Inside life on Tijuana’s garbage dumps

In May 1991, Jack Lued­ers-Booth trav­elled from his home in Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts, to Tijua­na, just south of the USA-Mex­i­co bor­der. He had been in touch with Luis Alber­to Urrea – a now famed writer and Pulitzer Prize final­ist born in the city, who was work­ing for the San Diego Read­er at the time. Urrea had been in his home town, work­ing on a sto­ry about land­fill dumps that were lived in by hun­dreds of fam­i­lies, and invit­ed the pho­tog­ra­ph­er to come with him to make pic­tures for it.

Upon enter­ing the dumps for the first time, Lued­ers-Booth was hor­ri­fied. Moun­tains of trash filled the skies as huge machines dropped and churned dis­card­ed items, food and dirt into the air. Among it all, peo­ple were pick­ing through the trash, look­ing for any­thing that they could eat, sell, or take back to their makeshift homes to keep for them­selves. Cov­er­ing his mouth as stink filled his nos­trils, he saw young men, elder­ly women in rags, and chil­dren wear­ing mis­matched shoes pick­ing through the piles of lit­ter. Lued­ers-Booth turned to Urrea and yelled: ​“No, I am not going to pho­to­graph here.”

“It’s alright Jack – they know us,” Urrea replied. ​“Get your cam­era off your chest gringo.”

“So I did,” recalls Lued­ers-Booth of that moment, over three decades ago. ​“I raised my cam­era to my face, and that’s how it began.” He would return each sum­mer for the next nine years, grow­ing close to the com­mu­ni­ty who lived there and mak­ing pic­tures of them. That work was first pre­sent­ed in his 2005 pho­to­book Inher­it the Land, and now those shots have been dug out of the archives for a new show at Gallery Kayafas in Boston. 

The project pro­vides insight into the incred­i­bly tough con­di­tions faced by those liv­ing in the dumps, among the machines and land­fill. Many peo­ple died young, while diar­rhea and dehy­dra­tion were com­mon. It came to high­light the chasm between the haves in the glob­al north and the have nots between the glob­al south, sep­a­rat­ed by a bor­der fence of no more than a few metres high, span­ning the divide between San Diego and Tijua­na. ​“Per­haps two-thirds of the fam­i­lies were born into [the dumps],” Lued­ers-Booth explains. ​“The remain­ing are peo­ple from South Amer­i­ca who have been mov­ing up from Nicaragua, Colom­bia [and else­where] to get into the USA, and the final hur­dle is the Tijua­na border.”

Trash was often import­ed from north of the bor­der, and scarce con­di­tions fos­tered a hier­ar­chy, where those who had been there for gen­er­a­tions secured the best loca­tions. ​“Much of the trash is from San Diego, and I don’t know what arrange­ment the city has with Tijua­na that they dump their trash there, but it’s pre­mi­um stuff because Cal­i­for­ni­ans own valu­able things,” he says. ​“The peo­ple clos­est to the trash as it is com­ing in on the trucks have prime posi­tion because they get to see the trash first, and they have achieved the sta­tus by being there for a very long time. But this is quite touch­ing – there are prime areas of the dump reserved for the elder­ly and infirm.”

In the face of com­mon hard­ship, peo­ple still found ways to look out for each oth­er. And that resilient spir­it and human­i­ty per­sists through­out the pho­tographs. Kids can be seen play­ing in decom­mis­sioned cars, while Lued­ers-Booth also makes warm por­traits of peo­ple in their homes, liv­ing ordi­nary lives and attempt­ing to make the best of their sit­u­a­tions. “[The resilience] was one of the most impres­sive aspects – how these peo­ple could not only sur­vive these cir­cum­stances but rise above them,” he says. ​“I feel deeply respect­ful of those who are there and able to make sense out of some­thing that we would nev­er under­stand, and how mutu­al­ly sup­port­ive they are.”

Inher­it the Land by Jack Lued­ers-Booth is on view at Gallery Kayafas in Boston until Feb­ru­ary 10. For more infor­ma­tion about pur­chas­ing the pho­to­book, vis­it his web­site.

Fol­low Isaac on Twit­ter.

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Like Huck on Face­book or fol­low us on Twit­ter.

Sup­port sto­ries like this by becom­ing a mem­ber of Club Huck.