Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment) [1st ed. 2023] 9783031288302, 3031288300

Table of contents :
Preface
References
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
1 The Environment in (Eco)Critical Perspective
2 Ecocriticism: Then and Now
3 Ecocriticism and Latin America
4 Visualizing Loss in Latin America
References
Chapter 2: Destruction: The Garbage Dump as a Global Biocritical Trope
1 Unfathomable Fluidity: Toward a Condition of “Exception”
2 Collateral Residues of Modernity’s Production, Consumption, and Disposal
3 Residual Humans (or Human Ruins)
4 Visual Tales of Indistinctness
5 Intermission: Verbitsky
6 Narratives of Bioenvironmental Destruction
7 Contemporary Slums as a Reconfiguration of the Dump (Other, New Conditions of “Exception”)
8 Out of Sight, Out of Mind
References
Chapter 3: Sustainability: Waste and Its Social, Cultural, and Aesthetic Re-significations
1 From Destruction to Environmental Conservation: The Enacted Object of Waste
2 The “Subversive” Condition of Waste?
3 Waste from the Global City
4 Cartoneros
5 Pepenadores
6 Catadores
7 Diving in Havana: Dream or Nightmare?
8 Intermission II: Berni
9 From the Street to the (Art) Workshop and Back Again
10 By Way of Conclusion: A Bio/Ecocritical Reading
References
Chapter 4: Preservation: Nature and Urbanism from Utopia to Dystopia
1 Utopian Imaginaries and Urban Territories
2 Green Utopias, Ecological Utopias
3 Green Utopias in Urban Venues
4 Science and Nature in Cities
5 Nature (Re)Appropriated: A Utopian Effort for Private Societies in the Twenty-First Century
6 Dystopia for all and Futurist Ecocide in the Latin American City of the Twenty-First Century
7 Coda
References
Chapter 5: Bioecocriticism: A New Critical Episteme
References
Index

Citation preview

LITERATURES, CULTURES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Visualizing Loss in Latin America Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment

Gisela Heffes Translated by Grady C. Wray

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment Series Editors

Ursula K. Heise Department of English University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA Gisela Heffes Rice University Houston, TX, USA

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment focuses on new research in the Environmental Humanities, particularly work with a rhetorical or literary dimension. Books in this series explore how ideas of nature and environmental concerns are expressed in different cultural contexts and at different historical moments. They investigate how cultural assumptions and practices, as well as social structures and institutions, shape conceptions of nature, the natural, species boundaries, uses of plants, animals and natural resources, the human body in its environmental dimensions, environmental health and illness, and relations between nature and technology. In turn, the series makes visible how concepts of nature and forms of environmentalist thought and representation arise from the confluence of a community’s ecological and social conditions with its cultural assumptions, perceptions, and institutions.

Gisela Heffes

Visualizing Loss in Latin America Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment

Translated by Grady C. Wray

Gisela Heffes Rice University Houston, TX, USA Translated by   Grady C. Wray

University of Oklahoma Norman, OK, USA

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment ISBN 978-3-031-28830-2    ISBN 978-3-031-28831-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28831-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Ken, To Sarah and Nathaniel To my mother Visualizing loss means making sense of absence. But what does it mean to make sense of presence when the world as we know it starts to vanish before our eyes? In the past years, I’ve been witnessing a huge deal of losses, from cherished species and precious forests to loved ones. I dedicate this book to those people who have marked me in different ways, and while they are no longer here, they reverberate in these pages because of their very existence. Because of their passing from this world. Because they are still, somehow, here, not completely extinct: my father, David Viñas, Josefina Ludmer, Carol and John Merriman, Adriana Astutti, Sergio Chejfec, and Sylvia Molloy.

Preface

There is an ever-growing wasteland around the ranches, greater every year, that frightens and saddens. —Rafael Barrett, “Tree Haters” (1907) Trans. by Patricia González

When the book Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación [Politics of Destruction / Poetics of Preservation] was published in 2013, the field of Latin American ecocriticism was in an embryonic stage. Over the past 10 years, Latin American environmental studies have undergone incredible growth which encompasses new areas of intellectual inquiry such as the vegetal turn and plant thinking, animal studies, queer ecology, new materialisms, waste and garbology, toxicity, and Amerindian epistemologies, among others. The translation of this book into English affords me new opportunities to discuss the recently published work of scholars and writers around the globe. I have also taken this as an opportunity to further refine my argument, and to expand and update the bibliography. In this spirit, I also decided to change the title of the book to Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment. Why would I make such a move? The book argues that the countless imageries of waste accumulation, a byproduct of our consumption patterns, social aspirations, and cultural values, serve as a reverse metaphor of the ongoing depletion of the environment. As modern extractive fossil fuel-based economies continue to surge, and as the extractive imperial frontier accordingly advances, it has become clear that capitalism has turned into a device that devours nature as a “natural resource” through a digestive operation of vii

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PREFACE

continuous transformation or “commodification of the non-human nature” (Foster and Burkett, 2016). The mechanics of this “social metabolism” inevitably results in the expulsion of refuse, a now amorphous matter that we (scholars, writers, artists) have tentatively categorized as “waste,” although it consists of much more: ruins, decays, vestiges, scraps. How can we visualize loss? Can we see, imagine, project, and account for what is no longer there? What’s left of a vanishing world, and how is environmental depletion imbricated in the complexities of human and non-human entanglements? While documentary filmmakers, journalists, photographers, and scientists have embarked upon the grim task of registering what has vanished, melted, burned, and been wiped off the Earth, I contend that another way of visualizing loss and what is being forever extinguished is by mapping the production of residues, in other words, the remnants of what Capitalism renders unusable and discardable. The question I would like to pursue in the pages of this book is the following: Are depictions of the enormous heaps of waste that pile up either at the bottom of the oceans or along the fringes of cities a useful way to making sense of loss? What role do the aesthetic objects that apprehend the complex human and non-human interdependencies—what is preserved and what is discarded—play, and which type of dialogue do they facilitate not only with the Earth but also with our current anthropogenic time? Poetry, narrative, and art are all aesthetic forms that capture unrelenting entanglements and interdependencies beyond their preliminary intentions: we live in the Anthropocene and we also live the Anthropocene, in the sense that we experience it, which means that it traverses our writings, our thinking, our performances, and, more broadly, our lives, our feelings, our thinking, and our bodies. In other words, there is no outside of the Anthropocene. What do the images of these sites of depletion and what do the portraits of those spaces of disposal and spillage amount to? One could argue that, to some extent, one is the condition of possibility for the other. As we attempt, sometimes unsuccessfully, to grasp and visualize loss, the materiality of what has been extinguished reemerges in a different shape, form, and color to be later disposed of. Where there used to be a mountain or a forest covered with trees, now there is, perhaps somewhere else, a mountain or a terrain covered with plastic, rags, and cardboard. By “externalizing nature” (Miller 2021) through extractive practices and the massive expansion and flow of capital, we encounter not only environmental destruction and degradation but, more importantly, emptiness and

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disappearance. How do we grasp through visual means the temporal, spatial, and material challenges brought about by a process that renders both humans and non-humans into commodities? How do we grasp the scale, the speed, and the irreversibility of a “damaged planet,” as Anna Tsing et al. (2017) have defined it? Or, following Lesley Stern (2017), is it a “garden” or a “grave”? Is it a home or a dump? Bringing this query to my home, how can we envision among a heap of discarded objects awaiting removal on the front yard of a house in Houston (Texas) that flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 a tree from Canada (in the legs of a couch), oil extracted and spilled in Ecuador (through the contours of an old polymer doll), Borneo’s monocrop palm trees instead of that region’s vanished magnificent forests (in an empty Nutella jar), and traces of child labor and exploitation (in the stains of Costa Rican coffee on an old blanket)? What Visualizing Loss seeks to demonstrate is that an aesthetic of waste constitutes both an irrefutable and inexorable testimony to this loss.

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The front yard of a flooded house in Houston (Texas) after Hurricane Harvey, 2017. Photo taken by the author. Gisela Heffes

References Foster, John Bellamy, and Paul Burkett. 2016. Marx and The Earth: An AntiCritique. Boston: Brill Publishers. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. 2021. Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stern, Lesley. 2017. A Garden or a Grave? The Canyonic Landscape of The Tijuana–San Diego Region. In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts of the Anthropocene; Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, 17–29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Acknowledgments

I wrote this book in 2012–2013, in Spanish, under the title Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación. Apuntes para una lectura (eco) crítica del medio ambiente en América Latina. I was then raising two little kids and had a husband who was commuting back and forth to and from Houston. Because this book was required for my tenure evaluation, it was written under lots of pressure and stress. I also wrote this book when the field of environmental humanities in Latin America was almost non-­ existent. In the midst of all these difficulties, who trusted me? Who trusted this book? This book was welcomed right away by my former editor, Adriana Astutti, from the Rosario-based publishing house Beatriz Viterbo. She did everything in her power to have the book ready in time for the tenure review. Once the book was out, I presented it in Buenos Aires through an invitation from Claudia Torres and Luz Horne at the Universidad de San Andrés. They, along with Florencia Garramuño, welcomed the book––and me––again. I feel enormous gratitude for that very cherished moment. It was intimate and yet insightful, enlightening. My beloved advisor, and by then also very good friend, Josefina Ludmer, read it and endorsed it with her usual affection and intellectual rigor accompanied by an inescapable sense of humor. My dear and generous colleague Beatriz González-Stephan wrote a beautiful appraisal for the back cover. The year after I was invited by José Antonio Mazzotti to coordinate a special issue on “Ecocrítica” for the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana. I am indebted to him as well as to all the contributors who agreed to participate in this project. In 2015, the book received the First Honorable Mention from a jury consisting of Francine Masiello, xi

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Mabel Moraña, and Marcy Schwartz. The mention arrived at the same time that my father departed, and it always felt like a little gift from him, from who knows where. At the same time, the book embarked on a journey that had unexpected surprises. I am thankful to all those who have, in many ways, directly or indirectly, contributed to the unfolding journey of this work which now has been translated into English. Because the book came out exactly 10  years ago, it is more than a translation. It is an expanded and revised version, which also explains my decision to change the title. Since its publication, I have presented the ideas laid out in this book in different venues, and I have also published sections either in the form of scholarly articles or book chapters on multiple platforms. I am thankful to those who invited me to be part of their research initiatives as well as to those who motivated me to contribute with pieces geared toward a more general audience (Cristian Alarcón for Revista Anfibia; Rose Mary Salum for Literal; and Héctor Hoyos and June Carolyn Erlick for ReVista, The Harvard Review of Latin America, to name a few). I am especially appreciative of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston for granting me permission to reproduce the two images of Antonio Berni’s wondrous works. I am deeply indebted to my incredible co-editor for the Palgrave series on Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, Ursula Heise, for her warm encouragement to personally contribute to our series. Allie Troyanos, Palgrave’s Senior Publishing Editor, is to be commended and thanked for her endless patience. Grady C. Wray is an incredible translator, but even more, an extraordinary friend. Several colleagues read and re-read the manuscript, contributing to its improvement in so many substantial, generous, and remarkable ways. I am especially indebted to Ken Loiselle and Isis Sadek for their invaluable and insightful suggestions. Without them, this book would have been significantly different. When I published the book in 2013, my children were three and five years old. Since then, I have seen them grow to become two beautiful human beings whose curiosity expands like tiny particles spread by the wind. Perhaps those piles of particles will also one day contribute to the ongoing queries on what it means to visualize loss. Despite their latency, they are always there, awaiting to be seen.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1 The Environment in (Eco)Critical Perspective  1 2 Ecocriticism: Then and Now 13 3 Ecocriticism and Latin America 27 4 Visualizing Loss in Latin America 41 References 44 2 D  estruction: The Garbage Dump as a Global Biocritical Trope 55 1 Unfathomable Fluidity: Toward a Condition of “Exception” 55 2 Collateral Residues of Modernity’s Production, Consumption, and Disposal 61 3 Residual Humans (or Human Ruins) 64 4 Visual Tales of Indistinctness 65 5 Intermission: Verbitsky 77 6 Narratives of Bioenvironmental Destruction 80 7 Contemporary Slums as a Reconfiguration of the Dump (Other, New Conditions of “Exception”) 94 8 Out of Sight, Out of Mind103 References109

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3 S  ustainability: Waste and Its Social, Cultural, and Aesthetic Re-significations115 1 From Destruction to Environmental Conservation: The Enacted Object of Waste115 2 The “Subversive” Condition of Waste?120 3 Waste from the Global City127 4 Cartoneros140 5 Pepenadores147 6 Catadores153 7 Diving in Havana: Dream or Nightmare?161 8 Intermission II: Berni169 9 From the Street to the (Art) Workshop and Back Again172 10 By Way of Conclusion: A Bio/Ecocritical Reading183 References185 4 P  reservation: Nature and Urbanism from Utopia to Dystopia191 1 Utopian Imaginaries and Urban Territories191 2 Green Utopias, Ecological Utopias195 3 Green Utopias in Urban Venues198 4 Science and Nature in Cities206 5 Nature (Re)Appropriated: A Utopian Effort for Private Societies in the Twenty-First Century212 6 Dystopia for all and Futurist Ecocide in the Latin American City of the Twenty-First Century237 7 Coda249 References252 5 B  ioecocriticism: A New Critical Episteme257 References262 Index263

About the Author

Gisela Heffes  is a writer and Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Rice University, Texas. She is the editor of the annotated anthology Judíos/Argentinos/Escritores (1999), and two monographs: Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana (2008) and Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación. Apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América latina (2013). She has edited the collections of essays Poéticas de los (dis)locamientos (2012) and Utopías urbanas. Geopolítica del deseo en América latina (2013). She was the guest editor for the special issue of Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana on “Ecocrítica” (2014). More recently, she co-edited The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (2020), Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (2021), Un gabinete para el futuro (2022), and Turbar la quietud (2023). As a fiction writer, she has published the novels Ischia (2000), Praga (2001), and Ischia, Praga & Bruselas (2005); the collection of short stories Glossa urbana (2012); a collection of poetic chronicles, Aldea Lounge (2014); the novella Sophie La Belle and the Miniature Cities; the novel Cocodrilos en la noche (2020); the bilingual collection of poems El cero móvil de su boca / The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth (2020; forthcoming in Swedish in 2023); and Aquí no hubo ni una estrella (2023). The English translation of her first novel Ischia was recently published with Deep Vellum Publishing (2023), and her novel Cocodrilos en la noche just came out in a new edition with Grupo Planeta of Colombia (2023). Gisela Heffes serves as co-president of ASLE (the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment). xv

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Chris Jordan, Albatross, 2017, video still Figs. 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 Boca de lixo [Mouth of Garbage], 1993, video stills Fig. 2.4 Book cover of Bernardo Verbitsky’s Villa Miseria también es América (2003) by Sudamericana Publishing (first edition of 1957). Photo taken by the author Fig. 3.1 Juanito va a la ciudad [Juanito Goes to the City] (1963) by Antonio Berni (1905–1981). Reproduced with permission from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, 2007.1167 © Luis Emilio De Rosa, Argentina. Photograph © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Thomas R. DuBrock Fig. 3.2 Ramona costurera [Ramona the Seamstress] (1963) by Antonio Berni (1905–1981). Reproduced with permission from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, 2007.1167 © Luis Emilio De Rosa, Argentina. Photograph © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Thomas R. DuBrock Fig. 3.3 Book covers from Eloísa Cartonera Publishing House (Buenos Aires). Courtesy of Eloísa Cartonera Ltda. Cooperativa de Trabajo Gráfico, Editorial y de Reciclado

3 68 78

170

171 174

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.4 Book covers from Eloísa Cartonera Publishing House (Buenos Aires). Courtesy of Eloísa Cartonera Ltda. Cooperativa de Trabajo Gráfico, Editorial y de Reciclado Fig. 4.1 Map of “la ciudad anarquista americana” [the American anarchist city”] (1914). Included in the first edition of the book. Photo taken by the author

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A garbage can is always like a box full of surprises. —Julio Ramon Ribeyro, “The Featherless Buzzards” (1955)

1   The Environment in (Eco)Critical Perspective In a not-too-distant future, archeologists will no longer dedicate their time to collecting rudimentary inscriptions from sedimentary rock in seawater. Instead, they will examine plastic and glass bottles from different “eras” within a unique, modern, industrial, and global period that includes artifacts that have evolved as rapidly as the technological changes of

Translator’s note: All translations of original Spanish and Portuguese citations are mine unless another published English translation is available. The parenthetical information after each citation either reflects the original Spanish or Portuguese source, which I have translated to English, or the available English translation, which can be found in the bibliography. If English translations of book, article, or film titles are available, then they appear in parentheses after the original Spanish or Portuguese and in the bibliography. Titles in brackets reflect my translations of book, article, and film titles. Many thanks to Arthur Dixon for his review of a draft of the entire manuscript in its late stages. GCW. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Heffes, Visualizing Loss in Latin America, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28831-9_1

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the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: syringes and needles that unexpectedly connect remote cultures, spaces, and times; multiple types of lighters; computers of all kinds; cell phones; iPads; iPods; printers; scanners; disposable and non-disposable cameras; household appliances such as televisions, refrigerators, and radios; daily objects like pens, headphones, coffee pots, and mattress springs, and endless matter that dominates our daily lives.1 Each object we throw away ends up somewhere, although we may not know where. Proof of the magnitude of this problem is the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a zone in the northern Pacific Ocean covered with scraps (located between 135° and 155° West and 35° and 42° North) that some scientists estimate is equal to double the land surface of the United States.2 This oceanic garbage dump is made of exceptionally high concentrations of suspended plastic and other waste material trapped by the rotating currents of the northern Pacific. Despite its size and density, the patch of oceanic trash is difficult to see with satellite photography, and 1  This era has been dubbed the Anthropocene. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), the period of human history generally associated with what we now understand as the institutions of civilization—the beginning of agriculture, the foundations of cities, the emergence of religions as we know them today, and the invention of writing—began approximately 1000 years ago when the planet moved from one geological period, the Ice Age or the socalled Pleistocene, to the most recent and warmer Holocene. Supposedly, we are presently in the Holocene period, but the possibility of an anthropogenic climate change (i.e., one whose transformation is the result of activities and actions on the part of humans—in contrast to those changes whose causes are natural and operate without the influence of humans) has begun to call into question the pertinence of that term. Given that in the present, because of our rapid demographic growth, the emission of toxic gasses, as well as many other daily practices, humans have become one of the planet’s geologic agents, some scientists have signaled the beginning of a new geological era, one in which the actions of human beings have the most influence and most determine the future of the environment and the planet. Therefore, to define this era, chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul J. Crutzen (and his collaborator, a marine science specialist Eugene F. Stoermer) coined the term Anthropocene (Chakrabarty 2009–2010, 59). Since this term was coined, others have proliferated, for instance Capitalocene (Moore 2016), Plantationocene (Haraway 2015), and more recently Wasteocene (Armiero 2021). 2  The recent book Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution (2017) by Markus Eriksen expands this notion and indicates that there is not a “trash island” but instead an ocean full of plastic fragments. He proposes to think of the ocean as a kind of smog, where swirls of particulate matter surround marine creatures who live, breathe, and eat underwater. After embarking with Joel Paschal, a sailing partner, on a trip to the gyre itself, he notes that seeing it from the bottom of the ocean would be like seeing “five massive clouds of microplastic” and “dark clouds of larger plastic pieces coming from the world’s largest rivers and densely populated coastlines” (162).

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Fig. 1.1  Chris Jordan, Albatross, 2017, video still

it is impossible to pinpoint using radar (Dautel 2009). Working on a smaller scale, the photographer Chris Jordan embarked on a documentary project to capture images of birds that have died in disturbing ways: a third of the small albatrosses photographed in the project perished because their parents had mistakenly fed them some of the plastic material that inundates the Pacific Ocean (Fig. 1.1). As Jordan indicates, this new layer of plastic fossils represents a “macabre mirror” in which dead birds have become an emblematic reflection of the critical and decisive moment in which our lives of unlimited consumption, together with out-of-control industrial growth, are immersed.3 While real icebergs are melting away at a dizzying rate, these “plastic icebergs” have become an adverse contaminating deposit in which the strata, or layers, that are forming prevent the development and growth of animals and

3  “For me […] kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth.” See Claire O’Neill (2011): “How Soda Caps Are Killing Birds.” See http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2011/10/31/141879837/ how-soda-caps-are-killing-birds. Accessed May 4, 2023.

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other living beings (Allsopp et al. 2006).4 Thus, the question of devastation as well as that of preserving nature affects all beings alike because, as the world grows progressively smaller, contamination and pollution are becoming more and more globalized. From the emission of toxic gases to the pollution of aquifers, either by means of the ever-increasing use of chemicals in agro-industry or the disposal of hazardous substances in rivers and oceans, these “hyperobjects” (Morton 2013) are widely distributed across time and space, connecting humans and non-human beings. Yet the debate concerning sustainability takes on a different dimension when read from those cultural constellations that implicitly or explicitly generate a dialogue with differing conceptions and positions regarding the planet’s fate. What’s more, this dimension engages with the arguable notion of “sustainable development,” positing it as a strategic concept to help save the future of planet Earth by promising a “new balance” between the use and the conservation of potential natural resources (Grober 2007), and connecting this notion to the current and tangible exhaustion of these resources by considering a wide range of aesthetic and cultural figurations. Culture manifestations are here defined as a process or a set of practices “rooted in a shared understanding of the world(s),” and it is also understood that taking the form of an artifact or a performance creates and conveys meaning jointly through symbolic representations (Rocheleau and Nirmal 2016).5 4  In the spring of 2005, National Geographic sent the environmental photographer James Balog to the Arctic for the purpose of capturing images that might help to understand climate change. Balog’s images are part of Jeff Orlowski’s documentary Chasing Ice (2012) that tells the story of this process. Along the same lines, David Breashears’s photographic project “GlacierWork” (2007) compares old photographs with new images from Mount Everest and shows the effects of global warming on the mountainous landscape, while Ethan Steinman’s “Glacial Balance” (2013) addresses this issue in the Andes Mountains by traveling from Argentina to Colombia. See respectively http://www.glacierworks.org/ and http://www.glacialbalance.com/. 5  The notion of “sustainable development” entered the global platform during the Earth Summit (Cumbre de la Tierra) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The United Nations introduced it as a strategic concept to help save the future of planet Earth and promised to make it a key term in defining the new balance between the use and conservation of potential natural resources. The Brundtland Report that paved the way for the Rio Summit defined sustainable development in 1987 as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Grober 2007, 5). However, the use (and marketing) of the term has simultaneously been called into question, and a movement emerged demanding the “liberation” of the term. See Richard Peet and Michael Watts (1996): Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements.

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In recent decades, these cultural components, in association with the need to understand the challenges posed by accelerating environmental change, have required a new critical glossary, given the difficulties of “intercommunication” arising in both the disciplines of environmental humanities and sciences (Buell 2011, 107). The emergence of an ecological awareness in the fields of art, literature, and, more broadly, cultural studies has opened up a space for inquiry as well as an ethical and aesthetic engagement with theory, criticism, and literary and cultural history (Marrero Henríquez 2011, 18). It is by now well known that in academic production, principally in the United States and Great Britain, this articulation has been defined as “ecocriticism.” By now, there is a general consensus that ecocriticism, especially as it was defined in its “first wave,” examines the relationship between literature, culture, and the environment. One of the most widely cited definitions comes from the work of American scholar Cheryll Glotfelty. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), she suggests that ecocriticism is a proposal focused on the Earth, in which one studies, analyzes, and explores literary and cultural artifacts (xviii). Of course, this definition, formulated in the first decade of ecocriticism, would evolve in tandem with the emergence of other theoretical concepts and scholarship such as posthumanism and new materialism.6 This paradigm of critical inquiry invites a broad series of questions that will be considered in the following chapters. Equally important to this need for a new critical glossary is the examination into how environmental studies combines the production of knowledge on anthropogenic change with textual, visual, and aesthetic expressions stemming from Latin America that grapple with the “environmental imagination,” whether by form, content, directly or tangentially.7 Furthermore, which distinctive traits can we identify in the continent’s cultural practices? Is it possible to establish categories of analysis based on these specific characteristics? How can we define an innovative disciplinary field? Which categories should be kept, and which should be discarded? And in what way 6  It is worth noting that Glotfelty’s definition dates back to the Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice - Sixteen Position Papers from the 1994 Western Literature Association Meeting. The text can be found in the tab “Definitions of Ecocriticism Archive” of the ASLE (the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) website: https://www.asle.org/explore-ourfield/ecocriticism-and-environmental-humanities/definitions-of-ecocriticism-archive/. 7  I am, of course, referring here to Lawrence Buell’s seminal work, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1996).

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can we classify and categorize (if this were the purpose) the wide range of features that emerge in a dispersed and enormous corpus of literary and cultural representations? This association has become even more problematic when the connections “among self, society, nature, and text” (Cokinos 1994) are not always the direct result of a pre-existing ecological agenda. In these instances, to what extent can we nonetheless harken back to a holistic, interconnected view of the universe (Dean 1994) that precedes the emergence of the institutionalization and implementation of environmental studies as an academic discipline? And what is the role of this consciousness in the effort of defining the contours and range of a Latin American ecocriticism? This book is the result of an ecocritical reading of a wide range of texts—from brief tales and short stories to chronicles, theater pieces, and novels—as well as documentaries and feature films, works of art and urban performances. Despite this broad range of source materials, they are all anchored in a specific territory: the space of the Latin American city from the early twentieth century to the present. Through an interdisciplinary and analytical methodology, the proposed reading draws from ecocriticism as a tool of literary and cultural inquiry all the while interrogating the extent to which this critical apparatus—originating and circulating in Anglo-American scholarship—can account for a Latin American phenomenon. By “phenomenon,” I refer to an extensive (though by no means exhaustive) and varied corpus of textual, visual, and cultural material interwoven with specific engagements with the natural world. My central argument is that Latin American literary and cultural contributions amount to a theoretical apparatus and overarching framework broader than ecocriticism. Although ecocriticism represents a fundamental discipline for generating a systematic reflection on the relationship that aesthetics and epistemology establish with environmental questions such as the interplay between the human and the non-human, nature and culture, and subject and object, as well as imagining alternative visions for the not too distant future, there is still a need to construct both a conceptual and theoretical apparatus capable of reassessing the emergence of a phenomenon that up to some years ago was only latent. Thus, this book poses the following crucial question: How do we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus to address issues of value, meaning, tradition, perspective, and language that contributes substantially to environmental thinking, and that is part and parcel of Latin America?

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The phenomenon analyzed here operates at the intersection of the built environment and urban settings in Latin America. Given the distinctiveness of Latin American “urban ecosystems” (Heynen 2016, 192), I have established three categories that each correspond to paradigmatic environmental tropes whose distinguishing features relate to the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas posed by environmental inequality and to the uneven dynamics of dominance that have enabled the overexploitation and abuse of the natural resources that surround these spaces, as well as a––not always visible––demarcation of physical itineraries informed and intersected by biopolitics. That is, what Michel Foucault referred to as the “biological existence” reflected in “political existence”; in other words, that the “fact of living” now passed into “knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention” (1978, 142). By “trope,” I allude to the classic definition of a rhetorical figure as it relates to an image capable of giving a different meaning to a word or phrase to which it belongs. Classical rhetoricians describe this change or transformation of meaning as a “movement,” namely, the divergence of a word from its common signification which involves the replacement of a word or concept with another (Bahti and Mann 2012, 1463).8 Each of these three tropes embodies three distinct sections of the book, all of which are undergirded by an environmental dimension that conceives “environment” as a means of interrogating power dynamics between the human and the non-human (Alston 2007, 103). These tropes correspond to the themes of destruction, sustainability, and preservation. The three tropes can be read autonomously and as a series.9 Each trope relates in different ways to each urban ecosystem which it understands as a complex entanglement between humans and non-human animals, trees, plants, 8  With the rise of rhetorical treatises, figures of speech began to assume a systematic character, which was rather heterogeneous depending on their respective origin and purpose. And consequently, figures of speech increased in number and were “located in systematic arrangements of ever-growing complexity” and based on the fundamental distinction of “tropes (Gk. tropoi) and schemes (Gk. sche ̄mata, Lat. Figurae)” (Plett 2001). Although most rhetorical works in the Greco-Roman tradition maintain the same dichotomy, and despite several attempts “at a terminological and systematic reformation of the figures of speech,” the classical model, in the course of the nineteenth century the traditionally strict distinction between tropes and figures/schemes was abandoned (Sharon-Zisser 1993). 9  Although most of the material discussed in the book stretches back to the beginning of the twentieth century, the implementation of a relentless neoliberal ideology through economic policies constitutes one of the most visible scars in Latin American’s uneven distribution of wealth, nature (whether recreational or commodified), and risks.

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and toxins, matter such as waste, microbes, and concrete, all of which branch out across place and space, intertwining bodies, politics, and ecologies (Adamson et al. 2016, 4). As a series, each one of these tropes evokes through a particular image––the landfill and the garbage dump; the practice of recycling; and the utopian imagination––three fundamental components for reflecting on what Marco Armiero (2021) has recently coined as the “Wasteocene,” namely, a “planetary mark of our new epoch” not merely for its ubiquitous presence but rather because “what makes the Wasteocene are the wasting relationships, those really planetary in their scope, which produce wasted people and places” (2021, 2). Both human waste and wasted lives are at the core of this book; they emerge in unequivocal correlation to each trope represented in each section. Because of the ambivalent nature of these tropes, each image sparks multiple meanings while destabilizing established assumptions. Hence, the garbage dump evokes environmental destruction at the same time as it enables human survival; recycling suggests sustainability, rag-picking, and scavenging; nature preservation conjures up utopian imageries along with tales of exclusion. A one-dimensional reading of the already ingrained modern binaries nature/culture, subject/object, and material/immaterial can therefore erode theoretical and critical positions aligned with the conceptualization—and hence representation—of the very idea of what is natural. Gabriela Nouzeilles, in her introduction to the collection of essays La naturaleza en disputa [Nature in Dispute] (2002), delineates a tentative formulation of nature based on three temporalities that each coincide with a different empire, with each formulation articulated in accordance with the modern ideology of Western progress. These phases are based, in fact, on the tripartite model Immanuel Wallerstein formulated with respect to the “modern world-system” (see 1974, 1980, 1989).10 The first stage corresponds to the commercial, bureaucratic, and cultural expansion of the Iberian empires in American lands and the colonization of their millions of native inhabitants. The second refers to the cultural history of nature in the Americas. This distinct period begins with the Scientific Revolution and corresponds to the historical events in which the imperial project emerges aligned with the rise of rationalism and capitalism, displacing the center of power from Spain to England and France. The epistemological 10  Enrique Dussel’s analysis of Wallerstein’s model and the limits of modernity can be found in “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity” (1998).

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paradigm that came to dominate all these representations of nature was that of modern science, according to the assumptions established by Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, through which nature became the target simultaneously of reason and commercial calculations. The third and final phase of Wallerstein’s schema is the span of globalization in which the United States began to compete for imperial domination with the War of 1898 and the consolidation of its leadership after World War II. This period extends to the present and is characterized by the extraordinary acceleration of previous tendencies, facilitated in part by technological and scientific advances and through less violent methods of domination, such as economic dependence, the monopoly of knowledge production, and cultural homogenization. The commodification of daily life, the predominance of the culture industry, and the conversion of society into spectacle are the defining traits of the logic of cultural production that were imposed until late capitalism, when they came to dominate the totality of its social aspects. In this context, the concept of nature has also been modified. Nouzeilles identifies two moments, one belonging to modernism and the vanguards, where what is natural and what is primitive function as “residue,” a critical outside from which to question capitalism; and a second one corresponding to postmodernism (Jameson 1991), which takes place when the separation between culture and nature collapses along with other distinctions specific to modernity (Nouzeilles 2002, 27). The three environmental tropes discussed in this book belong to this last phase. I argue that the reading and discussion of these aesthetic productions as a trope reveals, in a prismatic way, that nature, in addition to becoming an exclusive and commodified object, yields a different relationship with each trope. To be sure, this formulation would not be possible without putting together a conceptual framework that encompasses works from disciplines as varied as anthropology and cultural ethnography, archeology, and sociology, as well as urban, environmental, and utopian studies. This apparatus informs my critical analysis of distinctive Latin American literary and cultural works focusing on the overexploitation of human and non-human resources. I suggest that the aesthetic praxis that emerges in/from Latin America is permeated with a rhetoric of waste––a significant trait that overwhelmingly defines it. By waste, I refer, on a first level, to those objects that are discarded, reused, and/or preserved, and to what is linked, in turn, to the irreversible and destructive way resources are extracted and disposed of, the toxicity embedded in its fabric as well as in

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the methods used in manufacturing goods, and the impacts that transporting these products have locally and globally. Waste is socially unequal. I am concerned, on a second level, with mapping waste and its ability to generate relations among subjects and the materiality of objects that no longer hold any “value.” Moreover, I am interested in the definition of value itself vis-à vis the usability or caducity of an object, and its correlation with the assignment (or not) of “value” to human and non-human species. I agree with William Viney (2014) that waste can also aim at “doing philosophy” and can be a lens through which to better understand how “material things have us looking sideways, at our material relations, at our ecologies and at ourselves” (1). Although waste constitutes a manifold concept that can stretch out in myriad directions, this book will focus primarily on literary and artistic productions that intersect with everyday patterns of behavior, consumption, and waste in the urban ecosystems of Latin America. It spans aesthetic works from the early twentieth century to the first two decades of the twenty-first, with a focus on cities in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, and Paraguay. This general introduction offers the reader a mapping of the genesis and foundation of ecocriticism and environmental studies, first in the United States and the United Kingdom, and subsequently in Latin America, and the successive chapters expand on the three previously mentioned tropes with the purpose of formulating new schemes of thought. Environmental destruction is the central focus of the second chapter. Here, waste is not limited to its flow and circulation or to the appropriation or disposal and disposition of objects. I instead look at waste as a testimony through stories from and about the garbage dump. If the Anthropocene marks an era of human-driven geological change, what is the geology that defines the layers of these equally human-driven formations, these monstrous mounds of waste that feed the dispossessed while soaring as a marker of unrelenting daily consumption? I am primarily concerned with a collection of textual and visual works that, besides promoting a complex debate about the social and ecological places inhabited by human and non-human species, are usually marked by abandonment and oblivion through a narration embedded in what Jussi Parikka (2015) has defined as the “geological view both to the historical layers of discourse concerning technology, waste, and time and the geological realities where we collect and dispose of resources” (xi). This geological view sheds light on how space is reconfigured by a process spanning from the

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commodification of nature to its transformation into a manufactured object fated to become disposable matter. Paradoxically, assembled by disposed (manufactured) “nature,” waste shapes its host space as one devoid of “nature.” Of course, abandoned objects “rotting quietly in the landscape” are, as Gay Hawkins suggests, “alive with the activity of corrosion,” which has become a “habitat” and a “home” in its twofold disposition that is both “organic and machinic” (2005, 10). However, I am thinking of waste concentration in tandem with an ongoing process of “accumulation by dispossession,” as David Harvey (2003) argued. Marco Armiero suggests that the dump is a “function of the safe and green,” and, quoting Rebecca Solnit (2008), states that it “is the wall that makes the paradise, that is, the othering of someone or something that creates a safe ‘us’” (cited in Armiero 2021, 10). As the dump is located either on the outskirts of urban centers or in rural spaces, this chapter contends that it embodies a third liminal space, one of invisibility, or—borrowing a concept coined by Giorgio Agamben (1998)—a territory of “exception.” Chapter 3 addresses the trope of sustainability through an examination of a varied corpus of aesthetic expressions and manifestations, ranging from texts and visual material to urban performances and artistic involvements in what may at times overlap with eco-art. At one level, this chapter aims to understand the interactions and intersections of humans and non-­ humans, and questions to what degree these engagements grasp the displacements and flows that define human and non-human relations when they interface with the materiality of the urban ecosystem. On a different level, it also relates to an extralinguistic context, as it pertains to “extending the rather narrow definitions of site, context, and relationship that have been central to much [of] contemporary art” (Irland 2016, 60). It evokes a broader definition of eco-art, which contemplates non-human species with which we share multiple environments, to advance a conversation on “restoration, remediation, and reclamation,” in addition to the conventional notion of “reduce, reuse, and recycle” (Irland 2016, 60). This trope thus looks closely at the notion of sustainability in correlation with those of use, value, function, and obsolescence. It considers the subjects that interact with scrap and waste in order to highlight how their bodies are penetrated by toxic matter, thus undermining the narratives that support the “development paradigm of recycling and reusing,” be it obsolete technologies, medical waste, or any sort of “former” manufactured good (Leurs et al. 2018, 466).

