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.”
Text by Isaac Muk