“The trash isn’t what all of us throw away, it’s those people with no soul or heart or decency or any damn thing at all”. Who are the people who live on our waste? Who are those who, in order to survive, have to rescue what others consider rubbish? These questions are explored by Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny through her novel Trash (2023) translated to English this year.

I first heard about this Mexican writer through her work in the formation and advocacy of new voices in literature, rather than through her literary work. In the current times, it is worth asking ourselves what spaces we can look for as women and as dissidents, thinking through our challenges to create and find community with others who are also passionate about literature. Aguilar-Zéleny is part of this ongoing search: She directs of the creative projects of Casa Octavia in El Paso, Texas, a writer’s residency for women and members of the LGBTIA+ community.

Something about her as a literary figure has always intrigued me. Perhaps this has to do with her border and genre-crossing writing career, having published short stories such as Nenitas, cuentos (2013) and Señorita Ansiedad y Otras Manías, cuentos (2014), as well as novels such as “Coming Out”, (2015, Epic Press), Todo Eso Es Yo (2016), The Everything I Have Lost (2020), and El libro de Aisha (2021, Random House Mexico). Aguilar-Zéleny writes with versatility in both Spanish and English. And her constant topics are the search for identity, human relationships, migration, gender, and violence.

Something that I think also intrigued me was that she is a norteña writer. I could sense that we came from similar places, not only because we are both women and writers, but also because of the inevitable influence that being from the border has in the life of any individual. I grew up in a place marked by migration and cultural exchange, but also by militarization because of the drug war. It is beautiful and horrible at the same time. Sometimes we must face how our surroundings decline, how in a place that once seemed better there are now only remains, leftovers and waste.

Trash (2023) was translated to English this year by Deep Vellum. Translation – in this case in the charge of JD Pluecker – always presupposes various challenges. My first encounter with the novel was through the original Spanish version published in 2018; I noted that it features an oral and forceful narrative, a sort of homage to the phonetics of language, the portrait of a culture conveyed in the selection of vocabulary and the construction of solid, three-dimensional characters. How to do justice to a novel that can be heard while it is being read?

One thing is clear, this work reaffirms that translation must necessarily be a creative process. The freedom and creative license of the translator allows one to make choices that will help convey the essence of the novel to the reader. I was curious to see how Pluecker would be able to transmit the orality of the novel to Anglophone audiences. And he was right in his decision: to opt for a multilingual approach where English and Spanish are mixed to provide the sonorous experience that the original language offers in this novel.

The novel tells the separate stories of three women: the leader of a community residing in the municipal dump of Ciudad Juárez, a researcher interested in studying the community, and a transgender woman who runs a sex workers’ house. The stories of each of these characters are interwoven, showing marginality in contrast to privilege, migration, and cross-culturalism. The setting, and therefore stories, are just as Gloría Anzaldúa explains: ‘‘The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country, a border culture.’’

The novel creates a portrait of the borderlands through its characters: Firstly, Alicia, a young woman who, after being abandoned by her mother – who worked cleaning houses in El Paso and who always made comparisons between life in Mexico and in the United States:

She worked cleaning houses on the other side, over there, with gringos or for Mexicans who lived like gringos, I’m not sure. I just know she crossed the bridge downtown every day to get to gringolandia. It’s shit going back and forth, but the shit pays well, she’d tell anyone she ran into.

The author makes us ponder how difficult life can be when for some, childhood is a mere luxury and innocence an old habit. We enjoyed our youth depending on the extent of our privilege. I think about it in this way: Alicia was never going to receive an Easy-Bake Oven on Christmas; from her sad role she would find its cardboard box in the dump and exchange it for a few pesos. What are the myriad ways that our bodies can be discarded, transgressed, and used? Alicia has been abused and neglected. But there are two things that make Alicia survive: anger and the community of the Ciudad Juarez garbage dump. This is how she can cope with the vulnerability that comes with her youth and social class.

Secondly, there is the character of Griselda, a well-educated woman who migrated because of a family tragedy to Texas. There she lives with her aunt, who raised Griselda and her sister as her as her daughters and made it possible for each of them to get ahead. Griselda questions what happens to those who cannot get out of the context that pressures them and what happens to those who live off scraps because there is nothing else. As a character who moves between borders, she allows us to see how two cultures combine to create their own identity and sense of belonging:

Sometimes I ask myself who we would have become if our parents hadn’t died. If we’d stayed in Juárez. No doubt, we wouldn’t be who we are now. I imagine a normal life, the two of us growing up in the furniture store, working for our dad. (…) One of us pregnant at seventeen, the other teaching literacy classes or catechism in some neighborhood on the edge of town. Both of us with an uncertain future, like la tía now.

Thirdly, there is Reyna, who lives a completely different life from before her transition to womanhood. She decides to migrate from Ecatepec to follow the ‘‘American Dream’’. She lives and works in the United States, but following after her dissatisfaction with that she decides to make a drastic change in her life. She becomes the woman in charge of a house of prostitutes as she sees herself as their mother. Reyna feels that her retirement is approaching, and it is her wish to return to her hometown. Through this character, we see the embodiment of important themes such as migration, gender, sexuality, violence, corruption, and the desire to return to one’s origins.

The narrative shows the role that the territorial aspect plays in the imaginary. Likewise, the border as the setting of a literary work allows us to visualize the cultural hybridization produced by the proximity between territories. As García Canclini proposes, such hybridization is a characteristic of many contemporary societies because of the mixture and fusion of diverse cultural elements. Aguilar Zéleny uses the role of language as a canvas to show that we are here (Mexico) but from time to time, there is something that shows how close we are to there (United States).

Where I’m from, we call those towns and cities far from the country’s capital ”no man’s land”. It is a joke, but also a reality. It reflects the lack of structure, absence of institutions, no laws, or rules, just people living within their community and moving on. Walking through a border town can both amuse you and make your skin crawl. People just dance and pistea to have fun and to forget. Let the sounds of gunshots in the background be covered by the music of Los Tigres del Norte or Ramón Ayala, or perhaps Peso Pluma to be more fashionable. Nemesio García Naranjo said it well: “so far from God and so close to the United States.”

In this story the characters do not coexist in the narrative in a traditional way, but in each individual story we can see sketches and hints of the other. As readers we can fill in blanks that the characters can’t because they don’t have the picture that we as readers do. And despite a reality as frightening as Reyna describes:

This city is going to fuckin hell. Cause I’m saying, even though we’re okay here in this neighborhood, the city is going to fuckin hell, and fast. All you gotta do is walk the streets and you’ll see a ton of crosses everywhere or posters with faces of the girls who disappeared. Just go downtown and look at the buildings, pockmarks from bullets on the walls, cracked windows or full-on covered with bars, or empty on the inside.

The knowledge we have as readers permits us to see those spaces for hope, compassion, and care. Seeing how a place is taken away by la chingada, seeing all that is left after the disaster leads us to create safe spaces, even if they are only symbolic. The metaphor of trash is not an ending; the trash in this story connects our stories. It reminds us of the utter baseness of the world, but also of the will to hold on to life.

Each of the stories of these characters reveal the diverse forms of otherness. In a short story by Dahlia de la Cerda, Mexico is described as a country that devours women. And the portrayal is true, in these characters and in the circumstances that surround them: the patriarchy that murders or disappears them, the poverty and lack of opportunities that consumes them, the organized crime that conditions the way they live their lives. But why, despite the misfortunes, do we think it is worth staying there? And that is something that Aguilar-Zéleny also shows: it is us in connection with other women who can create safe spaces. Sorority. That is why it makes sense that three stories become one – because we take care of each other. This is how nosotras stop being las otras.