La Colonia Part 1: The Hardship of the Landfill People



When Barry Dugan drove down to Mexico for his construction work, he never expected to find people actually living in cardboard boxes.

Then he found thirteen families, united only in poverty, eking out a living in a landfill by searching through discarded knives and needles to find the building materials that will sell for a meager price.

Women become pregnant at fifteen or younger, and have their children right in the dump. Dogs with distended bellies run rampant--their corpses left where they lie--and almost everyone has tuberculosis due to a lack of clean water.

“Prior to seeing this, when I thought of Mexico, it was just the place to drink beer,” Dugan said. “How can a person be so oblivious, to not see the poverty for two whole years?”

Horrified by their squalid living conditions, Dugan founded the Ministries de Esperanza (Ministries of Hope), a non-profit church-based ministry where volunteers collect donations of food, clothing and feminine hygiene products. The volunteers then drive their own vehicles to deliver the items along with a sermon on the first Saturday of each month in order to tend to the physical and spiritual needs of the people in the dump.

“It’s amazing to see those types of conditions that close to the United States of America,” said Kevin Johnson, a pastor at Life in Christ Bilingual Church.

The church, located in Tucson at 102 E Palmdale St., is the headquarters of Esperanza, which has been operating since July 2006.

“It’s amazing that the Mexican government has ignored these people, and that we, as a country, have ignored our neighbors,” Johnson said.

Several other groups and churches have started becoming involved in the project, but Dugan himself is the core of the activity. “We get a little bit of donations, but it’s not enough to sustain us as a working ministry,” he said.

Dugan, the general superintendent for Corona Sierra, a Tucson construction company, is nothing but ambitious.

He hopes to build a clinic, soup kitchen, and church on two of the properties on the cusp of the landfill, though he has yet to collect the donations needed to buy the $1100 land. His wife, Claudia, has dual residency in the United States and Mexico, and though she wants to apply for citizenship, her Mexican property rights will allow the group to purchase property just outside the landfill community.

Dugan estimates that he currently spends at least 72 hours per week in the dump, with a commute of an hour and a half each way.

Families who live in the dump must purchase the lots for the rights to construct shanties there, in which they pay in monthly installments of 500 pesos, said Billa Señor, who owns a store less than a mile from the landfill. Including picking through the trash for items to sell, the average wage for the “squatters” is less than $60 per week.

“That place has a bad reputation,” said Señor. Aside from illnesses, drugs are in widespread use, with the most common being marijuana and methamphetamine, known as “cristal” in her neighborhood, Señor said, in Spanish.

A user who Señor sees often around her store is a wrinkled, haunted-looking woman named Guadalupe, who turned to drugs after she lost her children to death and child protection services. Guadalupe has been a resident of the dump for most of her life, ostracized in the neighborhood community and pushed to the landfill because of her drug habits.

Not all of the landfill's residents are drug addicts, however, with most of them actually being immigrants from Sinaloa and Chiapas. The immigrants are looked down up in Nogales as "invaders of north Mexico," Señor said. Most of the immigrants are searching for work in the border town, and some hope to cross into the United States, legally or illegally.

Originally from Sinaloa, Sajadana Martinez Romero lived in California illegally for seven years before he was deported to Nogales, a location that he begged for because there was more work in the border town. “Some people are happy working here,” Romero said, in Spanish. “It’s a lot better than where we come from.”

Romero now works for H.N.S., the company that transports waste to the dump—and scavenges there, too. The job is perfect for him while in Mexico, he says, because he can pick through the trash before he takes it to the dump.

Saenah Sindlod is an immigrant from Sinaloa who has family living illegally in Phoenix. He has not seen his mother, father or sister for six years, but fears going to them because he attempted to cross the border once before and passed out in the desert due to dehydration.

“It’s too dangerous to cross that way,” he said, in Spanish. “I could have died. People die all the time.”

Jose Marto emigrated from Sinaloa with his parents when he was five and stayed in the landfill for 22 years.

“I used to think about crossing the border all of the time,” Marto said, in Spanish. “But when I got married, I didn’t want to anymore because I was happy here.”

However, now that Marto has a third child to feed, he does not know what to do.

“These people have been displaced,” said Kat Rodriguez of Tucson human-rights group Derechos Humanos. “Nobody wants to ask why these people are coming. They just want to concentrate on stopping them.”

Her guess is that the immigrants from Sinaloa are most likely farmers who cannot compete with imported food from the United States, which is mass produced and genetically modified. Rodriguez said that past and current trade policies, which have been restrictive on the Mexican farmer and not conducive to dialogue, upset the economic balance in Mexico while bolstering the U.S. economy.

“Quite frankly, we haven’t looked at how our trade policies affect other people, and that’s a serious problem,” she said.

A new federal legislative measure aimed to rectify the situation is the Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy (STRIVE) Act, which was introduced by U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake, R.-Ariz., and Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D.-Ill. The act allows for 400,000 families of immigrants who learn English to enter the United States, organizes a computer system for worker identification, and enacts harsher punishments for employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Tucson Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat who represents a district of Arizona with 114 miles along the border, is well aware of the complex issues that plague the area, said C.J. Karamargin, Gifford's communications director.

He noted that Giffords decided to co-sponsor the bill because she recognized its ability to address and enforce several aspects of the border problem at once, with solutions ranging from harsher security to a loosening of the existing guest worker program.

"She ran against an enforcement-only opponent, which is a strategy that voters clearly recognized as insufficient," Karamargin said, adding that Giffords recognizes that any attempts to address the complex border issues must be "multi-pronged."

But, despite the policies being more slightly more open-ended than in the past, the new legislation will only allow highly qualified applicants to attempt the lengthy and costly process of filling out paperwork to become a citizen, which will disqualify the poorest of the poor, Rodriguez said.

“Are you changing the dynamic of that community with these new policies? No,” she said, adding that the people in the landfill would not even be considered worthy of an application due to their lack of education and diseases contracted from living in those conditions.

Barry Dugan has a different approach to the immigration debate. To him, the immigrants from Sinaloa “come up thinking they’re just a short walk away from the Land of Paradise, but they find that they’ve spent all their money and they’re stuck,” he said.

According to Dugan, the best policy is to build up the economic stability of Mexico using by not only creating a strong sense of community among the residents of Mexico, but also by opening up a global community between the United States and Mexico by instigating a guest-worker program that is easier to qualify for than the present one.

Above all, however, he wants immigrants to pay taxes and fill out the paperwork legally rather than risking life and limb to cross illegally, he said.

Next: La Colonia Part 2: Landfill Children.