While waiting for the final tweaks to the hotpress – by the way, Tomas has tweaked it and is delivering it to INTI this Thursday, December 13 – the remarkable Erika Loritz has helped us conduct street interviews with cartoneros. (I met Erika in October on a side trip to Iruya in Northwest Argentina where she was studying the impact of tourism on indigenous communities. Her in situ mentor was Victor Bretscher whose Finca Potrero cultural ecotourism project had received World Bank Indigenous Community Development funds http://www.fincapotrero.org.ar/_english.html. Coincidently, I learned that Victor had previously worked in Lesotho’s Malealea Valley where I participated in a 2006 Theatre for Development Project. Lesotho, of course, is where Caroline began her work with local cooperatives and where, if we have to choose a place, the idea of Waste-for-Life began to germinate.)

We have spent most of our time in BA working with cartonero recycling cooperatives. They have the structures in place to successfully incorporate a small manufacturing channel to their mostly collection, sorting, processing and distribution operations. But equally important to us is a common political and social outlook that stresses equity and human interdependence, and we have been the privileged witnesses of these ideas in motion, particularly their commitment to wage equality, non-hierarchical participatory decision making practices, and to ‘socializing’ their knowledge. We did not come to Buenos Aires to be community organizers, and so the individual or small family groups – the informal cartoneros who do much of BA’s recycling – have been, for the most part, a closed book to us. We realized early on that we were not hearing their voices, although we did hear many opinions about them from other people, but we didn’t have either the language skills or the confidence to simply go up to these people on the street and start talking. I spoke about this with Erika in Iruya, and she immediately offered to help us take up this challenge.

[QUICKTIME https://www.wasteforlife.org/movies/cartonero_train.mov 320 196]
(cartoneros taking a special train into Buenos Aires on the Tigre line)

We have done 4 interviews so far and have others to do, so we are not working with a large dataset, however, there is a strong leitmotiv that we can point to, that we’ve been aware of ever since attending The Workers’ Economy: Self Management and the Distribution of Wealth conference in July, and that can be summed up with the phrase, ‘sin patrón.’ This phrase, which means ‘without a boss’ or ‘without an overseer,’ gained currency during the recovered factory movement that began with the 2001 economic crisis, but we heard it used over and over again by the cartoneros we interviewed to describe the essential quality of their lives in very positive terms. They did not want to work for anyone, they did not want to be subject to the collective decision-making processes of a collective, they did not want to bother anyone, and they did not want to be bothered. It is still much too early to sum up the content of the interviews, and we have a lot of transcribing and thinking to do, and loads to read up on about informal work, but with Erika’s help we have a special opportunity to learn something about this previously unavailable population of urban recyclers.