Ivan Illich termed this new social paradigm that should be considered when analyzing the digital world—the pontiff's warnings have already been devoured by algorithms and accounts on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook (for the older generation of the digital world). Memes of Pope Leo battling AI have flooded social media, such as the one of the pontiff with his staff firmly warning Palantir: "You shall not pass." And to top it all off, thousands, perhaps millions of people have used AI to create a summary of the encyclical, mostly out of curiosity, sometimes with the aim of criticizing the Pope or the power of the companies that produce and control it. A slow, personal reading of the encyclical letter would be worthwhile to analyze its content.

Without losing sight of the ethical critique and the international legal regulation that must be promoted for the production and use of AI, it seems to me that it is important to first realize that we are already immersed in that tangle of data driven by individual, corporate and governmental wills, with an ever-increasing “autonomy” of what was called years ago “the internet of things” (IoT)., Internet of ThingsThis network of digital data flow systems is here to stay, monitoring information circulating in the digital environment in an automated way within systems created by humans, but operating with increasing “autonomy” to generate new data and produce unprecedented social, commercial, scientific and cultural effects.

The dystopian science fiction series Black Mirror, Created in Great Britain in 2011, the series depicted fascinating and chilling episodes of a society controlled by technology, where the boundaries between human reality and the virtual world were so porous that they created apocalyptic scenarios. Fifteen years ago, this reality of the algorithm's power seemed like a figment of the imagination. Today, it's already part of our daily lives.

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I am currently preparing a couple of talks on AI. I will be giving the first one this week at the Diocesan House in San Cristóbal de Las Casas to a group of priests from Generations X and Y—both born after 1965, following the generation of the Baby boomers- until 1982 when the Millennials. Of course, this classification, proposed by British and Canadian colonial sociology to designate first a generation without a defined desire, and then the first generation of digital natives, is relevant for describing certain social strata in each country. But it also designates the other side of the coin of globalization, due to the technological impact that television and computers have had on the lives of all people.

Later, with the team of JobeLab We will hold a discussion on AI at the end of June in the Temple of Charity to reflect on the recent Encyclical Letter Magnificent Humanity by Pope Leo XIV, published last Monday, May 24th. We will approach this from an interdisciplinary perspective, first giving voice to colleagues in computer science, education, and philosophy. There, I will offer some reflections on the meaning theological of the problem in question, from a phenomenological and decolonial perspective, deepening an intuition present in the Encyclical Letter, human vulnerability, but unfortunately not developed sufficiently by Pope Leo.

There are many ecclesial, university, and social forums where we must open intelligent conversations, with creative imagination, to think together about the digital reality that has already reached us, with its enormous possibilities for the flow of information and its challenging scenarios of post-human control of production and knowledge processes that we have never imagined.

AI is perceived today as a threat, even though it's already part of our digital-age "customs and practices." Perhaps we should learn to coexist with it as a "creature," that is, as a reality marked by the finiteness of all creation and, therefore, incapable of supplanting our imagination and creativity—much less divine glory—though we must remain vigilant against the danger of its control over our lives and destinies. Today more than ever, the bastion mystical The human condition is presented more clearly as a source of freedom in times of AI.

500 OP Chiapas

This Thursday, June 4th, we begin the commemorative events for the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Dominican friars to Tierra Firme of the American continent, on June 23, 1526 in Villa Rica de la Veracruz, as the first anchor of European colonization and the arrival of the Gospel with its model of Western Christianity.

In Chiapas, the small community of Dominican friars in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, along with friends and colleagues, has prepared cultural and liturgical events to commemorate this historic event. We will begin on Thursday, June 4th, with a concert by the San Cristóbal de Las Casas Symphony Orchestra and Choir at the Santo Domingo Church, where this youth ensemble will perform works of Baroque and modern classical music, with interludes that will briefly recall the friars' arrival in these lands, their evangelizing mission, their heyday during the colonial period, and their subsequent decline in the 19th century, leading up to their gradual resurgence in the 20th century.

On Friday, June 5, an academic colloquium on the Dominicans' contribution to Chiapas culture will take place at the friars' former convent in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, now the Museum of the Highlands of Chiapas. Two historians specializing in Dominican architecture in Chiapas during the colonial period will participate. The event will also feature the presentation of Friar Pablo Iribarren's latest book on the Dominicans in the 20th century, focusing on their evangelization efforts in dialogue with the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. Marimba music by the Díaz Sisters will provide a festive atmosphere.

On Saturday, June 6th, the celebration will take place in Zinacantán, thanks to the generous collaboration of the faithful communities of the Parish of Saint Lawrence the Martyr. A solemn Mass of Thanksgiving at the Church of Saint Lawrence the Martyr, the parish seat, will be followed by the cultural event “Transfigurations: Mayan Spiritualities Today,” which I have had the honor of organizing along with two masters of contemporary Mayan art. We will begin with the unveiling of the mural 500 OP Chiapas, a masterful work by Antún Kojtom, a Tseltal artist from Tenejapa, depicting the encounter between the spiritual traditions of the Tsotsil people and other Mayan communities of the Highlands and Rainforest of Chiapas with the Dominican friars throughout history. Tsotsil poetry by Xun Betán and some of his students from the creative writing workshop, held this month in preparation for this event, will be accompanied by traditional Tsotsil music performed by musicians from the parish church. And in the afternoon, a talk about the Dominicans in Zinacantán will be given by Friar Pablo Iribarren, as a framework for a closing liturgical act in which young people from Zinacantán will make their initial promises as members of the Dominican Youth Movement.

And to conclude the commemorative events, on Sunday, June 7, with a Eucharist presided over by Don Rodrigo Aguilar, current bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, the Dominican family and the faithful of the city will give thanks to the God of Life for this half-millennium of preaching, with its lights and shadows, invoking divine mercy to walk with hope as the people of God in the arduous times we are living through, to bear witness to the Gospel of liberation with justice and peace for all creatures of the cosmos.

We look forward to seeing you soon in Chiapas.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, May 31, 2026

May 31, 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.

∂

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