Home sweet dump
Tijuana landfills are home ot hundreds of people who depend on garbage for their livelihood
Dump Mountain looms in the background Click here for the "Dump Mountain" slideshow.
When it rains, the hillsides of Fausto Gonzales bleed trash. Jagged bed springs pop out of the soft mud like broken bones from flesh. Plastic bags, rotted wood, pieces of Barbie dolls, bottle caps, cigarette butts and other debris join a muddy waterfall that spills into the canyon below. The smell is putrid.
The houses down in the canyon are the most rudimentary, constructed from broken bits of plywood and plastic salvaged from Tijuana's dump and pieced together to make a shelter big enough to sleep one person. The houses get better farther up the hill. Constructed from old garage doors, most have sealed glass windows, running water and electricity, albeit shoddy. Even farther up, on top of the hill that's closest to the covered-over mountain of trash that once was Tijuana's most active municipal dump, some of the houses could even be called "nice." Constructed of concrete and plaster, a few even have two stories.
Fausto Gonzales, a neighborhood 10 minutes from downtown Tijuana, was born out of the city dump. Dump dwellers, trash pickers, scavengers, pepenadores-plenty of names are used to describe those who live in landfills and depend on other people's trash to make a living. The workers pick out recyclables-aluminum cans, glass bottles, metal scraps and cardboard boxes-and sell them for cash. If they find a piece of furniture or a mattresses, they use it. If they find semi-edible food, they eat it. And if they find a toy with just a few broken parts, they bring it home for their kids. Everything a person needs to survive can be found in a dump. Poverty-stricken people across the world have known this for decades. Thousands, maybe more, live at landfills worldwide, but there aren't any exact statistics-these are the untouchables, the invisibles, the forgotten and the ignored.
John Sheedy pushes down on the gas, and his old gold Mercedes squeals but refuses to go anywhere. It's raining again, and the dirt roads in Fausto Gonzales have turned slippery. Sheedy resolves to park his car about a half-block away from Alma Hernandez's house. Hernandez's family is the focus of his newest documentary, The Tijuana Project, a film about the people who live at the dump.
"We went out the first day to shoot, and it was the last week of full production at the dump," Sheedy says. "It was just total chaos-pure apocalyptic craziness. There were trucks in all directions. We went to the top of the mountain where these trucks were climbing; we were up there in the middle of it, probably four or five hundred people were working that day, and there was all this dust, seagulls clouding the sky, and the dump was filled with battery acid, baby diapers and everything in between."
"And the smell," assistant director Sasha Seyb adds. "The smell was insane. At that point, it was nothing but trash."
In its heyday, the dump at Fausto Gonzales took in 1,250 tons of trash every day. Hundreds of workers would labor waist-deep in garbage, jockeying for the best positions by swarming dangerously close to the city dump trucks. Countless garbage pickers have died after being squashed into the landfill by the heavy trucks, say residents and ministers. The toxicity inside the dump is dangerous, too. Rotting trash produces methane, a highly flammable gas. Seyb says she's heard of people lighting methane-producing holes with a match and using the flames as makeshift stoves. Four years ago, a house burst into flames because of a methane leak. Depending on which neighbor you ask, 40 to 80 homes were lost.
Slipping and sliding down stairs built from old rubber tires that lead down to Hernandez's house, Sheedy and Seyb duck under the low lines carrying stolen electricity. Dogs-some feral, some not-bark and swirl around the two as they make their way to the door.
Hernandez's husband, Esteban Manzo, takes some time to answer the door. After the city of Tijuana closed the dump in Fausto Gonzales last spring, he was one of the lucky who managed to get a job. Now he's the night watchman who guards the entrance of the old dump. Hernandez, on the other hand, is one of the many garbage pickers who now must pay to ride an old red bus to the new city landfill located about an hour-and-a-half east of Fausto Gonzales.
Manzo eventually opens the door, rubs sleep from his eyes-daytime is now his nighttime-and explains that Hernandez and their seven kids are over at the elementary school with the rest of the residents getting food and toys from one of the many ministry groups that frequent the dump community.
