Home sweet dump

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."