Buenos Aires, Argentina

Cartoneros

The cartonero first emerged on a widespread scale in Buenos Aires with the 2001 demise of the 1991 Convertibility Plan, whereby the Argentine peso was tied to the U.S. dollar. The collapse of the national economy resulted in the freezing of bank accounts and the biggest foreign debt default in world economic history. The percentage of people who were unemployed or underemployed increased dramatically in the wake of this crisis, and many of the newly unemployed were from the middle classes who encountered poverty for the first time. Confronted with this hardship, people turned to rummaging and sorting through trash to collect recyclable material—usually cardboard—in order to sell it to the recycling companies located in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The term cartonero is somewhat of a misnomer because these informal circuits of recyclers also collect glass bottles, plastic, newspapers, and metal.

History

Although the cartonero is a recent phenomenon, the history of the disposal of material wastes and the circulation of garbage in Buenos Aires stretches back centuries, beginning with the foundation of the city, in 1580, by Juan de Garay. Governmental urban hygiene policies have shaped the living conditions of the poor who depend on others’ trash to survive. In 1860, for example, the municipality established the system of the Quema (meaning “burn”) in the southern part of the city where trash was sent for incineration. This was a new technique that illustrates a major change in how Buenos Aires treated and disposed of waste. Before the Quema, trash was typically thrown into streams, indoor wells, or fields. Accompanying the advent of the Quema was the emergence of a new neighborhood in the same area inhabited exclusively by people devoted to the collection of garbage. By the end of the 1920s, the lower Flores neighborhood dump in the capital became the largest waste disposal site in the city. It lasted until the 1960s, when it was cleaned up and urbanized with the construction of the Almirante Brown Park and the channeling of the Cildañez stream. For many years, men, women, and children had collected paper, used rags, cans, glass, and even bones, gathering them for use as a source of heat. Argentine painter Antonio Berni portrayed the misery of the garbage collectors in the lower Flores neighborhood by inventing a character, Juanito Laguna, a young man whose daily survival depends on scraping together all sorts of remnants from the city.

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