A Nursery Beside the Foaming River

The Santiago river runs past El Salto and Juanacatlán in Jalisco through one of Mexico's densest industrial corridors, and it receives what those factories discharge. A toxicological study of 178 inhabitants found heavy metals — lead, aluminium, nickel — in 100% of those tested, and residents describe a pattern of cancers, kidney failure and neurological illness that the state has been slow to accept as connected. Un Salto de Vida, a collective of residents formed in 2005, has spent twenty years documenting that link and refusing to let it be treated as coincidence, including running a deliberately provocative 'horror tour' of the corridor for officials and journalists. In February 2020 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures to people living along the river. Alongside the confrontation they run a community nursery, propagating native species and planting thousands of trees — as they put it, building the world they want at the same time as fighting the one they have.