Chiapas is a focal point of Indigenous religious organizing and political dissent. As Father Juan Parada spends increasing time there, his church becomes a center for an Indigenous movement whose spiritual renewal is tied to local customs, stewardship of the earth, and resistance to the loss of land. The work draws support across villages but also intensifies conflict with landowners, Church authorities, and political opponents.

Setting and Organizing

Over a period of years, Father Juan Parada devotes more and more time to Chiapas. His church there becomes a base for an Indigenous movement, bringing religious work into direct contact with disputes over land and power. Local landowners are angered by the movement, while Parada’s increasingly public positions place him at odds with the Mexican right and with senior figures in the Church.

The organization has a substantial village-level presence. Parada describes six thousand Indigenous catechists spread throughout the villages, teaching the Gospel. That network makes the church’s role more than a matter of individual pastoral care: it carries religious teaching into communities across the state and gives the movement a durable local reach. At the same time, its scale becomes part of the controversy. Girolamo Antonucci measures the work by the Church’s declining share of believers, saying that Chiapas has Mexico’s highest proportion of converts to Protestantism and that only a little more than half of Parada’s people remain Catholic.

A Spiritual Renewal Rooted in Local Culture

The religious change in Chiapas begins with a challenge to the idea that Christianity arrived in the Americas only with Columbus. Parada’s assertion that Columbus did not bring God helps launch a spiritual revival: Indigenous people search their own culture for signs of the revealed God and find them in their customs, their care for the earth, and their ancient laws for treating one another. The narrative presents this discovery not as a rejection of Christianity, but as the condition that allows the communities to receive the message of Jesus Christ on their own terms.

The change also reverses Parada’s original purpose. He had gone to the countryside intending to convert Indigenous people; instead, their culture and religious understanding transform him. His evolving outlook helps explain why his ministry cannot be separated from the people’s lived circumstances. The hope of redemption is connected to centuries of slavery, oppression, humiliation, and poverty, rather than confined to an abstract promise of salvation.

Land, NAFTA, and Political Opposition

Parada’s opposition to NAFTA follows from his concern that the treaty will further dispossess poor and landless people. He argues against it from the pulpit, provoking Church superiors as well as political opponents. The prospect of Indigenous communities losing what little land they retain gives the economic dispute a concrete local stake: larger ranches could take the place of smaller holdings, while expanded coffee plantations, mining, lumber operations, and oil drilling would open additional land to commercial use.

The conflict therefore joins religious organizing to questions of economic power. The catechists teach throughout the villages; Parada speaks publicly against a treaty he believes will worsen dispossession; and landowners resent the movement centered in his church. Chiapas is not merely the setting for a theological disagreement. It is where Parada’s pastoral commitments meet the material pressures facing the communities he serves.

Institutional Conflict and Narrative Significance

The Church’s dispute with Parada is expressed both as a contest over doctrine and as a concern about institutional membership. Antonucci challenges the results of Parada’s work by pointing to the number of people leaving Catholicism. Parada, in turn, understands this criticism as a concern about losing religious adherents, while his own defense rests on the catechists’ reach and the communities’ developing faith. Their disagreement reveals how the same activity can be judged as spiritual renewal by one side and institutional loss by another.

Chiapas also exposes the political consequences of that religious work. Parada’s positions on land, poverty, and NAFTA make his ministry dangerous to powerful interests, and those around him fear that he may be killed. The state thus gathers the book’s religious and material conflicts into one place: Indigenous communities seek meaning in their culture and defend their place in the world, while church and political authorities dispute the consequences of their growing organization.