While much attention has been paid to the vast criminal organizations based in Mexico that manufacture illegal drugs for export – corrupting and destabilizing governments in the process – less well documented is the toll their presence takes on those living in their shadows. In northern Mexico, for instance, cartels routinely kidnap and ransom vulnerable migrants from elsewhere in Central America; further south, in the state of Michoácan, criminal organizations have insinuated themselves into avocado farming through extortion and violence. With avocado plantations requiring clear-cut land and abundant water, clandestine groups illegally began to log the high-altitude pine forests that anchor the hillsides. Such expropriative tactics plainly redound to some at the expense of others and threaten to decimate the country’s interdependent ecosystems.

By 2011, the situation in Michoácan had become untenable for the Purépecha community of Chéran. The Indigenous pueblo of some 20,000 people has long relied on the forest to sustain them. That year, the Chérani re-asserted control of their town and surrounding territory – beating back loggers, planters and the Mexican government – establishing collective governance, led by neighbourhood groups and a high council. They also founded an eponymous cultural centre, the home base of an intergenerational group of artists known as Colectivo Cherani, who work in a range of media with an agitprop flair.

Five members of the Colectivo – Betel Cucué, Giovanni Fabián, Huaroco Rosas, Ariel Pañeda and Alain Silva – were invited by the University Museum of Contemporary Art to create an in-situ work in the airy atrium…