Home sweet dump

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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Most of the improvements made in Fausto Gonzales have been the work of ministries and charity groups from the United States. Little to no help has come from the Mexican government, which charged the neighborhood $5,000 just to bring in waterlines, says Teresa Jaramillo, a Catholic nun with the international missionary group, Medical Missions. Jaramillo doesn't like handouts. She's been working with the people of Fausto Gonzales since 1992, and she says if people want to help, they have to get their hands dirty.

"One of the things that I'm 100-percent against is tokenism," Jaramillo says, "handing out free candy and used toys and used clothes to Mexicans. They line them up and hand things out-that's what you call beggars; there's no relationship between the giver and the receiver. It's a lack of respect for the person, as far as I'm concerned. It's making beggars out of people who are not beggars to begin with."

It's a few weeks after Sheedy had his car stolen, and Jarmillo is explaining her philosophy to a group of Boston kids who've come to help weatherize and improve houses. It's raining again, so they've arrived just in time.

Jaramillo-"Madre Teresa," as she's come to be known in Fausto Gonzales-gives her speech in a nice but small bakery, part of a community center that also houses a nursery and salon Jaramillo helped start and now operates with the help of a women's cooperative, Centro Comunitario Teresa.

An 80-year-old feminist with a knack for making detailed religious figures out of papier-mâché, Jaramillo is trained in sociology and has worked with the neediest groups in third-world countries since she was 21. When she found herself in Tijuana being asked for help by David Lynch, a fast-talking New Yorker who started a school in the dump 27 years ago by throwing down a blue tarp and casually teaching kids the basics, Jaramillo's first move was to take a step back and do a study of the people who lived in the neighborhood.

"I found that people came from all different parts of Mexico," Jaramillo says, "and the only thing that brought them together was the fact that they worked in the dump. They would work and then crawl back into their rat holes. They really had no sense of community."

Along with Lynch, who runs the kindergarten with the help of a former student, Felipe Quiroz, and a few other staffers from neighborhood, Jaramillo's goal has been to help build a sense of community and ownership among the people of Fausto Gonzales. She wants to see the dump community become a community like any other. And now that the dumpsite has closed, she says, they're one step closer.

"Little by little, the community's going to clean up," says Jaramillo, whose next project will be to take down the crematorium at the east side of the cemetery and replace it with a fútbol field where the kids can play.

But while one dump closes and things start looking up, another community is growing in a different landfill on the other side of town. Tijuana officials have said publicly that the new municipal landfill would be modernized and free of scavengers. But Lynch, who started the school back when the dump was in a different Tijuana neighborhood called Pan Americano-that dump is now completely paved over and the neighborhood cleaned up-has little faith.

"They said that about Fausto Gonzales 20 years ago," Lynch says. "So who knows. The school [in Fausto Gonzales] is just going to continue where it is; in fact, it's a brand-new story, and the community will just remain there. As far as the new dump goes, history is just repeating itself."

Alfonso López Posada, the co-director of Tijuana's Municipal Cleaning Services, drives his old Ford Explorer down the dirt road that leads to the new landfill. The entrance sits off of Kilometer 15 on the old highway from Tijuana to Tecate, about 30 minutes east of downtown. The first sight is a stockyard surrounded by hillsides spewing white clouds.

"Methane from the cow feces," López says, pointing at the streaming gas.

The smell is bad, but the effect is worse. The gases from the cow poop seem to heat things up while consuming oxygen at the same time, making it uncomfortable and hard to breathe.

A few small shacks lay between the stockyard and the landfill, which López says has been operating since 2003 in tandem with the old dump before it became the main municipal landfill last year. As the Explorer creeps past barbed-wire fences, López tries to explain the problem with waste management in Tijuana.

"The problem is that people don't apply the law," he says. It's illegal for people to live and work in dumps-but, clearly, no one follows that rule. Out his window, a broken plastic mold of Santa Claus stuck haphazardly on a metal pole marks the entrance to a dump worker's self-constructed house just outside the landfill.

An hour earlier, López smiled and shrugged as he stood in front of a line of more than a dozen broken-down and vandalized garbage trucks at one of Tijuana's new transfer stations, talking to a television reporter from Televisa. He candidly told the reporter that the vandalism was done by unionized city workers, which leaves the city utterly powerless to do anything. A Televisa cameraman filmed as some of the workers leapt from their chairs, lifted the hood of a garbage truck missing its two front wheels and feigned a little concern.

