Home sweet dump

Tijuana landfills are home ot hundreds of people who depend on garbage for their livelihood

By Kinsee Morlan 01/15/2008

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. Read the whole story here.....