Cuernavaca Center

THE CUERNAVACA Center for Intercultural Dialogue on Development (CCIDD) is a school for training people to be change agents in the Liberation Theology perspective. CCIDD is at a retreat center located near Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, which is about 40 miles south of Mexico City. The city of Cuernavaca lies at an elevation of about 5,000 feet where it enjoys a springlike climate year-round. In pre-Columbian times it was the resort used by the Aztec rulers. During colonial times the explorer Hernando Cortés and many other elites went to Cuernavaca to enjoy the especially restful climate.

CCIDD is an ecumenical Christian center and bases its operations on theology that is inclusive and liberational. Its mission is to give churches, groups, and individuals from Canada and the United States opportunities to encounter the presence of God in the struggle for justice in the Americas so that they will be equipped and empowered for the work of social transformation. It also has a program that is secular and appropriate for colleges and graduate programs. The CCIDD experience usually lasts from 10 to 15 days. It is presented as either a faith-based experience or a secular experience.

Either program seeks to aid the specific interests and needs of those who attend. CCIDD seeks to give to its faith-based visitors an encounter with the spirit of God as a part of the struggle for social justice in Latin America. The encounter takes place by meeting the spirit of God in direct encounters with the people of Mexico, who have experienced social, political, economic, religious, and cultural realities that deny them their divinely ordained full dignity as human beings. The Liberation Theology that CCIDD uses as part of its curriculum stresses that God has a “preferential option for the poor” and that their voices enable others to encounter prophetic dimensions of diversity in local communities of faith and hope.

CCIDD's training enables participants to be able to name and challenge practices that may be cultural, political, spiritual, or economic that support structures of inequality. The structures or systems of inequality support discrimination against people because of their gender, race, class, sexuality, or economic status, or even against the environment and the ecology of earth. Another part of CCIDD's curriculum analyzes the relationships between the northern and southern hemispheres whereby wealth abounds in the north and poverty in the south.

This disparity in wealth and the negative impact of American and Canadian foreign policies and business activities are examined as the sources of injustice between the regions. To eliminate these injustices the curriculum seeks to move beyond individualism and to promote the values of community. Those who study at CCIDD should leave empowered to work for social transformation at both the individual and collective level.