Negotiating the Dump: Luis Alberto Urrea's Sublime Use of Waste

Luis Alberto Urrea examined the role of waste and the dump in three creative works: Across the Wire (1993), By the Lake of the Sleeping Children (1996), and Into the Beautiful North (2009). The three texts describe the lives of those who live in the Tijuana and Tecate landfills. These dumps on the US-Mexican border beg the reader to consider the limits of livability; the environmental impacts of NAFTA (1994); the liminality of citizenship, especially on an international border; and the epistemological understanding of waste as an aesthetic subject. This article considers the role that waste plays in the actual dumps along the US-Mexico border and how the North American Free Trade Agreement affected the waste economy at the border.