The global surge in demand for avocados drew drug cartels deep into Mexico’s agricultural economy. In Cherán, a Purépecha community in Michoacán, this intrusion sparked a historic uprising. In 2011, a group of local women confronted cartels that had been seizing land and ravaging forests to plant avocado trees. Their resistance grew into a full revolution that expelled traffickers, political parties and corrupt authorities, allowing the community to establish an autonomous government grounded in long-standing Purépecha principles.
For five years, the collective Ritual Inhabitual documented Cherán’s struggle through Oro Verde, a project that mixed documentary and fiction to form a “mytho-documentary” of the revolution. Working with local artists and local archives, they retraced key events through ritual, photography and symbolic objects, creating a narrative that spoke of communal memory in many voices.
Since reclaiming control of the land, the community has produced nearly one million tree shoots annually, developing rainwater-harvesting technologies to support large-scale reforestation. The uprising was shaped in part by an ancient bond with the wild bees of these forests.
Oro Verde seeks to restore a sense of imagination to the revolution’s history, as it tells the story of a community that defended its forest and forged a political model rooted in biodiversity, sustainability and collective care.
Tito Gonzalez Garcia and Florencia Grisanti are both Paris-based and co-founded the collective Ritual Inhabitual in 2013. The collective is composed of artists, curators, and publishers working together to develop long-term projects that explore the role of myth within contemporary political struggle, particularly in relation to land, ecology, and indigenous rights across Latin America.
They were finalists for the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award in 2021 for Forêts Géométriques, luttes en territoire Mapuche (Actes Sud), and won the Musée du Quai Branly documentary photography prize in 2022 for Oro Verde, to be published by Actes Sud in 2024. Their work is held in collections including the Contemporary Art Fund of Seine-Saint-Denis, Rothschild Foundation Switzerland, and Musée du Quai Branly.