According to a 2004 report in the Tijuana newspaper Frontera, it was another union that made sure the garbage pickers would have a place in Tijuana's new waste sites. The recyclers' union, according to the report, got the city and GEN, a waste-management company owned by Promotora Ambiental-which runs the newer Tijuana landfill as well as landfills throughout Mexico-to sign an agreement allowing workers access to waste sites until the city can purchase recycling machines.

The recycling machines, López says, are on their way, but he hesitates to estimate a date.

López is upbeat and optimistic-partly because he's been at his position for only a month-and-a-half, since the recent Tijuana election that hoisted Jorge Ramos and the National Action Party (PAN) into power-but he isn't stupid. Unlike his predecessors, who were on record saying workers wouldn't be allowed at the new site, López acknowledges that it's a difficult problem to solve.

"Another problem is how far the new dump is," López says, explaining that the city's trying to find the millions of dollars necessary to build a four-lane road from Tijuana to the landfill.

The dirt road is bad. López passes three broken-down garbage trucks on the way to the landfill. "They drive too fast for the road," López says as he slows, rolls down his window and asks yet another driver if he needs any help.

The landfill itself can be smelled before it can be seen. López drops into a canyon and passes a security guard before he sees any action. GEN trucks and city trucks with the logo "Tijuana Limpia Siempre" (Tijuana Always Clean) are backing in and out while hundreds of workers in their unofficial uniforms of baseball hats and garden gloves pick through the mountain of garbage. A man in an orange hat finds a mirror and lifts it over his head as he walks back to the other side of a barbed-wire fence that marks the official property line of the landfill.

On the other side of the fence is what Fausto Gonzales must have looked like years ago. Cardboard boxes are built into ghetto lean-tos alongside barbed-wire, and the makeshift houses continue east for about 100 yards. A few old motor homes pop out over the masses of cardboard, but there aren't any permanent structures. A few fires have spontaneously erupted and are burning throughout the landfill, generating thick black smoke that eventually spreads out and sits like a black blanket over the village of cardboard.

Among the hundreds of workers, only one kid can be seen. She's in her early teens and sits on a pile of lumber, watching as the workers dig and kick their way through the trash.

On the way back to his office, López laughs and says his predecessor drove a Land Rover. "There is a lot of corruption here," he says, "and no one applies the law." And later, as he's getting out of his old car, "As long as there is trash, there will people who work in the dump."    

And on this side of the border...

Every day, Ricardo, who asked that his real name not be used, rides the blue trolley line and gets off at every stop to dig through garbage cans. He picks out plastic bottles and aluminum cans then uses a coupon he clips from Pennysaver to get $1.70 a pound at a Chula Vista recycling center.

You won’t find garbage pickers crawling through the Miramar Landfill. (Nationwide, laws make it illegal for scavengers to step foot anywhere near landfills.) It’s the first municipally operated landfill to meet international environmental standards and be certified ISO 14001, which means, among other things, that the landfill has an onsite recycling center; a native-plant nursery growing greenery that will eventually re-vegetate the land once the landfill is closed; the methane gas produced by decomposing garbage is collected and reused to power the electrical generators at the city’s water reclamation plant; the landfill produces compost and mulch for sale to the public; and there’s a Goodwill drop-off center at the entrance.

The city even employs someone to set off firecrackers near the landfill all day, every day, to keep birds from swooping in to pick through the trash. The city’s Bird Control Program, by the way, is the only one of its kind at U.S. landfills.

The Miramar Landfill’s progressiveness is impressive, but San Diego does rely, at least in part, on people who pick through trash to collect recyclables. There are no statistics, says Jennifer Ott, environmental services outreach coordinator, that detail the demographics of those who bring in recyclables to the stations throughout San Diego County, but the fact that many of San Diego’s homeless and poor make money by bringing in cans and bottles is indisputable.

As of Jan. 1, a citywide ordinance made recycling in San Diego mandatory. The law probably won’t affect Ricardo, who relies on public trash cans for his bounty, but he says those who rely on Dumpsters in the city’s neighborhoods to find recyclables might have to find new sources of trash.