By Alessandra Narváez Varela
“All of this stuff around us, it’s not trash. It’s food, shelter, clothes, furniture, life,” says Alicia, one of the narrators in Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s “Trash,” a novel that examines our relationships to trash – literal and metaphorical – by interweaving three powerful narratives that pierce the soul.
Or as Alicia would put it, trash is the “sole” – for she is as hard as the soles of the mismatched shoes she prizes. She’s also armed with a bat, always clad in black with a cap, living in and from a trash dump in Ciudad Juárez, one half of the borderland where this book is set.
In El Paso, we find Gris, the second narrator, a doctor interested in garbology, or the pursuit of a complete understanding of the relationship scavengers like Alicia have with waste – or more accurately, with the “mountains of trash” created by these two cities.
For this reason, “Trash,” serves as a compelling indictment of those behaviors that lead us to forgo meaningful recycling practices and depend on one-time-use, toxic plastics, without a care for their long-term effects on the planet and on the often invisible communities that thrive despite and because of us.
“Trash” is the El Paso Matters Book Club’s current read.
However, “Trash” is too masterful to resort to lectures, too respectful of its readers, because the individuals living off waste and those studying it are more than the sum of their parts.
Alicia, first nicknamed “La Peluda” then “La Pelona,” a once-voracious reader, has been abandoned by her guardian and abused by the latter’s boyfriend. Gris, a native Juarense whose life changed when her tía Mayela, a lawyer living in El Paso, took her in and took over for her dead parents, is now dealing with her aunt’s dementia and the unraveling of identity that comes with this illness.
Reyna completes the book’s narratorial triumvirate. She is a transgender “holy godmother of wayward women,” protecting and guiding sex workers operating in a pistachio-colored house in a barrio close to the trash dump. Reyna is unlike any other Virgil we’ve encountered.
She revels in solipsistic sermones a lá Juan Gabriel, curling her lashes even to sweep the porch, adding raisins to picadillo and sharing pieces of her life with humor and candor: “Maybe life is about never being complete, and you just keep walking that road to completeness over a lifetime.”
What does it mean to be complete, especially when society has condemned you? For Reyna, aware of the transphobia that claimed the life of one of her friends and the rampant femicides in Ciudad Juárez, it’s about making sacrifices to feel as you want. Be who you want.
“Love is love, chula…I like to love and be loved,” she says in her deft Spanglish tongue.
Without simplifying the thematic richness of “Trash,” I believe love is at the core of its narrator’s experiences. More so, it’s about what results from a lack of familial love – especially in Alicia and Reyna’s cases – and the secrets and pain we keep and hold in its name.
Indeed, the deciphering of a secret that connects all three narrators is what drives the plot toward the end of “Trash.”
But Alicia, Gris and Reyna don’t remain etched in our minds because of a secreto. Aguilar Zéleny is too skillful in her character construction and braiding of three narratives for that.
What we are left with, what will echo when Gris faces a life without her aunt and when Alicia and Reyna take a bus to a so-called promised land, is what they find in the people who have chosen to love them as they are; to guide them as they figure out who they’re supposed to be in a world where trash is the waste, the people and the past we leave behind.
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