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allowed it to flourish in order to grasp the suffering of those from whom it originated. He slept on the floor because the majority of the world’s population could not afford a bed.

CHAPTER ONE

SIFTING THROUGH THE TRASH

Trash
    O ne of the most beautiful views of San Diego is from the summit of a small hill in Tijuana’s municipal garbage dump. People live on that hill, picking through the trash with long poles that end in hooks made of bent nails. They scavenge for bottles, tin, aluminum, cloth; for cast-out beds, wood, furniture. Sometimes they find meat that is not too rotten to be cooked.
    This view-spot is where the city drops off its dead animals—dogs, cats, sometimes goats, horses. They are piled in heaps six feet high and torched. In that stinking blue haze, amid nightmarish sculptures of charred ribs and carbonized tails, the garbage-pickers can watch the buildings of San Diego gleam gold on the blue coastline. The city looks cool in the summer when heat cracks the ground and flies drill into their noses. And in the winter, when windchill drops night temperatures into the low thirties, when the cold makes their lips bleed, and rain turns the hill into a gray pudding of ash and mud, and babies are wrapped in plastic trash bags for warmth, San Diego glows like a big electric dream. And every night on that burnt hill, these people watch.
    In or near every Mexican border town, you will find trash dumps. Some of the bigger cities have more than one “official” dump, and there are countless smaller, unlicensed places piled with garbage. Some of the official dumps are quite large, and some, like the one outside Tecate, are small and well hidden. People live in almost every one of them.
    Each
dompe
has its own culture, as distinct as the people living there.
(Dompe
is border-speak, a word in neither Spanish nor English. It is an attempt to put a North American word or concept—“dump”—into a Mexican context. Thus, “junkyard”becomes
yonke
and “muffler” becomes
mofle.)
Each of these
dompes
has its own pecking order. Certain people are “in.” Some families become power brokers due to their relationships to the missionaries who invariably show up, bearing bags of old clothes and vanloads of food. Some
dompes
even have “mayors”; some have hired goons, paid off by shady syndicates, to keep the trash-pickers in line. It’s a kind of illegal serfdom, where the poor must pay a ransom to the rich to pick trash to survive.
    Then there are those who are so far “out” that the mind reels. In the Tijuana
dompe,
the outcasts were located along the western edge of the settlement in shacks and lean-tos, in an area known as “the pig village.” This was where the untouchables of this society of untouchables slept, among the pigs awaiting slaughter.
    I knew them all: the Serranos, the Cheese Lady, Pacha, Jesusita.
A Woman Called Little Jesus
    I t was raining. It had been raining for weeks, and the weather was unremittingly cold. The early-morning van-loadings were glum; all spring and summer and even into the fall, more volunteers than we’d known what to do with joined us for the weekly trips into Mexico. One day, we had over a hundred eager American kids loaded into buses ready to go forth and change the world. Now, though, as the late-winter/early-spring rain came, the group dwindled. Sometimes we were reduced to a small core of old-timers, six to ten at most.
    When we pulled into the dump, the vans slid almost sideways in the viscous, slick mud. Windchill turned the air icy;there was no smoke to speak of that day, and the dogs were mostly hiding. Women awaiting food were lined up, covering their heads with plastic sheets. Even in this wind and wet they joked and laughed. This feature of the Mexican personality is often the cause of much misunderstanding—that if Mexicans are so cheerful, then they certainly couldn’t be hungry or ill. It leads to the myth of the quaint and jovial peasant with a lusty,