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Chapter 4 examines the trope of preservation by evoking the utopian imagination in texts and films from the early twentieth century onward. It contrasts the notion of a “natural space” in narratives of the twentieth century with that of the early twenty-first century. Whereas in this first instance nature is “accessible” to everyone, the second one portrays a fragmented space that emphasizes disconnection and division among humans and non-humans alike. I further divide this second phase into two sections that conflict with each other in an evident—and ironic—way: the first section examines contemporary utopias where the depiction of natural space is explicit, evident, and exuberant, although restricted to a select minority. I am of course referring to “exclusive” utopias, represented in the form of fortified enclaves (private neighborhoods, gated communities, etc.). The alternative section depicts a vast number of marginalized people that have not been “invited to the party” and therefore remain excluded, clawing at the walls for acknowledgment and validation. This last section, then, highlights the downside of these “new enclosures” because, as Ashley Dawson (2010) rightly asserts, “the history of the modern era is one of waves of enclosure and the production of vast floating populations of landless and often illegal people” (1–2). The enclosure divides and confronts citizens, positioning them in a violently contentious position. The inverse of enclosure is openness: a space that affords free passage, access, view, and recreation, and that is neither blocked nor obstructed. This unrestricted space that contrasts with the exclusive utopia of contemporary Latin American cities yields to dystopian narratives in which natural space is extinct. I thus argue that access to natural spaces has become a commodity that not everyone is able to acquire. The remainder of this introduction discusses the emergence of ecocriticism, first within the disciplinary field stemming from the Anglo-American academic world and subsequently in Latin America. I then move on to proposing an alternative framework for a theoretical apparatus—a new critical episteme—that emphasizes the significance of Latin American aesthetics from both an environmental and urban perspective, and as a field of inquiry and exploration. I contend that the reconfiguration of pivotal concepts that have arranged, classified, and systematized the study of modern and contemporary Latin American aesthetic works has broadened our understanding of how cultural production relates to both nature and urban spaces. These reconfigurations will thus define not only how we understand a specific aesthetic work but, most notably, how we might revisit traditional texts in search of new understandings.

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2  Ecocriticism: Then and Now Cheryll Glotfelty (1996) signals that ecocriticism consists of an Earth-­ focused proposal from which literary and cultural studies are studied, analyzed, and explored (xviii). In this effort, the category of place is fundamental, and Glotfelty posits that, just as gender, social class, race, or the processes of colonization (and decolonization) have become categories of literary and cultural analysis, so should the notion of space. Glotfelty identifies three primary concerns of ecocriticism. The first is the assessment of nature’s representation in literature, extending this notion to concepts like borders, animals, cities, specific geographic regions, rivers, mountains, deserts, Indigenous peoples, technology, trash, and the body. The second relates to highlighting the existence of a great amount of literature linked to nature by rediscovering, republishing, or issuing new editions of forgotten or discarded texts and promoting their critical reconsideration within the broadest canon. The third focus is theoretical, far-­ reaching, and the most complex because it draws from a large number of diverse disciplinary theories with the aim of exploring issues pertaining to the symbolic constructions of species and their relationship to the environment. This perspective questions contrary, opposing, and dominant principles that have undergirded much of Western thought, those “dualisms that separate meaning from matter, sever mind from the body, divide men from women, and wrench humanity from nature” (1996, xxiv).11 Another definition of ecocriticism that surfaced in the United Kingdom came from Laurence Coupe, who incorporated some concepts already outlined by Lawrence Buell in the latter’s seminal study, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1996).12 In The Green Studies Reader (2000) Coupe contended that ecocriticism consists of the study of literature and the environment through a spirit of commitment to environmental practice. It is important to draw attention to the terms “commitment” and “environmental practice” because they are at the very core of many debates that define the field of ecocriticism. Unlike other critical theories, ecocriticism highlights the 11  Along these lines, ecofeminism, as a critical and theoretical framework, connects the oppression of women to the domination of nature. 12  Within British studies there is agreement that the discipline of ecocriticism officially begins with Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991), although important recognition is also given to the pioneering work of Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973).

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relation between the text and the physical world; according to Ralph W. Black, “the ecosystemic relationships within a literary text will often reach out and implicate us in its web” (1994, 2).13 Glen Love, in Practical Ecocriticism (2003), built on Kate Soper’s landmark book What is Nature (1995) to address the “contemporary critical conflict between what she terms the ‘nature endorsing’ view of nature and the ‘nature-skeptical’ perspective” (7) which correlates with two divisive positions: one that challenges different cultural representations of nature, and another that represents nature “as if it were a convention of culture” (Soper 1995, 4 cited in Love 2003, 7). Along these lines, Love’s “practical” stance relies on “ecological, naturalist, scientifically grounded arguments that recognize human connection with nature and the rest of organic life and acknowledge the biological sciences as not just another cultural construction” (8).14 It is worth noting his endorsement of Arnold Toynbee’s Mankind and Mother Earth (1976), a pioneering work that presciently warned about the future of humanity and the possibility that the biosphere may at some point become uninhabitable. At the same time, Love’s study followed a tendency within ecocriticism that consisted in comparing poetic and literary traditions with the natural cycles of decomposition and flowering, by way of sparking analogies with blossoming. Four years before Toynbee’s publication, Joseph W.  Meeker had already introduced the term “literary ecology” in his book The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1972), while William Rueckert arguably coined the term “ecocriticism” in 1978 in an essay entitled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.”15 Despite these rigorous––albeit sometimes 13  In addition to Ralph W. Black’s “What We Talk About When We talk About Ecocriticism,” see Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Sixteen Position Papers from the 1994 Western Literature Association Meeting (Salt Lake City, Utah–6 October 1994). 14  Although Love’s Practical Ecocriticism has circulated the most among his critical works, Buell, in his study, refers to two equally important articles: “Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism” (1990) and Et in Arcadia Ego: Pastoral Theory Meets Ecocriticism” (1992) (cited in 1996, 430). 15  There is no agreement as to who used the term for the first time. Carmen Flys Junquera, José Manuel Marrero Henríquez, and Julia Barella Vigal (2010) maintain that William Howarth coined it in his essay “Some Principles of Ecocriticism” in the 1970s. Other terms that circulated are “ecopoetics,” “environmental literary criticism,” and “green cultural studies.” Some critics favor the prefix “eco-” over “enviro-” because while environmental connotes, in English, an anthropocentric and dualistic perspective, “eco-,” on the other hand, implies “interdependent communities, integrated systems, and strong connections among constituent parts” (Glotfelty 1996, xx).

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differing––definitions, Anglo-American ecocriticism did not initially receive a warm welcome. As British critic Greg Garrard notes, some characteristics of ecocriticism “risked metropolitan condescension” mainly because of its apparent “hostility to human-centered literary theories emanating from ‘old Europe’” (2016, 61). The initial reaction to early ecocriticism, according to Garrard, was a “sniffy dismissal of ‘backpacker critics’ entranced by ‘poems with trees in them’” (2016, 61). Notwithstanding this rough start, ecocriticism began to develop into a coherent field of study. Although it had originated at the precise moment of publication of a handful of individual works—categorized under miscellaneous topics such as regionalism, pastoralism, the frontier, human ecology, science and literature, or representations of landscape—the unprecedented and novel condition of the discipline changed beginning in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, with the establishment of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) in 1992. The following year, the field of ecocriticism emerged as a recognized critical school with an institutional headquarters, and that same year the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment was founded; it was incorporated into Oxford University Press in 2008 and continues to publish the latest contributions in the field. As ecocriticism evolved, scholars chose to further delineate what Greg Garrard has called specific “positions” or varied forms of cultural and ecological inquiry that include different foci that can be juxtaposed and even set against each other (Garrard 2004). Garrard starts from the “cornucopian” position, which refers to the notion of abundance, to describe a perspective that defines the threats and dangers presented to the environment by modern civilization as mere illusions and exaggerations. This position is not that of activist ecological movements, and, in some cases, it is supported and disseminated by industrial anti-environmentalist groups to pressure governments into opposing measures that could possibly harm their interests. Additionally, this position considers that the problem of the scarcity of natural resources is an economic (and not environmental) phenomenon and contemplates nature in terms of its utility for human beings. “Environmental activism” is another relatively widespread position that includes those who are preoccupied with ecological problems such as the overheating of the Earth and pollution, but who try to maintain their standard of living in a conventional way. For example, they oppose radical social changes such as the reduction of consumption. These activists value

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the rural way of life and are, at times, members of the most well-known and long-standing environmental organizations. They are less radical than other groups, especially when it comes to questioning demographic growth, and may even favor the implementation of a broad control of birth rates in “underdeveloped” or “developing” countries over a campaign of state-sponsored sterilization; the most radical groups have formulated the latter option. It is true that environmental activism has brought to the fore significant issues such as the practice of recycling, supporting local and organic food growers and producers, and/or a continuous commitment to environmental conservation activity. However, its philosophical orientation remains aligned with Western values and traditions, which are considered to be the most precious, even as we witness an unprecedented environmental crisis triggered precisely by those philosophical and practical conceptions of knowledge, goodness, and existence originated in and promoted by the West. Although it has succeeded at changing some regulations and policies regarding the environment, most radical critics consider this position to be superficial insofar as it is committed to the dominant socioeconomic order. Most notable among these critics are the adherents of the deep ecology movement, which emerged in the 1970s drawing from the work of Gary Snyder and Arne Naess. Both advocated for granting an intrinsic value to human and non-human life, independent from the use of the non-human world for human purposes, and called for a demographic reduction that could not be postponed. In concrete terms, the deep ecology movement understands that the continuation of human life and culture is only compatible with the flourishing of the non-human within a substantially smaller population (Garrard 2004, 21). Following Greta Gaard (2016), ecofeminism, like deep ecology, maintains that the “logic of domination” is implicated as much in discrimination as it is in oppression on the level of race, sexual orientation, class, species, and gender, which converges with one of the main concerns of the environmental justice movement: the unequal distribution of natural resources based on the categories outlined above (68). Just as deep ecologists have identified the anthropocentric dualism that pits humanity against nature, depicting it as the last manifestation of the definitive source of anti-ecological beliefs and practices, ecofeminism, as expressed in the writings of Val Plumwood (1993), has argued that androcentrism needs to be held responsible for the confrontation between men and women. While anthropocentrism confers superiority on humans with respect to nature

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(be it, e.g., in the possession of an immaterial soul or the ability to reason), androcentrism confers superiority onto man (as a masculine subject and not, as in the previous case, a human subject). Androcentrism also entails a supposed superiority over the feminine subject. Ecofeminism thus underscores that these two arguments share a similar “logic of domination.” A “logic” that entails the association of women with “nature, the material, the emotional, and the particular” while men have been associated “with culture, the non-material, the rational, and the abstract” (Garrard 2004, 23). Along these lines, Plumwood signals the importance of questioning the gender dualism between reason and nature. She rejects neither science nor reason; rather, she calls for a reevaluation of those philosophies that polarize reason with respect to nature. In a different vein, social ecology and eco-Marxism add an economic dimension to the critical and environmental debate and suggest that environmental problems are caused as much by anthropocentric attitudes as they are by capitalist systems of domination and exploitation. These two approaches formulate a critique of the deep ecology stance for seeking refuge, and withdrawing, from rational thought and political compromise. For both social ecology and eco-Marxism, capitalist forms of production that depend on the manipulation of the dynamic between supply and demand create the perception that there is a shortage of natural resources. Technology modifies this dynamic either by initiating a new demand or changing the processes of extraction or production, compensating for or exacerbating the growing exploitation of natural resources. Together, social ecology and eco-Marxism thus emphasize that shortage is not simply an objective fact with respect to the natural world, but rather a function of desire and means of capital: the intentions that guide production and the technologies that facilitate it. In this sense, if the political structures of society were to be changed (and production were to satisfy actual needs instead of aiming to accumulate capital), the ecological problem stemming from the limits created by the capitalist structure of continuous growth would disappear. Like the environmental justice movement, they suggest that degradation and pollution are linked to poverty, marginality, and segregation, and call into question the underpinnings of that relationship. As this outline indicates, ecocriticism consists of a critical framework that, although it does not offer a definitive analytical paradigm, remains open to multiple debates, disciplinary methodologies, and theoretical positions. Perhaps one of its most distinctive traits is that it combines an

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ideological commitment with an aesthetic preoccupation. Furthermore, given its varied positions and foci, ecocriticism must establish, as Glotfelty suggests, what intersections and “cross-fertilizations” are possible between literary and cultural criticism and environmental discourse. Lawrence Buell rightly warns, in The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005), that thematic concerns were what propelled the “environmental turn” within literary and cultural studies more than a specific method or paradigm of analysis (11). He underlines that this term more accurately encapsulates the interdisciplinary nature of both literary and environmental studies, and, more importantly, he contends that ecocriticism had not yet attained the standing conferred to gender, postcolonial, or critical race studies. This explains why the term “ecocriticism” is often used interchangeably with other terms such as “environmental criticism” or “literary-environmental studies” (11). That said, ecocriticism has begun to gradually shift its focus from pastoral or preservationist literature toward more urban settings as sites of toxicity. Although Buell has identified two historical stages within the development of different tendencies in ecocriticism, it should be noted that the specific elements of the first moment persist in the second, and some aspects of the latter have been, in turn, adumbrated in the first. He defined this inextricable contiguity as a “palimpsest” of tendencies rather than two isolated moments (Buell 1996, 17). The first phase seeks to rescue literature from the reader’s distance regarding the text and to connect the text to the world––a tendency marked by the structuralist revolution in critical theory.16 Because of the so-called disconnect between literary works vis-à-­ vis environmental writing and ecological experiences, this perspective tends to condemn the “metropolitan” propensity of literary studies toward theoretical and abstract conceptualizations. The second phase, instead, considers both rural and urban loci, in light of those concerns resulting from environmental justice, postcolonialism, gender and queer studies, and posthumanism, among others. Buell’s assessment would be addressed by important works such as Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, 16  In The Environmental Imagination, Buell already expressed concern about the fact that the educational background in literary studies leads scholars to insist on a firm separation of text and referent and argued that “modern conventions of reading block out the environmental dimension of literary texts” (1996, 14).

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Animals, Environment (2010, 2015) and Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley’s Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011). In Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Huggan and Tiffin suggest that postcolonial studies address environmental issues not only as a fundamental problem for European projects of conquest and global domination, but also as the result of an inherent ideology of imperialism and racism that depends on them historically and persistently. Not only have people been catalogued as part of an exploitable nature—and therefore treated instrumentally, like animals, flora, fauna, and all available resources—they have also been forced to abandon their own values, environmental perspectives, and cosmologies to adopt those of the West, thereby rendering environmental and cultural restitution somewhat difficult if not impossible to achieve. Once the colonizing project has been initiated by Western practices in relation to human and living beings, in general, the environmental impact is practically irreversible. Emphasizing the historical importance of space, DeLoughrey and Handley (2011) draw on Edward Said’s work to address a postcolonial ecology that foregrounds a spatial imagination “made possible by the experience of place” (4). Furthermore, in underlining the production of history in the making of the Global South, postcolonial studies have employed the concept of place to question temporal narratives of progress imposed by colonial powers. In Postcolonial Ecologies, both the landscape and seascape are conceived of as participants in the historical process rather than as bystanders to human experience.17 Ecocriticism here has thus become more than “a simple extension of postcolonial methodologies into the realm of the human material world,” as it has begun to ascertain the degree to which ecology stands outside of the “frames of human time and political interest” (2011, 4). DeLoughrey and Handley’s definition of postcolonial ecology thus reflects a complex epistemology that recovers the alterity of both history and nature, without reducing either one to the other. A classic work that focuses much of its analysis on spaces or genres associated with the rural, natural, or regional was The Country and the City (1973) by Marxist theorist Raymond Williams. This pioneering cultural history traces the complex relationship between nature and urbanism,

17  Here they refer to historicization in the sense of Said and Fanon, as a central tool for understanding land and, by extension, the Earth.

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including industrial technology.18 For Williams, “culture” defined people and their practices, whose “civilized, aesthetic sensibilities and intellectual focus lifted them above the gritty physicality of farming, manufacturing, and artisanal work,” as Dianne Rocheleau and Padini Nirmal observe (2016, 51). There was a common agreement among scholars that culture stood outside of nature, altering it. This is what Bruno Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern (1993), criticizes when he makes the following observations: “The ozone hole is too social and too narrated to be truly natural,” and “the strategy of industrial firms and heads of state is too full of chemical reactions to be reduced to power and interest,” and “the discourse of the ecosphere is too real and too social to boil down to meaning effects” (6). As a result, it is therefore, Latour sums up, “our fault if the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society” (1993, 6; emphasis in the original). We have never been modern, then, because, as Cary Wolfe rightly argues drawing on Latour’s assertion, the fundamental mechanism of modernity creates two distinctive “ontological zones”: those of the human and the non-human (2010, xx). Although Wolfe is more focused on developing a theoretical apparatus to define posthumanism, he draws from well-known works such as Donna Haraway’s classic Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) to address the “ontological” binary that confronts culture with nature. Along with several ecocritics and environmental scholars, Wolfe shares an urgency for destabilizing notions such as anthropocentrism and androcentrism—notions that, in fact, place humans, particularly men, at the center of domination. Posthumanism, he writes, is “not just talking about a thematics of the decentering of the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates” but, more importantly, it is “about how thinking confronts that thematics, what thought has to become in the face of those challenges” (2010, xvi). As noted above, recent studies on ecocriticism––and environmental humanities––do more than conceive nature as a mere linguistic referent, as they address issues such as the controversy over the rights of “other” creatures (including the forests, rivers, and mountains; even the biosphere itself). By insisting on the importance of the non-human, they challenge the complacent culturalism that makes other species, such as flora and fauna, subordinate to the human capacity of signification. In other words, 18  Another classic text, along the same lines, is Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American Culture (1964).

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they question the validity of treating nature as something produced by language: denying these two assumptions (industrialization and culturalism), they conceive of planetary life in a critical condition and attempt to look for and offer a response to this crisis. This appeal is, ultimately, an ethical issue, and these studies, therefore, do not make sense on their own unless they contribute, as Coupe points out, to the struggle of protecting the biotic community.19 Media studies have also evolved in different directions regarding, as Adrian Ivakhiv (2008) has demonstrated, “ecologically minded film criticism,” “green film criticism,” or “eco-cinecriticism” (1; emphasis in the original). Images of nature, the chosen medium, green representations that (may) contradict commercial anthropocentric interests, cultural circulation or “circuits,” visual technologies, production, consumption, and the use of material/natural resources are, among many others, key questions broached by ecocritical film theorists.20 Ivakhiv resonates with the views of Andrew Ross (1994) when he writes that ecocritical film theory and criticism should attend not only to “images of ecology” but to the “ecology of images,” namely, to the “ethics, politics, economics, and ‘ecologies’ of the ways images are produced, circulated, and consumed in our society” (24). For their part, ecocritics Sean Cubitt, Salma Monani, and Stephen Rust, in Ecomedia: Key Issues in Environment and Sustainability (2016), refer to how mainstream global culture conceptualizes society as an “exclusively human phenomenon” (2). While we place society and nature at odds with one another and consider nature “as the external environment or the instinctive and biological aspects of being human,” ecocriticism and environmental humanities have questioned this division (Rust et al. 2016, 2). Ecocritics’ main task is therefore to critically question such dualisms and expose their misconceptions, particularly since society cannot survive without the environment, “which it inhabits and from which it derives” (Rust et  al. 2016, 2). This dualism is therefore embedded in a sequence of binaries that comprises, in addition to nature, 19  Love, in Practical Ecocriticism (2003), argues that ecocriticism must line up with the natural condition of the world and the ecological principles that underlie all human life at a moment in which the accelerated rhythm and the global scale of history demand a new examination of literature and culture. 20  David Ingram (2004) writes that “Hollywood’s environmentalist movies often use their concerns with non-human nature […] as a basis for speculation on human social relationships, thereby making those concerns conform to Hollywood’s commercial interest in anthropocentric, human-interest stories” (10; cit. in Ivakhiv 2008).

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women and animals. As Carolyn Merchant (1980) suggests, at the root of the “identification of women and animality with a lower form of human life lies the distinction between nature and culture fundamental to humanistic disciplines such as history, literature, and anthropology,” which at least until the second half of the twentieth century had accepted that distinction as an undisputed assumption (143). The nature–culture dualism is a crucial factor in Western civilization’s expansion at the expense of nature. With the disengagement of the bonding conjunctions of the older hierarchical cosmos, European culture progressively set itself above and detached itself from all that was symbolized by nature. A fundamental work in this regard was Kate Soper’s What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (1995). Soper not only challenges a perspective that builds on nature criticism––as it pertains to linguistic construction––she also emphasizes this paradoxical reading through a synthesis that visibly addresses these contradictions: “it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer; and the ‘real’ thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier” (151). Hence, Soper highlights the defiance ecocriticism poses to the anthropocentric tendency to place man at the center of the universe. In this sense, ecocriticism partakes in similar inquiries to those that are at the convergence of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism. While the former focuses on the critique of the “humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the universal representative of the human,” post-anthropocentrism criticizes “species hierarchy” and pushes forward “bio-centered egalitarianism” (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018, 1). In Politics of Nature (2004), Bruno Latour proposes a revitalization of political ecology beginning with the provocative affirmation that the latter has no relationship with nature. “Modernist Constitution,” he claims, is a theory of reality undergirded by an ontology that separates society (humans) and nature (non-human entities) in diverse and discrete groupings. Nature is ascribed to the domain of mechanical or biological causality, and culture—or society—consists of an autonomous domain of linguistic or social constructivism free of determination on the part of nature. This separation ensures that nature is imagined in a bucolic and postlapsarian mode, that is, as something that exists in a physical and mental location, at a distance from modern societies, which have “fallen”— having separated themselves from nature—starting with the destruction brought about by industrial modernity. An idealized and pristine nature perpetuates an ontological distinction that compromises political

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objectives whose rhetoric serves this ideology of nature, particularly a political objective whose immediate aim is to convince humans of our obligation to preserve and promote a natural environment as if the latter had existed with the least amount of human influence. This position, which is often read incorrectly as a way of giving credit to the conservationist discourse that endeavors to abandon environmental activism, tries to make political ecology’s postures more profound by means of a perspective that reorients the relationship between nature and society. In this way, for Latour, the complex interconnection between social and natural realities is the result of the interaction between human and non-­ human forces. From an ecocritical perspective, this position is taken up again in the works of Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010). For Morton, the ecocritical perception of nature is inevitably discursive, an arbitrary rhetorical construction, devoid of an independent and genuine existence, that establishes itself beyond the text that refers to it. According to Morton, to put “something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman” (2007, 5). Whereas Latour is fundamentally interested in how scientific knowledge translates its claims about nature from observations registered in the laboratory to the legislature, Morton, principally in Ecology, offers a significant complement to non-human studies from an aesthetic perspective. He analyzes how rhetorical figures transport readers to nature and nature to readers within the canons of nature writing, without any consideration for the lack of connection between semiotics and existing natural entities. In this sense, for Morton, it is not nature on its own that demands a conceptual reflection and reformulation, but rather the aestheticization of nature, which turns it into an entity that exists apart from humans.21 This scholarship created the necessary preconditions for the “decolonial turn,” a recent move among ecocritics as well as environmentalists that validates both the precolonial existence of multiple alternative epistemologies—those that erase the dichotomized understanding of nature and culture—and the possibilities that particular existing nature-cultures provide for decolonization (Rocheleau and Nirmal 2016, 55). Along with the decolonial turn, the ontological turn has also provided tools to inquire into what Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2018) defines as  Along these same lines is the work of Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology (2003).

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the “pluriverse.” Drawing from the idea of the need for “ontological design,” Escobar introduces this concept as a means “to think about, and contribute to, the transition from the hegemony of modernity’s one-world ontology to a pluriverse of socionatural configurations,” therefore suggesting that “designs for the pluriverse” constitute tools for reimagining and reconstructing local worlds (4). While the ontological turn resulted from the encounter between the field of political ecology and growing concerns with ontology (objects, matter, things, process, immanence, and the real) in postconstructivist social theory, in Designs for the Pluriverse Escobar suggests that the embryonic field of political ontology establishes a constructive space for rethinking design ontologically (52). Escobar and Mario Blaser define “political ecology” as a field in which scholars engage with “reality” as an emergent result of “relations and interdependencies” that stretch beyond boundaries based on modern binaries, such as nature versus culture, subject versus object, and material versus immaterial, and via a reassessment of non-Western epistemologies that emerge from conceiving what exists and that understand the world in alternative ways (2016, 166). The conception of the world as a “lively assemblage of humans and more-than-humans,” as described by Mario Blaser, underscores the question of what politics is: “what kind of politics do we need when heterogeneous assemblages are at stake that overflow stable categorizations of human/non-humans, animate/inanimate, nature/culture and so on?” (2014, 50). Furthermore, what are the ethical demands stemming from such questions about the political (Blaser 2014, 50)? In a similar manner, Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena has addressed political ontology in various works. One of her most important contributions to the field is the notion of “Earth beings” that she developed in her article “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics’” (2010), a significant piece because it inaugurates an alternative space of reflection on the emergence of lo indígena [indigeneity] in the terrain of present-day environmental and political activism. In the article, de la Cadena proposes that lo indígena—in particular, the Indigenous political movements in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia that have emerged in recent years—challenges the separation between nature and culture itself, connecting it to hegemonic notions of lo político. In fact, current Indigenous movements propose, according to de la Cadena, a different and pluralistic political practice, one characterized not so much by representing bodies marked by gender, race, ethnicity, or sexuality—an approach endemic to a multiculturalist perspective—but by

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evoking, through its demands, non-humans as fundamental actors in an alternative political arena. Both the decolonial and ontological turns capture the “critical renewal of cultural studies that is currently unfolding through recent theoretical and analytical publications, ethnographic work, art practice, and site-­ specific art and design collaborations” (Blackmore and Heffes 2022, 105). If ecocriticism was, as I have demonstrated, historically constituted in Anglophone contexts, Latin American environmental research and practice has expanded its inquiries’ scope by extending beyond these frameworks and articulating a space for contestation. Furthermore, since the last decade, ecocriticism and environmental humanities have shifted their focus through critical and recent interventions to take on questions of thinking about humans/non-humans, aesthetic expressions and practices, and scholarship/environmental knowledge within a context of ontological diversity. As Naomi Millner notes, the latest “scholarship troubles the notion that only one notion of nature exists” (2018, 101–2). Critical works by anthropologists Philipe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Eduardo Kohn, to name a few, not only expose the agency and spiritual connectivity ascribed to the Earth through multiple and different cosmological narratives, but, more importantly, explore non-Western cosmologies, such as those pertaining to Amerindian cultures, who “do not differentiate hierarchically between human and non-human species or, for that matter, between nature and culture” (French and Heffes 2021, 12). Western cultures are inclined to understand humankind as exceptional, occupying a special place in the universe and pursuing a distinctive destiny outside the province of non-human beings. From the forests of Amazonia to the glacial spaces of the Canadian Arctic––certain peoples instead conceive, as Descola notes, their “insertion into the environment in a manner altogether different from our own,” and they “regard themselves, not as social collectives managing their relations with the ecosystem, but rather as simple components of a vaster whole within which no real discrimination is really established between humans and non-humans” (2013, 17). Working on Amerindians’ ontologies, Viveiros de Castro uses the term “multinaturalism” to showcase how Amazonian cosmologies “presume nondifferentiation between the internal forms of humans and non-human beings” (Millner 2018, 102). As Viveiros de Castro points out, “[i]f Western multiculturalism is relativism as public policy, then Amerindian perspectivist shamanism is multinaturalism as cosmic politics” (1998, 472). This new scholarship, through groundbreaking modes of

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research and practice, is thus reconsidering key political concepts such as “cosmopolitanism, which traditionally acknowledges cultural difference, but does not acknowledge the richness of plural ‘natures’” (Millner 2018, 102). Material studies have also been a tool of environmental inquiry for ecocritics. Material ecocriticism, in the words of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (2012), derives from the idea that it is possible to merge our interpretative practice into material expressions such as “matters and meanings in the entire worldly reality,” from the activity of subatomic particles to the “way the combination of toxic substances and ‘toxic’ practices produces toxic places and toxic bodies” (450). Unlike the “ontological turn,” the “material turn” entails a search for new conceptual paradigms that are able to theorize the connections between matter and agency, and understand the “intertwining of bodies, natures, and meanings,” which can be cultural, social, political, symbolic, or natural, “namely, connected to the way living matter organizes itself in auto-regulated patterns” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 450). More importantly, material ecocriticism considers engagement with matter to be necessary for retracing and recognizing agential emergences as they amalgamate in social, scientific, and cognitive practices, together with the way we consume, exhaust, and deplete our material environment. For this reason, material ecocriticism recognizes matter as a text, a space of narrativity, and storied matter, as well as a “corporeal palimpsest in which stories are inscribed” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 51). If ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and being affected by it, how can we contribute to restoring the environment in our critical capacities and approaches? Glotfelty suggests that ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, particularly the cultural artifacts of language and literature. On a critical level, it has one foot in literature and the other on land, while as a theoretical discourse, it must negotiate between the human and the non-human (1996, xix).22  Glen Love’s Practical Ecocriticism suggests that there is compatibility between modern biology and social sciences. Biological evolution and cultural evolution are interrelated, hence the definitions “coevolutionary” or “biocultural” (2003, 19). He emphasizes the importance of Darwinian thought and the theory of evolution because they aid in understanding what makes us cultural creatures. In this sense, it is important to consider all of the biocultural aspects of human behavior. This means that the biological and the cultural do not find themselves separated nor do they exclude each other; on the contrary, there is a corre22

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Underpinning these perspectives is the confluence of several philosophical theories and social movements whose main concerns are situated at the interactions of human and non-human beings with their corresponding environments. This interplay determines different cultural attitudes, forging an intimate relationship at the core of how we perceive the space that surrounds us (Murphy 1995). What’s more, it is this very relationship that can explain, broaden, and improve our respective positions when facing an ecological crisis.23 But how does one articulate the ecocritical position within the field of Latin American studies? What effects does it serve and, as it pertains to a burgeoning discipline, what relationship does it establish with such a vast and varied literary and cultural tradition? The following section attempts to address these questions and to establish to what extent ecocriticism can serve as an adequate analytical tool of intellectual and ecological inquiry to account for the problems that emerge in Latin American environmental representations. It will also discuss how these cultural artifacts intersect with broader issues, such as a possible discursive rhetoric linked to nature, exploitation, and coloniality, the recuperation of Indigenous cosmogonies, or environmental injustice (i.e., how the increasing level of pollution equally affects the Earth and the subjects that inhabit it), among many other issues.

3  Ecocriticism and Latin America One decade after the publication of the first edition of this book, the emergence of an “environmental turn,” triggered by the accelerating deterioration of the Earth at a planetary scale, has been intensified by the flow of wealth from poor countries to rich ones, especially the Global North.24 This financial “drainage,” as characterized by Mary Louise Pratt spondence between them. Furthermore, it is important to bring an environmental ethic to the fore of the human agenda and to implement a transformation at the academic level, breaking down the walls and barriers that are raised between departments, university divisions, and academic disciplines. 23  Besides those referenced above, other positions are “environmental ethics,” “ecosophy,” and “ecologism of the south.” 24  However, we need to be careful with the use (and overuse) of the term “turn.” As Jamille Pinhero Dias notes, in reference to interactions between forms of plant communication and human language, poet Júlia de Carvalho Hansen “recently noted that if a ‘plant turn’ or ‘virada vegetal’ (as it is called in Brazil) is indeed taking place as a critical current, it must be taken into account that this notion of ‘turn’ is an Eurocentric one, since plants have been playing a central role in many non-European traditions since time immemorial” (2022, 144).

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(2002, 3), has unfolded within a “global crisis of human uprootedness [driven] by political violence, lack of economic opportunities, natural disasters and other manifestations of environmental degradation in the Global South” (French and Heffes 2021). Through the powerful critiques of the concepts of globalization, resource extraction, and resource dependency, in tandem with the irreversible degradation of the Earth at a planetary scale, a growing number of scholarly publications as well as art projects and initiatives have emerged in Latin America, deploying new strategies and mechanisms to transform deteriorated landscapes, give a voice to communities that experienced environmental racism, and creatively address the challenges at stake in the environmental justice struggles. In addition, the decolonial and ontological turns catalyzed the formulation of notions of relationality and pluriversality, as well as non-­ Western positions that disrupt theoretical foundations both progressive and conservative. In particular, Latin American critics focused on the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plantationocene have drawn from many perspectives to address local environmental concerns, especially those related to global anthropogenic impact as well as the intersections of colonialism, capitalism, and racism. While “Capitalocene” is the term proposed by Jason Moore (2016) as an alternative to “Anthropocene” to account for the role of capital in forcing anthropogenic changes, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing’s concept of the “Plantationocene” (see Haraway 2015) examines the legacies of colonial land use in contemporary resource extraction. From the industrial and urban impacts on the natural and built environments to monocrop agricultural and racialized labor, all these terms explore practices that continue to threaten the flows of knowledge, biomes, plants, and animal and human bodies in multiple spatialities.25 The present book intends to reconfigure the boundaries of ecocriticism as a discipline coming from the Anglo-American world by exposing its 25  This does not mean, however, that a critique of the ecological crisis from both an aesthetic and discursive position was absent prior to the institutionalization of ecocriticism as such. Even before the term ecocriticism was coined and spread in academic circles, scholars and intellectuals from Latin America expressed their concern about the fate of the planet, especially the ongoing depletion of natural resources through extractive mechanisms that harken back to the arrival of Europeans in the New World. Since then, Latin American writers have exercised some sort of (eco)criticism. See, for instance, The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (French and Heffes, eds., 2021), especially the introduction “Genealogies of Latin American Environmental Culture,” and chapters 1, 2, and 3.

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limits or, inversely, by establishing the features of a production that is specifically and distinctively Latin American. New and widely referenced interventions in the environmental humanities have emerged in the last ten years, situating the field of Latin American environmental aesthetic interrogations within a context of contestation of those earlier frameworks. This new wave of critical production is shaping the emergent field of Latin American environmental humanities, a rapidly consolidating discipline “that cross-fertilises methods and perspectives stemming from the social sciences, arts and humanities, natural sciences, and Indigenous thought,” to critically examine environmental histories and confront contemporary challenges (Blackmore and Heffes 2022, 105). At the same time, the critical renewal of “cultural studies that is currently unfolding through recent theoretical-analytical publications, ethnographic work, art practice, and site-specific art and design collaborations” has expanded to incorporate transhemispheric ecosystems and human/non-human interconnectivities, which were almost absent in previous works (Blackmore and Heffes 2022, 105).26 Visualizing Loss in Latin America is organized around some central questions that have yet to be addressed: How do we utilize these tools of cultural inquiry in a tradition as extensive and rich as that of Latin America? What specific Latin American traits appear, and to what extent is the use of this theoretical discipline pertinent to a deep reflection and analysis of the varied and dissimilar corpus that emerges from our social, cultural, and literary history? Moreover, how do Latin American aesthetics redefine and reconfigure those concepts formulated originally by ecocriticism, by venturing and proposing new forms of reading, conceptualization, effects, and distinctive markings? As I will demonstrate, Latin American literary and cultural traditions repeatedly put to the test not only the limits between one realm of inquiry and the other, but also their pertinence in the very field of ecocritical and environmental reading. Some earlier scholarship has already incorporated an ecological perspective that problematizes the field and methods of cultural and disciplinary inquiry and analysis. Two examples of this are Ileana Rodríguez’s article “Nature/Nation: Savagism/Civility Writing Amazonia” (1997) and Jorge Marcone’s “Cultural Criticism and Sustainable Development in 26  For a perspective on recent scholarship, art, and design practice, see the dossier “Latin American Environmental Research and Practice” (co-edited by Lisa Blackmore and Gisela Heffes) for the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2022).

