Inherit the Land

This wrenching photo essay by Jack Lueders-Booth provides a rare and intimate view of the personal lives, dwellings and struggles of families who live and work in the garbage dumps of Tijuana, Mexico.Lueders-Booth’s penetrating photographs, made over a six-year period, are further illuminated in a personal way with an essay by prize-winning writer Luis Alberto Urrea. Author of the current bestseller The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, Urrea worked as a missionary in the 1980s in the dumps that Lueders-Booth depicts in Inherit the Land.This will be the third collaboration between Lueders-Booth and Urrea. In the first two, Across the Wire and By the Lake of Sleeping Children, Lueders-Booth’s photographs served to illustrate Urrea’s text. In Inherit the Land, Urrea’s writing augments Lueders-Booth’s photographs.What has been produced, over these years of unprecedented access to the garbage dumps, tarpaper shacks, barrios, jails, back alleys and forbidding canyons of this unknown border, is a vast and comprehensive image bank of pictures the likes of which have rarely been seen. Few have had the chance to penetrate the daily lives of their subjects so completely as has Lueders-Booth. His cameras have lived among the people he photographs, he has picked trash with them, baptized their babies, played with their children while their mothers cook him meals gleaned from the trash dumps in the hills.—Luis UrreaJack Lueders-Booth’s photographs are included in the collections of many museums and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York. After retiring from 30 years of teaching at Harvard University, Lueders-Booth continues to teach and photograph in and around his hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts.Luis Alberto Urrea’s books have received a number of literary awards, including the American Book Award and The Christopher Award. Urrea currently teaches and lives with his family in Naperville, Illinois.