Sheedy and Seyb climb out of the canyon and head back to the Mercedes, but the glow of the gold car is nowhere to be seen.
"Is it still there?" Sheedy asks, quickening his pace. "Maybe it slid down below."
Seyb runs toward where the car was parked, "Oh shit," she says. "Didn't you park right there?"
The two frantically question neighbors. A few nod their heads in silence. Others say they saw it drive off this way or that. Sheedy and Seyb eventually resign themselves to the fact that it's been stolen and probably stripped by now (four chop shops are located within five miles of Fausto Gonzales). They head in the direction of a police car they saw parked in front of the rundown cemetery that sits near the neighborhood's entrance.
The cemetery in Fausto Gonzales is notorious. It greets people to the neighborhood with rows of crooked, homemade crosses and modest gravestones. Faded plastic flowers add splotches of color here and there, but mostly the cemetery is just dirt sprinkled with bits of trash. New this year is a paved road that leads drivers past the cemetery and into Fausto. The pavement stops abruptly at a corner store, whose owner, Juan, now has to compete with the Burger King and Calimax that are part of a new strip mall that went up across the highway last summer.
Drug dealers have marked out part of the cemetery as their territory. They use it for burning tires and mattresses to get to the metal, which they can sell for cash. They also use it to sell drugs to anyone with a few pesos to spare. Surprisingly, the biggest health problem in Fausto Gonzales isn't caused by the trash or methane-it's caused by drugs. Some garbage pickers take methamphetamine so they can work longer and faster; others simply take it for escape.
Today, it looks like one of the drug dealers is getting arrested. He sits in the back of the police car with a dazed look on his face.
"See, you try to help these people, and they steal from you," says one of the police officers standing in front of a burnt-out car in the cemetery.
"That's not true," says a woman who hears the conversation. "I don't steal."
Minutes later, two excited men approach the officer to report another stolen car. A small group gathers, and some blame the theft, at least in part, on the ministry group that's over at the school. A large number of gringos in the 'hood means there'll be a large number of nice cars, and it also means residents will be away from their homes collecting handouts, which means there'll be fewer eyes watching the streets. (Sheedy never did find his car, although some women in the neighborhood found out who did it and made sure the thief knew that Sheedy was a friend.) Most of the neighbors in Fausto Gonzales are hardworking, honest people who look out for each other, but because of the drugs and the poverty, they have their share of bad eggs.
Another pack of dogs circle Sheedy and Seyb as they make their way to the school in search of Hernandez. The scene they encounter makes them uncomfortable-a handful of gringos have cordoned themselves off on one side of the school's fence. They hand Doritos and soda over the top of the fence to the mob that's gathered outside. A gringo wearing a religious T-shirt made to look like a Starbucks logo makes his way through the mass to his truck, pulls out a bag of old stuffed animals and hands them out to a group of kids who nearly maul one another to get to the toys.
"That was just weird," Sheedy says. "What the heck were they doing?"
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Comments
In my hippy days, poor and in college, I used to cruise the dumpsters behind Safeway and City Market. It was amazing the fine dining we could put together with items just a few days beyond the expiration.
When you were a little girl, we used to go scavenging at the dump and furnished a significant portion of our home with "another man's trash".
I realize there is a quantum difference with what you wrote about, (Beautifully written by the way) but thought you would like to know that you come from trash picking stock.
Love Dad
Beautiful writing on an ugly topic. Although I hate the thought of people scavenging in and living near unhealthy landfills, I also think about how much people throw away that is still useful, how much we don't recycle. I wish there were a better way to go through garbage that sifts important metals and resources, rather than just bury it all. People still throw away too much, rather than donate or recycle. Smithsonian, a long time ago, did a story about an Asian landfill, from which people scavenged every form of metal and made useful items and art pieces. Scavenging, heartbreaking in so many aspects, is still a time-honored trade. It's sad, the things I see people put out for the dump truck--old bikes that are still in good shape, lamps that are no longer fashionable...does anybody recover these things or does EDCO just sweep it all away?