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Amazonia: A Reading from The Spanish-American Romance of the Jungle” (1998). The former reexamines the narrative of Father Gaspar de Carvajal to analyze narratives from the Amazon that extend to postcolonial and global ones. To that end, Rodríguez addresses the limitations of terms such as “natural” and “civic” and further demonstrates how “natural” became synonymous with “natives,” broadening the scope of “savage” so that it encompasses “nature” and “human nature” (1997, 31). While the “Indians” are characterized as “barbarians” and “savages,” their European opponents, those who established cities and lived in them (the civis and the polis) are “civilized” and “political” (Rodríguez 1997, 32). Following this discursive logic, the obligation to become the domesticated body on which the nation-state is based falls again to the Indigenous, whose transformation—or extermination—the nation-state requires, and on whom the construction of civilization as location and relocation is imposed. These reterritorializations will go on to become nation-states. Some paradigmatic examples of this articulation appear in textual and visual depictions of the Amazon such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde [The Green House] (1966), Darcy Ribeiro’s Maíra (1976), or Roland Joffé’s La Misión [The Mission] (1986), where the transition between “savageness” (salvajismo) and “civilization” is marked by clichés of cultural conversion and mechanisms of transculturation. Significantly, this notion of “savage nature” has transformed in the present day into an artificial community of parks, recreation and camp sites, museums, and natural gardens: a “perfectly square, measured, untouchable, preserved” and “guarded national territory, under the watchful eye of national investment,” dedicated to the planning of foreign trade earnings through tourism (Rodríguez 1997, 32). If Rodríguez’s approximation considers practices of natural resource exploitation and extraction in their most diverse—and concealed—forms, Marcone’s article examines the novel of the jungle in contrast to the regional “telluric” novel with a focus on the conceptualization of a possible ecological sustainability. To do this, he suggests that the novela de la selva or Jungle Novel (first half of the twentieth century) constitutes a failure with respect to the idea of the “return to nature” that had been successful in the telluric novel, and that, contrary to those readings that liken the Amazon space to a green hell, the Jungle Novel constitutes a new frontier that resists modernity and sets it against other cultural images from the region, such as the myth of El Dorado or the lost paradise. Beginning with a critique of the very discourse of sustainability, Marcone

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suggests that the novela de la selva is different not only in its way of staging the failure of a return to the natural realm, but also because, as Arturo Escobar has formulated, in the discourse of sustainability, nature is constantly and continually reinvented as it pertains to the environment so that capital—and not nature or culture—can always be sustainable (i.e., also by means of its own perpetual exploitation). Over the last decade, other scholarly works have emerged that contribute to current ecological debates from multiple disciplinary positions and varied thematic stances. They integrate the burgeoning field of Latin American environmental humanities that has gradually begun to draw broader interest. The most significant contribution of ecocriticism to the field of Latin American studies has been its capacity to revisit a specific trope, genre, author, or set of aesthetic representations, and to reassess its significance through an alternative critical apparatus. An ecocritical approach can thus shed new light on the object of interrogation and its relationship with pressing current matters such as global warming, the environmental justice crisis, extinction, pollution, ocean acidification, and the indiscriminate growth of waste, among many others. The presence of waste, as I shall demonstrate throughout this study, has long been acknowledged within Latin American cultural production. Texts, paintings, and documentaries such as Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s short story “Los gallinazos sin plumas” [“The Featherless Buzzards”] (1955), Costa Rican Fernando Contreras’s novel Única mirando el mar [Única Looking Out to Sea] (1994), Antonio Berni’s art series of trash assemblages of the fictional Juanita Laguna and Ramona Montiel, and Jorge Furtado and Eduardo Coutinho’s documentaries Ilha das flores [Island of Flowers] (1989) and Boca de lixo [Mouth of Garbage] (1993), respectively, have been traditionally analyzed through the lens of social criticism and social realism, an approach that prioritizes the portrayal of ordinary people.27 Ecocriticism instead addresses how such works represent waste, matter, and residue, placing them at the intersection of material ecocritical studies, garbology, Latin American and Global South studies, and decoloniality. 27  Shortly after the publication of the Spanish version of this book, new scholarship has emerged that examines the works of both Furtado and Coutinho through a posthuman lens that questions the premises of modernity (and therefore of the culture/nature, human/nonhuman, and subject/object divide, as well as the linearity of modern time). See, for instance, Luz Horne’s book Futuros menores: Filosofías del tiempo y arquitecturas del mundo desde Brasil (2022).

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On the one hand, residues are understood as a key tool of cultural and aesthetic inquiry that help better make sense of cultural expressions related to the disposal or accumulation of matter—whether it is discarded in the garbage dump or hoarded in the private domain. Residual objects, for instance, make visible the uneven interactions between economic, material, and social forces that shape the relationships among human and non-­ human beings (Mitman et al. 2018, x). Residue is associated with waste and the commodification of human beings, the human and non-human remnants of society; recycling and reuse; trash culture; art and the culture of waste; materiality, fossils, dirt, and detritus. It also operates as an indicator of what’s “valuable” and what isn’t, while at the same time shedding light on past and present residues—objects in all forms, shapes, textures, and conditions—and offers clues to how human and non-human histories are interwoven. In the Anthropocene, residues of the present could be perceived, as Ursula Heise (2016) suggests, as an “incompletely materialized future that makes palpable the obsolescence of the present” (219). By examining aesthetic representations of residue, waste, and obsolete materiality, we inquire into the role that discarded matter—human and non-­ human—plays in a globalized economy, its place in the contemporary landscape, and the outputs of neoliberalism at the intersection of consumer capitalism and biological extinction. Additionally, these aesthetic manifestations connect the exploitation of natural and human resources to a rhetoric of waste, since the question of what is discarded, recycled, and preserved is linked directly to the more general problem of environmental destruction and degradation. Ecocriticism places waste—typically relegated to the margins of social space—at the center of its critical inquiry by emphasizing the roles that residue plays in the increasing commodification of both objects and subjects. Just as trash and all those objects we discard constitute a contaminating element that increasingly fills our oceans and our land, their symbolic and cultural dimensions offer a vast corpus of representations in which trash and scraps establish a particular relationship with the subjects who interact with them as well as with the very idea of so-called natural space. If trash is “a part of being human” that has long burdened our species, the problem of non-biodegradable waste acquires an unpredictable breadth in the context of demographic growth and the territorial expansion of urban populations (Castillo Berthier 2010, 135–146).28 Hence, visual and  See also Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2006).

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textual narratives of waste address ecological conflicts emerging from the unequal distribution of natural resources, which revolve around the problem of the scale of waste, lack of access to adequate sanitation, and unequal levels of pollution that disproportionately affect certain populations. A cultural history of waste not only reveals the story of material residues in late capitalism, reimagining its meanings amid the climate crisis, but it also uncovers the ways in which waste shapes our daily lives. The perspective laid out above has been widely examined by the environmental justice movement, which is not merely political but also cultural in its concern with issues such as ideology and representation (Sze 2002, 163). Ecocritics’ attention to questions of social inequality and the environmental crisis, both in the United States and in the Global South, aims to expand the (eco)literary canon to include narratives that address aspects of racial, ethnic, class, and sexual difference, emphasizing the intersections between social oppressions and environmental degradation. By the same token, ecocritics explore artistic and poetic forms and expressions that seek to transform toxic landscapes, give a voice to communities subject to ecological racism, and imaginatively convey the problems and stakes that the environmental justice movement confronts on a daily basis. In this regard, it also bears mentioning that Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martínez Alier in Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997) suggested a convergence of the rural third-world notion of the “environmentalism of the poor” with the urban notion of environmental justice as it is used in the United States. This critique is especially relevant because the very conceptualization of “environmentalism of the poor” establishes a connection with the “environmental justice movement.” Both initiatives are specifically made up of attempts to rectify the disproportionate incidence of environmental contamination in communities inhabited by minorities (whether defined by class, ethnicity, or race), with the purpose of guaranteeing the affected communities the right to live without being threatened by the risks caused by environmental deterioration. Ultimately, the main goal is to ensure equal access to those natural resources that sustain life and culture. If a political posture implies an active practice that consists in identifying patterns of environmentally destructive and socially unjust activity, it also involves modes of political resistance through movements working jointly for communities of

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“environmental survivors” with the objective of finding solutions as well as taking immediate and efficient action.29 In the same vein, new critical and theoretical paradigms have emerged in the last decade that center around traditional case studies—such as the novela de la selva examined earlier—but that adopt an ecological approach. Other critical paradigms of analysis can be found through an examination of Anibal Quijano’s terms, colonialism and coloniality, as key concepts for an ecocriticism that aims to understand the “crisis of the imagination” at the heart of the environmental crisis, and to propose healthier ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relation to it (French 2012). Ecocriticism must engage with postcolonial theory to plunge into the “root cause” and “ethical implications” of environmental degradation, and hence identify conceivable alternatives to contemporary Western environmental imaginaries (French 2012, 158). French’s “Voices in the Wilderness: Environment, Colonialism, and Coloniality in Latin American Literature” is a sweeping study of the “environmental turn,” a byproduct of both the crisis of neoliberalism and the ecological catastrophe that has inspired authors such as José Martí, José María Arguedas, Anacristina Rossi, and Mayra Montero to recenter “forms of knowledge marginalized since the time of the Conquest at the center of an emerging environmental ethos” (French 2012, 164). At the same time, an ecocritical approach can shed new light on the relationship between prevailing environmental conditions across different literary genres. For instance, as Ursula Heise has shown, species extinction and environmental crisis are often depicted in elegiac and tragic forms, a tendency recently explored in Latin American scholarship (2016, 120). Niall Binns’s The Ecological Crisis in Hispanic American Poetry (2004) addresses the Latin American vanguard by examining the works of Huidobro, Neruda, Parra, and Teiller. His approach includes, besides the ecological, poetic forms as they pertain to a verbal artifact. An extensive revision of the regionalist novel has also been undertaken (French 2005; Selgas 2022), along with other additional works that have revisited 29  Although the expression seems novel, “environmental survivors” refers to persons or communities socially, materially, and spiritually devastated as a result of, for example, hydroelectric projects that destroy tribal lands and contaminate water, or radioactive and toxic materials that originate in factories, mines, waste incinerators, and agricultural areas and threaten the life and health of people who live near them. The term continues to include traditional peasant farmers and ranchers who have been displaced because they have not been able to compete with agriculture and livestock corporations.

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well-known literary and testimonial texts (Rivera-Barnes and Hoeg 2009); adopted a historical approach toward modernity and technology, utopia, and subalternity (Taylor Kane 2010); explored Mexican and Chicanx environmental writing (Marcone and Ybarra 2008); and unearthed an ecological imagination anchored in a rhetoric of nature that exposes and critiques human power structures in the context of modernization (Barbas-­ Rhoden 2011). Most recently, new publications have broadened the scope of Latin American environmental studies. Some of this scholarship includes the vegetal turn and the emergence of critical plant studies (Gagliano et  al. 2017; Wylie 2020; Ponce de León 2022); studies on the intersections of landscape, extractivism, and the legacy of colonization (Andermann et al. 2018); work on the notions of heterogeneous landscape (Briceño and Coronado 2019); the decolonization of science, knowledge, and nature (Page 2021); posthumanism and the limits of the human (Bollington and Merchant 2020; Fornoff and Heffes 2021); imaginary geographies and nation-state constructions in the tropics (Martinez Pinzón 2016); reconfigurations of the Latin American canon (French and Heffes 2021); the interplay between fictional images and real places in the context of developmentalism (Saramago 2021); literary counter-readings of the Amazon (Smith 2021); extractivism and the search for El Dorado (Rogers 2019); agrarian extractivism and large-scale monoculture (McKay et  al. 2021); transcultural materialism (Hoyos 2019); liquid ecologies (Blackmore and Gómez 2020); “tidalectics” (DeLoughrey 2019; DeLoughrey and Flores 2020); slow violence (Kressner et  al. 2020); reindigenization and land rematriation (Helland et  al. 2021); Indigenous art-making informed by interspecies relationality (Pinhero Dias 2022); and art practice as a mode of research that illuminates curatorial and transdisciplinary projects by generating both scholarly outputs and public engagement activities (Blackmore and Heffes 2022). New cross-cutting initiatives have also emerged that further pave the road toward new materialism, Indigenous and postcolonial criticism, animal studies, and queer ecology. This recent production, “which sometimes correlate[s] with the emergence of new voices in the field of Latin American Studies,” spans vital queries ranging from “aesthetic representations, temporalities, and spatialities to activism, indigeneity, monoculture, toxicity, and cultural and political resistance” (Blackmore and Heffes 2022). In a broader sense, questions such as the relevance of the use of “environmental humanities” in the Latin American context—as opposed

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to, for instance, the prevalent use of political ecology [ecología política], an “approach derived from the social sciences”—have triggered seminal publications such as those written by Eduardo Gudynas, Marisol de la Cadena, Arturo Escobar, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Deborah Danowski, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Eduardo Kohn, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, to name just a few (Blackmore and Heffes 2022). One may then ask whether an “environmental humanities” reveals a different paradigm of analysis, a significant and unique position that outlines a distinctive Latin American “geoepistemology” (Heffes 2023).30 That said, what all these approaches have in common is that they demand a “radical redefinition of the relationship between human beings and nature” (Emmett and Nye 2017, 140). A reevaluation of this kind could not take place, however, without foregrounding the concept of domination as it applies to the exploitation of both humans and non-humans.31 A central concern of ecocriticism is how literary and cultural studies have defined the human. The question of the human harkens back to the dominance of European philosophical traditions, especially those that stemmed from the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, as seen in the work of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, among others (Merchant 2016, 84). During the eight decades between the publication of Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning in 1605 and Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, a new awareness of humans’ power over, and prediction of, nature arose. Through experimentation, Carolyn Merchant notes, “‘Nature naturing’ would yield ‘her’ secrets; through mathematics, ‘Nature natured’ could be described, predicted, and managed” (Merchant 2016, 84). This idea of nature as an object of inquiry that would yield to nature as an object of 30  In “¿Una geoepistemología alternativa? Notas a partir de Futuros menores, de Luz Horne” I suggest, along the lines of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s notion of “epistemologies of the South,” that Horne’s book twists this idea a little bit further by proposing an epistemology from a spatiotemporal angle, a reexamination of the geographical productions of knowledge that does not aim to revert or invert existing assumptions and postulations but, rather, to complicate and trouble them—in other words, an alternative “geoepistemology.” 31  Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil proposed, in The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela (1997), a model to reorient Marxist theories for understanding Latin American societies, beginning with the recognition of the important role the natural environment plays in the economic production of nations on the periphery—which adds the problem of agricultural exploitation and extraction of resources to the problem of the division of labor, both of which exploitations are found at the very center of national production.

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mere exploitation has roots in the framing of nature–culture connections, which had been conceived of, at the onset of modernity, as a “dualistic, hierarchical, nonreciprocal, and partial, yet asserted universality” (Rocheleau and Nirmal 2016, 51). Given that the domination of non-human nature is integrated into the field of the domination of human beings, some scholars call for a reworking and application of certain formulations that stem from Critical Theory. Inspired by the work of the Frankfurt School, Carolyn Merchant (in Ecology - Key Concepts in Critical Theory [1994]) has drawn attention to the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, who have explored the problem of domination through an exhaustive perspective and a totalizing theory of modernization and its alternatives that emphasizes Hegel’s dialectic theory of the interactions between diverse aspects of society. Instead of seeing the “progressive” aspects of modernity, in which sciences, technology, and capital supposedly would better the human condition, they emphasized the dehumanizing tendencies of modernity, its destruction of the environment, its potential for totalitarian policies, and its inability to manage and control technology. It is, as Merchant well posits, the myth of progress through the domination of nature that Adorno and Horkheimer had set out to expose (2008, 16). Moreover, they exposed those concepts underlying instrumental reasoning, along with those typical of scientific thought and capitalist society. Enlightenment thought has “disenchanted” nature, extracting the magical elements and changing the subject into object–– namely, a break with the myth of the enchanted past and with mimesis, which invites participation in nature through an identification with it.32 The “disenchantment” of external nature was achieved, therefore, through the “despiritualization” of internal nature in the human being; logic and mathematics, together with the calculus of capital, turned into privileged modes of thought, “defining the very meaning of truth” (Merchant 2016, 18). Describing the world through logic and mathematics led to prediction and, consequently, to the possibility of controlling nature. Instrumental reason and the Enlightenment became synonymous with domination. 32  This break was embodied by Francis Bacon, as already mentioned. At the beginning of modernity the process of objectification created a distance between the subject and the object. Bacon, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, advocated for the broad domination of “man” over the whole universe by means of an experimental science that would extract nature’s secrets. See especially the first section of Carolyn Merchant’s edited collection of essays “Critical Theory and the Domination of Nature” (2008, 27–76).

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There is hence still a need to further expand the questioning of the limits between species as a central critical inquiry. Reexamining the interrelations between nature and culture, humans and non-humans, is not only urgent and pertinent today, it resides directly within the postcolonial preoccupations with extractive agro-imperialism (Petras and Veltmeyer 2014), in tandem with the development of new theories such as “indigeneity.”33 Lúcia Sá, for instance, in Rain Forest Literatures (2004), addresses questions related to indigeneity—or lo indígena—in her analysis of a significant corpus of works from the tropical forest, especially from the Amazon. Here, indigeneity is used to describe the process of transculturation through which tropical forest texts offer a distinctive trait to categories such as space and place, emphasizing the specific character of the territories the native populations have inhabited for centuries, through which they have designated a name and a sacred history to mountains, rivers, and waterfalls. Though focused on the impact of Indigenous narratives of their history on the literary and cultural sphere, Sá has not ignored the political urgency of the struggle waged by the Indigenous people of South America to defend their lands and cultures. Just as the Pemon, So’to, and Macuxi communities in the region of Roraima have been violently abused by Brazilians and Venezuelans in a mining conflict that has gone on for more than twenty years, the Tuí and Guaraní ethnic groups have suffered a similar fate.34 Sá’s study thus resonates with environmental

33  The term “indigeneity” does not exist in Spanish, although there is an expression in Spanish that transmits a similar meaning, “lo indígena” (“that which is Indigenous” or “the Indigenous”), which is used to refer to peoples and things Indigenous. While these expressions are not interchangeable they do coincide on one point: both imply a question about what is Indigenous—about what makes it possible for somebody or something to be considered Indigenous. Indigeneity, then, is the state of being Indigenous (Onsman 2004). In short, it is a question about an essence, or a being. Therefore, “indigeneity” often implies a certain degree of essentialism when it comes to defining what is Indigenous and what is not (Verdesio 2008, 555). For a discussion of the term from a social anthropological perspective, see Mathias Guenther (2006), “The concept of indigeneity.” 34  Other documentaries devoted to the ongoing abuses of Indigenous communities are Laura Graham, David Hernández Palmar, and Caimi Waiásse Xavante’s Owners of the Water: Conflict and Collaboration over Rivers (2008); Ana Zanotti’s Seguir siendo [Still Mbyá] (1999); Mari Corrêa and Vincent Carelli’s Agenda 31 (2003); Andrea Heckman and Tad Fettig’s Ausangate (2006); and Vincent Carelli’s Children of the Land (2000). Similar cases have been reported in Paraguay, Argentina, and Peru, where the enforcement of violence as a coercive method of instigation has remained the same for three centuries: intentional contamination by means of contagious diseases, the use of false property titles, armed attacks on mines, roads, and villages, and policies of local authorities of conveniently ignoring villages.

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justice’s demands that have been recently characterized as “Global Indigenism” (Chase-Dunn et al. 2020). One of the key principles of the global environmental justice movement is the belief that all people have an inherent natural right to enjoy a healthy environment. It identifies the environment as the space in which we live, work, play, and develop spiritually. The initiatives of the environmental justice movement specifically consist of attempts to rectify the disproportionate incidences of environmental contamination in communities inhabited by minorities (whether defined by class, ethnicity, or race), with the purpose of ensuring the affected communities the right to live without being threatened by the risks caused by environmental degradation and contamination, and being able to enjoy equal access to natural resources that sustain life and culture (Adamson and Evans 2002). While this position entails an involved practice capable of identifying repeated samples of environmental devastation, it additionally points toward the identification of modes of resistance and activisms to provide communities of “environmental survivors” help in finding solutions, as well as to address their social and material urgencies. Although the expression may seem novel, “environmental survivors” refers to persons or communities socially, materially, and spiritually devastated as a result of hydroelectric projects that destroy tribal lands and contaminate water, or radioactive and toxic materials originating in neighboring factories, mines, waste incinerators, and agricultural areas, threatening the life and health of people who live around them.35 Social movements for 35  Two works coming from the social sciences illustrate the perspective of “environmental survivors” and analyze, respectively, a paradigmatic case in Argentina and another in Nicaragua. Regarding Argentina’s case study, see Javier Auyero and Débora Alejandra Swistun’s study in Inflammable (2009). The name refers to a settlement located on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in proximity to the petrochemical zone in the southern part of the city, where the contamination of the soil with a high grade of lead, among other toxic substances, has had devastating effects on the minds and bodies of its residents. For Nicaragua’s study, see José Adán Silva (interviews) and Manuel Esquival’s (photographs) 2007 journalistic work about the contamination in Chinandega by Nemagón dew (the commercial name of DBCO or 1.2-dibromo-3-choloropropane nematicide whose toxicity has led the American government to prohibit its use in the United States) on banana and pineapple plantations. With a prologue by former vice-president and writer Sergio Ramírez, this text orally and visually registers the human and environmental disaster of the peasant communities that worked on the plantations for 70 years. In addition, see Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva’s documentary Amor, mujeres y flores [Love, Women, and Flowers] (1988), a testimonial work about the women who live in the Colombian savannah (on the outskirts of Bogotá) and work

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environmental and climate justice are mobilizing large numbers of people (both in person and virtually) and making a broad national and global impact beyond local contexts. Their appeal lies in no small part in their ability to blend environmentalism with longstanding struggles for social injustice and equality. A compelling reevaluation of the notion of nature informed by environmental criticism, environmental justice, and critical and ecological theory can relate, to a certain extent, to some of the formulations of postcolonial studies. The questioning of an anthropocentric position—or, within ecofeminism, of an androcentric approach—along with a proposal of an ecocentric/biocentric position––a “transcorporeality” that maps the material interchanges across human bodies, animal bodies, and environments (Alaimo 2010, 12)––entails, implicitly or explicitly, a methodological scrutiny of an imperial, colonizing, and subjugating ideology. While Stacy Alaimo demonstrates that the route between the body and the environment is “exceedingly local”––and that nevertheless tracing a “toxic substance from production to consumption often reveals global networks of social injustice, lax regulations, and environmental degradation” (Alaimo 2010, 15)––Max Liboiron argues that “pollution is not a manifestation or side effect of colonialism but is rather an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to Land” (2021, 6). By evoking “plastic” as a critical case study, he notes that “pollution is best understood as the violence of colonial land relations rather than environmental damage, which is a symptom of violence” (2021, 6–7). Colonial violence through colonial state-formation, settlement, and capitalist development is about “genocide and access” to the land (Liboiron 2021, 9). Put another way, colonialism propagates through “White Geology” (Yusoff 2018) the imaginaries that arrange, classify, and categorize “Blackness as a stratum or seismic barrier to the costs of extraction,” throughout “the coal face, the alluvial planes, and the sugarcane fields, and on the slave block, into the black communities that buffer the petrochemical industries and hurricanes

in the growing flower industry. Some of them have contracted leukemia because of the use of pesticides. For its part, Steven Soderbergh’s already classic film Erin Brockovich (2000) is based on a true story and addresses similar issues; an archetypical text is Rachel Carson’s novel Silent Spring (1962), a “poetic parable” (Garrard 2004) made up of literary genres such as the pastoral and apocalyptic to narrate an environmental devastation of a town in the United States due to the use of two powerful pesticides—that until then seemed to live in a sort of romantic harmony.

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to the indigenous reservations that soak up the waste of industrialization and the sociosexual effects of extraction cultures” (Yusoff 2018, 11). All these interwoven perspectives reveal the diverse positions that an environmental literary, cultural, and aesthetic approach can yield, as well as the breadth and range of its multiple objects of critical inquiry. They lay out an intellectual engagement in a nascent debate whose more immediate objective is to define some of the contours that shape, in a broader sense, environmental humanities.

4  Visualizing Loss in Latin America The previous sections have firstly assessed the emergence of ecocriticism in the United States and Great Britain, and secondly traced the extent to which this discipline has informed Latin American literary and cultural criticism. One of the central questions of this study is how we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus that can be helpful in understanding the environmental phenomena which are unique to Latin America. I will argue that the aesthetic praxis analyzed here is informed by a critical framework that will result in a new epistemological paradigm that does not correspond categorically to ecocriticism but enters into dialogue with it while also establishing some substantial differences. This new episteme stems from the most specific aspects of the Latin American visual, textual, and artistic works compiled and examined here (although not limited or exhausted, by any means, in this study) and it raises questions of spatialities and temporalities, of the overarching scale of waste, and of wastescapes. These aesthetic productions operate at the intersections of biopolitics and ecocriticism, placing Latin American figurations within a bioecocritical paradigm that defines the material conditions of human and non-human relational networks––especially those at the convergence of what’s discarded and what isn’t, as well as of the notion of what’s valuable and what isn’t––while constituting different meanings and enabling new forms of understanding. Since the arrival of the Europeans to the New World, Latin America has been––and continues to be––the “locus of important ecological contests,” where the “abundance” of natural resources the European colonizers encountered “created the conditions of possibility for an economy based on the exploitation of human beings and non-human nature through the extraction of mineral wealth, monoculture, Black slavery, and the encomienda system” (French  and Heffes 2021, 8). In addition to the

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appropriation, depletion, and contamination of local territories [usually referred to as “sacrifice zones” (Steve Lerner 2010)] there is also an issue of time. While space harbors a praxis that has turned the “vernacular landscape,” to borrow Rob Nixon’s term, into a “scarred landscape” (Emmett and Nye 2017, 173), the geological timescale of the Anthropocene, so-­ called deep time, is immense. Although some scholars wonder how the Anthropocene engages with this timescale and inquire about the temporal structure of the Anthropocene (Nordblad 2021, 331), it certainly unsettles ideas about time and place by contrasting the local scales of a city or a village in the Global South with the planetary narratives that run across geological stratifications. At this spatiotemporal crossroads lie the figurations, epistemologies, and problematics generated by the scale of waste and of wastescapes in contemporary Latin America. I consider this spatiotemporal dynamic to enable the visualizing of loss because the ongoing “excess” created by the accumulation of soon-to-be-discarded commodities demands the continuous extraction of natural resources. Furthermore, as I will argue in this study, it is a dynamic that incorporates the use, abuse, and extraction of human resources as well, whose bodies entangle, blend, and come into close contact with disposed matter, becoming altogether an enmeshed production of Capitalist modernity. The convergence of these two extractions (human and non-human), a mechanism that harkens back to the arrival of Europeans colonizers, is what I tentatively define as “bioecocriticism.” This is a new theoretical paradigm that intends to elaborate a critical methodology of analysis, that is, to establish a new praxis of epistemological understanding. A significant component of this critical apparatus is, unlike most of the studies I have discussed in the previous sections, anchored in the territory of the city. Unlike the ecocritics who have looked closely at what is rural, natural, or regional, this book aspires to map out the “excess” that grows in the city. Adopting an ecocritical approach to the urban setting allows one to ascertain the ways in which the dichotomies of urban/rural, visibility/invisibility, and commodity/waste flow across social, spatial, and temporal boundaries. On the other hand, this biopolitical position signals a rupture in the order of politics: “the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques” (Foucault 1980, 141–2). Two theoretical examples from Anglo-American scholarship that address the engagement and dynamics between the urban and the rural

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are Leo Marx’s classic, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American Culture (1964), and Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973). Both texts deal with a reading of cultural history that registers the complex relationship between nature and urbanism. While Williams also discusses industrial technology, Marx’s work displays a degree of nostalgia for a rural landscape that is irreversibly disappearing as a result of economic powers and class interests. Both Marx and Williams share the Marxist perspective that views the process of modernization as the inevitable victory over the pastoral world (for Marx) and local knowledge and culture (for Williams) (Buell 2005, 14).36 Given that both the city and the countryside are historically interwoven, literary and environmental studies must develop a socially inflected ecocriticism that considers deteriorated urban spaces and landscapes, notably, the “constructed” landscape, as seriously as the “natural” landscape (Villanueva Gardner 1999, 203). A new critical episteme in the field of Latin American studies therefore must include the intersections between the metropolis and the interior as well as the combination of anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric demands. It must incorporate works from the social sciences, such as social and cultural anthropology, but also from economics (Leff; Martínez Alier), urban theory (Harvey; Davis), and urban ecocriticism (Bennett and Teague 1999).37 Bearing in mind that these literary and cultural works engage with a rhetoric of waste (objects and subjects), the works of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Zygmunt Bauman have 36  For Buell, this indignation on behalf of a pro-rural perspective facing the degradation of the landscape has been key to the creation of a “toxic discourse” accordingly to the most recent defenders of the environmental justice movement. See Lawrence Buell (1998): “Toxic Discourse,” 639–665. 37  This practice goes back to urban ecology, although this discipline originally comes from social studies—and the works of Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and R.D. McKenzie in relation to the ways in which urban life transforms human consciousness—and lacks a cultural analysis that meticulously examines urban environments. In this sense, Michael Bennett and David W. Teague (1999) refer to the sociological works of Lewis Mumford and Paul Goodman that contrast with the most recent works of Andrew Ross, Will Wright, and Timothy W. Lukes. Therefore, there is a tradition that begins with a rhetorical image of the city as an immense biological organism (Ross and Bennett 1999, 17) and that, unfortunately, has redirected its focus toward broader issues that include, first, movements concerned with making cities green, and second, those works focused on a social ecology that deals with, for example, the distribution of wealth, racial segregation, or waste management. Andrew Ross defines these studies as “green criticism” (Ross and Bennett  1999, 18). See also Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and R.D. McKenzie (1925): The City.

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been illuminating for prompting a deeper ontological reflection. Walter Benjamin, Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson, William Rathje, and Cullen Murphy have furnished me with the most significant tools to address conceptually what is of value and what is not, what is thrown out and what is collected, recycled, and preserved. These are but a handful of the scholars I draw from in the subsequent chapters to configure this new epistemological archive. While some address the ecological conflicts that emerge from the unequal distribution of natural resources and the lack of access to sanitary goods and services, others reflect on the increasing production of waste, the economic scale, and the disproportionate distribution of pollution in marginalized areas. In a strict sense, the three tropes developed in this study aim to shed light on an issue that has gradually begun to generate more interest among academic researchers as well as writers and artists. I concur with Kathleen Wallace and Karla Armbruster (2001) that, if ecocriticism is to have a real force as a theoretical and pedagogical approach, ecocritics need to consider more urgently those places where most people live—cities and their surrounding peripheral areas. When it comes to Latin America, it is even more imperative to consider spaces of both segregation and self-­segregation that interweave a complex environmental phenomenon, where consumption and waste permeate the fragile condition of those who remain on the margins. I hope this study will serve as a contribution to the development of what David Naguib Pellow defined as critical environmental justice studies in the field of Latin American Cultural Studies in tackling the question of the expendability of human and non-human populations facing socioecological threats from states, industries, and other political economic forces (2018, 14), and by expanding the debates around an urban ecocriticism whose tools of cultural inquiry incorporate other positions. From environmental justice to politics and poetics, ecological activism, and multiple forms of aesthetic expressions, each trope will become the archetype of a new critical episteme through which readers may visualize what is no longer there.

References Adamson, Joni, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow, eds. 2016. Keywords for Environmental Studies. New York: New York University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Adamson, Joni, and Mei Mei Evans, eds. 2002. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Allsopp, Michelle, Adam Walters, David Santillo, and Paul Johnston. 2006. Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/ publications/reports/plastic_ocean_report/. Accessed 3 Dec 2012. Alston, Vermonja. 2007. Environment. In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, 101–103. New York: New York University Press. Andermann, Jens, Lisa Blackmore, and Morell D.  Carrillo. 2018. Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape. Zurich: Diaphanes. Armbruster, Karla, and Kathleen R.  Wallace. 2001. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Armiero, Marco. 2021. Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Auyero, Javier, and Débora Swistun. 2009. Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Bahti, T. and J.C. Mann. 2012. Trope. In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Roland Green, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul F.  Rouzer, and Harris Feinsod, 1463. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barbas-Rhoden, Laura. 2011. Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Bate, Johnathan. 1991. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London; New York: Routledge. Bennett, Michael, and David W.  Teague, eds. 1999. The Nature of Cities. Ecocriticism and Urban Environments. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Binns, Niall. 2004. Acercamientos ecocríticos a la literatura hispanoamericana. Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana 33: 9–13. Black, Ralph W. 1994. What We Talk About When We Talk About Literary Criticism. In Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Sixteen Position Papers from the 1994 Western Literature Association Meeting Salt Lake City, Utah--6 October 1994. https://www.asle.org/explore-­our-­field/ecocriticism-­and-­ environmental-­humanities/definitions-­of-­ecocriticism-­archive/. Blackmore, Lisa, and Liliana Gómez, eds. 2020. Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. New York; London: Routledge. Blackmore, Lisa, and Gisela Heffes. 2022. Latin American Environmental Research and Practice. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 31 (1): 105–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2022.2084720. Blaser, Mario. 2014. Ontology and Indigeneity: On the Political Ontology of Heterogeneous Assemblages. Cultural Geographies 21 (1): 49–58. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/26168541.

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Bollington, Lucy, and Paul Merchant, eds. 2020. Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Braidotti, Rosi, and Maria Hlavajova. 2018. Introduction. In Posthuman Glossary, ed. Braidotti, Rosi and Maria Hlavajova, 1–14. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Breashears, David. 2007. Glacier Work. http://www.glacierworks.org/. Briceño, Ximena, and Jorge Coronado, eds. 2019. Visiones de los Andes: ensayos críticos sobre el concepto de paisaje y region, primera edición. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh and La Paz. Bolivia: Plural Editores. Buell, Lawrence. Toxic Discourse. Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (1998): 639–665. Buell, Lawrence. 2011. Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends. Qui Parle 19 (2): 87–115. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0087. ———. 1996. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press. Castillo Berthier, Héctor. 2010. La basura y la sociedad. In Residual: Intervenciones artísticas en la ciudad, 135–146. México D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / Museo Universitario Contemporáneo de Arte. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222. ———. 2009–2010. Clima e historia: cuatro tesis. Pasajes (Publicacions Universitat de Valencia) 3 (Winter): 50–69. Chase-Dunn, Christopher, James Fenelon, Thomas D.  Hall, Ian Breckenridge-­ Jackson, and Joel Herrera. 2020. Global Indigenism and the Web of Transnational Social Movements. In Challenges of Globalization and Prospects for an Inter-civilizational World Order, ed. Rossi Ino, 411–434. Switzerland AG: Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­44058-­9_23. Cokinos, Christopher. 1994. What Is Ecocriticism? In Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Sixteen Position Papers from the 1994 Western Literature Association Meeting Salt Lake City, Utah--6 October 1994. https://www.asle.org/explore-­ our-­field/ecocriticism-­and-­environmental-­humanities/definitions-­of-­ecocriticism-­ archive/ Coupe, Laurence, ed. 2000. The Green Studies Reader: from Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London; New York: Routledge. Dautel, Susan L. 2009. Transoceanic Trash: International and United States Strategies for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal 1 (Fall): 181–208. Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London; New York: Verso. Dawson, Ashley. 2010. Introduction: New Enclosures. New Formations 69: 8–22.

