Finding hope among the ruins
Local filmmaker focuses on ‘picker’ subculture

Juan Pedro, center, hugs his brother Jesus, left, and his sister Lizbeth in front of their house that is built from materials from a Tijuana garbage dump. The children and their family are featured in a new film by local filmmaker John Sheedy about the lives of Tijuana garbage dump “pickers.”/Photo by Heidi Montoya

by Shawna Bethell

After the award-winning success of his film “El Inmigrante,” a film that depicts the events surrounding the murder of an unarmed Mexican boy by a rancher on the Texas border, John Sheedy said his next project would be lighter and more fun. The Durango filmmaker said he needed a break from the emotionally draining subject matter of U.S.-Mexico border conflicts. He was sure, he said, that the right, light-hearted project would find him, and he’d have a new film to bring to the world.

Sheedy will soon be bringing a new film to the world, and he laughs when he is reminded of what he said almost two years ago. Sheedy is working in the Tijuana dump, filming a documentary on the families whose livelihoods depend on digging through toxic garbage to survive.

“It really is a film about hope,” said Sheedy, though Mother Teresa is quoted as saying that the people who live in the dump are “the world’s most destitute.”

The individuals who work the dump are called “pickers,” because of the work they do sorting through the steaming mountain of trash looking for goods they can sell to recycling transfer stations.

“There is a dump culture, which sounds weird to most people, but the people who live and work here are allowed to be here by the dump owner who takes a percentage of everything the pickers make,” Sheedy said. He also explains there is a hierarchy to the system, whereby the “professional” pickers get the better trash to work from while the others, perhaps drug addicts or newcomers, get the trash that has already been combed through. People make a life of it, with families relocating from dump to dump if they hear that more valuable recyclables are found in the next city over.

“When we first arrived in the dump it was chaos,” said Sheedy. “There were around 500 pickers and this huge mound of garbage you had to climb. But then you got on top, and there was a plateau with trucks coming and going, people working and swarms of seagulls overhead.”

What separates Tijuana from other dump cultures is the existence of a school in the dump. Twenty years ago, David Lynch went to Tijuana and saw what was happening with the children of the picking families. Often, according to Sheedy, kids who were 5 or 6 years old were working alongside their parents. However, the drivers of the trucks couldn’t always see the kids in the mounds of garbage, resulting in accidents. One day, Lynch pulled up a sheet of plastic, called it a school and began teaching English. Eventually, after years of fund-raising, an actual school was built and teachers were hired. Today, the kids are getting a full, formal education.

One success story follows a child in that first class who learned sitting on that sheet of plastic. He grew up, worked his way through college and has returned to teach kindergarten in the dump school. Another 16-year-old has gone through the school and is now setting up the dump’s first internet café. This is the hope Sheedy was talking about.

“If you can break the cycle and give the kids an education, they do not have to continue to work here. That hope is the focal point of the project,” he said.

John Sheedy films with his Super 8 camera on top of the dump mountain, often reffered to as "El Dompe," in Tijuana./Photo by Heidi Montoya

Sheedy had not planned to go back to Mexico after “El Inmigrante.” But at the showing of that film at the San Diego Latino Film Festival last spring, he met author and lecturer Victor Villaseñor who told him about the kids living in the dump. Sheedy did some research and took on the project, with Villaseñor as the production advisor. Also working with Sheedy are Durango natives Sasha Syeb, assistant director, and Heidi Montoya, still photographer.

As a vehicle for his story, Sheedy is profiling one family. “I’d told David Lynch to keep his eyes open for someone I could talk to,” Sheedy said. “Then one afternoon I was in the dump and saw two brothers. My eyes met with one of them, and I said to myself, ‘That’s the kid.’”

The boy, Juan Pedro, asked his family for permission to bring the filmmaker and crew into their home. Sitting around the table for a meal, Sheedy said he and his crew were so welcomed that they felt as if they had been adopted. They interviewed the grandmother who had been working in the dump for 30 years, as well as the entire extended family including aunts, uncles and cousins. The work of pickers is generational, or had been, until the school offered new opportunities for the kids.

“The whole thing is like a tragic comedy,” said Sheedy. “This is a happy community with a strong family element. The kids don’t seem to see their lives as suffering.”

Though the homes literally have streams running through them during rainstorms and the walls are made of nothing more than tin or plywood, Sheedy said this is juxtaposed with Domino’s Pizza delivery scooters zipping in and out of the “neighborhoods” when the families want a special meal.

Despite the glimpses of normalcy, Sheedy said that more often, what the familes eat comes directly from the dump. Furthermore, the local health clinic reports a higher-than-normal rate of skin rashes, throat ailments and cancers among the pickers. In fact, Sheedy and his crew often left the dump with sore throats and burning eyes after just a few days of filming. Off-gases from fires, some of which have been burning up from the dump for more than 10 years, are a constant reminder of the health and environmental issues facing the families. And as if this were not enough, the families have just gotten unofficial word that, after 20 years, the dump will close. According to Sheedy, people are terrified of losing their jobs as well as the educational opportunities for their children.

The film team will continue to work in Tijuana through 2007 to follow the tension of the dump closing and what it will mean to the families, Sheedy said. To follow the progress of the film or to donate to the film or the school, visit www.tijuanaproject.org. •

Workers sift through trash at the Tijuana garbage dump looking for treasures or food but especially materials such as glass and metal to recycle./Photo by Heidi Montoya