Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize

September 19, 2005–January 8, 2006
Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries

Guatemala City Dump: Life at the Rim

MISTY KEASLER AND CHARLES D'AMBROSIO (2003)

The dump at the heart of Guatemala City, one of the world’s largest, serves as a makeshift village for hundreds of Mayan Indians who have migrated from the rural mountains in search of work and better lives. Many of them were uprooted when army campaigns destroyed their former villages during a thirty-six-year civil war that lasted until 1996. Lacking marketable skills and facing a significant language barrier, these struggling new urban dwellers drift without work or money for subsistence. Most dwellings, only a few yards away from the dump, are made of cardboard, cement, and corrugated tin. The residents “move to the dump, rummaging through the trash to find, essentially, a life—food and housing. They eat what others have thrown away; they erect hovels out of scrap material. The rim of the dump is now a ghetto for Indians, many of whom stay for months, even years,” write Misty Keasler and Charles D’Ambrosio.



VIDEO
Excerpts of an Interview with Misty Keasler





PHOTO GALLERY
Photographs by Misty Keasler










banner image:

Installation view of Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Lange–Taylor Prize. Photograph by Christoper Sims.


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