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De la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics’. Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334–370. Dean, Thomas K. 1994. What Is Eco-Criticism? In Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Sixteen Position Papers from the 1994 Western Literature Association Meeting Salt Lake City, Utah--6 October 1994. https://www.asle.org/explore-­ o u r -­f i e l d / e c o c r i t i c i s m -­a n d -­e n v i r o n m e n t a l -­h u m a n i t i e s / definitions-­of-­ecocriticism-­archive/ DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B.  Handley. 2011. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and Tatiana Flores. 2020. Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art. Environmental Humanities 12 (1): 132–166. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-­8142242. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dias, Jamille Pinheiro. 2022. Environmental Thinking and Indigenous Arts in Brazil Today. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 31 (1): 141–157. Dussel, Enrique. 1998. Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity. In The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 3–31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Emmett, Robert, and David Nye. 2017. Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Eriksen, Marcus. 2017. Junk Raft. An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution. Boston: Beacon Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence Autonomy and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Escobar, Arturo, and Mario Blaser. 2016. Political Ecology. In Keywords for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William A.  Gleason, and David N. Pellow, 164–167. New York: New York University Press. Figueroa Helland, Leonardo E., Abigail Perez Aguilera, and Felix Mantz. 2021. Decolonize, ReIndigenize: Planetary Crisis, Biocultural Diversity, Indigenous Resurgence, and Land Rematriation. In Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures, ed. McCullagh Suzanne, Luis I Pradanos, Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, and Catherine Wagner, 61-150. Lanham Maryland: Lexington Books an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Fornoff, Carolyn, and Gisela Heffes. 2021. Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. Albany: State University of New York Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Penguin Random House.

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French, Jennifer. 2005. Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. French, Jennifer L. 2012. Voices in the Wilderness: Environment, Colonialism, and Coloniality in Latin American Literature. Review (Americas Society) 45 (2): 157–166. French, Jennifer, and Gisela Heffes, eds. 2021. The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Gaard, Greta. 2016. Ecofeminism. In Keywords for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow. New York: New York University Press. Gagliano, Monica, John Ryan, and Patricia I.  Vieira. 2017. The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. London; New York: Routledge. Glotfelty, Cheryll. 1996. Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis. In The Ecocriticism Reader. Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, xv–xxxvii. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. Grober, Ulrich. 2007. Deep roots - a conceptual history of ‘sustainable development’ (Nachhaltigkeit). Discussion papers / Beim Präsidenten, Emeriti Projekte, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, no. P 2007-00233: 1-33. Guha, Ramachandra, and Joan Martínez Alier. 1997. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. London: Earthscan Publications. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Taylor & Francis Group. ———. 2015. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–165. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawkins, Gay. 2005. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Heffes, Gisela. 2023. ¿Una geoepistemología alternativa? Notas a partir de Futuros menores, de Luz Horne. In Revista Transas. http://www.revistatransas.com/. Heise, Ursula K. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Heynen, Nik. 2016. Urban Ecology. In Keywords for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow, 192–194. New York: New York University Press. Horne, Luz. 2022. Futuros menores: Filosofias del tiempo y arquitecturas del mundo desde Brasil. Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado. Hoyos, Héctor. 2019. Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London; New York: Routledge. Ingram, David. 2004. Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter: U of Exeter Press. Irland, Basia. 2016. Eco-Art. In Keywords for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William A.  Gleason, and David N.  Pellow, 50–55. New  York: New York University Press. Ivakhiv, Adrian. 2008. Green Film Criticism and Its Futures. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15 (2): 1–28. Iovino, Serelleno, and Serpil Oppermann. 2012. Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity. Ecozone. European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment. https://doi.org/10.37536/ ECOZONA.2012.3.1.452 Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kane, Adrian Taylor. 2010. The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth Century Writings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Publishers. Kressner, Ilka, Ana M.  Mutis, and Elizabeth Pettinaroli. 2020. Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World. New York; London: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. Politics of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lerner, Steve. 2010. Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Leurs, Koen, Tamara Shepherd, and Alison Harvey. 2018. Youth. In Posthuman Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 463–466. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Love, Glen. 1990. Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism. Western American Literature 25 (3): 201–215. ———. 1992. Et in Arcadia Ego: Pastoral Theory Meets Ecocriticism. Western American Literature 27 (3): 195–207. ———. 2003. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment, 2003. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Marcone, Jorge. 1998. Cultural Criticism and Sustainable Development in Amazonia: A Reading from The Spanish-American Romance of the Jungle. Hispanic Journal 19 (2): 281–294. Marcone, Jorge, and Priscilla Solis Ybarra. 2008. Mexican and Chicana/o Environmental Writing: Unearthing and Inhabiting. In Teaching North American Environmental Literature (Modern Language Association of America

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options for teaching N° 22), ed. Laird Christensen, Mark C.  Long, and Fred Waage, 93–111. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Marrero Henríquez, José Manuel, ed. 2011. Literatura y sostenibilidad en la era del antropoceno. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Fundación Canaria Mapfre Guanarteme. Martínez-Pinzón, Felipe. 2016. Una cultura de invernadero: trópico y civilización en Colombia (1808-1928). Madrid: Iberoamericana. Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press. McKay, Ben M., Alberto Alonso Fradejas, and Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete. 2021. Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America. Abingdon Oxon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822958. Meeker, Joseph W. 1972. The Comedy of Survival. Studies in Literary Ecology. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row. ———. 2008. Introduction to Ecology - Key Concepts. In Critical Theory, ed. Carolyn Merchant, 15–39. New York: Humanity Books. ———. 2016. Autonomous Nature: Problems of Prediction and Control From Ancient Times to the Future. New York; London: Routledge. Millner, Naomi. 2018. Terra plena. Revisiting Contemporary Agrarian Struggles in Central America through a “Full Earth” Perspective. In Coloniality Ontology and the Question of the Posthuman, ed. Jackson, Mark, 101-129. London; New York: Routledge. Mitman, Gregg, Marco Armiero, and Robert S.  Emmett, eds. 2018. Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Moore, Jason W. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. ———. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murphy, Patrick D. 1995. Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nordblad, Julia. 2021. On the Difference Between Anthropocene and Climate Change Temporalities. Critical Inquiry 47 (2): 328–348. Nouzeilles, Gabriela, ed. 2002. La naturaleza en disputa: retóricas del cuerpo y el paisaje en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Paidós. O’Neill, Claire. 2011. How Soda Caps Are Killing Birds. http://www.npr.org/ blogs/pictureshow/2011/10/31/141879837/how-­soda-­caps-­are-­killing-­ birds. Accessed 11 Jan 2012.

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Orlowski, Jeff. 2012. Chasing Ice. https://chasingice.com/the-­film/. Page, Joanna. 2021. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art. London: UCL Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peet, Richard, and Michael Watts, eds. 1996. Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements. London; New York: Routledge. Pellow, David N. 2018. What Is Critical Environmental Justice? Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishers. Petras, James F., and Henry Veltmeyer. 2014. Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s New Frontier. Leiden: Brill. Phillips, Dana. 2003. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Plett, Heinrich F. 2001. Figures of speech. In Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Oxford University Press. https://wwwoxfordreferencecom.ezproxy.rice.edu/ view/10.1093/acref/9780195125955.001.0001/acref-­9780195125955-­e-­ 103 Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London; New York: Routledge. Ponce de León, Alejandro. 2022. Latin America and The Botanical Turn. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 31 (1): 129–140. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2002. Why the Virgin of Zapopan Went to Los Angeles: Reflections on Mobility and Globality. Keynote address at the Third Annual Encuentro, Lima, Peru, July 8, 2002. https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/ enc02-­keynotes/item/1867-­enc02-­mary-­pratt.html. Accessed Nov 29 2022. Rivera-Barnes, Beatriz, and Jerry Hoeg. 2009. Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rocheleau, Dianne, and Padini Nirmal. 2016. Culture. In Keywords for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William A.  Gleason, and David N. Pellow, 50–55. New York: New York University Press. Rodríguez, Ileana. 1997. Naturaleza /Nación: lo salvaje /civil escribiendo Amazonia. Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 23 (45): 27–42. Rodríguez, Marta, and Silva, Jorge. 1988. Amor, mujeres y flores. Una producción de Fundación Cine Documental Investigación Social en asociación con Firefret Productions. New York, N.Y: Women Make Movies, Inc. Rogers, Charlotte. 2019. Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Ross, Andrew. 1994. The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society. London: Verso. Ross, Andrew (Interviewed by Michael Bennett). 1999. The Social Claim on Urban Ecology. In The Nature of Cities. Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, eds. Bennett, Michael, and David W.  Teague, 16–30. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

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Rueckert, William. 1978. Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism. Iowa Review 9 (1): 71–86. Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt. 2016. Ecomedia: Key Issues. London: Earthscan/Routledge. Sá, Lúcia. 2004. Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture, 2004. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Saramago, Victoria. 2021. Fictional Environments : Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Selgas, Gianfranco. 2022. Regionalismo ensamblado. Medioambiente, modernidad y reacción político-cultural en Latinoamérica (1930-1940). Dissertation at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Sharon-Zisser, Shirley. 1993. A Distinction No Longer in Use: Evolutionary Discourse and the Disappearance of the Trope/Figure Binarism. Rhetorica 11 (3): 321–342. Smith, Amanda M. 2021. Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography After the Rubber Boom. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. Soderbergh, Steven. 2000. Erin Brockovich. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios. Solnit, Rebecca. 2008. Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Soper, Kate. 1995. What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human. Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Steinman, Ethan. 2013. Glacial Balance. http://www.glacialbalance.com/. Sze, Julie. 2002. From Environmental Justice Literature to the Literature of Environmental Justice. In The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy, ed. Joni Adamson and Mei Mei Evans, 163–180. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Toynbee, Arnold. 1976. Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Villanueva Gardner, Catherine. 1999. An Ecofeminist Perspective on the Urban Environment. In The Nature of Cities. Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, eds. Bennett, Michael, and David W. Teague, 191–212. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Viney, William. 2014. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Viveiros De Castro, Eduardo. 1998. Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspective. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469–488. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System, I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.

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———. 1980. The Modern World-System, II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1989. The Modern World-System, III: The Second Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840s. San Diego: Academic Press. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New  York: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wylie, Lesley. 2020. The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 2

Destruction: The Garbage Dump as a Global Biocritical Trope

[T]oday’s democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life. Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental bio political fracture of the West into account will be able to stop this oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth. ­—Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998, 180)

1   Unfathomable Fluidity: Toward a Condition of “Exception” Interest and attention directed toward the sociological, anthropological, and cultural study of our relationship with waste has increased since the 1960s. In his Rubbish Theory (1979), British anthropologist Michael Thompson develops an understanding of trash as part of a flexible and changing value system, foregrounding notions of innovation, creativity, and social status. In the previous decade, Mary Douglas (1966) had pointed out the centrality of practices related to the disposal of trash in the construction and maintenance of social relationships. Likewise, at the very heart of material culture studies, the work of anthropologists William Rathje and Cullen Murphy in the last two decades of the twentieth century has advanced © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Heffes, Visualizing Loss in Latin America, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28831-9_2

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significant insights into the relationship between archeological artifacts and trash by exploring the function of waste as a resource for understanding sociocultural practices.1 For their part, Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman have called into question the fate of human beings as disposed or discarded elements in discourses related to sociopolitical hygiene. Agamben (1998) takes up the work of Foucault, especially the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité (La volonté de savoir [1976]), to refer to the process by which “bare life” understood as zoè—a Greek term to refer to the simple and common life of all living beings as opposed to bios that indicates a “form of life” or “qualified human life” of individuals or groups—has come to gradually occupy the very center of modernity’s political stage (2017, 1204).2 1  The development of “material culture” studies occurred in multiples stages. The first phase came to emphasize that “things” have importance and that approaching the study of material worlds does not necessarily fetishize these physical objects; on the contrary, these “things” are made up of a superstructure that is not separate from the social world. The most important material culture theorists who were developing theories in the 1980s demonstrated that social worlds were made up as much of materiality as of its inverse [some examples are Bourdieu (1977), Appadurai (1986), and Miller (1987)]. This generated a great variety of approaches to the theme of materiality that considered material culture as an analogy of the text (e.g., Tilley 1990, 1991) to the application of psycho-social models (e.g., Dittmar 1992). The second phase of material culture studies bears in mind how the argument about how things and materiality have importance has already been addressed, and therefore goes beyond this and concentrates on the diversity of material worlds. In this second phase, material worlds become different contexts and, therefore, try to avoid reducing these worlds to models of the social world, or to assign them to a specific subdisciplinary preoccupation—such as the study of textile materiality or that of architecture. In fact, this phase aims to show that material culture studies can help to better understand the cultural process than a “literal” anthropology (Miller 2001). Nonetheless, as Daniel Miller correctly suggests, material culture studies are not made up of a particular discipline, and the most important works come from different academic fields: An important aspect of this second phase is that it does not focus on the study of material culture per se but, rather, by avoiding the fetishism that can be derived from even the names of these studies, it tries to focus on the world of artifacts without basing itself on a general theory of artifacts or material culture. 2  In The Omnibus Homo Sacer (2017), Agamben expands on these categories that he already developed in his 1998 work. Here, he refers to Aristotle’s Politics to define the categories that are prevalent in the present: “Even though it is not concerned with citizens as natural living bodies but with the city as hierarchically supreme community, the concept life assumes a technical meaning from its very first pages. It is not necessary that it be defined for a term to have a technical character; it is sufficient that it develops a decisive strategic function in the theory. A summary survey of the meanings of the term zoè and zen shows that, even if Aristotle never gives it an axiomatic definition, it is precisely its articulation in the couple ‘living/living well,’ ‘natural life/political qualified life,’ ‘zoè/bios’ that allows one to define the sphere of politics. The celebrated definition of polis as ‘born in view of living [tou zen], but existing in view of living well [tou eu zen]’ (Politics 1252b 28–30) has given canonical form to this interweaving of life and politically qualified life, of zoè and bios, that was to remain decisive in the history of Western politics” (1204).

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According to Agamben, the entrance of zoè into the polis—or the politicization of bare life—“constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (1998, 4). Not only does bare life become the main object of projections and calculations alike on the part of the state, it also gradually begins to converge with the political realm. Along with this process, the category of “exception”—originally situated on the margins of political order—increasingly becomes the norm. As a result, what is excluded and included, interior and exterior space, bios and zoè, law and fact, enter together into a zone of irreducible indistinctness (Agamben 1998, 9).3 With the dissipation of these boundaries, bare life, which occupies that state of separation and isolation, is freed and becomes simultaneously the subject and object of the conflicts of the political order (Agamben 1998, 9).4 This phenomenon, that originally occurred in the space of the city, is displaced in modernity by the space of the “camp”—whether concentration or refugee. For Agamben, this constitutes the most important biopolitical paradigm of the West. To a certain extent, this displacement embodies a dilemma or aporia in the very frame of modern democracies: at the very moment when they have supposedly triumphed over adversarial political models, which have reached the highest stage of their consummation, they have also demonstrated their inability to save zoè from an unprecedented ruin (Agamben 1998, 9–10).5 3  By referring to the category of “exception,” Agamben evokes the state or particular condition that, by finding itself “separate,” constitutes the least visible foundations on which an entire political system rests. 4  For Agamben, this thesis sheds a sinister light on the modalities that today’s social sciences, urban studies, and architecture are trying to conceive and organize in the public space of the world’s cities, without a clear awareness that, in the very center, lies bare life—even if it has been transformed and become, apparently, more human—that has defined the biopolitics of the most important totalitarian states of the twentieth century (Agamben 1998, 181–182). 5  Ernesto Laclau (2008) criticizes Agamben’s proposal in regard to the state of exception and suggests that the “myth of a fully reconciled society is what governs the (non-) political discourse of Agamben. And it is also what allows him to dismiss all political options in our societies and to unify them in the concentration camp as their secret destiny. Instead of deconstructing the logic of political institutions, showing areas in which forms of struggle and resistance are possible, he closes them beforehand through an essentialist unification. Political nihilism is his ultimate message” (Laclau 2008, 22).

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In this chapter, I am particularly interested in two conceptual proposals that I will address later when I examine a defined corpus of literary and visual works. I will also add another proposal to which Agamben refers elsewhere. The first is the relationship that I establish between the representation of human beings as disposable elements within the Latin American phenomenon at the specific historical moment of production and consumption that is modernity. In turn, I consider that this residual condition is linked to a state of indistinctness and irreducibility to which Agamben alludes. The second is the dedifferentiation of the edges and borders that separates the human from the non-human, the subject from the object, and—we could tentatively suggest—life from death that constitutes a decisive element of the works assembled here. Agamben’s third conceptual proposal refers to the “camp”—concentration or refugee—as a paradigm of public space in which politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer is essentially fused with the citizen (1998, 171).6 By extrapolating this modern spatial paradigm (the “camp”) to the territory of the garbage dump, I intend to demonstrate the correlation between the “camp”––as described by Agamben––and those distinctive spaces examined in this book. Tentatively, I define these distinctive spaces as the locus of non-voluntary concentration where human leftovers pile up. Of course, these are the humans that both economic development and social progress have expelled, subjects who occupy a cartography of invisibility and whose existence is ignored daily and systematically.7 In like manner, Zygmunt Bauman (2004, 2011) examines these issues, though from the double perspective of the production of waste by humans as well as the production of “wasted humans” by globalization: the “excessive” and “redundant”—all of those in the population “who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay” in the  Referring to Roman jurisprudence, Agamben defines homo sacer as one who has a particular status of double exclusion that is carried out beginning with its subtraction from the sanctioned forms of human and divine laws, and who in turn is exposed to a violence that cannot be classified as sacrifice or homicide, or as condemnation to death or sacrilege (1998, 82). For Agamben, “what is captured in the sovereign ban is a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed: homo sacer” (1998, 83). 7  I have analyzed, although tangentially, the problem of residual humans that are fed by trash in the third chapter of my book Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana (2008), and in the articles “Reimagining Contemporary Latin American Cities” (2009), “La ciudad latinoamericana contemporánea revisitada” (2010), “Crisis, imaginación y estética: espacio urbano y la resignificación de los desechos en Buenos Aires” (2011), and “Muerte y transfiguración de la ciudad: territorios urbanos, cuerpos y marginalidad” (2012). 6

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privileged space where modern contemporary life takes place—are the inevitable consequences of the process of modernization that inseparably accompanies modernity (2004, 5).8 Bauman underscores that an inevitable result of globalization’s “order-building” is the casting out of certain population groups that are deemed “unfit” or “undesirable,” just as earlier ways of earning a livelihood are rendered subordinate and replaced by “economic progress” (2004, 5).9 Similar to Agamben, Bauman deals with a series of distinct spaces, namely, those that escape territorial boundaries and accommodate wasted humans while embodying, at the same time, a unique paradigm. Whether he is discussing prisons, refugee camps, or the ghettos in the United States where populations of color reside, Bauman refers to these paradigmatic spaces as “dumping sites” for various forms of human “waste”: …the human waste of the global frontier land, are ‘the outsiders incarnate’, the absolute outsiders, outsiders everywhere and out of place everywhere except in places that are themselves out of place—the ‘nowhere places’ that appear on no maps used by ordinary humans on their travels. (2004, 80)

Defined as “collateral casualties” and “collateral damage,” this human phenomenon relates to subjects who, as discarded elements, represent the

8  Not only does modernity belong to a category that rests at the very heart of globalization but, given its propagation and expansion (as well as that of the West and capitalism), it is perceived as the principal motor that pushes globalization, the crisis of which has been transformed into the result of a narrative about modernity, linked as much to its success as to its failure (Giddens 1991; Bauman 1995). From this perspective, postmodernity is understood as much as a historic process in which modernity has found its limits as a critical discourse that deconstructs modernity (Jameson 2003). But even where “the global” is represented more in postmodern terms than in modern terms, globalization frequently represents an intensification of modernity rather than a break from it: “Globalization therefore becomes Western modernity without labels or pretensions, mere ubiquity” (Krishnaswamy 2008, 5). 9  The notion developed by Aníbal Quijano (1992, 2000) with respect to the “coloniality of power” to represent the “dark side of modernity” allows for a broadening of the reflection on the relationship between modernity, colonialism, capitalism, and racism into this conceptual matrix. In the same way as the “modern world-system” of Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, and Giovanni Arrighi, the conceptualization of coloniality/modernity makes use of dependency theory and emphasizes an articulation of power based on economic and spatial aspects. From this perspective, modernity is a structural relation and not substantial content, and as Mignolo suggests (2001), Latin American criticism of modernity, in particular, understands coloniality as constitutive of capitalist modernity.

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space of unfathomable fluidity in which the roots of the human condition’s daily uncertainty are immersed. Building on Agamben’s and Bauman’s analyses, I propose to read these spaces as the archetypical site of both human and non-human destruction. I will first analyze a cluster of literary and visual works through the lens of modernity and globalization, focusing primarily on its margins, to trace an undefined territoriality that eludes cartographic demarcations. This amounts to a liminal third space that is found neither in the urban nor in the rural territory and that we define here as one of “exception.” In these works, the unspecified territories configure spaces of contamination as a twofold mechanism that, on the one hand, exposes the inhabitants to the effects of toxicity, while, on the other, it confounds human and non-­ human degradation with the ecological cycle of garbage.10 The images evoked here hence correspond to a trope of devastation that is not only environmental, but also human.11 Agamben’s and Bauman’s studies are especially relevant for defining the contours of the subjects represented here since they embody the indistinct and irreducible “threshold.” In a strict sense, these individuals oscillate between the position of consuming subjects and discarded objects, and epitomize, I would like to suggest, not only one of the most degraded stages of modernity, but also a separate condition that we could tentatively define as “residual humans” or “human ruins.”

10  Ivan Restrepo points out that the “desechos domésticos contaminantes (polluting household waste [DDC])” reveal the existence of an “ecological cycle of garbage”: This means that if it is eliminated inadequately, it will return to individuals’ consumption by means of new and other forms, from drinking water to polluted land that is then used for agricultural production, among many other uses (Restrepo 2010, [Spanish 182] [English 193–194]). 11  According to the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the significant problems related to the elimination of waste in the United States is food disposal that winds up in landfills as well as incinerators. Besides taking up space, discarded food rots very quickly and rapidly generates methane gas, a greenhouse gas (GHG) whose impact is more than twenty-­ five times greater than carbon dioxide. See https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-­ greenhouse-­gases#methane. Accessed 23 April 2017.

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2   Collateral Residues of Modernity’s Production, Consumption, and Disposal The photograph that appears on the cover of Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (2003) shows a child digging in a garbage dump in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In recent years, this portrait has become a recurring image for it condenses the unmistakable space of present-­day modern life’s waste in its double meaning as it simultaneously operates as a deposit of massively reproduced, consumed, and discarded materials as well as the receptacle of those “discarded” subjects that survive exclusively in the dump. What has been once extracted and processed will end up here. The unspecified territories of modernity are sites of a very specific task: from separating to cataloguing and collecting trash, based on various categories (cardboard, aluminum, glass, plastic), which will be subsequently sold for recycling––perhaps through an intermediary, who then sells the material to wholesale buyers, or, in some other cases, directly to the wholesalers. Even more importantly, the dump is the site where these subjects live, and it is therefore a permanent source of food and daily sustenance. In the field of social sciences, the “Garbage Project,” conceived in 1971 and established officially at the University of Arizona two years later, was mainly run by a team of researchers who, led by the archeologist William Rathje, made use of an innovative method with the goal of applying “real” archeology to the following question: Is it possible to analyze and investigate human behavior through garbage, that is, to analyze contemporary solid waste with the objective of studying the management of economic and nutritive resources in the home? Since then, this academic effort has been known as “garbology,” and those who practice it are known as garbologists (Rathje and Murphy 1992, 14). Modern dumps are an unequivocal example of the legacy of urban and industrial contemporary society (Restrepo 2010, 173). The project, under Rathje’s leadership, processed 250,000 pounds of trash, the majority coming from urban landfills, but also from garbage bins in private homes. The project classified, codified, and catalogued garbage and built a database beginning with these scraps in order to cover every aspect of daily life in the United States, from drinking habits to the use of contraceptives. Besides the most evident results, some conclusions brought into view the relationship that trash initiated with other elements of modernity. In the article “The Perfume of Garbage: Modernity and the Archeological”

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(2004), Michael Shanks, David Platt, and William Rathje warned that contemporary archeologists, as well as other academic researchers, have not correctly addressed or reflected upon the problem of garbage, and they proposed a definition for the latter that incorporates everything from ruins to leftovers and remains, scraps, elements in decomposition, hygiene, dirt, and illnesses (65). Specifically, they maintained that ruins should be included in the definition of trash and that construction rubble, which generally winds up in a landfill, constitutes modern ruins. As they contended, just as one cannot think about modernity without its continuous production of trash, neither is it possible to conceive of modernity without its museological and archeological component (2004, 64–65).12 The cultural imagery that undergirds the works I will examine in this chapter draws on this linkage between archeology and trash. I argue that this partnership is situated at the very core of the composition and decomposition of modernity, and that we therefore must keep in mind that trash, ruins, and cultural imagery constitute a triad that stems from a mechanism of production (of objects to be consumed), and whose maximization of profits is to be attained by any means regardless of the consequences (Ortega 2010, 216). Of course, this ecological damage corresponds to a production within the logic of the market, an economic strategy that the United States put in motion after World War II to get out of the recession in a very short time and establish an “elaborate psychological seduction scheme” meant to make the population fall into an accelerated “use and dispose” dynamic for all products made available to the population (Ortega 2010, 216). This program defined the reactivation of industry as its immediate objective, drastically reducing the useful life of all types of objects while simultaneously accelerating the rhythm at which they were produced and increasing their supply while developing and monitoring carefully designed packaging and advertising campaigns, as well as the durability of any product that could be placed in the market. In this way, new needs were created that did not exist before, and people started feeling (or suffering) a dependency on recent technological advances just as with new seasons’ styles and fashions, forcing them to acquire new products. Directly related to the access or “loss of status,” this process of economic 12  The argument set forth in this article refers to the ruins from the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001, which were transferred to the Staten Island (New York) landfill, Fresh Kills, and, once there, examined and catalogued. This landfill was closed that very year, and in its place the construction of a public park has been projected.

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activation and consumer greed spurred an urgency to make more money and to spend it frantically (Ortega 2010, 216). Cities—privileged spaces of modernity—turned into trash-generating points on a grand scale, and therefore, they became critical places of environmental harm, with great concentrations of trash that accumulated in open-air dumps or sanitary landfills that were rarely monitored and therefore turned into sites of serious health complications.13 Modern societies have grown accustomed to not seeing the problem of the large quantity of matter that indiscriminately winds up in garbage dumps and that these spaces, in some cases, even house populations who feed from those residues. While the landfills to which Rathje et al. refer, like the majority of modern landfills that abound in “developed” countries, follow certain environmental safety standards and rely on a series of impermeable layers that stop lixiviate or leachate filtrations, those portrayed in the literary and visual works examined in this chapter lack such regulations. In most of the landfills in Latin America, trash is disposed of inappropriately and, as a result, returns to the cycle of consumption in new forms: polluted water and the use of contaminated land as a space for residences or even farming. As a consequence, the elimination of trash or “polluting household waste” in the dump causes problems of a diverse nature: On the one hand, it generates an “ecological cycle of garbage” and the damaging effects that derive from its malfunctioning; on the other hand, it carries a higher grade of environmental pollution that threatens and puts at risk the health of the people who inhabit these spaces.14

13  Nonetheless, to say that cities are the most harmful spaces is erroneous: One of the major causes of environmental deterioration comes from agricultural zones whose fertilizers and pesticides pollute aquifers as well as surrounding rivers, putting in danger the life of all species and human groups who use these natural resources daily. I owe this information to my colleague Caroline Masiello, from the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences (Rice University), whose presentation “Two Modes of Watershed Contamination: A Comparison of the Developing and Developed World” within the panel that I organized in January of 2011, titled The City and the Environment in Latin America: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, offered a panoramic argument about the problem of environmental pollution in rural areas, contrasting the urban paradigm with the agrarian one. 14  As Mary Douglas (1992) pointed out, these are risks that have to do with official policies that include social and moral problems. However, since the threats and risks do not refer to a concrete category—such as an earthquake or a flood—but rather to a category linked to ways of thinking about and perceiving these risks—an invention, an artificial product—these risks can be used politically and culturally for diverse purposes.

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3  Residual Humans (or Human Ruins) The story of people who live in garbage dumps is not new. Humans have always generated, produced, manufactured, excreted, separated, discarded, and eliminated different forms of waste, as Martin Melosi has pointed out in his already classic Garbage in the Cities (1981). Nevertheless, waste has not always been a problem, or at least a problem at the scale and magnitude that it has come to acquire in contemporary societies: Throughout history, agrarian societies have successfully avoided solid waste pollution and contamination. Trash has therefore become an unequivocally urban problem, and although it varies in degree and intensity, the limits that habitable space imposes, such as population density, have exacerbated the problem (Melosi 2004, 1). The stories I examine unfold precisely in this scenario of ecological destruction, articulated as an urban condition, that is tied to a “culture of exception” (Diken and Laustsen 2005). In The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) anthropologist Anna Tsing suggests that to know “the world that progress has left to us, we must track shifting patches of ruination” (206). True, we can trace the sites of precarity and the humans and non-humans that inhabit the ruins. Although this is a “globally coordinated phenomenon,” it takes place disproportionally, as Tsing notes, in unique parts of the world, such as the Global South (2015, 205). So, when Tsing asks what “emerges in damaged landscapes, beyond the call of industrial promise and ruin?” (2015, 18) one may answer “residual humans”––or “human ruins.” Not surprisingly, those “living in ruins” have been called different names: facks and teugs (which refer to a social caste system) in Dakar, wahis and zabbaleen in Cairo, gallinazos in Colombia, scavengers or garbage pickers in English-­speaking countries, pepenadores or resoqueadores in Mexico, catadores de lixo in Brazil, cartoneros and cirujas in Argentina, and buzos in Costa Rica.15 These are just different ways of defining the same livelihood: “making a living out of garbage” (Castillo Berthier 2010, 137). Although generating waste is part of being human, and humans have always had the burden of their waste, demographic growth and the geographic expansion of urban populations have had unpredictable and alarming dimensions as waste fills already polluted water sources with mud, soiling air and land all over the planet. Historically, the correlation between the accumulation of garbage and risks to health became evident 15  According to Verónica Paiva (2006) the word “ciruja” surfaced in the context of “quema” (burning and incinerating trash), alluding to the term “cirujano,” or “surgeon” in English, since they oversaw the almost “surgical” separation of trash; it is curious, nonetheless, that the magazine Caras y Caretas from 1899 refers to those who do this as “cateadores” (118).

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toward the middle of the nineteenth century. Public health institutions drew causal links between disease and the debris on the streets, sidewalks, and alleyways of industrializing cities (Melosi 2004, 21). The nineteenth century bequeathed new objects of trash, such as tin containers, corrugated cardboard, ready-to-wear clothing produced for mass consumption, commercial packaging, pre-cut wood, and a great number of other construction materials. Nonetheless, before the official institution of garbage dumps—which marked the acknowledgment of the problem of where to discard those objects whose death certificate had been decreed—other methods were implemented. In the United States, for example, the household practice of digging refuse pits into which one could throw out the trash had already been in place since the middle of the eighteenth century; this replaced the older early modern method of simply throwing debris out the window or door of the house (Rathje and Murphy 1992, 42). Following this system was the use of incinerators or the system of “reduction,” a technique that came principally from Europe in which “wet” garbage (food waste, peelings, fruit and vegetable scraps, eggs, legumes, and rotten food) and “dead animals” were stewed in large containers in order to retrieve various byproducts. Until then, people who rummaged through the trash, at times even recycling it, formed part of the multiple and hazardous rounds that waste made through the complex urban labyrinth. Rummaging through the trash was not penalized, and in some places, it constituted a familiar and accepted characteristic that was part of the daily routine. It was not until the late nineteenth century that a recognizable modern approach to urban sanitation made a decisive change and implemented an organized system of garbage collection. Trash was now taken to dumps, which grew rapidly in size, becoming mechanized and, in some cases, privatized (Rathje and Murphy 1992, 43). The displacement of disposable items from the city to the outskirts generated problems that, after all, are associated with the current perception of garbage, denying its existence because it has been confined to a space with no visibility. How, then, can we conceive and grasp the reaches of its existence and final removal? How far away from and how far outside of the nearest city is this place? Where does “far away” begin and where does “outside of” end so that it is not found, unavoidably, within the next inhabited space?

4   Visual Tales of Indistinctness In Latin America, discarded items such as organic waste and objects account for the daily nourishment of thousands of people who rummage through garbage, collect it, and consume it. Most of this garbage is

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generated in cities. Latin American films and narratives have reflected these phenomena for many decades. In Brazil, trash mounds have become a persistent presence in the images of national cinema at least since the 1960s. Some of the most notable examples range from the episode Um Favelado [The Slum Dweller] (Marcos Farias) in the film Cinco Vezes Favela [Five Tales in the Slums] (1962), to Ilha das flores [Isle of Flowers] (Furtado 1989), Boca de lixo [Mouth of Garbage] (Coutinho 1993), and Estamira (Prado 2004).16 In Argentina, similar images have become a pattern: A paradigmatic example is Pablo Trapero’s short film Sobras [Leftovers] that belongs to the longer film collection Stories on Human Rights (2008). While some of these visual narratives intended to promote a complex debate with respect to the social place that these subjects inhabit, marked by abandonment and oblivion, they also portray the daily life of ordinary people such as the catadores or garbage pickers, who tell their stories from the dump itself, where they live. Lacking an analytical assessment, Mexican director Ícaro Cisneros’s longer film, Los pepenadores de acá [The Pepenadores from Here] (1982), also evokes these images. Several novels, such as Única mirando al mar [Única Gazing at the Sea] (1994), by Costa Rican Fernando Contreras Castro, and Waslala (1996), by Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli, make the garbage dump the principal axis around which their narratives develop. From both a poetic and critical perspective, the images articulated in these representations bring to light the unsettling effects of globalization where modern economic forces have marginalized people, leading them to live in non-human conditions (such as living in the landfills) and to become “wasted lives” (Bauman 2004). Before I look 16  I have left out Lucy Walker’s acclaimed documentary Waste Land (2009), which owes a great deal to Boca de lixo. The film takes place in “Jardim Gramacho,” the largest garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro. The main character is Vik Muniz, a visual artist who resides in New York and refers to himself as one of the Brazilian artists who sells the most outside of Brazil. Given that he grew up very poor, he wants to make art that gives something back: the money he earns from portrait sales of the catadores de lixo reverts to the very catadores he portrays. Taking as a starting point the question of whether or not art can change people, the film follows the diverse stages of Muniz’s project until its transformation into a “work of art” and its later sale in an international art gallery. Nevertheless, this film—whose cinematic techniques had already appeared in Coutinho’s documentary—has various problems, such as the lack of transparency regarding the process of selection of the catadores that will be photographed; the focus on individualism over a more community-driven notion (taking into consideration that the documentary is about a group of people that inhabit the garbage dump); and the absence of an eco-consciousness that raises awareness about the environmentalism of the poor.

