Trash

Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny received her MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of four short-story books and a young adult novel series. Her novel Todo Eso Es Yo won the National Book Award in Tamaulipas, México in 2015, and was republished as The Everything I Have Lost (Cinco Puntos Press, 2020) as a rewriting in English. Her work has been included in anthologies in México, the United States, Australia, Peru, and South Korea. She has also given conferences and participated in various panels addressing the work of women writers of Latin America, as well as panels on teaching bilingual creative writing and/or teaching fiction to first or second generation students.

"Trash interweaves the voices of three women with connections to the municipal garbage dump of Ciudad Juâarez, Mexico. Sylvia Aguilar Zâeleny's English-language debut shows the complexities of survival and joy, love and violence for three women: a teenager abandoned by her guardian at the dump, a scientist doing research on residents of the dump, and a transwoman living nearby who is the matriarch of a group of sex workers. Each character navigates family, abandonment, power, jealousy, greed, and multiple taboos around sexuality and gender violence. Their stories are linked by geography and by ideas of waste and abandonment. As Aguilar Zâeleny explores these territories, she asks crucial questions: Who is seen as disposable and why? How do women find their own means of survival and joy in the midst of a perilous sociopolitical context? What does it mean to live a life in a time of austerity and extreme violence? Trash is a critical intervention in Mexican literature"