At first glance, the three Cruz siblings, lounging on Barry Dugan’s couch, appear perfectly normal.

Yet appearances can often be deceiving.

The siblings, now wearing Nike sweatshirts, spent most of their young lives in a landfill in Nogales, Sonora, hunting through trash for scrap metal to sell for food.

Marlene Cruz, 15, likes silver jewelry and going out with friends.

However, she also has a tendency to cut classes and prefers to spend her lunch money on soda and junk food, said Claudia Dugan, Barry’s wife and the kids’ American guardian.

Fourteen-year-old Francisco, the man of the house since his father was incarcerated in the United States, loves playing soccer and plans to become an accountant if he can keep his math grades up.

“The schools here are difficult but better, because in Mexico, they're not that organized,” he said, in Spanish. “Sometimes you need to repeat things you’ve already learned because they don’t know what everyone knows.”

Maria Guadalupe “Lupe” Cruz, named for her mother, is the smallest at nine years old, and is so quiet she could almost disappear underfoot. Unlike her siblings, Lupe has had health issues since coming to Tucson involving stomach problems and chronic fatigue. According to Claudia, Lupe chooses to eat depending on who serves her the food, and usually will not eat in front of strangers.

“I worry for her,” Claudia said, adding that Lupe has had the hardest time adjusting to Tucson schools due to being uncomfortable in social situations. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the other kids are bullying her on top of the other things.”

The Cruz siblings, all born in Baja, Calif. to an illegal immigrant mother, were taken in by Barry Dugan, the superintendent for the Tucson construction company Corona Sierra, after he was touched by their squalid living conditions in the landfill.

The family was pushed to the landfill after spending several years being shuffled from house to house, moving out every day they owed rent and staying with aunts and uncles until they had no other options, Fransisco said in Spanish.

"Soy siempre frío aquí," said Maria Guadalupe Cruz, the children's mother, in Spanish of the living conditions. "I am always cold here. The stove does not work for heat because it fills the house with smoke, so much so that we cannot breathe."



The people at the landfill construct their one-room shanties out of what they can salvage from the garbage, which results in roofs made of mattresses and walls made of rusted aluminum. Children run barefoot among discarded knives and needles.

“People have died there, even babies,” Marlene said, in Spanish. One woman left her infant son behind in a one-room shanty to scavenge through the trash, and when she returned, he had frozen to death.

The Cruz’s elderly next door neighbor had a heart problem and had been throwing up blood when she passed out and fell down a hill, Marlene also said.

According to Francisco, disease also runs rampant in the seventy-five person community, where a lack of proper hygiene and clean water contributes to infections. Upon coming to Tucson, all three children tested positively for tuberculosis bacteria on their skin, a form of the disease which is not contagious or deadly, but can worsen quickly without treatment.

Rabies is also prevalent due to a mass of dead and dying dogs, as those without collars are killed indiscriminately by the dog pound and dropped off at the dump.

“If a dog with rabies bites a person, we don’t have medicine to treat them,” he said. “That’s why we’re not allowed to touch the dogs.”

The fourth and youngest Cruz sister still scavenges in the landfill with her mother. Though she was also born in the United States, was unable to come to Tucson with her older siblings because the Dugan’s were unaware of her existence until after they had filed the necessary paperwork for guardianship.



However, even after knowing about the fourth sister, the Dugan’s could not afford to take her in. Claudia and Barry have their own share of troubles from taking in the three. Soon after Claudia applied for formal guardianship and updated the family’s taxes, they were taken off of their health insurance, preventing the Cruz children from receiving their TB medication for a brief time.

"We’ve made a lot of sacrifices for them," Barry Dugan said. "But we knew what we were getting into when we took them in."

. . . . . . . . . . .

Unfortunately, the Dugans must not have realized everything that came with taken in such troubled children.

The Cruz children returned to their mother on April 11, 2007, after spending almost half a year with the Dugans.

Financial difficulties and personality conflicts made it impossible to keep them any longer, Claudia Dugan said.

She cited incidences where the kids were “eating the family out of house and home, and still complaining that they weren’t getting enough.”

When given the choice to return to the landfill or get jobs to help support their appetites, all three returned to be with their mother in Nogales.

“The choice is up to them now,” Claudia said, near tears. “They need to fend for themselves and live in the way that God wants.”

BACK: La Colonia: The Hardships of the Landfill People