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in greater detail at some examples of the works enumerated above, I would like to emphasize that residual culture in Latin America is located at the intersections of trash production, modernity, and urban environments. If Latin American cities are the privileged spaces of modernity, they have also become sites of large-scale waste generation. Because of this, they represent critical spaces of environmental degradation, with large residual concentrations that pose a real health threat for the surrounding populations who are often among the underrepresented. The documentary Boca de lixo [Mouth of Garbage, 1993)] by Eduardo Coutinho was shot in the garbage dump of Itaica, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro (40 kilometers away), in the municipality of São Gonçalo. This is one of hundreds of sites where men, women, and children, or catadores, retrieve aluminum cans, glass bottles, cardboard, and plastic, as well as food, clothes, and other artifacts that they may reuse. Unlike other scavengers and rag-pickers, these families live in the landfill and experience what Argentine sociologists Javier Auyero and Débora Swistun (2009) have defined as “environmental suffering.” Through the camera’s framing of the space with a long shot that depicts people and their makeshift homes—a euphemism to refer to the tents composed of plastic bags that serve as shelter—as frail, ephemeral, and unsafe, Coutinho’s perspective emphasizes that the catadores straddle the border between the existent and non-existent, amid permanence and evanescence. Adopting the format of a series of interviews, the documentary consists of a set of one-on-one conversations with different people who live in the landfill and who narrate their experience of inhabiting this space. A pioneer, Coutinho makes a visible effort to avoid both staging these interviews as coercive interrogations and cataloguing individuals in well-worn stereotypes. Instead, the documentary displays an informal conversation with multiple narratives. Far from creating a unique account, these open-­ ended narratives point in different directions. He defined his position as a documentarian precisely by inquiring into how interviewees established and interpreted the relationship between themselves and the space of the garbage dump (Coutinho 1997, 169). Coutinho explained this effort as one that avoided the middle-class intellectual consciousness that abhors these families’ activities. A striking example is when he chats with a woman who lives in the landfill with her children (Figs. 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3).

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Figs. 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3  Boca de lixo [Mouth of Garbage], 1993, video stills

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This scene shows two different narratives: first, the oral account of the woman who states that she has a good life, and that her children, who were raised there, “are all healthy”; on the other hand, the visual account through the angle of the camera—simultaneous to the woman’s oral account—focuses on a pile of disposed syringes along with other hazardous material most likely from a hospital. The camera then travels to her feet, stopping at an open wound the woman claims to have obtained from one of the needles. The following framing of the woman and her children walking barefoot in the landfill not only juxtaposes several registers (an oral and a visual in this case), it also displays the sharp contrast between an illusory perception of a healthy environment and a reality that is both contaminating and toxic. In a similar vein, “Lúcia,” another woman from the documentary, recounts dump life while the camera captures her “taking a bath” with a small water pitcher that barely holds enough water for her to rinse her hands and arms. As Lúcia grooms herself, she confides she has found in the dump “good clothes and good shoes” because “what isn’t good for the rich is good for the poor.” Boca de lixo therefore displays numerous accounts without guiding the spectator’s gaze in one direction or the other. It will thus be up to the spectator to decide and prioritize either the oral or visual narrative, or both.17 Social inequality is a catalyst for waste injustice. The waste of the rich is different from the waste of the poor (you only need to examine both garbage bins to draw a conclusion). Waste injustice operates as a cultural category by unsettling the notion of value. At the same time, it configures a distribution of space that correlates with social, economic, and legal status; just as it separates and divides spatially, socially, economically, and legally, it also differentiates between valuable and residual subjects. Furthermore, it assigns varying degrees of citizenship and humanity. If waste is constantly hidden from our sight (either in the garbage bin or in the landfill), what renders it visible? In Homo Sacer, Agamben again takes up the first Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and posits that it constituted a passage that began to transform the “subject” into a “citizen,” and that birth, for 17  The questions that Auyero and Swistun considered for their ethnographical research on the inflammable slums in Buenos Aires were, first, how people make sense of the problem of pollution in which they live and how, as a consequence, they face the toxic dangers that surround them; second, how much do the residents of these spaces know about their contaminated habitat, and what is the relationship between this knowledge, their suffering, and their apparent collective inaction (2009, 4–5).

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the first time, became the immediate element that conferred sovereignty. This proclamation, which hides a certain “fiction,” will appear more clearly undermined with Nazism and Fascism in the first third of the twentieth century, although it will be made more manifest with the analysis of the figure of the “refugee,” the increasing presence of which becomes an unsettling element within the modern order of the nation-state, creating a break in the continuum between “man” and “citizen,” nativity and nationality, and placing the original “fiction” of modern sovereignty in full crisis (Agamben 1998, 129–131). Coutinho’s residual humans, those that reside in a “damaged landscape” (Tsing 2015), embody a vivid revelation of Agamben’s dictum: Not only do they decenter the modern sequence of birth- citizenship enacted at the end of the eighteenth century during the French Revolution, they also disclose the flaws of the nation-states’ sovereign powers that fail to represent and recognize them. Waste makes visible, then, the contours of these informal human settlements located on the external perimeter and away from the urban populations. They differ even from favelas, those marginal zones that are often inserted into the urban space and contribute to the creation of social “patches,” enclaves of different status and class that combine great misery with great wealth.18 Manuel Castells (1974) refers to these spatial dispositions as urban segregation as it pertains to a tendency to organize space in zones with a strong internal social homogenization and a strong social disparity within them—a disparity that is understood not only in terms of difference but in terms of hierarchy. Waste also makes visible the ominous: While residual humans bear the mark of an indefinable and indistinguishable existence, they nevertheless render visible the fear of the constant and imminent threat of contagion.19 Ilha das flores [Isle of Flowers] is the name of a garbage dump in Porto Alegre, an intended, brazen euphemism that defines the human settlements that inhabit it. Documentarian Jorge Furtado examines this landfill 18  According to Alfonso Valenzuela Aguilera (2002), the “complexity of urban structure is organized around a multitude of oppositions that intervene in the symbolic, social, and functional differentiation of space,” and for this reason, the evolution of the city represents “the traces of the transformations that social relationships have experienced because of the confrontation between the different powers at the time” (37). 19  According to the RAE (Real Academia Española/Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary [the standard dictionary of the Spanish language]), one of the meanings of “contaminate” (from the Latin “contamināre”) is “to noxiously alter purity or normal conditions of a thing or a resource by chemical or physical agents.”

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with harsh criticism in his short film by the same name. The documentary delves into the role that residual humans play in contemporary society as they are inserted into a space of “indeterminacy” (Agamben 2005), the locus of segregation and confinement that hosts the human waste that society execrates. What emerges here is what Agamben called the “immediately biopolitical significance of the state of exception”: a paradigmatic structure in which “law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension” (2005, 3). As in the memorable short story “Los gallinazos sin plumas” [“Featherless Vultures”] (1955) by Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro, in Ilha das flores the human inhabitants of the dump, along with the vultures and rats, fight daily over the leftovers that arrive from the city. Thiago de Faria e Silva signals that Ilha das flores establishes an ironic game between progress and violence, happiness and omission, fiction and documentary, encapsulated in the disclaimer that appears at the very beginning of the film: “This film is not fiction; a place called the Isle of Flowers does exist…” (511; emphasis in the original). The short film exhibits a contrasted, caustic, narrative in which the social order is presented as fully functioning—the happy family, the peasant worker, merchandise production, and commercial trucks operating daily—while cast in the shadow of unceasing social violence. In addition, the documentary embodies Agamben’s warning that “the total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man” (Agamben 2004, 77) when Furtado depicts how pigs have a higher priority than people, the latter eating the remains of what the former have left behind. Waste, therefore, not only organizes the relationships around toxicity and its flipside, purity, it also reflects and reinforces larger structures of inequality by “stigmatizing already marginalized bodies for their association with pollution” (Theriault and Kang 2021, 14). Waste brings up the question of who has the power and authority to define “toxic,” its correlation with human and non-­ human, and what is worth keeping and what is worthless. If “dirt is matter out of place,” as Mary Douglas pointed out in Purity and Danger (1966), this presupposition implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations as well as a contravention of that order since dirt is “never a uniquely isolated event” (2002, 44). What’s more, where there is dirt there is a system (Douglas 2002, 44). Dirt is the result of a systematic order and a classification of materials to the extent that its ordering implies and results from the rejection of inappropriate elements. To elaborate a conceptualization of dirt we must therefore include all of those elements that are rejected by ordered systems. Douglas proposes, then, a system for

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how to read what is residual insofar as it is a rejected (or accepted) category within the classification scheme, which defines it as “anomalies.” This evaluation of what has or lacks value reminds us that the limits between what is and what is not “rubbish” fluctuate as a response or reaction to social pressures, and that to understand the functioning of the social control of value, one must study waste and what is residual (Thomson 1979, 10–11). Not only are there significant consequences in the understanding (and acceptance) that trash is defined socially, but also, as Douglas has pointed out, it is implied that a configuration in social terms of what is dirt, and by extension, what is “residual”—and, with it, what must be eliminated—constitutes a “positive effort to organize the environment” insofar as “dirt offends against order” (Douglas 2002, 2). This is due to the fact that this arrangement implies a social structure that catalogues and categorizes social components based on their “utility” and “value,” assigning them a positive or negative rank according to the relationships they establish with power.20 In the current system, cities embody a platform of global opportunity—beyond their reproductive condition in national economies. Cities transform the city–State relationship and condition urban development to the amalgam of international capital that recodifies the city (Smith 2009), and residual humans make up an important part of this transversal order. In reference to Furtado’s documentary, Thiago de Faria e Silva notes that the urban territory of the global economy displays the incompatibility between capitalist progress and human development (2011, 511–512). Similarly, it establishes the garbage dump as a “human dump” because, as Mike Davis (2006) appropriately defined it, the main function of “the Third World urban edge remains as a human dump”: the infamous site where “urban waste” and “unwanted immigrants” end up together (47).21 Marcos Prado’s Estamira portrays the life and meanderings of the eponymous heroine of the documentary, and is most notable for its varied 20  According to Lhuilier and Cochin (1999), “we are wrong to think that we are throwing out trash; to the contrary, it is the act of being thrown out that constitutes trash” (cit. in Dimarco 2007, 9; emphasis in the original). In this sense, Dimarco suggests that “what is residual can be thought of as an empty space, susceptible to being occupied socio-historically by different elements, ideas… people” (2007, 9; emphasis in the original). 21  See Richard Robbins’s documentary Girl Rising (2013) that recounts the story of nine young people who get to reorient their destiny significantly. One of the stories, that of Sokha in Cambodia, relates the life of a young woman in a garbage dump and how her collection of leftovers and waste was the only possible way for her to get out and to survive.

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attempts to illuminate the different aesthetic forms used to represent the dynamics embedded in the politics of waste from a toxic angle. An important characteristic of the film is how categories such as visibility and invisibility are strategically deployed in very different ways. Estamira is everywhere. In the film, not only does she deliver philosophical discourses on several distinct issues, including the state of humankind, as well as revealing the truth while sorting through garbage in the mundane space of the landfill, she’s also very active and functions as the main character throughout the entire documentary. Her presence, in images that constantly shift between black and white and color, fills up all the sequences from the beginning to the end, rendering no possible emptiness to the audience. Her ubiquity is both physical and auditive. Her ubiquitous presence (she would say, e.g., “Estamira is all around. I am here and there. And Estamira is abstract”) makes it clear that there is not only one Estamira. Or, if there is, the multiple presences of Estamira flood the visual setting, stretching “beyond the beyond,” as she would describe it. Perhaps this ubiquity, of which she is aware, transforms her marginality––her subaltern condition––into a general one. If Estamira represents the disposable––a “useless” life, like the many obsolete objects confined to the marginalized space of the landfill––obsolescence, as a category applied to the ephemeral life generated by a society of consumption, is everywhere. By placing Estamira in the foreground of the documentary, the film aims to defy the efforts of late capitalism to render invisible those whose existence is dim and not operable. Estamira makes it clear that poverty and marginality are also ubiquitous. In this sense, the documentary succeeds in reversing her spatial confinement into one of visibility and meaning. Another trait is related to the politics of toxicity. In the documentary, the presence of toxicity as a literal and metaphorical trope contributes to its further assessment from the perspective of environmental justice. The latter viewpoint underscores inequality, underlying the equivalency between toxic wastelands and places inherited by minority and marginalized communities. Along with social justice, environmental justice raises issues of environmental equity. Toxicity, one may argue, entails a materially eschatological framed reality. The imagery of the end, condensed into a spatial portrayal that captures, multiple times, the past and the present, as well as the future that will never happen, is, in an eloquent way, one of Estamira’s most prominent critiques. Matter, like Estamira, is everywhere. The artisanal and piecemeal labor of sorting through garbage blurs the

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boundaries between space and body. Estamira occupies the landfill in the same way that the garbage she separates and collects occupies her body and her mind. The waste disposal site of Jardim de Gramacho in Rio de Janeiro is a “riskscape,” to use literary critic Ursula Heise’s term.22 In these riskscapes, toxins are agents that erase the boundaries not only between body and environment but also between domestic and public spheres, and between the beneficial and the harmful. The toxic space that contains Estamira, as well as all of humankind alike, has become—according to her––lifeless. One of Estamira’s observations, toward the end of the first hour of the film, is that “the Earth used to speak, but now the Earth is dead.” Through her quasi-mystical discourse, her dictum fits quite well with the warnings that Rachel Carson penned in Silent Spring (1962), where she dramatized through a notable account the “growing planetary toxicity” and the possibility of an “uninhabitable planet.” Facing the fallout of living in a riskscape, Estamira uses that unique stage to appeal to an eschatological solution, which reminds us of religious purification and purge, as if a new fresh start were even conceivable. The only solution––she declares––is fire: She finds it essential to “incinerate all the space, the beings, and replenish the space with other beings.” Coherently, Estamira realizes that if humankind has set itself up for an ecological devastation, then her appeal to “other beings” lays down the foundation for a new beginning—one that will replace the toxic politics of consumption and waste for another regime—without hinting at what this regime might look like. By using poetic means to construct a critical, sometimes unsettling narrative, Estamira condemns the fact of living in a garbage dump. While her interventions may initially seem enigmatic and to “make no sense,” the montage serves to spark in the spectator a degree of vacillation with respect to the “healthiness” of her discourse, as Thiago de Faria e Silva suggests (2011, 514). The sometimes lyrical composition of individual memory not only displays Estamira’s mental detachment, it also allows her to achieve a sense of place and belonging that she usually lacks. The incoherence of her discourse seems to be questioned at certain moments. And more importantly, the documentary underlines what Bülent Diken and 22  In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Ursula Heise borrows the term “riskscape” from Susan Cutter. Cutter developed the term as a concept to describe environmental and technological riskscapes as places where hazard events intersect social structures in Living with Risk (1993) and Environmental Risks and Hazards (1994).

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Carsten Bagge Lausten (2005) have defined as the present-day “society of exception”: an increasingly fragmented society in which what is normal, and the exceptions to normality, enters a zone of indiscernibility, and where the borders between culture and nature, biology and politics, law and transgression, what is outside and what is inside, are erased. This trait, which utilizes the paradigm of the “camp” developed by Agamben as a point of departure, emphasizes that the logic of the “camp” can be generalized to all social structures, whose privileged space is urban. The “camp” brings about, at the same time, a differentiation and a dedifferentiation of contemporary society—a society that can no longer sustain itself as a Durkheimian organic model. Prado’s documentary thus turns the invisible into a tangible, discernible reality: from the appearance of two cadavers to a visual registry of the water, which the catadores drink even though it is bubbling due to its high methane content. By now we can contend that there are several prototypes when it comes to visually portraying residual humans. They are most frequently framed against the vast horizon of the dump, as on Bauman’s book cover. The short films Um Favelado by Marcos Farias (1962) and Sobras by Pablo Trapero (2008) deploy a similar method, as does the full-length Los pepenadores de acá by Ícaro Cisneros (1982). Um Favelado provides a tangential portrait of the garbage dump where women and children forage for food throughout the day, but its main focus is the story of a man who lives in the favela and is exploited (and beaten) by the owners of his precarious dwelling, to whom he owes past rent. Since he cannot legally work, he unsuccessfully turns to crime and winds up in jail. Here the garbage dump is the setting of the short film, a “natural” background that normalizes its presence as well as the activities derived from its existence. Trapero’s short film, on the other hand, presents a poetic portrait, less driven by narrative and plot. Here, an enormous number of families trudge daily to a dump in the province of Buenos Aires in search of food. They are the “sobras,” the leftovers of neoliberalism and its consequent “adjustments.” As Nigerian writer Fidelis Odun Balogun (1995) observed, while the middle class rapidly disappeared, the garbage heaps of the increasingly rich few became the food table for the growing population of the abject poor (80). Ícaro Cisneros’s film, for its part, is a highly stereotyped comedy of poverty: It describes the life of the pepenadores with humor and flippancy, as if the act of living in (and from) the dump did not constitute a social

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emergency.23 Some characters, like “el Gorilón,” get their daily pay at the market and go out drinking with friends, reinforcing the stereotype associated with male behavior among the lower classes. From the outset, the two drunks that work in the garbage dump complain that the garbage is not distributed equally since “la profana”––a female character––takes everything. Although these complaints, couched in obvious gender bias, are delivered in a superficial and supposedly comic tone, they reveal that their “machismo” entails violence against women, promiscuity, abuse, and ignorance (the two characters do not know how to read). The depiction of the “profana” evokes an incoherent feminine frivolity, as she goes out to collect trash wearing high heels. What could be perceived as an innocent—dangerously innocent—treatment of the characters is, in fact, a trivial and typified representation. In addition to a basic plot reduced to a search for comic effect, the film does not specify any geographical location. However, the gender perspective is the most problematic since it stereotypically defines women as tattlers and witches who blather on, scream, bicker among themselves, hit and insult each other, use vulgar language, and even pridefully accept the cruel destiny of their lives. This visual narrative of human misery differs notably from the previous works analyzed, for the latter at least attempt to rehumanize those subjects that have been reduced to waste. Cisneros’s film, in contrast, falls short of furnishing them with any individual, non-banal characteristic. Interestingly, when it comes to representing poverty, films like Um Favelado, as well as the novels Villa Miseria también es América [Slums are also America] (1957) by Argentine writer Bernardo Verbitsky, and Mis amigos los pepenadores (La vida de un Maestro de Banquillo) [My Friends the Pepenadores (The Life of an Itinerant School Teacher)] (1958) by Mexican writer José Luis Parra, portray a state of abandonment that, although discouraging, preserves a level of hope. These depictions, however, were produced in the 1950s. It is not coincidental that in the 1980s––a period that corresponds in greater or lesser measure to the implementation of the neoliberal economic reforms through structural “adjustments” in Latin America and across the Global South––the perspective of any possible remedies to poverty seems truncated. Novels like

23  The term “pepenador” comes from the Nahuatl verb “pepena” and means, among other definitions, “to pick up, gather, and combine things that are spread out,” and “to choose the best” (Simeón 1999, 379).

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Única mirando el mar and, shortly afterwards, Waslala, are emblematic of this trend. The aesthetic production that precedes the 1980s still exhibited a degree of “dignity” (for lack of a better term). The rhetoric of waste does not yet completely dehumanize them, or place them in an indiscernible zone where the existent and perishable, what endures and what is transient, becomes indistinct. Even Argentine painter Antonio Berni, who mounted a brutal critique of the social conditions of poverty through the two characters he created, Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel, conveyed a sense of hope. While these characters generate a feeling of empathy in the viewer, Estamira, like Ilha de flores, Boca de lixo, and Sobras, as well as Fernando Contreras Castro and Gioconda Belli’s novels, leaves us in a state of profound bewilderment and distress. In sum, while environmental injustice helps us better understand the unequal distribution of risk and health across nations, communities, and even families, Agamben’s notion of “exception” becomes increasingly a regulating principle that organizes subjects’ existences.

5  Intermission: Verbitsky The now classic Villa Miseria también es América (1957) by Bernardo Verbitsky––known for coining the term “villa miseria,” or “slum,” in Spanish––shares a similar approach when it comes to depicting hardship and scarcity (Fig. 2.4).24 Judging from the image featured on the book cover, the reader can grasp a level of hope and naïveté: Despite the poverty that enshrouds the lives of these characters, the picture portrays a happy couple with a baby, surrounded by manufactured goods such as a TV and a motorcycle, both emblems of “progress” and mobility. There is nothing ruthless here. Furthermore, this novel can be read in tandem with Mis amigos los pepenadores [My Friends the Scavengers] (1958) by Mexican writer José Luis Parra, a text that will be discussed in the following chapter. In the prologue to the reissue of Verbitsky’s novel, Argentine writer Pedro Orgambide outlines how Villa Miseria también es América approaches the margins and anticipates the novelist’s exploration of the most conflictive zone of the city: the slum (2003, 8). He rightly points out both the similarities and differences between the slum of 1957 and those  See Mara Daniela Espasande (2008): “Vivir en una villa (miseria)” (7).

24

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Fig. 2.4  Book cover of Bernardo Verbitsky’s Villa Miseria también es América (2003) by Sudamericana Publishing (first edition of 1957). Photo taken by the author

of the present day. Whereas in the past there was hope for social change, twenty-first-century slums have come to be portrayed as the last space devoid of aspirations. In the slum that Verbitsky describes, the idea of dignity for a good day’s work was still attainable; the inhabitants of the slum set up a network of solidarity, mobilization, and participation when faced with shared challenges. Furthermore, as Orgambide underlines,

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resistance and struggle were not devalued principles, but rather the possibility of a “quotidian epic” (2003, 9). Verbitsky’s plot does not take place in the landfill since garbage treatment through so-called sanitary landfills did not begin to operate in Buenos Aires until 1977. Up until the 1970s, residential incinerators had been used, but after observing high indexes of pollution resulting from this process, the mayor, Osvaldo Cacciatore, prohibited their use in 1976 and enforced the compaction of trash in all buildings over four stories high with more than twenty-five living units (Paiva 2008, 7). “Villa Pobreza” (“The Poverty Slum”) consisted, as one of Verbitsky’s characters describes it, of a “big group of shacks all pushed together” and their construction, more like a “garbage can than a place to live” (2003, 63).25 This is a moment of exodus, when families arrived from the interior of the country or from neighboring countries like Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay.26 Another character describes the arrival to the slum “like going to live in a garbage can,” to the point that “descending” into a slum was like “hitting the rock bottom of animalism” (34–35). The novel not only anticipates many of the problems related to the emergence of informal settlements, whose instability and fragility is always on the verge of coming apart, but it likewise foreshadows the emergence of residual humans––subjects lacking legal attributes and that reside in an interstitial zone.27 These women, men, and children portend the archetype of the cirujas, the “spirit of the Quema,” the “bearded genie of the Trash” (64). But, unlike subsequent works, it will be the narrator who later exhorts the characters to come out of the darkness in which they live, to mobilize their shacks and begin to march from all the slums.

25  Mara Daniela Espasande refers to the “spontaneous style” of the first slums, dwellings built with “all the elements available for use that the city offers such as boxes, bags, sheets of tin, [and] wood” (2008, 7). 26  See La ciudad producida. Historia de la configuración territorial (ssplan.buenosaires.gov. ar). Accessed 7 February 2022. 27  On the 1956 “Plan de Emergencia” to eliminate informal settlements in Buenos Aires, see Adriana Massidda (2012): “The Plan de Emergencia (1956): The Argentine Debate about Housing Shortage Then and Now” (42–51).

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6  Narratives of Bioenvironmental Destruction Literary and visual depictions of waste and the garbage dump abound. Nonetheless, in novels such as Única mirando al mar and Waslala, trash acquires a symbolic dimension through the convergence of the dump and its inhabitants and by setting up the perimeters, through Agamben’s logic of the “camp,” of a space of indiscernibility and dedifferentiation. Contreras Castro’s novel (1994) includes the “divers,” or “buzos,” who, in San José de Costa Rica, take on the task of combing through trash and collecting leftovers for personal use, to exchange, or to sell. With ironic references to the “dead sea,” the dump harbors a community of buzos that rummage through waste to retrieve cans, bottles, and paper, among other disposed matter. The novel narrates the story of “el Viejo” (the “Old Man”), who “throws himself away” at the dump as a form of attempted suicide after being fired from his job and unable to find another (17). This act correlates human obsolescence with that of discarded objects, as I discussed earlier. When “el Viejo” arrives at the garbage dump, “Única,” a woman “diver” who inhabits the landfill, saves him because, like everything else that emerges in the dump, “el Viejo” can be recycled too. Like objects, residual humans also acquire a new identity. She had already recycled the young “Bacán,” whom she found wandering through the garbage after someone else had thrown him away. As with “el Viejo,” she gave “Bacán” an identity and accepted him as her own child (18). “Única Oconitrillo” had also been a “teacher,” and like “el Viejo,” was forced to retire and live off of her pension when she was barely over forty, “thrown out like a piece of scrap people get rid of even though it can still be used” (14). Humans and objects share a similar fate: Their durability is never determined by natural causes but rather by the span of their usability. Human obsolescence, as with objects, signals a mechanism of uninterrupted replacement of the “old” with the “new.” It disrupts the teleological course of life and evinces biopolitical interventions. One may ask where human obsolescence falls when addressing the realm of political conflicts between those who defend human exceptionalism and those who advocate for non-anthropocentric rights. Bioecocriticism can play a role in addressing this pressing gap. The parallelism established here between someone’s duration and durability and objects that are discarded—although they may all still have potential for use—highlights the modern purchase-and-discard mechanism that continually replaces subjects/objects with younger or newer

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ones, respectively. Therefore, the reification of the subjects and their continuous discarding lays out two fundamental problems in the “era of technological reproduction”: On one hand, subjects have been objectified, losing their human quality, as perpetual reproduction has produced a disposable humanity. On the other hand, since the system does not reabsorb the subjects from a social perspective, the very condition that these “disposables” carry with them becomes part of a vicious cycle in which non-­ human waste is reabsorbed by human waste (or wasted humans), although human waste is not later (or ever) reabsorbed. From an ecological perspective they are not reused (beyond their capacity for use). Rather, human waste “survive/s” by means of the absorption of non-human waste. So, the circle is unbroken, seeming to go on indefinitely. The garbage dump in Contreras Castro’s novel is ironically called “Río Azul” (Blue River) because it is completely black, stinks, and is nauseating: Its “fetid smell” was …the sticky atmosphere that the whole town breathed and had always breathed even after they shut the dump down. The smell came from the liquid soup of aged broths of tons of trash on top of more tons of trash that came spilling into the subsoil from the day it opened, just like the uncontrollable overflow of black tide from the cracks in the earth’s ulcerated body. (20)28

This double condition of contamination, of the soil as well as of the residents of the dump and neighboring villages, lines up with the claims of critical environmental justice by tackling the unequal distribution of natural resources, poverty, and risks with the aim of achieving what American philosopher Peter Wenz (1988) has called a “coordinated environmental restraint.” This type of restraint establishes mutually agreeable principles of 28  Besides being linked to the idea of bioenvironmental destruction, this image of a contaminated Earth refers to a corporeal destruction related to an abused and insulted body. This representation, although in a different context, reminds us of the work of the artistic movement Escombros in Argentina, which, through their engagement and installations in “natural” spaces as well as urban zones, tried to express what was “broken,” fractured, violated, vulnerable, and torn apart, establishing a relationship between abuses to human rights and natural rights. See “La Estética de lo Roto—Primer Manifiesto” (1989) at http:// www.grupoescombros.com.ar/manifiestos.html. Accessed 2 January 2013. It is not by chance that this manifesto was conceived in a paradigmatic year for the Argentine national economy; it was the beginning and implementation of the Menemist government’s neoliberal model.

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justice, which must be pursued and employed with the purpose of determining fair shares for everyone (Wenz 2008, 259–261). The reasoning that involves restraint can be applied to pollution and contamination, as well as to any other environmental risk and hazard related to a particular distribution of space and unequal resources. The scale, magnitude, and impact of all these environmental threats applied systematically over a prolonged period could render much of the currently inhabitable space uninhabitable (Wenz 2008, 261), a situation which resonates with Ulrich Beck’s contention that while “poverty is hierarchical, smog is democratic” (1992, 36). The problem of environmental pollution is deliberately represented in textual narrations. It is, however, less visible in documentaries and films possibly because, unlike the protagonists of fictional stories, the subjects who inhabit and are represented in the dumps lack awareness of the degree of toxicity that is condensed in the space where they live.29 The presence of third-person narrators, who are not directly involved with the plot and who might possibly share the author’s ecological agenda, allows these narratives to be part of what Lawrence Buell has defined as a “toxic discourse” (1998). When these narrators find themselves on the edge of a deep and traumatic experience that characterizes life in the garbage dump, they delve into issues that inhabitants are incapable of addressing and thus ineluctably make value judgments.30 The nature of ethnographic 29  According to Martín Medina (2007), the environmental risks to human health that have been observed in this degraded territory are bad odors and air pollution; proliferation of rats, birds, cockroaches, flies, and other organisms that are potential disease transmitters; the production of large quantities of toxic leaching that contaminate aquifers and surface water; fires that contribute to atmospheric pollution, whether started by humans or spontaneous; the production and accumulation of methane (which could trigger explosions or fires); soil instability due to the irregular decomposition and settling of waste; and the limited future use of dumps (225). 30  This is evident in some sections of Castro Contreras’s novel when the narrator reflects on the benefits of recycling, informing readers and, at the same time, exposing them to the grave problems caused to aquifers by the pollution of the dump. At the moment when shutting down the site appears imminent, the narrator refers to the fact that, as a consequence, the national government has put together “a ‘National Plan for the Management of Waste,’” with the aim of finding new land in which to relocate it: “for the time being, the only thing that was clear was that the GMA [Greater Metropolitan Area] was not appropriate for the installation of the landfill because it was a zone of great urban expansion with important blanket aquifers. There was talk of neutral sectors where eventually they could locate a landfill; also talk of previous soil tests, of seismic intensity, and of environmental impact, such as the lining of the bottom of the landfill with plastic and clay, and drainage channels for liquids produced from the trash, and ductwork for the evacuation of methane gas” (1994, 65–66).

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documentary also curtails the articulation of a coercive—and to a certain extent censorial—discourse, since the latter would go against the very presuppositions of all anthropological/ethnographic work (Geertz 1983).31 Besides the toxicity that filters into both the body and the soil, olfactory and noise pollution is significant: “the noise was as bothersome as the hot and pestilent vapor that never stopped” (Contreras Castro 1994, 37). “El Viejo,” whom they called “Momboñombo,” believed for a long time “that this was a world of madness, that anything or anyone could not be lower than the people who were on the same level as the trash” (38). The reference to Dante’s Inferno, used by anthropologist Michael Taussig (2003, 181) to describe the Navarro garbage dump on the outskirts of Cali, Colombia,32 is just as apt to describe the lives of the subjects who live in the dump: In a land of interminable alienation, Momboñombo confesses that not even craziness seems crazy to me, here where everything is out of place, where people eat trash and dress in tatters. Here it’s not just that mad people walk around loose, but simply there are no crazy or sane people to compare them to, to say that they’re mad. (Contreras Castro 1994, 38)

As in Estamira, here the presumed insanity also functions as a way of generating a “sense of place” and “belonging” to the landfill or dump. Following Ulrich Beck’s conceptual proposal with respect to “risk society” (1992), Ursula Heise, in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), relates that in cases where the subjects are transferred—directly or through negligence and/or abandonment—to vulnerable, dangerous spaces posing multiple environmental risks, one of the central challenges is that of  See specifically Chap. 3, “‘From the Native’s Point of View:’ On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding” (55–70). 32  “We reach the foot of the mountain. There are two sturdy metal gates, a weigh station, and a guard box on either side of the gates, with three trigger happy guards, shotguns at the ready […] Trucks with garbage come every few minutes. Sometimes they have one or two people clinging to the back of the truck who will claim the entire load for themselves. There are many women and young people under fourteen years of age. Every day dead people are found, the driver says. Three bulldozers spread the garbage, maintaining the cone shape of the mountain with its circular ridges. You can make out people swarming behind the garbage trucks like birds darting on seed in a freshly sown field. We can distinguish dark tents on the top, where people live” (Taussig 2003, 178). 31

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bringing about an awareness of risks (177). However, when environmental pollution reaches a significant scale or magnitude, the same contaminating elements effectively blur the boundaries between a sense of place and belonging and an awareness that undermines the latter: In this land and among these imprecise domains, uncertainty reigns with respect to the perception of risk and the very evaluation of risk itself.33 In this way, madness is also situated in this interstitial territory “between” perceptions and realities, although in Estamira the principle of sanity inverts and transforms the alien perception into a real and tangible fact, closer to the truth than the very same discourses that come from the alleged “sensible” consciousness. Prado’s documentary resembles an eschatological fable in its way of emphasizing the oneiric and fantastical reconstruction of daily life in the Metropolitan Landfill in Gramacho, Río de Janeiro (Wolff 2007, 2), while addressing controversial questions with regard to the genre of the documentary and its forms of negotiation with reality. As in epics of contemporary misery, we find ourselves facing a paradoxical purgatory, since, on the one hand, it forges a sort of “heaven” for the subjects that live there, while on the other, it consists also of a trans-­ corporeal space where “the human is always intermeshed” with the non-­ human world, underlining “the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment,’” as Stacy Alaimo contends in Bodily Natures (2010, 2). Some of these substances are human bodies, non-human creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors such as toxic gases, corpses, glass, and a myriad of disparate scraps. And yet, as Única’s outcome shows, without the existence of this space, the inhabitants of the landfill would have no other place to go or dwell. It is, ultimately, an ephemeral, unstable, and undefined space, the precariousness of which has a direct equivalent in the fleeting and perishing condition of its inhabitants. In this sense, all these representations conclusively underscore the fact that, as Ulrich Beck maintains, “the globality of risk” does not, of course, “mean a global equality of risk; on the contrary, ‘pollution follows the poor’” (1999, 5–6; emphasis in the original). 33  For Beck, “the framework of risk society” connects three important areas: “the question of nature, the democratization of democracy, and the future role of the state.” Risk society demands an opening of the process of decision-making not only by the state, but by private corporations as well as science, and appeals to an institutional reform of those power structures that are less visible but are nonetheless involved in related conflicts with worldwide risks (Beck 1999, 4–5).

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The “Río Azul” dump, in Contreras Castro’s novel, is in fact a “floating city” (1994, 48): The subjects who live there are suspended in a shifting and unstable material where, just as some can be found in the daily process of rummaging and digging in trash to unearth edible scraps to feed the entire population, others can get lost. From the time Momboñombo “joined the ranks of the divers” he was terrified by the myth that “from time to time the dump swallowed someone up, like in the story of the Llorona” (Contreras Castro 1994, 35): a madwoman, a poor lady who, a few years back, came to the dump with her baby in arms, only a few months old; after going on a deep dive, directly under the garbage trucks, she couldn’t find her child where she had left him. It was a matter of seconds, she had just left him in a small clearing in the trash. She went to get a promising bag of trash, and when she returned, the child was no longer there. (35)

The appearance and disappearance of bodies in the garbage dump is a constant characteristic of this space of “exception” where, following Agamben’s framework, law is suspended and consequentially becomes a “dislocating localization” where neither the political system nor the rules of justice organize forms of life within this determinate space. Instead, its very center contains the dislocating localization that exceeds it, where every form of life and every rule can virtually be used up or snatched away (Agamben 1998, 175).34 María Carman’s ethnographic research points to a similar problem that begins with the analysis of the relationship between segregation and the environment (or at least discourses linked to an environmental rhetoric). In two chapters of her book Las trampas de la naturaleza: medio ambiente y segregación en Buenos Aires [The Pitfalls of Nature: Environment and Segregation in Buenos Aires] (2011) she focuses, respectively, on the 34  Other examples are those who have been executed by a firing squad and are “rescued” from oblivion by Rodolfo Walsh in his now classic Operación Masacre [Operation Massacre (2013)] (1957). They end up in the “sinister garbage heap of José León Suárez, tracked through with waterlogged trenches in winter, infested with mosquitoes and unburied creatures in summer, all of it eaten away by tin cans and junk” (2013, 66). Or Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s most recent journalistic chronicle ¿Quién mató a Diego Duarte? [Who Killed Diego Duarte?] (2010)—a title that plays with Walsh’s other text, ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? [Who Killed Rosendo?] (1969)—where he again takes up the José León Suárez garbage dump to address the impunity that characterizes this hidden land where inanimate and animate bodies live together without distinction.

