Through an analysis of a land‐dispute case involving indigenous Ch´ol community members in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, this article critically examines the role of anthropological knowledge in the production of the judicial arena as a terrain through which are disputed not only collective rights claims but also a sense of justice. The case of the Ch´ol ejido, or communal land holding, of Tila reached Mexico's Supreme Court in 2010. Yet five years later, tired of the excruciatingly slow pace of the judicial apparatus, Ch´ol ejido authorities rendered their own verdict by way of an assembly decision that reclaimed the 130 hectares under dispute as their own. This para‐state legal verdict unsettled the pre‐ascribed role of different political actors—the state judicial apparatus, human rights organizations, and anthropologists—whose interplay grants certain cohesion and sediment to the current judicial arena in the country when indigenous communities are implicated. The assembly decision and subsequent actions in the ejido Tila displaced these actors, including the Supreme Court judges, and in doing so rendered visible the racialized hierarchies that neither human rights organizations nor anthropologists were effectively able to subvert. [legal activism, cultural expert witness reports, Indigenous territorial claims, racial justice, Latin America]

This article situates the dramatic case of the forced disappearance of forty‐three peasant and indigenous students from the teachers college, Ayotzinapa, in the city of Iguala, in Guerrero, on September 26, 2014, in a broader context of state violence in Mexico. What are the forces that operate to classify indigenous and peasant lives as waste, hence rendering permissible such atrocities? The article draws on ethnographic evidence collected over six years in La Montaña, Guerrero, Mexico. It points to the racialized spatial forms of governance that articulate state security punitive measures, to neoliberal antipoverty programs, and to the social imaginaries that represent indigenous regions as inherently backward, violent, and ingrained with cultural deficiencies. Drawing from Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism, this article argues that the effects of these racialized geographies engender the conditions for the permissibility of state‐sanctioned death.

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The labor of witnessing, however, is heavy with contradictions that in some contexts may deepen, rather than ameliorate, the racial, gendered, and social wrongs we seek to redress. This is the central dilemma undergirding the three articles in this collection, which critically interrogate the involvement of anthropologists as expert witnesses in four legal proceedings involving Indigenous and Afro-descendant land claims in Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Chile. While the cases direct our attention to collective claims to autonomy and self-determination in Latin America, they also shed light on broader disciplinary debates concerning the role of anthropologists within the legal realm as well as how ethnographic knowledge intervenes in the production of social facts within post-truth regimes (Ho and Cavanaugh 2019).The global trend toward extreme right-wing politics, alongside the expansion of extractivist economies and unprecedented levels of environmental destruction, has forced anthropologists to rehearse, yet again, how to bring our expertise to bear on issues of urgent public concern. 1 In her 2014 annual review essay, Courtney Morris framed the debate surrounding the practice of engaged anthropology as a matter of life and death: "What would happen if we imagined our work as a practice of freedom, an act of imagination, a tool for transforming an unequal world? What if we did the work of anthropology as though our lives and the lives of others depended on it?" (Morris 2015). What Morris suggests is the necessity to question, critique, and strengthen the role of anthropology in the promotion of social change, at best, or at least to hold at bay further death and destruction, as what progressively seems to be the calling of our times. Firmly anchored in an anthropology for liberation long promoted by Black, Latinx, and Native scholars (Allen and Jobson 2016;Ranco 2006), public anthropology in the