Magic Circle of Education
Twenty Years of Telling the Cartonera Story I Heard from My Student
Image of the author’s personal cartonera collection. Image by Ksenija Bilbija. Copyright Ksenija Bilbija, 2022.
Some twenty years ago, in 2003, a student in one of my undergraduate classes brought to my attention a strange 14-page long book that looked like something his grade school sister could have made at home (hand painted cover included!) and asked me if he could write a final class paper about it. I was puzzled when he explained that a friend of his had just brought it from Buenos Aires, that she bought it on the street from a cartonero, and that it contained the unpublished story El pianista by a renowned Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia. “Every night cartoneros pick up cardboard (cartón) from the streets of Buenos Aires,” my student continued, eager to add some tell to his show, “and push their heavy loaded carts to the outskirts of the city of 14 million people where they are paid about 30 cents for two pounds of cardboard. Eloisa Cartonera pays them five times more and makes book covers out of that recycled material,” he said, already out of breath. “And they also pay 3 pesos an hour to the kids who would otherwise collect cardboard from the streets. They get together in the back of grocery stores and cut and paint the book covers. My friend paid 5 pesos for this book, but she would have paid double,” he continued. The class I was teaching was about Argentina and the post-Menem economic crisis of 2001, a time when four presidents were replaced in two weeks. The Argentine peso lost parity with the US dollar, saving accounts were frozen and therefore many small and midsized businesses went bankrupt. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their source of income, thereby losing their place in the system of production. The combination of nearly one-fifth of the citizens of Buenos Aires living below the poverty line together with an explosive increase in the price of paper gave birth to a new occupation: cartoneros, or cardboard pickers. But there was also something in the voice of this student that I will never forget: passion, excitement, the urge to tell the story of a brilliant idea and become part of it. Not only did he want to write his paper about an iconoclastic, new publisher called Eloisa Cartonera, but he wanted to tell the story to as many people as possible. Little did I know that day towards the end of the Fall of 2003 when I told him that he should definitely write his paper about it, that the idea of making books by hand out of recycled cardboard—bought at five times the market price from those whose daily survival depended on its collection, thereby creating jobs for their family members—would resonate beyond the Argentine capital and that UW-Madison would become one of its protagonists.
Only five years later there were eight cartonera publishers in seven Latin American countries, and since then some 300 new ones were founded and are making books in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. The brilliance behind Eloisa Cartonera is in showing that the garbage that cartoneros collected—technically the product from which all the value has been used up—actually does have worth, just like the cartoneros themselves; people who have value despite the fact that they have been relegated to the status of societal detritus. The Argentine publisher brought older technology and familiar tools back to the practice of bookmaking: cardboard, cutting knives, paint, brushes, and stencils. Then, they handed those tools to the casualties of the new neoliberal market of the economically devastated country and opened doors to other members of the community sensitive to social (in)justice and willing to participate in a bookmaking project. Technology with personality is relational—we can relate to it as it creates relationships and emotional meanings. To this texture were added words by emerging writers that were neither formulaic nor predictable. Books fell into the neoliberal minefield, where the market had determined their value solely in economic terms. What mattered at the turn of the century (and still does) was that books were consumable. In a way—a somewhat romantic way—by hand painting each recycled cover, one by one, books made from cardboard recovered an “auratic” quality lost by mechanical reproduction, as remarked by Walter Benjamin.
Cartonera books accumulate resilience and resonate with different kinds of citizenship and readership. In that sense, they are in the forefront of the sustainability challenge that our society faces, not only in terms of environmental aspects and the recycling that cartoneros do, but also in their role of cultivating and sustaining the practice of reading—as well as sustaining those writers willing to experiment and engage with the unknown possibilities that language and imagination offer. Furthermore, they foster and disseminate ethical and social qualities of diverse cultural communities while engaging the aesthetic mandates of our century. Cartonera books radiate the aura of resistance and action! Coming from the margin, they are bound to settle accounts with colonial history and neoliberal economy. However, their trajectory remains all but straightforward and predictable. Today’s cartoneras share the anti-imperialist imaginary while also publishing editions in indigenous languages, calling attention to gender imbalance, immigrant issues, and by working with incarcerated populations.
All cartoneras have two things in common: pages of their books are wrapped in recycled hand-painted cardboard, and they support social equality and egalitarianism. They are committed to criticizing and resisting the exploitation brought by neoliberal capitalism. In terms of book culture, they strive to de-commodify literacy and make literature accessible to under-privileged readers.
It is precisely that aura of resistance and action that touched and seduced my student when his friend gave him a strange book. Soon after, our Memorial library’s Spanish collection, guided by an impeccable instinct of the librarian Paloma Célis Carbajal, started purchasing cartonera books and placing them alongside Bibles and other sacred and unique volumes from past centuries. Given their iconoclastic size and face, they could not be organized alongside regular books and found their home in the Special collection. Our library, with the biggest collection of cartonera books, became a globally renowned center for cartonera research. Coinciding with the Wisconsin Book Festival in October of 2009, Paloma and I organized the conference Recycling Latin American Bookscapes and several workshops whose purpose was twofold: to connect the members of different cartonera initiatives who came from Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico, who in most cases did not know each other; and to bring together members of the community of scholars who were already working on research projects related to this iconoclastic paradigm along with members of the local community, public schools, and environmental agencies. The simultaneous publication of the volume of bilingual manifestoes, Akademia cartonera: A Primer of Latin American Cartonera Publishers (Parallel Press, 2009), marked the first wave of the cartonera publishing phenomenon. The volume also included a compact disc with nine academic articles written by a number of our graduate and undergraduate students along with scholars from other universities. The entire content of the book was also made available online, and each of the publishers was given 100 copies of the volume so that they could place around them recycled, hand-painted cardboard covers and sell them in their respective cities. Some of those students will continue their research and write their dissertations on the cartonera phenomenon.
The rebellious story my student was eager to tell fell on fertile ground. In the past 20 years, many cartonera publishers were invited to the UW-Madison campus to give workshops and break the routine of our literature classes with laughter, paint, cardboard and newly made books that contained narratives of their lives. At least half a dozen of my students won Hilldale and Sophomore awards for doing field research in Peru, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil on cartoneras. LACIS supported several graduates with internships in cartoneras abroad. The concept is not unknown in Madison’s high schools and elementary schools. My colleagues and I regularly teach about cartoneras and I can testify that even cell phones fall into oblivion when students grab scissors, paint, and glue, and start making books! Most recently, in June of 2022, I saw a cartonera workshop announced on the entrance of the Mercado Miramar grocery store and taquería in Madison, so I would dare to say that cartoneras that started in grocery stores in Buenos Aires have made a full circle and are here to stay not only in the university library but also in our community!
Image of books made in the Cárcel de Segovia by incarcerated people for Aida Cartonera. Image by Ksenija Bilbija. Copyright Ksenija Bilbija, 2022.
About the Author
Ksenija Bilbija is a professor of Spanish American Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in cultural studies, gender criticism, post-traumatic memory and cartonera publishing. Her most recent book Ni perversas ni traidoras: Ficciones de colaboración femenina en las dictaduras de Argentina y Chile was just published by Cuarto propio in Chile.