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Buenos Aires slum “Rodrigo Bueno,” next to the Ecological Reserve of the Costanera Sur, and the “Aldea Gay,” next to pavilion 3 of the Ciudad Universitaria on the Costanera Norte. Although these spaces differ in important ways, to a certain extent she deals with comparable experiences. In the first case, “Rodrigo Bueno” is on lands officially designated as part of the river, which means that this slum is not under the jurisdiction of any of the area’s healthcare centers or hospitals. This is an urgent problem since ambulances refuse to enter this space without a police escort (Carman 2011, 45). This points to the wider fact that this space and its inhabitants legally do not exist; They possess an “ontologically liminal” status that one resident, “Juan,” encapsulates: “in the records office we’re in the water: you don’t find us. To the government we’re N.N.” (nomen nescio/a nameless nobody) (Carman 2011, 47). The “Rodrigo Bueno” slum originally started as a site of refuse disposal for construction rubble, used batteries, and discarded cars (Carman 2011, 50–51, 58). As in other dumps examined in this chapter, the residents of this slum repurpose what has been thrown out by “legitimate humans” to erect unstable dwellings. It is the possession of this trash that generates a new social hierarchy within the slum, making those with larger amounts “richer” than others (Carman 2011, 59) In Única mirando el mar, each scrap is also reusable: from food to the smallest objects that the buzos occasionally find and transform into modest gifts (Contreras Castro 1994, 81). Years are also “thrown out when they get old” (82). And like the years, time is also recycled (83). When a Bible and a priest’s cassock show up in the dump (“the sea of black seagulls”), religion has also become unusable and therefore dispensable (19). Later, it will be the character “el Oso” (“the Bear”) who gives new life to these two objects, using them to say mass and recycle spiritual rites as well as his own identity as an unordained “priest.” But this indefinite dimension that oscillates between what is disposed of and what is disposable, between subject and object, between reality and hallucination, inevitably turns them into non-persons, residual humans, human ruins: the ‘throw-away people,’ those who live from what is thrown away, left over, wasted, squandered, neglected, destroyed, damaged, mistaken… these unfortunates for whom Momboñombo Moñagallo had made the effort to pretend that life was worthwhile, even after all they had been through, was worth it, even when they were living in the midst of inequalities. (64–65)

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Contreras Castro’s novel resonates with the work of another Costa Rican, Rima de Vallbona. In her short story, “En el reino de la basura” (In the Kingdom of Garbage; 1986), the narrative is centered around a girl whose universe is made of scraps and rubble. The tale begins in the second person and recreates the insults that the girl is subjected to by the “little ones who are all cleaned up, with their hair all combed and with shoes on their feet” (Vallbona 1986, 85): Ugly, horrible, stinky, your eyes are all crusted over, snotty, you smell like pee and wet bread. Your scabs make dark maps on your arms, your legs, your face. You’re full of lice, fleas, all the dust from the street that smells like horse shit, you’ve got it all in your matted hair and in the dimness of your eyes […] Useless! What are you good for? Nothing? You belong in the corner with the old dust catchers where you can get mixed in with all those things that aren’t worth anything. No, you’d be better off in the trash, with banana and squash peelings, coffee grounds, putrid juice from half-eaten fruit and rancid carcasses. You’d be better off in the shit hole, with all your shit and smell fading away in the excrement and reeking odor, so you won’t bother anyone… in the shit hole… in the bottom of the trash. (85)

The life of the girl in this short story lacks value, so she is made of what is “left over.” Her residual condition reflects what sociologist Sabina Dimarco has stated regarding waste in late capitalist societies: It is made up of “things, products, ideas, but also—more and more every day—people” (2007, 3). She unsurprisingly disappears into the ruins and the decomposing elements of her ephemeral world: Among “food leftovers, rubble, torn paper, the ugly, dirty, and stinking girl” will finally be found “dead” (although paradoxically, in “the kingdom of trash, the ugly and repugnant girl” has “for the first time” a “placid smile of satisfaction”) (Vallbona 1986, 86–87). Death thus has a redemptive function, rescuing the girl from misery, transforming her disgrace into a possible form of happiness. In contrast, Contreras Castro’s novel lacks any possible redemption. The community of subjects that inhabit the dump loses the only and last possible habitat that sustained them—and fed them—with its definitive closing and shutdown. Concerning this closure, the authorities alleged that it was due to high levels of contamination, despite the protests of the residents, who were left without any other place of refuge. Once it was closed, the authorities condemned the dump to be an “open-air sewer,”

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where the rivers as well as the land “were simply in agony,” without referring to its former inhabitants who now, too, found themselves in a situation of agony, destitute and without shelter (Contreras Castro 1994, 115). If the decision to shut down the dump may seem appropriate, less justifiable is the absolute abandonment of those who are left behind, the now displaced buzos. This prompts, once again, the question of the assignment and distribution of value through hierarchical categories of humanity. Nonetheless, this also brings up the subject of what Marco Armiero defined as “wasting,” understood as “a social process through which class, race, and gender injustices become embedded into the socio-ecological metabolism producing both gardens and dumps, healthy and sick bodies, pure and contaminated places” (2021, 10). A phenomenon that, as the main character points out, turns the “the whole country” into “a dump” (Contreras Castro 1994, 115). In this sense, and returning to the question formulated by Baudrillard (1994)—with respect to what occurs when the residual and the exceptional become the “norm” and when society has absorbed each exception, all pathological remains—we can suggest that, given the characteristics of Contreras Castro’s novel, it is difficult to decide whether the exception is the residual from the social or whether the social itself has become the residual: “When a system has absorbed everything, when one has added everything up, when nothing remains, the entire sum turns to the remainder and becomes the remainder” (Baudrillard 1994, 144). For this reason, it is possible that what in Única mirando al mar operates as environmental speculation functions, in the long term, as an already more all-encompassing ecological and humanitarian warning. After all, it operates as post-cautionary tale, since it does not “seek to avert crisis or radical change,” but instead to “acknowledge that we are already living through those things and that we are going to have to deal with the consequences” (Hine et al. 2013, 2–3). In Gioconda Belli’s novel Waslala, the imagined territories where the story of the main character, Melisandra, takes place constitute another example of a human dump. From the outset, the text explains that the regions that make up the country of Faguas are separated from “progress, development, civilization, and technology,” and reduced to “functioning as lungs and a dump for the developed world,” which, after exploiting these regions, then adds them to “oblivion and misery” and abandons them as a “badlands of war and epidemics” (Belli 1996, 23). As Faguas is governed by corrupt and bloodthirsty strongmen, the novel establishes an indelible relationship between corruption and environmental destruction,

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foregrounding explicitly what Norman Girvan (2014, 54) has defined as the ongoing rounds of “accumulation by dispossession” that the Global North exacts upon the Global South. In other words, “extractive capital” acquired “concessions in the peripheries of world capitalism” securing for themselves a greater part of the “rents derived from the exploitation of the resource commodities associated with the massive expansion of international trade in the late 19th century” (Girvan 2014, 55). The ongoing environmental devastation that takes place in Latin America would not only be illegal in “developed” countries, but, more importantly, underscores what Enrique Leff has defined as the “ecological debt” that developed countries owe to developing countries (2004, 257).35 The plot revolves around the main character’s search for “Waslala,” a utopian “experimental” city, which reveals the contrast between the space she inhabits—a real place—and that ideal and hidden territory on the margins of “external conflicts” (Belli 1996, 64–65). The search for the ideal utopian space triggers Belli’s story and corresponds with Enrique Leff’s epistemological proposal for a “utopia of a sustainable future” (2004, xi). Against the “epic” of knowledge that seeks to apprehend a concrete, objective, and present totality, the “environmental epistemology” proposed by Leff inquires into the history of what was not and what still is not—that is, a denied externality, a subjugated possibility, and a repressed otherness—and what “traced from the potency of what is real, from the forces at play in reality, and the creativity of cultural diversity still may be possible” (2004, xi). The correspondence between an alternative and possible spatial dimension and an epistemological one anchored in the 35  Enrique Leff refers to “environmental knowing” as a “new rationality and a new episteme” that breaks with the “mirror of representation and speculation of an objectified world and the transparence of knowledge” and becomes, instead, a “critical conscience of knowledge and exercises an epistemological vigilance on the social conditions of the production of knowing and the effect of knowledge on what is real, that unfolds in strategies of power in knowing within economic-ecologic globalization” (2004, 254; emphasis in the original). Political ecology emerges within this new perspective of knowing—within the politicization of knowledge by the social reappropriation of nature—and is in the foundational moment of its theoretical-practical field: the construction of a new territory of critical thought and of political action. Leff signals that it is in this context that a “discourse” is beginning to take shape “that vindicates the idea of ecological debt as an imaginary and a strategic concept within the resistance to market globalization movements and their instruments of financial coercion, taking issue with the legitimacy of the economic debt of poor countries, a good portion of them in Latin America” (2004, 257; emphasis in the original).

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possibilities of the real appears to be represented in the novel through those tools that the main character uses to find utopia. The technological instruments typical of the “developed” world, together with a supposed rational knowing, are not sufficient to reach it. Throughout the novel, Melisandra is warned that getting to “Waslala is a matter of being able to interpret riddles” (Belli 1996, 151). By doing so, the quest allegorizes what Mary Louise Pratt has recently characterized as “the crisis of knowledge and futurity experienced by many sectors of humankind in the 1990s,” a plight brought about by the fallout of neoliberal capitalism and encapsulated in ecological catastrophes (2022, 5). As Pratt accurately suggests, “traditional knowledges became less and less able to explain the worlds” people inhabited, and “traditional lifeways” were “less able to offer viable futures for the young,” but as the “narratives of progress collapsed, along with hopes for more prosperous futures,” modernity “also lost its power to map credible aspirations” (2022, 6). In fact, the most significant confrontation in Waslala occurs between the “developed” world that represents “civilization” and the world of the novel, or the “primitive” or “underdeveloped” world. In the former, for instance, cruelty to animals is penalized, while in the latter, cruelty to people is a banal occurrence that goes on unpunished (Belli 1996, 78–79). This disparity reveals the geopolitical limits of two exclusive biopolitics, in that animals (like all non-humans) appear as organisms who have rights so long as they are in the right jurisdiction—that is, one in which rights as much as individual guarantees operate in an effective way. In “underdeveloped” countries, however, the human as much as the non-human is confined to a space of “exception,” indistinct and indeterminate, which lacks representative justice as well as all principles of social and constitutional rights. In this sense, the people of Faguas are faced with a fate similar to that of the inhabitants of the “Rodrigo Bueno” slum examined earlier in this chapter: Both are denied their humanity and treated like “extemporaneous trash from a natural state” (Carman 2011, 56). Faguas is a country fed from what the “civilized” world discards: “ever since it occurred to some smart executive to include scrap metal, discarded materials, junk, and scrap in loads of trash and to send it without shredding it, the doors of the impoverished world have been open to what’s thrown out” (Belli 1996, 56). A city in Faguas that is fundamental to grasp a sense of urgency concerning both residual humans and non-­humans alike is Cineria, where Engracia, a woman who informally runs the town, is in charge of “unloading and burying trash,” a beneficial concession starting

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with the negotiations carried out with big corporations that agree to send “discarded automobile bodies and a wide variety of other discarded equipment without shredding it” (129). Because of this agreement, the entire city of Cineria lives and grows with (and from) the waste of the modern world. According to Morris, the “scientist” in the novel, this trash embodies the “daily scraps from societies of abundance” and, in fact, a great number of the discarded objects work perfectly (Belli 1996, 131–132). In this sense, the name “Cineria” resonates with questions associated to the social and economic dynamics of waste and wasting since “cineria” relates to incinerating [incinerar], ashes [ceniza], fire [fuego], and incinerators [incineradores]. In effect, the term conjures up a phoenix city that was born from rubble and is described as the most ancient one in Faguas—it had been “burned and reconstructed many times” (Belli 1996, 135). The other space or “first window from which to view the deterioration caused by neglect and misery” is the city of Las Luces [The Lights]––a sardonic way of referring to the lack of “lights” and/or “civilization,” that proposes, instead, what Appadurai defined as the “postcolonial structure of appropriation and transformation of the values and premises of the West” through a procedure that degrades Western modernity (1996, 17). This mechanism not only takes issue with its point of origin and referent, it also challenges its homogenizing position as well as its teleological imperative. As a result, different societies “appropriate” the materials of modernity in different ways, with the objective of producing alternative, hybrid, and multiple modernities (Appadurai 1996, 17). In Las Luces, the appropriation yields an alternative, different, and unique form of “illumination,” one that destabilizes the paradigmatic equation of civilization as enlightening. Cineria and Las Luces both demonstrate that a whole politics (and poetics) emerges from forced recycling: These cities (and indeed the entire country of Faguas) are fed from the remnants of the Global North while their inhabitants intermingle their human condition with noxious substances. The more trash Engracia sees arriving to her country, the more she is able to understand that “those who have it all are just as unfortunate” as those who only have their waste (Belli 1996, 141). The issue points to contemporary consumer society, a society of abundance that sets itself against a society in which everything is scarcity and need. Susan Strasser traces the beginnings of the so-called US throwaway culture in Waste and Want (1999). Not only does she analyze the categorization of what makes up (or does not make up) trash, she also points to the social difference that is derived from trash in each culture. According to Strasser,

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people who reside in the “developed” world have additional reasons to discard objects, and these reasons are not entirely new. They operate on an unprecedented scale. She explains: More often than people in less developed countries, we discard stuff simply because we do not want it. We buy things devised to be thrown out after a brief use: packaging designed to move goods one way from factories to consumers, and ‘disposable’ products, used one time to save the labor of washing or refilling. In addition, vast numbers of us declare clothes and household goods obsolete owing to changing tastes. (1999, 4)

In contrast, the overwhelming majority of people in “developed” countries do not have the economic means to discard clothing or domestic appliances until they have simply stopped working. It was with technological innovations at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century that the habit of discarding clothing came into vogue. Technological material and devices (computers, cell phones, printers, etc.) became part of a mechanism that promoted the veneration of everything new, overloading dumps with objects that function perfectly but have lost their newness, or that have been thrown out simply because their owners got tired of them or bored with them. Not only is the act of cataloguing what works or must be discarded a social issue, as Strasser warns and as Mary Douglas had conceptualized in her precursory work (1966), but also the practice of creating trash underlines and creates social differences based on economic status. What is trash to some is of value to others, and those who see the value in “trash” are frequently those with less purchasing power (Strasser 1999, 9). The affluent have the luxury of discarding, and, according to urbanist Kevin Lynch (1990), in those societies “where material shortage is the norm, discarding things is a notorious way of demonstrating power” (31–32). The contemporary practices of US consumption, which have expanded to (and imposed upon) a large part of the globe, suggest that even in cultures with material abundance, the act of discarding obeys diverse functions of power and that, from its very beginning, the act of discarding and using that which is to be discarded has been stimulated by how it makes the wealthiest people feel (Lynch

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1990, 31–32).36 Likewise, as this machinery of production, consumption, and disposal becomes faster, more efficient, and continuous, national and metropolitan municipal institutions have developed efficient methods to displace trash and all types of waste, as well as treatment plants of residual elements (including water), to zones that are becoming increasingly farther removed from their place of origin and production. At times, institutions even export toxic waste and, in some cases, nuclear waste to “underdeveloped” countries (Strasser 1999, 7). One episode in Belli’s novel that is based on a real-life event is the elimination of nuclear waste from the garbage dump after inhabitants have already been contaminated. The actual event occurred in Goiânia, Brazil, on 13 September 1987, and at the end of her novel, Belli refers to the article in The New York Times that inspired her fictional reconstruction.37 The text relates how Engracia, some youngsters who work with her, and the scientist Morris are contaminated with Cesium 137, a radioactive isotope which is lethal at 500 to 600 rems. They find some blue dust while rummaging through a trash container, innocently rub it all over their bodies for fun, only to suffer in agony until their deaths a mere two weeks later (Belli 1996, 186–192). As we have already noted, the search for ideals— embodied in the utopia of Waslala—moves the narration forward, and is in permanent contrast to the fact that Engracia and the other inhabitants of the cities of Cineria and Las Luces live, literally, “among scraps and waste” (281). After initial contact with the radioactive material, all the characters, emaciated and full of sores, finally die (247). Krista, another main character in the novel, is right when she warns that “sending toxic trash is immoral” as is “forgetting about a third of the world after exploiting it” (233). In this sense, the utopian proposal becomes a possible way 36  While in contemporary societies, “people always talk about ‘consumption of goods,’ as if they were actually consumed and disappeared” (Small 1970, 11; cit. in Castillo Berthier 2010, 148), Castillo Berthier refers to William Small who points out that the “[m]odern economy is entirely based on extracting natural resources, turning them into ‘consumable products,’ selling them, and forgetting all about them” (Castillo Berthier 2010, 148). 37  The accident that took place in Goiânia consisted of a radioactive contamination incident in the center of Brazil that caused the death of several people and infected many more due to fallout. According to The New York Times in a 3 May 1995 piece by James Brooke (“Goiania Journal: Tourist Site Springs From a Nuclear Horror Story”), the nuclear accident was one of the worst in the history of the Americas.

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out when, according to Engracia, the only “salvation of our species” is its “capacity to imagine the impossible” (282). In the novel, reaching the utopia of Waslala means finding an alternative model—one that in turn must remove itself from a hegemonic and dominant vision. Melisandra therefore sets out on a different path, following her dreams, her own instincts, without maps and without a compass: Only her desires, aspirations, and convictions tell her that it is possible to get to that blessed place (282). The representations of these landfills, which residual humans inhabit, as well as those who find themselves continuously exposed to all sorts of toxic contamination, make acutely “visible” what we would prefer not to see. And it is this need to increase visibility of that which is hidden—like the trash that is thrown out and transported far away so as to avoid confronting it in its visual tactile and odoriferous dimension—that obeys the exhortation expressed by the narrator of Villa Miseria también es América, who, toward the end of the novel, urges its inhabitants to come out of the “folds in which they grow like blind vermin, so the city will see them” (2003, 67; my emphasis).

7   Contemporary Slums as a Reconfiguration of the Dump (Other, New Conditions of “Exception”) More than fifty years after the publication of Verbitsky’s Villa Miseria, the same obscurity clouds the lives of the inhabitants of “El Poso,” the Argentine shantytown at the center of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s La virgen cabeza [Slum Virgin] (2009). From the outset, the slum evokes a space demarcated by ruin and waste. The story opens directly onto the territory of a destroyed slum that has been completely bulldozed by the police who are at the service of new urban projects: “the slum, driven over by bulldozers, became the womb for the foundation of real estate

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businesses” (Cabezón Cámara 2009, 12).38 This human settlement is not only anchored in an immediate and ephemeral reality; from an ecological perspective, it is built on a terrain most vulnerable to all types of environmental disasters, from fires to floods.39 As the El Poso slum in Cabezón Cámara’s novel is located in “the lowest part of the zone” (37), its center floods continuously: when it rained there were no kids, the Virgin was not around, and the paths of the Lord turned navigable […] sure, water falls ‘down,’ but what’s even more sure is that ‘down’ is where the slums are. Water sweeps away the most unsteady lean-tos, and every once in a while, someone drowns. (51)

In fact, there were mornings when “the debris of a shipwreck were only boxes of wine, syringes, plastic bottles and diapers”; with luck, there “were no dead bodies” (51). The rain brings to the surface all of the trash that piles up in the slums, including dead bodies, in the same way that human beings appear and disappear in landfills. The characters sift through leftovers, scraps, trash, and ruins, themselves becoming residual humans and human ruins. Indeed, the slum is so much like a landfill that kids “would run and play tag in spite of the fact that their mothers would howl at them, trying to keep them away from the shit that was the ground” (51). This might be the reason why the narrator emphatically reiterates “that the center of El Poso was a swamp of shit” (52). The novel narrates the story of the journalist “Qüity” and “Sister Cleopatra” or “Cleo,” a transexual “medium” of sorts who lives in the slum, talks to the Virgin, and supposedly 38  As María Carman (2011) demonstrates in the paradigmatic case of the “Rodrigo Bueno” slum, the “opulence and shine of Puerto Madero residents do nothing but double the ‘gray’ or apparent impurity of the inhabitants of the slum. The tolerated use of these lands—when they were nothing more than some 100 meters next to the river—was put, years afterwards, to an intolerable use. When opulence advances, the obscenity of the poor must be diminished” (98). Therefore, she warns that the “reserve is not only becoming a coveted place for its neighbors in the city, the new habitués of the exclusive Puerto Madero neighborhood, as well as tourists, but that it also appears in Puerto Madero real estate megaproject publications that are trying to reposition Buenos Aires within the global ‘map’ of sophisticated cities” (2011, 99; emphasis in the original). There is no doubt that the “materiality of the slum disarms the insurmountable utopia of Puerto Madero” (Carman 2011, 99). This condition, beginning with this real model, adjusts very appropriately to the spatial configuration that Cabezón Cámara proposes for the slum “El Poso.” 39  The contrast between the representation of demolished urban spaces and real estate projects that promote a nature-filled life in accordance with environmental preservation will be analyzed in the last chapter of this book.

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works miracles. To alleviate hunger and misery, the Virgin Mary communicates with Cleo, who demands that all of the inhabitants of El Poso become fish farmers, “like the apostles”—that is, that they use their “field” to practice fish farming (65–66). In order to carry out the Virgin’s mandate, the inhabitants of the slum choose “carp,” since carp feed on “any old crap”: from what the residents themselves eat (“hot dogs, choripanes, with chimichurri and everything”) to the trash that the residents throw to them (67). But when they excavated the ground to make the fish tank—whose fish would feed all of the inhabitants—a “stream gushed up from the guts of the earth, breaking through the web of bones, roots, dead bodies, and worms” and turned into a “fiesta of ancient garbage and contemporary archeology” (69). Floating for days, “two canons, a wash basin, a newspaper, a pot, a gold cross and stones, and a barrel of oil,” this discovery immediately draws “university archeologists,” who come with “long ladders and, according to them, were able to take from the gusher everything an archeologist would need” (69). Besides relating the representation (and condition) of contemporary trash, this episode is in line with garbologists’ exhortation (Shanks et al. 2004) that, as a discipline, archeology must take on the task of examining objects that come from the dump—discarded objects—and that the dump and trash can provide elements that can be reused or reexamined archaeologically.40 With this in mind, they identify some archeological fields within modernity and modernism that focus not only on trash and its representation. One of them, for example, links trash to ruins and what is abject: In the works of British artists Paul Nash and John Piper, the abject resonates with historical echoes on the monuments 40  Turning briefly to the history of waste and their relation to the discipline of archeology, the authors specifically focus on their modern conception, defining the relationship between both as ironic: On the one hand, “its ubiquity is denied, ignored, and misunderstood”; on the other, “it simply constitutes an embarrassment and a problem” (Shanks et al. 2004, 69). This paradox is linked to archeology with broader cultural attitudes that have to do with trash and, from this perspective, the article is important since it tries to formulate a definition of archeology that goes beyond the academic discipline, specifically speaking: When one works with fragments from the past that can be artifacts or other forms of material, the themes that are interesting to archeology cut through what is natural or cultural. Therefore, a new definition of archeology should be considered as a practice of mediation, addressing the past as much as the present. For Rathje et al., this new function must incorporate elements such as old junk, trash, and waste, and even extend to ruins.

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and ruins that cover England’s landscape like remnants from the past (Shanks et al. 2004, 75), establishing a central element of ­decomposition. In these cases, the ruins are in a full process of transformation due to negligence and urban abandon. This reading informs my analysis of the aesthetics of the slum and the garbage dump in Cabezón Cámara’s story. Its precarious nature, combined with its ephemeral condition, transforms the space of El Poso into one of abject ruin, one that, as Rathje et  al. posit, is always undergoing transformation. Like the trash landfills examined in previous sections, the slum and those who live there—like abject ruins—are situated in a liminal space, always on the brink of collapse and disintegration. The main character in La virgen cabeza refers to this feature convincingly: “misery was not made of the same things that built the Taj Mahal. Where the hell had they seen the slums of the Roman Empire? Misery rots, burns, and flies away” (Cabezón Cámara 2009, 70). Although trash—and everything associated with it—can be seen, most people prefer to look the other way and, as a result, it is difficult and problematic to incorporate this issue into the social imaginary, especially when trash and people mutually feed on each other—both literally and metaphorically—coexisting indistinguishably and being confined to a space of “exception” and dehumanization. This problem of double meaning, to which we referred at the beginning of the chapter, corroborates another hypothesis: If in the corpus analyzed here the garbage dump condenses everything that society discards precisely because dirt constitutes an “out of place” material and, therefore, a relative problem, then this distinction and dissociation of what is human and what is trash carries with it the implementation of a system of cataloguing that establishes human hierarchies (“pure” vs. “dirty”) and, in accordance, displaces, transfers, expels, and confines all those “impure” attributes to a space of reclusion, segregation, and marginality. As Mary Douglas (1966) indicates, separating dirt from what is clean implies a systematic ordering and classification, although simultaneously arbitrary and associated with the values that have been socially and culturally conferred upon it. Significantly, therefore, Douglas develops the idea that a socially elaborated configuration of what is dirty and, with it, what must be eliminated ultimately constitutes an efficient effort to organize a determined social order. Following this approach, the visual and narrative works discussed in this chapter emphasize the role that

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these subjects embody—as “dirt” within an order that is defined in contrast to them. Cabezón Cámara’s novel exemplifies the place that society has assigned them. Not only do the immigrants from neighboring countries or other Argentine provinces (who are excluded both nationally and as foreigners) live in the slum, but this space also begins to become an in situ relic in that, as the archeological excavation advances, things begin to appear from all time periods, especially bones, bones of dead bodies, dead bodies from the inlands and the outlands, dead bodies of all colors, mutilated dead bodies from the last dictatorship, dead bodies from the Armenian genocide that nobody remembers, those who died of hunger from the last democratic governments, black dead bodies from Rwanda, white dead bodies from the Saint Petersburg revolution, red dead bodies from all the revolutions from everywhere, we even found one of Spartacus’s teeth, dead bodies of unitarios with a mazorca corn cob up their ass, and dead bodies of Indians with no ears; we have a lot of them; they were what we found the most of. (2009, 71–73)

In all these aesthetics, the residual humans and human ruins live together in dirt and poverty, vilified, and this condition forms part of a previously established order. They live in the degraded spaces of the garbage dump, slum, favela, or emergency zone, and they do not enjoy rights normally conferred upon citizenry; their status is defined by negation. They are devoid of all sovereign rights or representation, as well as categorized as garbage and, as a consequence, politically, socially, and economically “discarded.”41 Kevin Lynch points out that just as we get rid of objects, we also get rid of people: When they reach a certain age or level of disability—physical or mental—“they are classified as useless” and then we define them as “outcasts,” “dregs,” and “scum” (1990, 33). Similarly, it becomes natural, as the main character in La virgen cabeza points out, that in spite of the fact that it is not “hygienic to live like this,” the slum is filled with “shit” (Cabezón Cámara 2009, 73).

41  They were only rescued culturally, and in fact, these expressions and representations allow us to try to understand more systematically the causes and consequences of their semi-­ veiled presence.

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The narrations (both textual and visual) about territories considered inappropriate for human life proliferate, as poverty becomes more globalized and the world becomes increasingly more urbanized (Heffes 2012). As “there [are] increasingly more slums in Buenos Aires” (Cabezón Cámara 2009, 80), the representations of this space, in tandem with the garbage dump, also become more frequent. These aesthetic expressions promote environmental ethics and philosophy that, either explicitly or implicitly, establish guidelines for an inevitable questioning of globalization and modernity. In fact, these narratives conform to a sort of paradigmatic reaction facing the increasing number of human settlements in zones that are deemed unstable from a social and ecological perspective—settlements that are in a vulnerable situation, continually exposed to the threat of destruction and disappearing forever. The environmental risks and dangers to which these subjects are exposed stem from the unequal distribution of resources, including problems from food safety to increasing deforestation and contamination. This is evidenced not only in the problems of water and flooding, of trash and excrement that abound, as we see in La virgen cabeza, but in the absence of green spaces that function as lungs so that inhabitants can breathe: For example, in the slum El Poso, there are no longer “[trees] of any kind” (79). Settled in sterile territories, in continuous putrefaction and on the limits or border between existence and imminent disappearance, trees are not necessary to slums—instead everything smells like “shit,” and the “smell of shit is not simply bad; to smell shit is to smell decomposition, death in progress” (79, my emphasis).42 The trash dump, like the contemporary slum, takes in the dead and the “shit,” which coexist alongside the residual humans in a process that, besides fusing them together to the point of making each one indistinguishable from the other, denies individuals any legitimacy that could guarantee their basic rights, thus calling into question their very status as human beings. 42  Tim de Chant, on his webpage, has analyzed how the presence and absence of trees in different cities—and within cities, in different zones, neighborhoods, and geographic spaces—can be an indicator of economic inequality. This essay, which later shows a contrast with these same spaces through satellite images taken from Google Earth and titled “Income Inequality, As Seen From Space” (May 24, 2012), allows for the visualization of how, in effect, the lack of trees is seen in marginal neighborhoods while those who enjoy greater purchasing power exhibit a great variety of vegetation, which includes not only trees but all types of flora—and even fauna. The work includes Latin American cities. See Tim de Chant (2012): “Income inequality, as seen from space:” http://persquaremile.com/2012/05/24/ income-inequality-seen-from-space/. Accessed September 6, 2012.

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The garbage dump turns into a slum—an informal settlement—where people live, and the slum, inversely, turns into a dump that takes in all kinds of waste. Waste contaminates, and in the process of classification through a “toxic discourse” about what poses a “risk” for the “healthy” population, objects and subjects have the same fate. As Bauman has suggested, these objects and subjects make up a marginal class that, although it pertains to society, does not form part of it: This marginal class represents a status devoid of the rights granted to recognized and socially accepted members (2011, 3). And beyond this, they are alien bodies that do not count as “natural” and “indispensable” parts of the social organism (Bauman 2011, 3).43 Because they “pollute,” they are isolated within a marginal space where they are exposed to a continual and irreversible contamination, devoid of subjectivity: By means of an implicit operation of dehumanization, the exercise of public violence is carried out, and, lacking legal and legitimate existence, they are transformed into vulnerable and violated subjects.44 Another text that evokes the dynamic of the dump in the space of the contemporary slum is the novella La boliviana [The Bolivian] (2008), by Argentine Ricardo Strafacce. With a tone reminiscent of Argentine novelist César Aira, the story unfolds in the “Barrio de los Sapos,”45 a settlement made up of an “emergency neighborhood with 2000 souls squeezed inside,” that was

43  Bauman uses the term “alien body” because, besides referring to the underclass and socially marginal, it includes the (undocumented) immigrant and foreigner. 44  It is fitting to ask, as Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (2010) does, to what extent can literature and art play a significant role in social and environmental struggles at a national level as well as a local and regional one, or if writers and artists must go beyond their creative roles and into bioecological activism with the objective of effecting a more immediate change. 45  The name “Barrio de los Sapos” (“Neighborhood of the Toads”) dialogues with the old “Barrio de las Ranas” (“Neighborhood of the Frogs”) that historically was the first barrio inhabited by people “dedicated to the recovery and sale of trash of which there is record” (Dimarco 2007, 7). Also called “Barrio de las Latas” (“Neighborhood of the Tin”), it was located in the southern part of Buenos Aires. With the installation of the “quema,” or incinerator, toward the end of the nineteenth century, a neighborhood began to form around it populated by people “who lived from what was collected there” (Paiva 2006, 118). It is from this neighborhood that the first definitions of subjects as “cirujas” derived (see note 16 in this chapter for a definition of ciruja.), or the less common terms “ranero” and “ranada,” slang terms in Buenos Aires for people from the frog swamp, and in this case they live in and from trash (Dimarco 2007, 8). Dimarco refers to the “philological analysis” of these terms to show how the “cirujas (scavengers) were marked by the idea of crime, of something forbidden, something undesirable, suffering early on from persecution on the part of public authorities” (2007, 7–8; my emphasis).

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lying between the Reconquista River, whose contaminated waters wound around the edges of the houses marking the northern limit of the slum […] the ‘Barrio de los Sapos’ was bordered on the other side by the dump that extended as far as the eye could see and marked the southern border. The dump separated the neighborhood from the urbanized zone…. (Strafacce 2008, 9)

The dump thus exhibits a demarcating function, and it also separates the “barbarous” and non-urbanized world from the “civilized” and urban one: The city is privileged and exclusive, a fenced in territory that relegates and segregates “dirt” and contagion to its exterior, practically denying it the right to exist. Because the factories located in the zone “unscrupulously emptied their liquid waste into this river, which they said was one of the most contaminated rivers in the world,” its waters are in “no way suitable for drinking” (10). But despite this, “the kids from the neighborhood splashed in it, and the toads that marked the edges of this causeway in unbelievable quantities made up the principal and many times only source of food for the inhabitants of the slum” (10).46 The subjects who inhabit the slum are thus nourished from contaminated toads, which constitute the only source of nutrition in a marginalized space, sealed off by social abandonment. And even though some make a living from sending their children to the capital city to beg, the majority survive by “scavenging for bolts, cardboard, soft drink and beer cans, aluminum or old clothes” (10), or rather, the collection of garbage. If in La virgen cabeza the long-awaited miracles are scarce, in La boliviana, in contrast, they abound: In the neighborhood “there was no police authority […] or health care station, which really did not matter because, firstly, almost no one committed a crime […] and second, the inhabitants of the Barrio de los Sapos never got sick” (11). In the text, this supernatural phenomenon is attributed to the fact that the habitual intake of those toads that swam in the ultra-contaminated river had provoked some strange chemical combination that had a positive effect on metabolism (there was so much industrial liquid waste that infested the waters of the river, and it was so varied, that it was not strange for these poor toads to be mutants and even radioactive). Or perhaps the fact that knowing they possessed this small and pestilent treasure, but still a treasure (the toads were found in such scandalous quantities around the river that they were 46  Curiously, in the corpus of texts and films that we will examine in the Chap. 4 of this book, another amphibian—in this case the frog—will be an exquisite food source (delicacy) for the privileged classes.

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never lacking on any neighborhood table), they made life happy and ­brightened people’s moods and habits, making their health better and more robust with a sense of calm. (11)

The residue, in this case, is represented in the continuous cycle that begins with the intake of the contaminated amphibians, the only source of nourishment for those who live in the slum, once again fusing subject with object into an undifferentiated category: If the subjects are nourished by garbage—in this case by the toads that have absorbed the industrial waste emptied into the waters of the river—their lack of politico-legal protection and status leads them to be classified as human waste. Nevertheless, these paradigms of representation and segregation, in which the degradation of what is human goes beyond Bauman’s (2011) definition of “collateral damage,” encompass not only Latin America but the majority of the Global South, including some territories of the hegemonic nations of the so-called developed First World.47 Life in the garbage dump, in tandem with trash as a form of daily nourishment, has certainly become globalized and, as a consequence, its textual and visual stories have gained increased visibility. The exposure of waste that cannot be assimilated by a social order and the survival of the subjects who represent this waste function as an excess that destabilizes notions of what is human, and therefore what belongs (or not) to the social sphere of the “developed” world. Borrowing from Rob Nixon’s idea of “unimagined communities” (2011), this excess underlines that inasmuch as “the modern nation-state is sustained by producing imagined communities,” it simultaneously produces “unimagined communities,” those “communities that lie beyond the national boundaries” and

47  Elizabeth Donovan’s 2012 thesis “Day to Day Change Making: The Transformative Potential of Dumpster Diving” analyzes the task that people who dive into dumpsters in California fulfill, as well as the larger problem of trash in the United States. In a footnote she signals that during her first trip “dumpster diving” she learned that the term “to dumpster” is a colloquial one used by the divers to refer to the act of diving/searching through the trash (Donovan 2012, 9). Her interesting work has an impact on the perspective that we are analyzing here since it focuses on the problem of eliminating organic waste (principally food) in the United States, with the objective of putting this problem on the current political and environmental agenda—an issue launched by the alarming statistics that in the United States approximately 50% of food products are thrown out: Jonathan Bloom, American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (2010).

