La Chureca grew from catastrophe. On December 23, 1972, a devastating earthquake struck Managua, destroying roughly 70 percent of the city, killing thousands, and leaving tens of thousands unemployed. In the aftermath, families with no other options began scavenging the rubble for metals, building materials, and anything that could be sold or reused. Much of what they gathered ended up at the dump site. Some returned home at the end of each day. Others, left homeless by the quake, built shelters from the wreckage itself and stayed. What started as a survival strategy hardened into a permanent community. By the time the earthquake's aftershocks had faded from memory, La Chureca had become a fixture of Managua's landscape — a place the city needed for its waste but preferred not to see.

The churequeros developed systems. Over the years, they learned to organize the incoming waste, identifying and extracting recyclable and salvageable materials they could sell for small profits. It was grueling, dangerous work. Thick smoke from fires set by municipal authorities to reduce the volume of garbage hung over the site. The air carried the smell of burning plastic, lead, shoe glue, and human waste. Studies found elevated levels of persistent organochlorine pollutants and polybrominated diphenyl ethers in the bodies of children who lived and worked at the site. Researcher William Grisby Vergara described La Chureca as a war zone and an "enormous breeding ground for flies, microbes, rotting food, burnt trash, hundreds of plastic bags." Despite these conditions, the community endured — families raised children, maintained social bonds, and built the only lives available to them.

La Chureca drew attention from international organizations and NGOs who built community centers, libraries, and schools within the dump. ProNica, a Quaker solidarity group, worked alongside Catholic Youth Advocates, Manna Project International, and others. FUNJOFUDESS, a local NGO, partnered with Manna Project to operate Casa Base de Salud, the only health clinic serving the community. These organizations did not pretend that their work was sufficient to transform the structural conditions that created La Chureca, but they provided education, healthcare, and community spaces that the residents would not otherwise have had. For the children especially, the schools and libraries represented a possibility that the dump itself could not offer.

The turning point came in August 2007, when Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, the Vice President of Spain, visited La Chureca during an official trip to Nicaragua. What she saw prompted action. Within months, the Spanish Agency of International Development Cooperation (AECID) announced a 30-million-euro development project with three goals: close the existing dump, create a recycling industry to replace it, and provide housing and social integration for the families who had been living and working there. The project's stated purpose was straightforward: to bring dignity to people. Whether the word dignity is adequate to describe what was owed to the churequeros — people who for decades sorted through a city's waste to survive, who raised children in conditions that scientific studies documented as toxic — is a question the project's architects left to others. What they built was a beginning.

La Chureca sits a few hundred meters from the Museo Sitio Huellas de Acahualinca, which preserves human footprints more than 2,100 years old — the oldest known tracks in Central America. The proximity is hard to ignore. In one place, the earliest evidence of human presence in this landscape, feet pressing into volcanic mud. In the other, the waste products of a modern city, and the people who made their lives within them. Both sites speak to what human beings will do to survive, and both are preserved on the same stretch of Managua's lakeshore. The footprints of Acahualinca were left by people walking steadily through uncertain ground. The churequeros did the same, in their own way, for decades.