Houstonia’s The Must List tells you about something going on in Houston that you absolutely cannot miss.

Houston’s status as a car city isn’t exaggerated—inadequate public transportation options have given rise to a subculture of gearheads and creatives who use vehicles as an extension of their own unique personal visions. Slab cars, art cars, and itasha all routinely show up in parking garages and lots throughout the city. The annual Art Car Parade and monthly meetups like Coffee & Cars draw generous crowds to admire all the handiwork that goes into lovingly decorating or restoring a vehicle.

Cars are culture. Cars are also devastating to our local air quality. And it’s this uncomfortable, yet necessary reality that Miami- and Mexico City–based multimedia artist Sue Montoya confronts at her Box13 ArtSpace exhibition Rastros, on view now until November 23.

“I have climate anxiety… [the show] is kind of like somatic therapy, in a sense, because I get to release all of that anxiety that I may have due to whatever thing may be happening,” Montoya says. “I’m from Florida, so hurricanes are a huge thing. It was kind of hard to start with this, because I was so consumed with trying to figure out what was going to happen with the last two hurricanes: If my family was going to be in the path, or the anxiety of what will happen to the people who live in those areas. I think the way that you see it visually represented is through collage.”

Rastros involves a series of five piñatas constructed out of both typical colorful paper as well as free auto advertisements and magazines, newspaper clippings, and other disposables that have become easily dismissed visual noise to urban life. The piñatas were all created on-site at Box13 ArtSpace, and depict the cars and trucks Montoya observed passing the gallery’s window facing Harrison Street.

She never visited Houston before her exhibition, though grad school colleagues brought her here for the show. As a fellow Gulf Coast resident, however, Montoya empathizes with the persistent fear of extreme weather, worsened by climate change. Crafting the piñatas while absorbing the city’s own unique timbres and tones grounded the results with a more realized sense of place. It allowed her to connect with Houston via its fundamental, cultural DNA, rather than working off preconceived assumptions about it.

Montoya also envisioned Rastros as an homage to her parents. As a child growing up in both Miami and Tegucigalpa, Honduras, her late mother made piñatas and other crafts on the side before moving on to full-time maid and senior caretaker work. She learned to construct her own piñatas through observation and eventual participation, nurturing a lifelong love of learning without written instructions.

Her father worked in construction and auto repair, and Montoya often begged to accompany him on his frequent junkyard trips—in Miami, “rastro” refers to a self-service junkyard—though he never acquiesced out of concern for her safety. In fact, she never had a chance to actually visit a junkyard until last year while in residency at Artpace San Antonio’s Home+Away program.

“I was fascinated by the structure of the things that are left behind…particularly because of my family’s precarity in the past. In some cases to this day, there’s a lot of hoarding tendencies…I have to keep an eye on it, because if not, I will try to keep everything. And I think that translates into the stuff that I make,” Montoya says. “I want to try to make everything from scrap, from things that I find: the free newspapers that they have in Mexico City…and then the free magazines that they have throughout Texas.”

In this, the artist connects all of Rastros’ core themes together. She refers to the piñatas her mother created as “pristine and beautiful,” then shaped her own to depict the vehicles favored by her father. However, these symbols of purity are instead adorned with the disposable, the dismissible…which also happens to decay into the detritus that contributes to ecological collapse. Five piñatas tell a bittersweet story of both family love and connection as well as the expansive environmental rot persisting around us, threatening to tear these essential human bonds apart.

Montoya says, “You get to see the news, and then you also get to see what is going on in Mexico and internationally, but then also in the collection of these things that people deem trash.”