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whose “vigorously unimagined condition becomes indispensable to maintaining a highly selective discourse of national development” (151).48

8  Out of Sight, Out of Mind The first chapter of historian Martin Melosi’s book Garbage in the Cities (1981) is entitled “Out of Sight, Out of Mind.” This popular expression condenses one of the most significant challenges posed by waste. As a contaminating, dirty, and ominous object, it is necessary to displace it from the field of vision and “condemn it” to a sort of perpetual confinement. There have been important works written in the field of Latin American studies dealing with sanitation projects principally focused on bodies and urban space (Nouzeilles 2000; Armus 2003, 2007) and the role that rhetoric coming out of the nation-state plays in the process of discursively articulating a “sanitation” and “regeneration” program particularly focused on sick, contaminated, and infected organisms. However, the role that these programs play in the politics (or biopolitics) of cleaning up––and by extension eliminating––what produces infection, sickness, and contamination—whether in the form of viruses, bacteria, or people—has until recently received little attention. Susan Strasser discusses the historical importance of marginal physical spaces in relation to the production of trash and waste: Dumps (and, in the past, incinerators) were kept in zones located on the outskirts, accessible only to marginalized subjects with few resources (1999, 7). But even more importantly, all institutional practices that had to do with waste—that is, its cleaning or disposal—were embedded in a project of order and discipline in a Foucauldian manner: Trash, since it cannot be “normalized” or “reformed,” must be removed, confined, or eliminated, like any unassimilable Other. Furthermore, waste unleashes, as Sonja Windmüller suggests, a threatening sensation even while it causes fascination (2010, 169).49 To segregate or discard what no longer  The recent novel Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012) by Katherine Boo narrates the story of Abdul, a resident of the Annawadi slum in Bombay (Mumbai), India, who lives, together with 3000 other residents, from the garbage that the rich throw out on the edge of this precarious settlement. The text is based on research done by the journalist who tried to show, in the same way as in Fidelis Odun Balogun’s previously mentioned novel, Adjusted Lives, how these subjects do not have the slightest possibility of transforming or modifying the precarious condition in which they live. 49  If, as Windmüller argues, trash and waste unleash a threatening sensation even while they cause in us fascination, this aspect, characteristic of the relationship that is initiated with what we throw away, reveals how close trash is to us, even though we have thrown it away: “It confronts us as the chaos we have barred from our aspirations toward structure and orientation, as something amorphous and hybrid, as the ‘Other’ of the ‘inside’ of the system, the ostensibly ordered (personal and social) Self” (2010, [163 Spanish] [169 English]). 48

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works—eradicating it from our sight until it is finally disposed of—can function as an archetypical indicator of the hierarchy of objects, material as well as social, that we dismiss daily, whether on the individual level or, in a broader sense, within the sphere of our societies and communities. Besides justifying their hygienic function, technological solutions related to the sanitizing process possess “surplus meaning” since “they incorporate socially prefigured images, general principles, and values” (Windmüller 2010, 167). As a consequence, the introduction of municipal waste management must be read as a grand project of imposing order and discipline on the threatening and aggressive presence of garbage. Waste management, as Windmüller points out, “was war against rubbish (as the internal enemy of social order) and not only in a metaphorical sense” (2010, 167). In the same vein, Melosi establishes a relationship between the project of sanitation and “soldier-like” discipline, part and parcel of the first urban practices of cleanliness and collection.50 In his research, Melosi relates how in 1894 the sanitation of the city of New York was entrusted to Coronel Waring, who during his tenure implemented a great number of sanitation reforms that adhered to Hippocrates’s adage “pure air, pure water, and a pure soil” (Melosi 2004, 49). But still more significantly, Waring was convinced that sanitation was a symbol of the degree of progress and “evolution” of a social group and, based on this judgment, he argued that “there is no index more reliable with respect to the civilization of a community than the way in which it treats its waste” (Melosi 2004, 49). Waring was so aware that the practice of street sanitation was homologous with medical practices that he ordered everyone who worked in street sanitation in New  York to wear white uniforms. Although this could seem (and be) not very practical, the public soon associated sanitation workers in the city with healthcare workers (Melosi 2004, 54). The disciplinary sanitation project was also directed at the population, who had to learn the proper way to fill new garbage cans and practice correct placement of what was emptied, and thus, to a certain degree, acquire the adequate skills to evaluate and manage garbage. As part of this education program, the private practices of garbage removal were made public, evaluated, and, in some cases, subject to fines. Different cultural patterns of garbage management portrayed trash as threatening, a phenomenon that should inspire fear. In this way, a fundamental principle of garbage removal was established: taking it as far away as possible and destroying what was undeniably “dangerous,” often through incineration (Windmüller 2010, 162). In this sense, it is not surprising that at the beginning of the twentieth century,  This aspect will be developed extensively in the next chapter.

50

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the incineration of trash impressed the experts as well as the general public by its “irrevocability, thoroughness, and the finality of its elimination” (Windmüller 2010, 162). Besides the hope that was deposited in the effective power of incineration that went along with the “rational image of elimination technology,” a religious component appeared through allusions and references to the “purification process” and the “infernal fire,” where “dirt and filth are to be overcome with the aid of the cathartic flames” (Windmüller 2010, 163). These expressions appeared above all in the newspapers of the time and reinforced the idea of trash incineration as a large-scale project of punishment and elimination. Given the impurity of trash compared to society, trash was an “aggressive threat that has to be adequately confronted” (Windmüller 2010, 163). In fact, according to Melosi, a doctor defined the cremation of trash as “a great sanitary device” and another, from West Virginia, expressed himself this way: “at last we have secured a means of entirely destroying these substances and their power to do evil” (2004, 39; my emphasis). Trash, dirt, sickness, and all that which contaminates and is contaminated are elements that lead to” the following question: At what point will equating these multiple associations of trash and humans who draw nourishment from it not imply a legitimization of the value increasingly assigned to it (its distinctive and threatening traits), as well as the legitimization of isolating it, especially at a historical moment when the distance that separates trash from those who are fed from it has been considerably reduced? From a social vantage point within the globalized map, relegating, displacing, and confining what has been classified as dirty to a space of “exception” consists of a deliberate structuring and hierarchical organization in which the rearrangement of markets and merchandise based on maximizing production, consumption, and the concentration of profit transforms the internal particularities of social inequalities (García Canclini 2001, 19). But it is also a reconfiguration, no longer at a global level but at a national and local one. It begins with what Neil Smith (2009) defined as a neoliberalism that is “dead” though still in force and expressed in the three fundamental pillars of neoliberal structure: first, the persistence of an eroded form of the free market economy as the operating logic that shapes social relations; second, the withdrawal of the State from public welfare and social support; and finally, the sacralization of private property and the privatization of public services (12–13). The mechanisms of production, consumption, and elimination that indifferently exploit both objects and subjects allow us to see in these paradigmatic representations that elements like trash, waste, and residual

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humans compose the trope of a global biopolitics that, in Latin America— as well as other “underdeveloped” countries—confines a considerable portion of humanity to a discarded and dehumanized territory, depriving them of subjectivity and meaning. The metaphor of the “thrown away” character in the novel Única mirando al mar is archetypical in this sense because it reveals the stark condition of the uselessness of certain subjects and, in turn, their ineffable fate in the garbage dump. Bauman turns to the image of cancer to refer to the metaphoric and literal space occupied by socially marginalized people, for whom the most “sensible” and practical treatment is “excision” (2011, 3).51 In the Latin American context, this comparison reminds us of the rhetoric used by military governments to justify widespread torture and mass killings. It also echoes positivist medicine, which utilized the image of the social body and all its “evils” to, yet again, intervene and carry out a “surgical” practice on society with the goal of cleaning it up, bringing together order, and disciplining “deviant behavior.” In this sense, we can suggest that the effort to segregate and confine the residual humans to the realm of the invisible entails, as the textual and visual stories in this chapter have demonstrated, an ongoing process of disappearance akin to those of so many “Others” who, throughout Latin American history, have been missing or forced to disappear. The reason for this can be ethnic, racial, ideological, or economic. What this mechanism makes evident, nonetheless, is a characteristic and recurring practice that emerges—or better yet, is resurrected—under multiple cultural forms and artistic expressions. These aesthetic constellations, therefore, not only throw into relief a hidden problem, they mostly bring into visibility what has been condemned to abjectness, placing the question of residuality at the core of their discourses, while contesting and destabilizing already established notions of hygiene and civility. If the inhabitants of the garbage dump have become, following Agamben and Bauman, “residual humans” living wasted lives and confined to invisibilized places, the aesthetics examined here contest those characterizations 51  These multiple assignations remind me that Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor, has extensively examined the use of illnesses such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and cancer as metaphors that have been corresponding to different social uses and needs: “TB and cancer have been used to express not only (like syphilis) crude fantasies about contamination. […] For more than a century and a half, tuberculosis provided a metaphoric equivalent for delicacy, sensitivity, sadness, powerlessness; while whatever seemed ruthless, implacable, predatory, could be analogized to cancer. […] Cancer was never viewed other than as a scourge; it was metaphorically, the barbarian within” (1978, 61). Sontag also refers to the environmental images that have typically been associated with cancer in a negative manner.

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by foregrounding through their narratives the individual traits of each subject and, by doing this, restoring the human dimension. To appeal to a “toxic discourse” (Buell 1998), to define both a literary and visual representative space that invariably refers to a politics of contamination and bio/environmental destruction may likewise have the effect of evoking a “sense of pertinence” and “of place” that displaces–– within the broader cultural imaginary––these “thrown away” communities into an alternative and more visible territory. We agree with Lawrence Buell when he points out that sociological and historical evidence demonstrates that the emergence of “toxicity” as an ample and shared paradigm of cultural self-identification, as well as “toxic discourse” as a force that can be easily influenced proportionally, continues to grow. Rhetorical eloquence as much as testimonials from people affected by growing environmental degradation can have a substantial influence on public policies, especially when the media is watching and recording (Buell 1998, 653). Unlike the slow and procedural conservatism of legislative and regulatory bodies (by and large ineffective in most Latin American countries), diverse communities have begun to develop what some environmental anthropologists have defined as “disaster subculture” (Omohundro 1991, 165), where the very values of the communities, as well as the social and cultural rituals on which they depend, begin to form because of the memory and/or the anticipation of an environmental disaster (Buell 1998, 665). The visualization of human and ecological loss becomes increasingly frequent in the spatial imaginary of the subjects who form part of these communities, no longer as the only way out or as mere consumers, but as a collectivity that has no other alternative than to cooperate in the recognition of mutual needs and their interdependencies. Therefore, whether individually or culturally, socially or politically, it is not wrong—although some judge it to be idealistic—to echo Mike Davis’s call (2010) to the “utopian” imperative in the “era of catastrophe.” In an article entitled “Who Will Build the Ark?” Davis describes a scene of threats and opportunities, of strengths and weaknesses with respect to the present situation of cities in the neoliberal period. The environmental problems accentuate the feeling of risk; consequently, he warns that climate change will produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes, inflicting the greatest damage upon poor countries with the fewest resources for meaningful adaptation. This geographical separation of emis-

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sion source from environmental consequence undermines pro-active solidarity. (Davis 2010, 37)

The environmental impact will be most severely felt in the poorest of the world’s cities, as roughly 90% of the projected three billion increase in the global urban population will be concentrated in the developing world (Davis 2010, 39). For Davis, no one, he reiterates, “no one—has a clue how a planet of slums with growing food and energy crises will accommodate their biological survival, much less their aspirations to basic happiness and dignity” (2010, 39–40). This catastrophic vision, which had already been adumbrated in his important article “Planet of Slums” (2004)—and in his later book by the same name (2006)—as well as in City of Quartz (1990) and Ecology of Fear (1998), stands out from other perspectives in that it deals with a scene of catastrophe that contains, by way of a Marxist dialectic, the contradictions pointing to the model that would be able to overcome it. Hence, Davis lays out a radical urbanism, linked to the idea of ecological justice, which would translate into privileging public welfare over private wealth. This vindication of equality in urban life, for Davis, would be the most effective basis for environmental conservation in a broad sense. Thus, “either we fight for ‘impossible’ solutions to the increasingly entangled crises of urban poverty and climate change, or become ourselves complicit in a de facto triage of humanity” (Davis 2010, 45; emphasis in the original). Consequently, what are the modes of resistance? Or, put another way, is there a mode of resistance? Turning again to the literary and visual works that we have reviewed in this chapter, as well as those that we will examine in the following, one can propose that, on a practically insignificant scale, these narratives enact resistance by casting a ray of light on what residual humans may create out of waste, as well as by portraying these acts as some of the most degrading human activities. As we will observe in the following chapter, the appropriation of what is thrown away in all its possible forms and dimensions can imply a transformative and creative gesture of both its discursive and contextual logic in a broader sense. Additionally, this gesture establishes a relationship in an unprecedented and unexpected way to an original and innovative initiative of ecological sustainability. As this practice of recycling pertains to producing a specific cultural structure and dynamic, as well as to peculiar aesthetic artifacts, it assumes a surprising, subversive, and exceptional character, capable of producing new significations and alternative meanings that diverge from

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those that were assigned in the past. From this perspective, this gesture of transformation redefines the attributes of what was defined as waste, resignifies its function from an ecological point of view, and, in turn, challenges the laws of the market and the very mechanisms of economic power.

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de Faria e Silva, Thiago. 2011. Imagens do lixo no cinema brasileiro. Projeto História 43 (December): 509–516. de Vallbona, Rima. 1986. En el reino de la basura. In Mujeres y agonías, 85–87. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press. Diken, Bülent, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen. 2005. The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp. London; New York: Routledge. Dimarco, Sabina. 2007. ¿Podremos mirar más allá de la basura? Raneros, cirujas y cartoneros: historias detrás de la basura. Papeles del CEIC 2: 1–29. Dittmar, Helga. 1992. The Social Psychology of Material Possessions: To Have Is To Be. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire; New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf; St. Martin’s Press. Donovan, Elizabeth Emery. 2012. Day to Day Change Making: The Transformative Potential of Dumpster Diving. Pomona Senior Theses. Paper 59. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_theses/59 Douglas, Mary. 1992. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London; New York: Routledge. ———. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge Classics edition (originally published 1966). London; New  York: Routledge. Dujovne Ortiz, Alicia. 2010. ¿Quién mató a Diego Duarte?: crónicas de la basura. Buenos Aires: Aguilar. Espasande, Mara Daniela. 2008. Vivir en una villa (miseria). Todo es historia 496: 6–17. Farias, Marcos. 1962. Um Favelado. In Diegues Carlos and Leon Hirszman dirs. Cinco Vêzes Favela: Em 5 Episódios. Santana de Parnaiba: Frontlog. Furtado, Jorge. 1989. Ilha das Flores. New York, NY: First Run/Icarus Films. García Canclini, Néstor. 2001. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Girvan, Norman. 2014. Extractive Imperialism in Historical Perspective. In Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s New Frontier, ed. James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, 49–61. Leiden: BRILL. Heffes, Gisela. 2008. Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana. Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora. ———. 2009. Reimagining Contemporary Latin American Cities. World Literature Today 83 (2): 42–45. ———. 2010. La ciudad latinoamericana contemporánea revisitada. Boca de Sapo: Revista de arte, literatura y pensamiento 5 (11): 58–63. ———. 2011. Crisis, imaginación y estética: espacio urbano y la resignificación de los desechos en Buenos Aires. Revista Estudios 19 (38): 29–51.

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———. 2012. Muerte y transfiguración de la ciudad: territorios urbanos, cuerpos y marginalidad. Cuadernos de Literatura 15 (32): 125–152. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Hine, Dougald, Nick Hunt, Paul Kingsnorth, and Adrienne Odasso. 2013. Editorial: Post-Cautionary Tales. Dark Mountain 4: 1–3. Jameson, Frederic. 2003. The End of Temporality. Critical Inquiry 29 (4): 695–718. Krishnaswamy, Revathi. 2008. Postcolonial and Globalization Studies: Connections, Conflicts, Complicities. In The Postcolonial and the Global, ed. Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C.  Hawley, 2–21. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Laclau, Ernesto. 2008. Debates y combates. Por un nuevo horizonte de la política. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Leff, Enrique. 2004. Racionalidad ambiental: la reapropiación social de la naturaleza. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Lynch, Kevin. 1990. Wasting Away. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Massidda, Adriana. 2012. The Plan de Emergencia (1956). The Argentine Debate about Housing Shortage Then and Now. Scroop (Cambridge Architecture Journal) 21: 42–51. Medina, Martín. 2007. Una visión general del reciclaje informal en África, Asia y América Latina. In Recicloscopio. Miradas sobre recuperadores urbanos de residuos de América Latina, ed. Pablo J. Schamber and Francisco M. Suárez, 222–243. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la UNLa/Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento/Prometeo Libros. Melosi, Martin. 2004. Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Mignolo, Walter, ed. 2001. Capitalismo y geopolítica del conocimiento: el eurocentrismo y la filosofía de la liberación en el debate intelectual contemporáneo. Buenos Aires; Durham, NC: Ediciones del Signo; Duke University. Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford, U.K.; New York, N.Y.: Blackwell. ———. 2001. Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Oxford, U.K.; New York, N.Y.: Berg. Nouzeilles, Gabriela. 2000. Ficciones somáticas: naturalismo, nacionalismo y políticas médicas del cuerpo (Argentina 1880-1910). Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo. Omohundro, John T. 1991. From Oil Slick to Greasepaint: Theatre’s Role in Community Response to Pollution Events. In Communities at Risk: Collective Responses to Technological Hazards, ed. Stephen Robert Couch and J. Stephen Kroll-Smith, 159–181. New York: Peter Lang. Orgambide, Pedro. 2003. ‘Prólogo’ to Verbitsky, Bernardo. In Villa Miseria también es América (1957), 7–10. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Ortega, Gonzalo. 2010. La era de los residuos y las emisiones. In Residual: Intervenciones artísticas en la ciudad, 215–223. México D.F: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Museo Universitario Contemporáneo de Arte.

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Paiva, Verónica. 2006. De los ‘Huecos’ al ‘Relleno Sanitario.’ Breve historia de la gestión de residuos en Buenos Aires. Revista Científica de UCES X 1: 112–134. ———. 2008. Cartoneros y cooperativas de recuperadores: una mirada sobre la recolección informal de residuos. Área metropolitana de Buenos Aires, 1999–2007. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2010. Caribbean Utopias and Dystopias: The Emergence of the Environmental Writer and Artist. In The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth Century Writings, ed. Adrian Taylor Kane, 112–135. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co. Publishers. Parra, José Luis. 1958. Mis amigos los pepenadores. (La vida de un Maestro de Banquillo). México: J. Pablos. Prado, Marcos. 2004. Estamira. Buenos Aires: Europa Filmes. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2022. Planetary Longings. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Quijano, Anibal. 1992. Colonialidad y modernidad-racionalidad. In Los conquistados: 1492 y la población indígena de las Américas, 437–447. Bogotá; Quito: Tercer Mundo; FLACSO. ———. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla 1 (3): 533–580. Rathje, William L., and Cullen Murphy. 1992. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Restrepo, Iván. 2010. El estudio arqueológico de la basura Mexicana. In Residual: Intervenciones artísticas en la ciudad, 173–184. México D.F: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Museo Universitario Contemporáneo de Arte. Robbins, Richard. 2013. Girl Rising. Sausalito, CA: Ro*co Films Educational. Shanks, Michael, David Platt, and William L.  Rathje. 2004. The Perfume of Garbage: Modernity and The Archaeological. Modernism/Modernity 11 (1): 61–83. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. https://doi. org/10.1353/mod.2004.0027. Siméon, Rémi. 1999. Diccionario de la lengua náhuatl o mexicana. México: Siglo XXI. Smith, Neil. 2009. ¿Ciudades después del neoliberalismo? In Después del neoliberalismo: ciudades y caos sistémico, ed. Neil Smith, 9–42. Barcelona: Ed. Museu dÁrt Contemporani de Barcelona; Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Colección Contra Textos. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness As Metaphor. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. Strafacce, Ricardo. 2008. La boliviana. Buenos Aires: Mansalva. Strasser, Susan. 1999. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New  York: Metropolitan Books. Taussig, Michael T. 2003. Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a ‘limpieza’ in Colombia. New York: New Press. Theriault, Noah, and Simi Kang. 2021. Toxic Research: Political Ecologies and the Matter of Damage. Environment and Society 12 (1): 5–24.

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Thompson, Michael. 1979. Rubbish Theory. The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Tilley, Christopher Y. 1990. Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and Post-Structuralism. Oxford, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ———. 1991. Material Culture and Text: The Art of Ambiguity. London, New York: Routledge. Trapero, Pablo. 2008. Sobras. In Stories on Human Rights. Milan: Art of the World. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. United States Environmental Protection Agency. 2017. Overview of Greenhouse Gases. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-­greenhouse-­gases#me thane. Accessed 23 Apr 2017. Valenzuela Aguilera, Alfonso. 2002. Las nuevas centralidades: fragmentación, espacio público y ciudadanía. In Latinoamérica: países abiertos, ciudades cerradas, ed. Cabrales Barajas and Luis Felipe, 31–64. Guadalajara, Jalisco: Universidad de Guadalajara, Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, Ciencia and Cultura (UNESCO). Verbitsky, Bernardo. 2003 [1957]. Villa Miseria también es América. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Walker, Lucy. 2009. Waste Land. London: Almega Projects. Walsh, Rodolfo. 1957. Operación masacre. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Sigla. ———. 1969. ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? Buenos Aires: Ed. Tiempo contemporáneo. Walsh, Rodolfo J., Daniella Gitlin, Michael Greenberg, and Ricardo Piglia. 2013. Operation Massacre. Trans. Daniella Gitlin; Foreword by Michael Greenberg; Afterword by Ricardo Piglia. Brecon: Old Street. Wenz, Peter. 1988. Environmental Justice. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2008. The Importance of Environmental Justice. In Ecology—Key Concepts in Critical Theory, ed. Carolyn Merchant, 259–264. New York: Humanity Books. Windmüller, Sonja. 2010. Confrontaciones entre el hombre y la basura. La investigación sobre los deshechos en los estudios culturales, o lo que la basura nos dice sobre nosotros mismos. In Residual: Intervenciones artísticas en la ciudad, 159–163. México D.F: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Museo Universitario Contemporáneo de Arte. Wolff, Jorge H. 2007. O cinema no lixo. Uma trilogia dos restos da cidade. Crítica Cultural 2 (2): 34–37. https://doi.org/10.19177/rcc.v2e2200734-­37.

CHAPTER 3

Sustainability: Waste and Its Social, Cultural, and Aesthetic Re-significations

Consumer society consumes what is fleeting. Things, people: things made not to last die as they are born; and more and more people are thrown in the trash from the moment they come to life. —Eduardo Galeano, Úselo y tírelo (1994, 173)

1   From Destruction to Environmental Conservation: The Enacted Object of Waste The phenomenon of waste, what we discard, and what we simply call “trash,” “junk,” “leftovers,” and “crap,” is defined not by inherent characteristics but by externally assigned categories. Michael Thompson’s now classic Rubbish Theory (1979) establishes three categories of objects. First, he describes objects for daily use that almost exclusively belong to the “transient” category. They are characterized by their limited lifespan and the constant depreciation of their value. “Durable” objects include works of art and antiques, things that conserve or even increase in value (Thompson 1979, 7). Finally, “covert” or concealed objects correspond to rubbish, the third category of objects, comprised of trash, scraps, leftovers, and whatever is discarded, and therefore given a “death” certificate. This category, according to Thompson’s hypothesis, “is not subject to the control mechanism (which is concerned primarily with the overt part of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Heffes, Visualizing Loss in Latin America, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28831-9_3

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the system, the valuable and socially significant objects)” (1979, 9). In fact, the category of rubbish has the difficult task of facilitating the transfer of an object in the “transient” category to the “durable” one: for Thompson, an object of transient value that gradually declines in value can fall into the category of rubbish. Those in a privileged social and cultural hierarchy have the power to transform objects into durable or transient ones, and to ensure that their own heritage is inscribed within the sphere of durable objects while that which does not belong to them remains confined to transience. This manipulation of value thus facilitates a consolidation of patrimony whose value eventually can become unquestionable. Can this self-perpetuating system of value assignation ever change? How, for example, can something transient shift to the durable category, a transfer that runs against the current of the powerful mechanism of control that results in an already established combination of roles? The answer lies in the fact that these two overt categories—the durable and the transient—do not exhaust the universe of value: there are some objects (those with a “zero and unchanging value”) that constitute the concealed or covert third category, which corresponds to everything that has been discarded: waste, trash, and scraps. In an unreal world, an object can reach a value and a lifespan of zero, immediately disappearing into dust. But this does not always happen. Rather, it continues to exist in a dormant state, deprived of time and value until it has the chance to be “discovered” and even transferred to the durable category. This change of category—which, beyond material culture, can be related to systems of ideas and knowledge—is made possible by a change in ownership and is therefore connected to the social relations of power (Thompson 1979, 7).1 In equal  For Thompson, there is a relationship between our view of and action in the world, and the question that he asks has to do with the nature of this relationship: according to his perspective, the category of objects’ “membership determines the way we act towards them: that is, world view is prior to action” since it is “located within a region of fixed assumptions.” If, for example, we look at two flower vases, as Thompson says, we can realize that the way we act around them—whether we treat them as antiques or secondhand objects— determines their category membership: then “action is prior to world view”; it is found within “a region of flexibility somewhere between the inflexible regions” (1979, p. 7). And it is, then, this region where innovation and creativity emerge, although this region concerns a restricted space. The imposition of a social order differentiates access to this: for people of limited resources there is practically no region of flexibility, but by the same token, those who have unlimited resources have the most freedom to manipulate the system. Michael Thompson wants to show how the durability—as well as the transience—of objects is imposed through the world of objects and in this way proves that a tendency exists to think that “objects are the way they are as a result of their intrinsic physical properties. The belief that nature is what is there when you check in is reassuring but false: the belief that it is made anew each afternoon,” for Thompson, “is alarming but true” (1979, pp. 8–9). 1

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measure, this way of looking at things with respect to their former functions allows trash to take on new values and meanings for trash. My position concerning the notion of trash proposes a model—not a theory, as Thompson does—for reading literary and visual works as well as aesthetic artifacts and urban performative interventions that refer, in multiple and varied forms, to discarded and leftover objects whose point of departure is precisely the “covert” value to which Thompson refers. The curator and art historian Michael Fehr (1989) suggests that discarded elements can be “highly suitable for stimulating reflexive behavior and productive cognition” (187; cit. in Windmüller 2010, 166). In fact, the act of putting them together allows for a different paradigm of inquiry: one that not only proposes new discursive approaches but also narrates novel visions of the past and future. Aleida Assmann has argued that trash constitutes a register that was not intentionally formed and that is differentiated from verbal reports or written documents. If one of the preconditions for the existence of archives as a collective repository of knowledge is that their unity of data collection is material and functions as support, above all, for the written word, then all that has been discarded, like waste and trash, accumulates outside of the archives (Assmann 2011, 12–13).2 Moreover, if we consider that archives are not the only place where documents from the past are preserved but also the place where memory is constructed and produced—a process shaped largely by social, political and cultural interests—it is legitimate to ask what type of reading is constructed starting from the examination and re-elaboration of waste. Assmann maintains that waste that accumulates outside of the archives makes up the “remnants of civilization that have not been collected” and yet constitutes a collection that could be defined as alternative memorial image of the archives: “Waste as a ‘negative store,’ however, does not stand only for disposal, destruction, and oblivion; it also stands for latent memory, which takes its place between functional and storage memory and lives on from one generation to the next in a no-man’s land, between

 Sabine Schmidt, paraphrasing Thompson, points out that everything that ends up in a museum, originally, at some moment, near or far, had the status of trash that acquires the traits of a “phenomenon” whose temporalities, as well as its potentialities, are juxtaposed and confused: “anything that is currently in the rubbish is itself tainted by its past and at the same time reaches into the future” (2010, 267). 2

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presence and absence” (2011, 13–14).3 The limit between the archives and the junkyard is a thin one, flexible and malleable, where what is discarded and neutralized transforms, through its recovery, into what Krzysztof Pomian (1990) has defined as semiophore—that is, a visible sign of something invisible and ungraspable, like the past or a person’s identity, but still endowed with meaning (30).4 The transformative capacity and power of the recycling, reuse, and reutilization of thrown away objects not only revitalizes the presumed extinction of discarded objects, it also operates on diverse levels, joining disciplines and generating change within both the environmental and cultural spheres. Its subversive dimension is what interests me, since recycling, reuse, and reutilization not only escape the logic of consumption and produce an interruption in the production-consumption-discard cycle, they also, adhering to Pomian’s definition, become elements of recovery of the past as out-of-date or perished identities claim an unprecedented meaning. These identities can be recovered and reinvigorated through a number of mechanisms where the environmental intersects with the social, the aesthetic with the public, and the ominous with the creative. A structural analogy between trash and the museum or the long-term storage of garbage (the dump) and the museum (the repository) implies thinking about how, in both of these sharply differentiated spaces, the objects are withdrawn from circulation and use, with the objective of settling and accumulating (Windmüller 2010, 166). The trash heap is 3  According to Aleida Assmann (2011), if the garbage dump and junkyard are capable of housing a discarded collective memory, this memory consists of a form of “counter-memory and reverse archive”: starting with the premise that the act of remembering cannot be separated from that of forgetting, she suggests that both constitute necessary and indispensable operations of memory; this “paradoxical yet consistent connection became especially obvious in the experiments of artists and writers who focused on rubbish as a form of counter-­ memory and reverse archive. The remembering of rubbish and forgetting is a plausible consequence in a culture that in the modern era has followed the doctrine of innovation with the concomitant effect of filling the refuse bin of history to overflowing. […] From this abyss of the rejected, the unuseable, the forgotten, artists have fashioned new material archives in which they remind society of its suppressed, traumatic foundations” (Assmann 2011, p. 400), or as Thompson has suggested, its “covert” origins. Thus, dedicating oneself to this phenomenon, certain artistic mirrors have been erected with the purpose of reflecting the social process that entails the practice of remembering and forgetting. 4  For Pomian, the “semiophore” is an artifact that must be understood in allegorical terms and in contrast to a pragmatic meaning: Pomian pits useful objects and things up against the “semiophores,” objects that lack usefulness but are endowed with meaning and represent what is invisible.

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comparable to a collective memory insofar as it is a receptacle into which one consciously and unconsciously disposes of multiple past experiences, desires, images, expectations, delusions, and frustrations; trash thus functions as an alternative social archive. It is a material trace imbued with feelings and stories that bears testimony to the unique life of a particular individual or community: an old computer from a classroom, a car that has passed down from one family to another or the pots and pans of a soup kitchen for the poor. The discarded object acquires a sort of skin that turns into an invisible palimpsest, and on it, all kinds of elements (from material to intangible) have been accumulating from its beginning to its disposal. But in spite of all this beauty and history, the discarded object, it if is not reutilized or recycled, becomes part of a contaminating army that threatens the presumed harmony of the ecosystem, as we have seen in the preceding chapter. In this sense, if the garbage dump and discarded material turn into a receptacle of memory that has been eliminated, they also house all the memories that have been discarded. Memories from all walks of life are haphazardly intermingled, regardless of the object’s socio-cultural origins. In this sense, the garbage dump does not discriminate, as it constitutes a democratic space: everything is absorbed. Unlike in a museum, there is no curator. Or if there is a curator, it is the one who has (im)posed an “end” to the life of the object. When an object taken out of the trash is reutilized, not only is it being “recycled”—and simultaneously contributing to a practice associated with ecological sustainability—, it is also being granted a new and different memory, perhaps even a contradictory one with respect to what it previously possessed. Thus, the collective memory of a city, a region, or a certain zone is recycled according to the jurisdiction of the discarded objects, their displacement and transfer, and their final resting place. Their past is recycled, re-inscribed with a new story, and a future is assigned to something that presumably was already buried. When the object was discarded, it also received its death certificate, and the reutilization of this dead object confers on it a new meaning and status, a reason for being, a use that escapes the network of consumption coordinated by a capitalist system that tries to sum up—through the ebbs and flows of the market—the brief function of one of the objects that surrounds us. In sum, the transforming capacity present within the activity of recycling not only produces a break in relation to what is considered to be discarded and out-of-date, it is also capable of elevating this practice to a new, completely unprecedented, plane. Taking as a point of departure the

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labor of collecting discarded objects and trash that conserve a “covert” value, this chapter will analyze how this distinctive trait is linked to a corpus of specific aesthetic manifestations in which “recycling” operates on two different levels, as both textual and visual representations, as well as extra-textual aesthetic productions reflected in objects of art and performative interventions in the very space of the city. Here, recycling becomes not just an image but a verb that alters the meaning generally granted to matter that has been discarded, eliminated, and then recollected, by recovering and reinfusing its social, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions. Accordingly, this chapter will aim to elaborate on the critical relationship established between environmental crisis and urban economic disparity through a trans-disciplinary analysis of the figure of the garbage picker and the practice of recycling in the Latin American cultural landscape.5 As I will show, unlike its Global North counterparts, the aesthetics analyzed here are distinct inasmuch they catalyze a sense of immediacy. And this sense of urgency epitomizes a wide range of works that appeals at times to the readers’ sensibilities, other times to their affective understandings, and many others, to their preconceptions.

2  The “Subversive” Condition of Waste? Charles Baudelaire, in “On Wine and Hashish” (“Du vin et du haschisch”) (1851), described the “chiffonnier”—rag-picker or scavenger—as an archivist, a cataloguer who walks the streets and classifies all that the city has discarded, lost, rejected, and destroyed. Let’s lower our sights a little. Let’s contemplate one of those mysterious beings, living so to speak off the excrement of great cities…Here is a man whose task is to pick up all the rubbish produced on one day in the capital. All that the great city has thrown out, all it has lost, all it has disdained, all it has broken, he catalogues and collects. He consults the archives of debauchery, works through the lumber-room of rubbish. He makes a selection, 5  By trans-disciplinary I mean the definition proposed by Alfonso Montuori (2005) as a paradigm of analysis that emphasizes the focus of cultural inquiry (above the discipline per se), the construction of knowledge and its organization through networks, connections, and contextualizations, and the integration of the researcher in the process of the construction of this knowledge. In fact, this epistemological approach endeavors to emphasize the need for a concrete practice in the application of knowledge instead of an “objective” position that avoids the focus of study (Montuori 2005, pp. 154–157).

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chooses astutely; he picks up, as a miser seizes on treasure, the refuse which, when chewed over by the divinity of Industry, will become objects of use or enjoyment. (2002, 7–8)

This scavenger work that Baudelaire likewise associates with the work of the poet was later recognized by Walter Benjamin, who takes up the figure of the junk, trash, and scrap collector and puts together an analogy regarding his own methodology as a cultural historian. Like Baudelaire’s chiffoniers, the historian wanders through archives, scrutinizes the trash of the past that has been utilized for other purposes, recycles the figurative and literal remains, and then, ends up giving them a new meaning (Wohlfarth 1986, 151). Benjamin’s fascination with the chiffonier lies in the fact that this figure constitutes the most immediate result of new industrial processes that grant a different value to waste. Benjamin suggests (2006) that the garbage pickers appear on the urban scene in great numbers, working for “middlemen” and constituting “a sort of cottage industry located in the streets” (53–54). These subjects triggered a significant interest in the first researchers tasked with studying and analyzing poverty who, with their eyes fixed on those who picked through garbage, asked themselves: Where does the limit of human misery begin and end? (Benjamin 2006, 54). This description of the chiffonier, which appears in Benjamin’s “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (1938)6 and is the most disseminated among the work of Benjamin, differs from other important texts such as “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian” (1937) or even the unfinished Arcades Project, which was conceived as a work in which archival material would speak for itself once it was rescued from the oblivion of history. Its method would consist of a “literary montage” in which it would not be necessary to say anything but only to “show” it, removing all clever formulations intended to help it accrue value. Benjamin’s project was to restore artifacts, objects, and trash from the past without appropriating them. But this form of “recycling,” as well as the proposed model of the paradigm of the garbage picker, still leaves us with certain problems. In his essay about Eduard Fuchs, Benjamin suggests that the work of the rag-picker was a socially dissident activity, as the 6  “When the new industrial processes had given refuse a certain value, rag-pickers appeared in the cities in larger numbers. They worked for middlemen and constituted a sort of cottage industry located in the streets. The rag-picker fascinated his epoch. The eyes of the first investigators of pauperism were fixed on him with the mute question as to where the limit of human misery lay” (Benjamin and Gershom 1992, 19).

