Única Looking at the Sea

Book excerpt: Fiction. Latino/Latina Studies. Inside the great landfill at R�o Azul, �nica and her friends, her family, society's cast-offs, struggle to survive on what those in the city throw away. This story of the "divers" (buzos), the community of Western untouchables who live in landfills and dumps, immediately made Fernando Contreras Castro famous in his native Costa Rica and around Latin America. Now available in English for the first time in Elaine S. Brooks' translation, �NICA LOOKING AT THE SEA tells the story of an underclass invisible to the urban bourgeoisie who produce the trash they eke out a living from, a story no less pertinent in the US and the rest of the English-speaking world than it is in Latin America.