I am now obsessed with garbage. As I walk down the street, I scrutinize people’s bins with a quick glance, so that passers-by will not think that I am trying to steal their neighbors’ property, but I can still manage to get an idea of the contents of their waste. When I reach a corner, I peek at the baskets trying to find something that I have not clearly identified in my mind, but I that keep looking for intently. It is as if I suddenly discovered the potential usefulness of whatever others may dispose of: old lamps, shoes and clothes, magazine collections, books and wooden planks. These last weeks have revealed to me the patterns of plastic bottle recyclers in my neighborhood: men and women of diverse age-groups that wake up early and comb the streets, meticulously searching for plastic litter on the curb, inside garbage bags, and in recycling bins outside apartment buildings. They quickly collect soda bottles, milk containers, all the PET and HDPE plastic they can find. Older women carry their bottles in carts; younger men collect them in bags, but all of them sort the plastic according to classifications unknown to me.
My initiation into the world of garbage has not only consisted in the realization of its economic value or its transient character as waste. The dimensions of its potential to be reincorporated into the “world of usefulness” have not been fully processed in my brain, but I have become increasingly aware of the aspects that make it loathsome culturally. The first aspect is noise. In about three weeks, the old building that used to stand right across my place was torn down by sheer muscle of five men. They banged and bashed the wooden beams, the walls, their only tool a sledgehammer, and then shoveled the debris into the “scoop” of an orange truck that noisily deposited it into the container on the curb. The uproar is such in the mornings that it has been literally impossible to sleep in since I moved into this apartment in Park Slope (I have been living there for four weeks).
Complaints about garbage trucks that wake up people too early are commonplace, but all I kept thinking while the workers made progress was the amount of debris that had to be taken away. I am not sure how many times the container got full, but a large truck would periodically collect its contents so that the workers could proceed dumping the fruit of their destruction and racket and considerable toil. Only one of the men, who seemed to be supervising, wore a proper mask, while the rest of them just tied a t-shirt or a piece of cloth around their heads in order to protect themselves from the clouds of dust that rose with every hit of their tools. Five stories above, I had to close my windows whenever they were working in order to be able to breathe inside my apartment. Everyday there would be less left of the old building and new rubble inside the container. It seemed to me that the workers were of Latin American origin and this was confirmed when I overheard them speak what sounded like Spanish from a South American country.
Once the ground was leveled, a different group of men started to hang out in the now vacant lot. I noticed that one of the walls of the adjoining building was covered in graffiti and assumed that the new construction would block it out of sight. But what this new crowd proceeded to do was to contribute to the graffiti. They stood there and pondered and then added color to the recently uncovered art piece. I wondered if the local to be built will be a bar or some sort of cultural space, which made me sigh with relief (as no tall apartment complex might block the sun from my windows). But I also noticed the process by which immigrant workers fouled their bodies and lungs in conditions not much better than those found in developing countries, so that room could be made for another sector of the population to work or live.
Park Slope is a neighborhood that, as many others in New York City, have gone through what is commonly known as gentrification, so that land property, rents, and services in general are considerably more expensive than they were five years ago. The Puerto Rican and African-American settlers are in decline, in order to make way for the trendy young couples that are moving out of Manhattan in order to have kids. In my case, I got the apartment thanks to a Puerto Rican acquaintance that was willing to rent the place to me without having a guarantor. And I find myself kind of in-between the mentioned groups, as I am a Mexican graduate student who fled Manhattan in search of a more reasonably priced lodging in a handsome and accessible area of Brooklyn. How does my ethnicity relate me to the Latin American or Latino workers that tear down buildings and handle the dirty work? How do I relate to the artsy, whiter crowd? And, what does any of this have to do with garbage?
Distinctions of class and race are expressed in the allocation of tasks and zones to each group, in language usage, in clothes and habits. Dirty work, the kind in which people expose themselves to harmful substances, to loud noise that damages their ears, to accidents and high death rates, is handled by people that have no other choice. The first time I heard the expression ‘white trash’ I founded it incredibly crude and at the same time, very revealing of the U.S. social psyche. Low-income, uneducated white people are pictured as society’s refuse. As disposable as them seem to be other darker-skinned, low-income ethnic groups, the workers that perform dangerous jobs without proper equipment in detriment of their health. Later eulogies of immigration may acknowledge the work that the waves of Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Dominicans and Colombians, to mention a few, carry out hired illegally by companies that profit from their outsider status. Right now they are criminals, according to the U.S. federal law, but this law is not enforced so strictly on the side of the construction companies and restaurants that benefit from their cheap labor.
Older words that show derogatory attitudes towards lower-class sectors of society are, ‘scum’ and ‘vermin’ , and many languages establish an equation between garbage and the lowest class sectors of society. There is a word in Spanish closely related to scum: escoria, and it is used equally to refer to “a vile, low, or worthless person.” Therefore, the stigma of those who touch the untouchable is not exclusive of the U.S. or of our time. The connotations of a word like vermin (from the Latin vermis, worm) associate the people who are forced to deal with the refuse of our societies with the undesirable life that thrives wherever there is garbage: bacteria, cockroaches, rats. These in turn are related to ideas of disease, contagion, and death. Our fears are hidden in reactions of disgust that apply to our daily discards and to populations that we do not understand or find displeasing. We turn up our noses at the unpleasant outcomes of our way of life, but the fact is that we rely on people that clean the mess while we close our windows to prevent the dust from offending our nostrils.
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SCUM: extraneous matter or impurities risen to or formed on the surface of a liquid often as a foul filmy covering; 2 b: the scoria of metals in a molten state; c: a slimy film on a solid or gelatinous object; 2 a: REFUSE b: a low, vile, or worthless person or group of people. [Merriam Webster Dictionary online]
VERMIN a: small common harmful or objectionable animals (as lice or fleas) that are difficult to control b: birds and mammals that prey on game c: animals that at a particular time and place compete (as for food) with humans or domestic animals2: an offensive person [Merriam Webster Dictionary online]