Scrap Metals

Recently, a psychic pathway emerged between my present self and the eight-year-old boy who lived on the west side of Rio de Janeiro. Along that pathway were feelings, thoughts, and words that had been suspended in a kind of purgatory. They resurfaced while I was watching a video about Brazilian workers’ rights. The video featured laborers whose days are consumed by long commutes into Rio’s city center and affluent coastal neighborhoods. Many came from the city’s often-forgotten neighborhoods in the North and West Zones.

One scene showed the train station at Senador Camará, the neighborhood where I was born and spent nearly the first decade of my life. Senador Camará is known throughout Rio for the many social problems that marginalized communities often endure. Much of the neighborhood was developed during Brazil’s military dictatorship era (1964–1985), a period when poor and disenfranchised residents were directly and indirectly pushed away from central and beachfront areas in an effort to conceal the city’s inequalities, sending them to neighborhoods like Camará.

With more than 100,000 residents, it contains one of the largest concentrations of favelas in Rio de Janeiro and in the Americas. The overwhelming majority of residents are working-class people who often bear the brunt of state violence, community violence, and the inequalities of the local and global economies. Adjacent to the neighborhood in Bangu sits a landfill, or more accurately, a mountain of trash, where Rio de Janeiro disposes of its waste.

Not only Rio’s waste but increasingly the world’s. 

Numerous reports have documented the export of waste from Europe and the United States to countries in the Global South, including Brazil. Beyond the economic and racial injustices that Senador Camará already faces, it must also contend with environmental injustice, serving as a dumping ground for the refuse of a metropolitan area of more than thirteen million people and, increasingly, for the waste streams of the Global North.

The workers’-rights video included brief clips of children searching through garbage and collecting scrap metal to resell or repurpose. The landfill draws thousands of people each day: men, women, and children known throughout Brazil as catadores. The footage occupied only a few seconds of a much longer video, yet those images lodged themselves inside me. Not only because of the neighborhood but because of those children. One child looked strikingly familiar. Something that had long remained dormant in me made itself known that day.

As someone who researches transgenerational trauma and emotion, I understand that trauma is not constrained by time. Feelings and symptoms do not obey chronology. We cannot schedule integration. We can only hope to recognize what emerges when it finally surfaces.

The younger me, alongside my two older brothers, spent hours in a Rio de Janeiro landfill searching for scrap metal. That child, young Sostenes, known then as Nenê, became aware of class and race long before he possessed the language necessary to articulate what he was observing.

As a cria, a child raised in the favela, I learned early that there was another Rio on the other side of the city. A Rio of beaches, five-star hotels, parties, and ease. A Rio that often excluded people who looked like me. Many times throughout adulthood, I have done something similar myself. I have practiced a kind of internal urban segregation. I have kept that child in the favela and left him there because he is difficult to explain. Because he is embarrassing. Because he complicates the story. It is easier to leave him behind than to invite him into the parts of my life I now inhabit, into the professional circles, privileges, and institutions to which I have gained access. When he appears, he brings discomfort: His speech. His clothes. His skin, dry from spending entire days under the Rio sun searching for scrap metal in a landfill. For years, I looked away. 

I remember the day the plane left Rio de Janeiro and landed in Miami. Flying out of Rio was surreal. I got a picturesque view of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, where the mountains and forests interact effortlessly with the ocean. It was a view of my city that I had never seen before. 

As soon as we arrived at the Miami airport, my brother and I saw our first limousine. We became mesmerized and completely propagandized by it. Soon afterward, however, while driving to our new home in my father’s friend’s Dodge Caravan, we were hit with a strong smell that reminded us of rotten eggs. My brothers and I joked that someone had farted. My mother became embarrassed and upset until my father’s friend explained that the smell was coming from a nearby landfill.

The second half of my childhood unfolded in a town called Pompano Beach, just north of Miami. Pompano, though now in the midst of gentrification, was known throughout South Florida during the 1990s and early 2000s for many of the struggles marginalized communities often face.

Pompano was the place where South Florida dumped its trash. The Pompano Beach landfill, widely known as Monarch Hill, or “Mount Trashmore,” sits only a mile or two from the house where I lived as a teenager. Just far enough not to smell it, but we often drove past on a weekly basis. One thing I became particularly aware of were rants from my friend’s older brother, who spoke about the landfills, the highways that cut through the neighborhood, and how, in his words, the government was directly trying to poison and kill Black and brown bodies. As a teenager, hearing a young adult say something like that sticks with you.  

When I was nineteen, I began working at a granite-countertop warehouse located just down the street from the landfill in Pompano. Being that close to the landfill every day, you begin to normalize the smell. After a few weeks, you hardly notice it anymore, but you are reminded of how overwhelming it is whenever a new employee starts working there. They comment on the smell day after day until, eventually, their nose adapts. I now wonder about the visceral feeling I must have carried throughout my preteen and teenage years each time we drove past Monarch Hill, and whether my body was remembering, on some level, the landfill in Rio de Janeiro.

A few years ago, I had coffee with a friend who is a physician and whom I had not seen in years. During our conversation, he reminded me that I had once told him about my experience as a child scrap-metal picker in Rio. I have no memory of telling him this, but according to him, I recounted the story rather casually.

He then told me about a film he had watched starring Wagner Moura and Martin Sheen called Trash, which follows the lives of child trash pickers in Rio de Janeiro. As we discussed the film, I became aware that the landfill was not only in Rio de Janeiro. It was also present in our conversation, even though I was thousands of miles away in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was in the language between us, in the breath exchanged across the table, and most of all, it was inside me. 

As someone who has spent years in analysis as both patient and clinician, I understand that many people come to therapy carrying a mountain, or perhaps a landfill, inside themselves. They carry unspoken stories, histories, experiences they regard as trash, or memories they have buried deeply.  

In the consulting room, we support patients in creating language, narrative, feelings, and meaning out of experiences that were once treated as waste. Something discarded becomes useful. Something forgotten becomes recyclable, refurbishable, and capable of taking on a new form. Eventually, a pathway opens toward something that has been buried in the landfill we all carry within us.

In many ways, this mirrors what I did as a child. Back then, I collected scrap metal and searched for discarded materials that could be repurposed. It was a way of conserving resources, reducing waste, and creating value out of what others had thrown away.

What was once an informal, self-created economy born out of poverty and state neglect has become a central pillar of my theoretical understanding of the clinical space.

Only now am I beginning to see the threads that connect those experiences: the child who collected scrap metal on the west side of Rio de Janeiro; the teenager who drove past a landfill in South Florida; the psychotherapist discussing a film with a physician about trash pickers; and my present self watching a workers’-rights video.  

When I told my mother I was thinking about writing this essay and asked whether she could help me remember details from when I was somewhere between six and eight years old, she downplayed the whole thing.

“You boys barely did any work,” she said. “You and your brothers mostly chased each other around and used the scrap metal as swords to play sword fights.”

Interestingly, her attempt to minimize the experience actually helped me understand a feeling I had struggled to make sense of: I never carried an overtly negative feeling toward that period of my life.

I may not have fully registered the pain and trauma of being a child laborer inside a city dump because, at the time, it was simply my normal. It existed alongside all the other odd jobs I did in Brazil.

Talking and writing about it now gives me access to the feelings I did not possess the language for then. It allows me to experience compassion for someone who feels distant in years but remains present in my life in ways I am only beginning to understand.

The ability to revisit those experiences, to feel them differently, and to give them language may be one of the deepest forms of agency we can have over our own history.