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c­ ollector withdrew objects from the world of use, the principal value of bourgeois capitalism. For Benjamin, the collector enjoys a relationship with objects that does not emphasize their economic and functional value—that is, their utility; on the contrary, the collector analyzes them, studies them, and appreciates them as they have to do with the “scene, the stage of their fate” (1999, 170). The “gratuitous artefact cherished by the collector,” thus “subverts the commodity status ascribed to all objects under capitalism” (Smith 2010, 119). Nevertheless, as Leo Bersani suggests, this criticism of capitalism takes the ironic shape of a vindication of private property and, in a strange way, confronts Benjamin’s Marxist posture (1990, 63; cit. in Smith 2010). Moreover, Douglas Smith posits that there is a paradox between Benjamin’s comparison of the chiffonnier to the collector insofar as the former contradicts the latter: “To reconvert materials to use in the manner of the rag-picker is to recycle the object that has escaped from use back into the circuit of utility, and so runs counter to the logic of the collector as analysed by Benjamin” (Smith 2010, 119). In this sense, perhaps Adorno is right when, in a letter to Benjamin, he points out that his colleague “fails to articulate the economic function of ragpicking, namely its reintegration into the cycle of capitalist exchange of objects that have been discarded” (Smith 2010, 119). And, as a consequence of this economic function, the collection of trash and junk can be read as the “ultimate form of capitalism, wringing the last drops of exchange value from material that seems already exhausted” (Smith 2010, 119). In fact, for Adorno, to adopt rag-picking or the collection of scraps as a methodological model, “is not to resist capitalism but to surrender to it” (Smith 2010, 119). Whether we agree with this criticism or not, Benjamin’s project is interpreted in terms of a redemption of what official history has thrown away, and a recuperation and rehabilitation of what has been exhausted, the obsolete (Wolin 1982, 31). Adorno disapproves of this posture insofar as it bends to the very value of exchange in the capitalist era. In any case, this “ontology of waste,” as Douglas Smith calls it— aside from countering Georges Bataille in “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933)—either in a redemptive (Benjamin) or in an anti-redemptive (Bataille) way, has cultural effects insofar as form, content, and material support are concerned. As Smith points out, “the virtue of Benjamin’s and Bataille’s work is their clarification of the opposing poles of cultural development, its alternating processes of destruction and conservation, waste

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and accumulation” (2010, 126). Their works on discarded and/or forgotten objects form a sort of scrapbook that points “ultimately to the wider scrapheap of culture itself” (Smith 2010, 126).7 Perhaps, pace Adorno, it may be valid to ask if there is an existence “outside” the logic of capital, and to what extent the acts of removal and reutilization of objects destined to die entail a minimal form of resistance. If this were the case, the idea of recycling—reusing and giving new life to supposedly extinct objects—can work as an allegorical apparatus to reflect upon the broader issues stemming from the practice of re-appropriating waste insofar as it is a vehicle for cultural metamorphosis that transforms what is forgotten into memory. Also, and more significantly, recycling transforms a final and finished product into a natural resource by means of a mechanism of re-signification that grants a new and unprecedented meaning to what has been eliminated and stripped of value. In this particular analysis, the notion of recycling, as much in its material order as on its symbolic level, can be conceived of as a process of articulation and transformation that allows for the identification of different literary and cultural phenomena. These phenomena function as paradigmatic models that go from (literary, visual) representations to the aesthetic production of artifacts and cultural and urban interventions, in the last case as a condition for simultaneous action. Besides the literary and visual works whose stories revolve around the idea of what is discarded— and the subjects who, in increasing numbers, fulfill the task of daily rag-­ picking—one of the objectives of this chapter is to analyze and characterize the extra-linguistic context as the frame that takes in the new life, or second life, of the discarded object. In this sense, I will analyze the narrative and visual aesthetics related to the practices of collection, recycling, and reuse. With this in mind, I will then posit that these works reflect a transformative practice of waste that can translate into a categorical proposal that alters their previously given function, departing from their originally assigned use and, in this way, re-signifying it on the socio-cultural plane. The representation of the storehouse of scraps, junk, and trash in this sphere is approached from the perspective of the recycling, reuse, and reutilization of objects integrally, as a process that entails the satisfaction of a basic need such as that of daily survival. Waste is collected either for a 7  Curiously, already in Lost Illusions (1837–1843) Balzac proposed that books (literature) were scraps, discarded material and trash, and that, by extension, culture also was made up of a scrapheap (see de Balzac 1961).

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new personal use, for its exchange, or for its sale to big recycling companies—either directly or by intermediaries who sell these objects to wholesale buyers. The materiality of waste is therefore embedded in a both functional and elemental register. Some examples of this phenomenon that will be analyzed below, in the first section of this chapter, are the novels Mis amigos los pepenadores (La vida de un Maestro de Banquillo) [My Friends the Pepenadores (The Life of an Itinerant School Teacher)] (1958), by the Mexican José Luis Parra and the Argentine César Aira’s La villa (2001) [Shantytown] (2013), the Cuban Eduardo del Llano’s short story “Greenpeace” (2000), the Brazilian Plínio Marcos’s play Homens de papel [Paper Men] (1978), and the following three documentaries: El tren blanco [The White Train] (2003) by Nahuel García, Ramiro García, and Sheila Pérez Giménez, Cartoneros [The Cardboard Collectors] (2006) by Ernesto Livón-Grosman, and Los cartoneros/The Cardboard People (2006) by Michael McLean. All these texts and documentaries bring the problem of waste to view and demonstrate the way in which the labor of trash collection is interwoven with a most complex and ample cultural, social, and economic framework.8 In these urban narratives, the privileged stage is no longer the garbage dump—or its extrapolation of the space of the contemporary slum, whose environmental and human degradation corresponds to the dump, as we noted in the previous chapter. Neither is it the ideal, green city exempt from contamination that corrodes the life of marginal subjects, as we will see in the following chapter. These examples examine a moveable geography, the perpetual displacement that is the itinerary that accompanies the practice of collection; A geography that, as a material manifestation of subject fluctuation, harbors indistinct forms of humanity. With urban collapse, or the city in ruins (Shanks et al. 2004), this space resembles a tapestry made of different materials and different textures, split up and differentiated, a tapestry made by different hands and in different eras. The spatiality of the city acquires traits of a Foucauldian heterotopia insofar as it can juxtapose “in a single real place, several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 1986, 25).9 8  More references regarding the representation of trash collectors, be it in the form of cartoneros, catadores, or pepenadores, appear in Washington Curto’s poem “La cartonerita” [The Little Cartonera Girl] (2003) (Argentina), Lisandro Cardozo’s short story “El cartonero” [“The Cartonero”] (2008) (Paraguay), and Jorge Andrade’s play Senhora na Bóca do lixo [The Lady in Mouth of Garbage] (1968) (Brazil). 9  This definition from the article “Des espaces autres” (1967) was reproduced in his posthumous work Dits et écrits (1994). See especially the “third principle” of heterotopia.

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Nevertheless, it is an amended tapestry: while some demarcations seem impeccable, meticulous, and well-manicured, others unravel and reveal abandonment, neglect, chaos, and a lack of care. Geographies therefore in motion wander the streets or move by other means, especially by train. In general, carts pulled by horses or even by people, including shopping carts, accompany these geographies. In the following section, I will examine the work of Argentine painter Antonio c (1905–1981). I will demonstrate how his work conveys a broader dimension about the narratives linked to ecological sustainability and the transformation of discarded objects. Here I refer principally to the creation of iconic personalities such as Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel. This dimension allows me to introduce a defined aesthetic production, as well as a reference to the socio-cultural practice addressed in the preceding narrations and visual tales. Beginning with this foundation laid by Berni, the expressions and representations that I will address in this second section include the publications produced with recycled cardboard—collected by the cartoneros (cardboard collectors/recyclers) of Buenos Aires—that started the Eloísa Cartonera project. This initiative grew and expanded throughout all of Latin America in the form of various similar entrepreneurship, such as Animita Cartonera (Santiago, Chile), Dulcinéia Catadora (São Paulo, Brazil), Felicita Cartonera (Asunción, Paraguay), La Cartonera (Cuernavaca, Mexico), Mandrágora Cartonera (Cochabamba, Bolivia), and Sarita Cartonera (Lima, Peru), among many others. More examples include the eco-furnishings designed by Santiago Morahan, from Entre Ríos, Argentina, and the trash collection projects that the artist Águida Zanol (Minas Gerais, Brazil) is implementing— through the Instituto Reciclar—T3. Zanol and the Instituto’s effort at environmental sustainability translate into educational practices as well as aesthetic ones. Additionally, I will examine Residual / Artistic Interventions in the City, the urban artistic project that commissioned eight Mexican and German artists to create artistic interventions in Mexico City in 2010. This was a collective project sponsored by the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) through the General Direction of Visual Arts (Dirección General de Artes Visuales), the University Museum of Sciences and Art (el Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte [MUCA Roma]), and the Goethe-­ Institut Mexiko, which, when joining the bicentennial celebration of independence, the 100-year anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, and the 100-year anniversary of the UNAM, was able to transcend historic

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revisions and encourage the construction of a future committed to a sustainable environment. If we reexamine the idea put forth in “The Perfume of Garbage” (Shanks et al. 2004) and accept that, beginning with modernity and modernism, it is possible to identify different archeological fields that focus on the idea of scraps, junk, and what is eliminated and left over, it is also possible to work with these different identified fields through literary elements such as the scenarios, characters, and plots that help make sense of them and give them shape (Shanks et al. 2004, 73). One of these archeological fields is the (post)modern city in ruins. The historical imaginary regarding this figure can imply an ample and, at times, contradictory array of ideas: “the triumph of nature, the transience of cultural achievements, the folly of human ambition, humankind’s self-destructive urges, the end of the world, new beginnings, fates, and futures” (Shanks et al. 2004, 74). What particularly interests me is to use this urban conception as the stage where the representations analyzed here occur—the ones I explore first as much as the ones pertaining to the second section of my analysis. In these aesthetic manifestations, the city is not a frozen element; on the contrary, time continues its labor on top of its remains.10 The time-space machine is one of the most representative means of visualizing the articulation of the related elements in these processes of transformation that encompass both what is left over as well as trash. Given that ruins as well as junk condense time and space into one point, artifacts that come from different times and spaces are deposited together in the same place to later be re-discovered (Shanks et al. 2004, 78–79). In the art gallery or in the museum we contemplate objects and remains that have been brought together from all histories and geographies of the world to be exhibited, appreciated, and valued, while in the city in ruins we find layers of rubble and debris that 10  Another one of these fields relates to the metamorphosis of history through the material textures of decomposition. This approximation focuses on “what becomes of things as their form and context changes,” and, as such, they “become incorporated into different lives, become history, or garbage, as they slip into new associations” (Shanks et.al., 2004, 74). One example is the art of Cornelia Parker, from Great Britain. For Rathje, Shanks, and Platt, some of Parker’s most important works recreate objects starting with the appropriation of discarded and preexisting elements, with the objective of questioning the temporal dimension that accompanies the production, circulation, and final disposition of all the things that surround us daily, as well as their potential for a possible reconfiguration. See especially Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988–1989), Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), Mass: Colder Darker Matter (1997), Avoided Object (1995), and The Negative of Words (1996).

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belong to buildings that have collapsed, discarded objects that have accumulated in dumpsters, plastic matter, and lost artifacts. Particularly in junk, leftover, and trash deposits there appears a sort of hybrid among points of origin, categories, textualities, formats, and appearances: layers of accumulated objects and remains coming from all parts of the city, which additionally juxtaposes, displaces, and embeds all of these elements in diverse spatialities. The textual, visual, artistic, and performative expressions featured this chapter privilege the space of the museum, bookstores, the urban territory in broader terms as their stage, turning them into a theater where sustainable performance is carried out, as well as spaces of exchange of value and cultural transaction. These spaces appear as revelations as much as connections, since in the museum, in the ruins, and in junk deposits that populate the city it is possible to find aesthetic incongruences and the unexpected: contingency we can argue, is one of the most distinctive modalities. But to pose a more important reading proposal: in this corpus, what is left over (as it pertains to art and aesthetic production) is capable of synthesizing some previously mentioned aspects. First, in a more straightforward sense, waste functions as a device capable of creating awareness with respect to the environmental crisis. Second, it establishes a correspondence between the environmental crisis and the abandonment of basic social premises. Likewise, waste problematizes the issue of (aesthetic, cultural) value: by means of reconfiguration and transformation into an object of art, waste provokes a social contemplation and reflection, while it can also function unexpectedly and innovatively as a producer of something new, such as renewable energy. By this, waste also suppresses the temporality gap in the life of objects from the moment they “‘are finished’ or ‘dead’” (Viney 2014a, 3) to the moment they acquire a new purpose. Accordingly, waste promotes a form of reuse, recycling, and reutilization of discarded objects while offering an array of sustainable solutions to ecological problems.

3   Waste from the Global City The demographic explosion that has characterized urban growth in recent years—and that projects an “unsustainable” increase from an ecological and environmental standpoint—has transformed the contemporary landscape of urban space, where growing poverty, violence, and multiple forms of survival have also evolved and changed. A considerable number of manuscripts, articles, narratives, and films have privileged the urban territory as

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the center of critical and/or fictional productions. Some of the problems that have been explored the most range from representations of violence, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and migration to urban imaginaries’ analysis of the spatialization of this territory (urban space) according to the logic of globalization.11 From the perspective of Latin American urban studies, the scholarship put forward by geographers, demographers, sociologists, and politicians is significant insofar as they try to implement new regulations and new urban and social planning to meet complex challenges such as the rapid growth of migratory phenomena, pollution and contamination in urban centers, “failed industrialization movements,” as well as the corruption and ineptitude of local governments (Biron 2009, 3). Perhaps most pressing is the demographic growth underway in Latin American megacities where one of the principal concerns is that a population explosion will also entail an explosion in poverty. As Mike Davis presciently warned, one of the most important challenges is whether this growth can be “biologically or ecologically sustainable” (2004, 6).12 Garbage collection and recycling make up one of the ways of survival utilized by those excluded subjects who are immersed in constant and inescapable poverty. Relegated to a position of social and spatial segregation, the collapsed city, compartmentalized and divided, becomes the territory par excellence of failed modernity. This means the incapacity on the part of the latter to be operational insofar as it is an organic and collective project, and in the “measure in which the social begins to be configured by instances that escape the control of the nation-state” (Castro 1999, 95). Beginning with the relationship established between the city, its ruins, and its waste on one hand and the gesture of reuse, recycling, and reutilization of what has been discarded on the other, a question that arises throughout this chapter relates to the role that these transformative forms 11  In “Territorios del presente—En la isla urbana” [Territories of the Present—On the Urban Island] Josefina Ludmer proposes that current literature “erases the borders between rural and urban; erases the opposition, absorbs the country and includes in its interior many of its subjects, its dramas, and its mythologies. In fiction (and in reality) the Latin American city is barbarized (and it is possible that the country is urbanized and absorbed into the city)” (Ludmer 2004, 104). 12  Davis also refers to the phenomenon of global urbanization and signals that small cities have recently absorbed the majority of rural populations. According to Davis, the price of this new urban order is growing inequality in the cities and among cities of different sizes and specializations. Yet the principal problem is that the most recent urbanizations have been cut off from or deprived of an industrialization process as well as its own development (Davis 2004, 5–34).

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play in the representation of urban contemporary spaces, as well as how they are distinguished from similar undertakings in “developed” countries, where such practices do not arise from an urgent need to survive. Rather, they embody an ideological positioning linked to environmental activism and ethics, originating from the belief that this daily practice will improve the conditions of the environment. In Chap. 1, we pointed out the different “positions” within ecocriticism that correspond to this activism and how this ideology is reflected in different poetic and narrative works (as a matter of fact, in some “developed” countries “green” policies are subsidized by the national government).13 In Latin America, these transformations have been underway for the last few decades in various cities like Asunción, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. They have also emerged in a broad and varied aesthetic corpus of narratives and films in what we can define as a residual culture. Before we look in greater detail at some examples of the works referred to above, I would like to emphasize that residual culture in Latin America is located at the intersections of trash production, modernity, and urban environments. If Latin American cities are privileged spaces of modernity, they have also become sites of large-scale waste generation. Because of this, they represent critical spaces of environmental degradation, with large residual concentrations that pose a real health threat for the surrounding populations who are often among the underrepresented. Most contemporary Latin American metropolises—like so many others in the Global South countries—are cities that break into fragmented zones with clear boundaries, whose circuits suppose different itineraries, regimes, and passages. The dichotomy that pitted the suburb against the urban 13  In the majority of industrialized countries, recycling and composting programs are increasingly available. Due to the fact that recycling generates social benefits like saving energy and water, it lessens contamination, generates jobs, and improves industrial competition. In these countries, recycling is carried out formally and through official programs, generally separating materials at the source. In some countries it is even carried out through a legal mandate (Japan) stipulating the participation of inhabitants, organizations, and businesses in these programs through which recycling is perceived as something positive. In fact, recycling in these countries does not make economic sense and frequently the costs outweigh the investment. Therefore, recycling programs must be subsidized. On the other hand, in “underdeveloped” countries, few official recycling programs exist, and there are very few laws that encourage it. For the most part, informal recyclers carry out most of the recycling, and—unlike in “developed” countries—the industrial demand for recovered materials is high: as a consequence, recycling in these countries exists because it generates earnings for the individuals involved in this activity (Medina 2007, 229–230).

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center no longer translates (or reproduces) these borders; on the contrary, the urban territory and the urban center now overlap and embody a different type of border zone, one that adheres to different configurations of space and produces other modes of urban interaction. As this intricate environment has served as the spatial platform for the emergence of the phenomenon of cartoneros, catadores, and pepenadores, it has drawn the attention of literary critics, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists, as well as writers and artists principally from Latin America.14 So how do these Latin American representations reconfigure and redefine fundamental concepts of the emerging discipline of ecocriticism? In this chapter I intend to demonstrate to what extent ecocriticism can––or cannot–– account for Latin American phenomena, and postulate, in turn, the need to construct a new theoretical apparatus—a new critical episteme—from which to read and address Latin America’s distinctive traits and attributes. The relationship established between those who rummage through garbage and the discarded objects themselves has started to shape urban features and transform their image as much as it has the subjects who inhabit these metropolitan geographies. If narrative and visual works put forward stark metaphors for the general state and impact that this phenomenon has had on urban territories, these representations have also become, ultimately, monuments to a process that is consolidated and immersed in the continual metamorphosis that paradoxically embodies what is thrown out as well as those who sift through it. These aesthetic expressions also comprise plastic arts as well as the expansion of this phenomenon to other creative and labor areas. It is not by chance, then, that, in a great number of these narratives, what the middle and upper classes throw out becomes prized merchandise in the eyes of the most impoverished subjects; this trash thus has only “temporarily exhausted” its value (Viney 2014b, 1058). Waste objects condense an emblematic element of capitalist and transnational globalization, standardizing both consumption and poverty and transforming the urban circuit into a landscape of daily disposal and displacement. What is at stake here is the twofold condition of waste, in which the discarded object signals not only the temporal instability of waste but also that of the subject that consumes it. Time,

14  This is, of course, a global phenomenon: it is estimated that there are 10,000 basuriegos in Colombia, while in Egypt (especially in Cairo), the zabbaleen are calculated at 12,000, recycling 8% of the trash generated in the city (Medina 2007, 230).

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through an ever-accelerating process of continuous production, confers upon both objects and subjects their “outmoded” mark. In the first section of this chapter, I analyze a wide corpus of textual narratives and visual stories where the representations of the cartonero, buzo, catador, and basuriego––subjects who live off of other people’s waste––intersect with the practice of reuse and recycling. Prior to this, I will contextualize the socio-historical and economic conditions for the emergence of these subjects in the three distinctive cities where the texts’ and films’ diegesis take place. In the Buenos Aires of 1990s and the aughts, the impoverished residents of the capital’s shantytowns and surrounding areas have taken the initiative of collecting a great part of the city’s recyclable waste, and this survival mechanism additionally contributes to the cleanliness and improvement of the environmental conditions of the metropolitan area. However, recycling in Buenos Aires, as in other Latin American cities, differs from how this practice unfolds in “developed” societies, where, through the intervention of official organizations, citizens who generally belong to the middle and/or upper classes are in charge of this task. In most Latin American cities, recycling is decentralized and carried out thanks to a series of individual efforts, which stem from an immediate economic need to survive. Recycling differs visibly from what it would look like if it were a coordinated effort subsidized by the government, whose principal objective is economic sustainability and the reduction of costs in the acquisition of raw materials. In these countries, an intensive system of informal recycling exists, and according to the World Bank, the scraps produced by 20% of the population of higher wage earners provide, directly or indirectly, a way of life for up to 2% of the population (Medina 2007, 230). While recycling in “developed” countries is generally carried out at the source (by those who produce the waste that is discarded), in “underdeveloped” countries the method and location of recycling varies: it takes place in the streets, in clandestine garbage dumps, in rivers, in communal garbage containers, in collection centers, in transfer stations, incinerators, and sanitary landfills (Medina 2007, 230). Recycling in Buenos Aires takes place mainly in the streets and within the urban boundaries, undertaken by a human geography of collectors pushing carts and in perpetual displacement. Although the cartonero is a recent phenomenon, the history of the disposal of waste, like its circulation throughout the capital as well as the surrounding area, dates back centuries, beginning with the foundation of the city by Juan de Garay in

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1580 (Paiva 2008, 49). As in any metropolis, hygienic and urban policies implemented by the government affect the poor, who depend on the trash that others throw out to survive. In 1860, for example, city authorities established the “quema” system in the southern part of Buenos Aires, where trash was sent to be burned.15 This brought about a new technique and fundamentally changed how Buenos Aires handled the treatment and elimination of trash. Before the “quema,” trash was typically thrown into rivers and streams, pits within the urban area or vacant lots. With the implementation of the “quema” system, a new neighborhood coalesced nearby, exclusively inhabited by people who made their living by collecting waste.16 Toward the end of 1920, the garbage dump in the borough of lower Flores, in the capital, was transformed into one of the largest dumps in the city, and this lasted until the 1970s when it was finally cleaned up and urbanized with the construction of Admiral Brown Park and the channeling of the Cildañez River. In this context, between the 1930s and the 1970s there emerged two specific social subjects within the space of informal garbage collection: the botellero (bottle collector) and the ciruja. The ciruja survived by collecting scraps, which were thrown into both the municipal and clandestine dumps.17 Nevertheless, with the creation of the Metropolitan Ecological Coordination Area (Coordinación Ecológica Área Metropolitana Sociedad del Estado [CEAMSE]) in 1977, the government prohibited the use of industrial incinerators in the Greater Buenos Aires area, replacing them with dumps on vacant lands (Schamber 2008, 62). With ordinance 33691 of 8 August 1977 in the Capital and law 9111, sanctioned on 7 July 1978, in the greater Buenos Aires area, the collection of trash and scraps was finally prohibited. The implementation of the sanitary landfill system would put an end to open-air dumps and at-home incinerators, definitively shutting down the plants (Schamber 2008, 63). This new policy also spelled the end of incineration, and as a result, garbage collection was only accessible to a select group of companies. The 15  As we referred to in the previous chapter, his novel Villa Miseria también es América (1957), Bernardo Verbitsky appealed to the “spirit of the Quema” (2003, 64), which revealed the extent to which the practice of the “quema” or incineration of trash was present in the imaginary of the time. 16  It was known as the Barrio de las Ranas or Barrio de las Latas (Paiva 2008, 57). Ricardo Strafacce’s novel La boliviana (2008), analyzed in the preceding chapter, takes place in the “Barrio de los Sapos,” which bordered “a dump that went as far as the eyes could see” and separated “the borough from the urbanized zone” (9). 17  For a definition of the origin of the term ciruja, see note 15 of the previous chapter.

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growing unemployment of the 1990s and the economic “crisis” of 2001 led to a recalibration and redistribution of trash sorting. In this context, the figure of the cartonero emerged, quickly acquiring a predominant and continuous visibility within the urban cartography of Buenos Aires. The collapse of the national economy as a result of the failure of the Plan de Convertibilidad (which had kept the Argentine peso pegged to the U.S. dollar), resulted in the freezing of bank accounts across the country and one of the most important defaults on Argentina’s external debt in the country’s history. As a result, the percentage of unemployed or underemployed people increased dramatically in the early 2000s, with many of the newly poor having been previously part of the middle classes. Confronted with these hardships and losses, many people began to rummage through trash with the objective of collecting recyclable material—generally cardboard—and selling it to recycling companies located in the suburbs of Buenos Aires.18 However, the term cartonero, related to cardboard recycling, is somewhat of a misnomer for this new variant of trash collector, since the recyclers seek out not just cardboard, but also glass and plastic bottles, metal, as well as newspapers and magazines. This labor, which is conducted independently—in spite of the recent creation of numerous labor cooperatives—is different from the collection methods used in other Latin American cities.19 Until 2017 the majority of recycling was done without the existence of a municipal department or an official institution exclusively dedicated to the recycling, reuse, and reutilization of discarded objects, and the social interaction and organization among the garbage sorters acquired different traits in each of the contexts where we find the aesthetic works examined here.20 In Mexico City, the lack of an official organization that handles the collection of waste for reuse as new consumer goods has turned the process of recycling into an associative practice that Héctor Castillo Berthier 18  With unemployment climbing to over 20 percent by the middle of 2002, garbage collection became the survival strategy for those newly impoverished families in and around Buenos Aires (Paiva 2008, pp. 81–84). 19  In Buenos Aires, apart from the legalization of informal recycling, in recent years, recycling cooperatives have been established. 20  In 2017, Unilever Cono Sur signed a collaborative agreement with the City of Buenos Aires government to promote and advance sustainable programs for waste reduction and the recycling of plastic, glass, and cardboard, among other materials. The goal is to reduce the environmental impact of waste by fifty percent. See https://www.unilever-southlatam.com/ news/2017/menos-residuos-mas-reciclaje/. Accessed 8 December 2022.

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(1983), who studied waste circulation in Mexico City from an anthropological perspective, defines as typical of “urban despotism.” This practice has turned into a business in which “people who participate in the process” and the “leader of the pepenadores, who controls the majority of the recoverable trash that is produced in Mexico City” intervene (Castillo Berthier 1990, 11).21 Castillo Berthier attempts to explain the daily cycle of trash throughout this Mexican city and also brings to light those economic aspects that enable waste management to generate great capital, and, as a consequence, create a sort of “informal government within the government” (1990, 11). This dynamic renders the daily labor of the Mexican pepenadores both similar to and different from other Latin American cities: although garbage collection is the means by which the poor survive in a global economy, their subjection to an exploitative strongman, or mob boss, prevents them from living independently and taking charge of their own fate. In this case, waste collection is part of the circulation of commodities in the accelerated cycle between consumption and new production. As Castillo Berthier suggests, it creates “an incalculable accumulation, on the boss’ part, from the economic surplus” that stems from this operation, becoming the bosses’ “political power legitimated through economic power,” although benefiting from the tireless labor of the destitute (1990, 12).22 In his novel Le roi des ordures (1997) (translated to Spanish as El rey de la basura [Trash King], 1998), French writer Jean Vautrain has approached the web of power embedded in what we can define as a “network of waste,” addressing its relationship with Mexico’s main and dominant political party for seven decades, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional/Institutional Revolutionary Party). In the same vein, Johan Sundgren has visually broached the topic of residual culture in his photo documentary Los pepenadores (2003). In the introduction, Stefan Johnson refers to the pepenadores as a byproduct of “fast growing metropolises” (n.p.). The unbridled increase of waste in urban and suburban areas of “underdeveloped” countries coexists with a “paradigm of development” that “forces people to the very bottom of the urban setting” (Sundgren and Jonsson 2003, n.p.). While the life expectancy for pepenadores is 39 years of age, their children contract illnesses such as cholera, dysentery,  For a definition of pepenador, see note 24 in the previous chapter.  For examples of consumer products made from waste in Mexico, see Castillo Berthier (1990, 11). 21 22

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tuberculosis, anthrax, and malaria (Sundgren and Jonsson 2003, n.p.). In Mexico City nearly 10,000 people depend on this work for their survival, and it is estimated that there are more than 1000 locations where recyclable materials are bought and sold (Castillo Berthier 1990, 49; Medina 2007, 232). Castillo Berthier has studied these areas in his analysis of despotism. This network of waste, which sustains a large part of the informal economy of Mexico City, begins at the outset of its transportation: once the vehicles are full of collected trash, “they are directed to the official dumping grounds or other designated areas” but not without first “passing by certain ‘strategic locations’ where they sell materials separated during the trip” (Castillo Berthier 1990, 49). It is a surreptitious procedure—although not completely unknown to the public—in which “each sanitation vehicle driver brings with him, along with two macheteros, one or two people who work as ‘volunteers’” (Castillo Berthier 1990, 49). Riding in the “boxes” where the trash piles up, the “volunteers” separate, along the way, the materials and objects that need to be sold before emptying the boxes in official dumping grounds. The macheteros are salaried workers, but the percentage the “volunteers” earn from the sale of this material constitutes their only somewhat stable income. Specifically, once they are on the truck surrounded by trash, they inspect the content and sort the material into bags that will later be sold. The principal materials they get from this separation are cardboard, paper, rags, bottles, hard tortillas, hard bread, and junk metal (which is made up of no longer useable objects such as pieces of iron, sheet metal, and aluminum among other things). Less frequently, they find bones and leather. The trucks then go to private weighing stations that are on the way to the dump where the collected objects are bought. The earnings from the sale of the materials are distributed among the volunteers and the macheteros, although the driver receives 10% or 15% of the total sale (Castillo Berthier 1990, 50). It is difficult to address the relationship between waste and despotism in Mexico City without evoking Rafael Gutiérrez Moreno, a.k.a. “the trash czar.” For more than 20 years, he controlled the “Unión de Pepenadores de los Tiraderos del DF” (Mexico City Dumping Ground Pepenadores Union) and secured his “despot” or “boss” position as a representative of the pepenadores, who was popular among them, and as an intermediary and agent for channeling certain governmental benefits to his union workers (Castillo Berthier 1990, 147). Upon his assassination in 1987, it was believed that his “majestic” empire—which reported “daily profits of more than 90 million pesos” for that year—was in jeopardy.

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Nevertheless, apart from the conflicts that arose after his death, the power vacuum was filled by new leaders whose purpose was to preserve the political and economic benefits that “the czar” had achieved during his reign (Castillo Berthier 1990, 151). This circuit dates back to 1787, when garbage was thrown into the streets of Mexico City without anyone to pick it up. Officially, carts to collect waste as well as municipal regulations were put in place to sweep and water the streets, which propelled the cleaning and sprucing up of the city. Nonetheless, only in 1824 did a system of control and collection carts begin. Curiously, 70 years before the New York City sanitation project was designated and assigned by means of “martial discipline” to Coronel Waring—who was also called the “Apostle of Cleanliness” (Melosi 2004, 42)—in Mexico City, army Colonel Melchor Músquiz was put in charge of establishing the first guidelines for garbage collection from homes, which included numbering the carts, identifying routes, and ringing a bell while passing through the streets, much of which continues in practice today. In São Paulo, however, as in other Brazilian metropolises, the practice of garbage collection dates from the end of the nineteenth century. It is at this moment, and more intensely in the twentieth century, when—together with Rio de Janeiro—the city became the scene of an intense sanitation policy of “purification.” Just as in Mexico City, hygiene became an economic, political, and moral problem. Trash and urban misery became a new vehicle for contagion. According to Daniel de Lucca Reis Costa, the principal concern on the part of official organizations was to “deodorize the public space” and “organize and clean the city” (2007, 56). In the eyes of public administration, industrial trash and organic waste as well as the poor and sick were associated with the same symbolic operation, and this policy of integral control over the city, in public and domestic spaces alike, encouraged the generalized belief that urban disorder, filth, and dirtiness were causes of contagion and therefore, the places epidemics began. At that time, the perimeter of São Paulo was limited to what today is known as the downtown area and was full of detritus and dead animals, along with the trash that was piling up on the streets (Daniel de Lucca Reis Costa 2007, 57). The implementation of hygienic regulations, originating with the fearful bourgeois’ pressure that plagues and diseases were spreading, spurred the development of programs to segregate the poor and marginalized as well as the construction of new, healthier

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neighborhoods away from downtown: Higienópolis, the city of hygiene, was the most paradigmatic. However, a particular transformation began in the 1960s and the early part of the 1970s, and deepened and expanded in the 1990s with the emergence of a world economy that was interconnected and organized within the phenomenon of economic globalization. Changes that the dynamic of international capitalism produced began to become more visible, starting with the social consequences of the disparity between healthy neighborhoods and those that were considered infectious. As a result of the neoliberal model that was adopted and inserted into a globalized economy, unemployment went from being circumstantial and temporary to structural and lasting (Deluiz 2000, 17). In this panorama of transformation, the destructuring of work was evidenced in the high rates of unemployment and the expansion of non-salaried jobs whose precarious conditions and low productivity were on the increase: for example, between 1989 and 1998, three million formal job positions were lost, increasing the mass of undocumented workers and leading to a 47.5% rate of employment among the general population (Deluiz 2000, 17).23 It is in these circumstances that, just like in other Latin American cities, the figure of the catador of waste emerges. The catadores are urban “pilgrims” who walk endlessly: crossing, rambling and transiting through cities, digging through the remains of what society has consumed and left behind. Their objective is to find remains that will allow them to survive. More important still is the fact that the presence and practice of the catador institutes a new type of work, as well as a novel way of living in and experiencing the city (Loschiavo dos Santos 2000, 38). This phenomenon, which becomes more visible in large urban areas, inserts the work of the catador not only within the informal market economy but also within the space of transformation that throw-away culture has shaped, introducing a visual difference into the urban landscape where waste and scraps become increasingly more evident. Thus, the catadores embody an ambivalent symbol of economic changes both global and local, challenging their portrayal by the general population, which is, for the most part, negative. In the imaginary of the metropolis, the catador is perceived as an “infractor,” someone who breaks the implied rules of use and behavior in the public space, and, 23  These figures are additionally shocking if one also bears in mind the elevated number of child workers embedded within this mass of unemployed, despite the legal prohibition for children under 16 to work in Mexico (Deluiz 2000, 17–18).

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among other things, gets in the way of transit and the daily flow of urban circulation. The catador, as the counterpart of this process, lives in a ­permanent state of uncertainty, indignation, and conflict, obligated to wander the urban space as a nomad (Loschiavo dos Santos 2000, 39). It is significant that, up until the 80s, the large majority of studies of poverty in cities like São Paulo were, for the most part, restricted to the periphery of the city (De Lucca Reis Costa 2007, 47). However, since the early twentyfirst century, critical changes have reshaped the production of the Latin American urban space, especially the spatial boundaries that separate marginal from more affluent areas, broadening an increasingly more complex and problematic zone. In the downtown region of São Paulo, more than 11,000 people (mostly men) live on the streets, and at least half of them are catadores who use the streets as a place to “spend the night.” They are, for the most part, “working alone, on their own behalf and are not organized into a cooperative” (De Lucca Reis Costa 2007, 49). José Raimundo de Soiza notes that although there are increasingly more cities in Brazil that are beginning to implement policies of inclusion that can translate into the creation of different associations of catadores (some of these policies are related to public policy; others are of a religious character), they present limitations “due to the fact that the workers continue to be catadores who push carts” (2007, 145). In this sense, the practice of collecting waste in São Paulo resembles that of Buenos Aires, and both differ from what is done in Mexico City, where trash collection is syndicated and overseen by a despotic system. Nevertheless, what all these Latin American informal circuits of urban waste collection have in common is the physical mobility and displacement of the poor who labor in this process. Not only do the majority of the catadores “possess human-drawn carts that move around the city during the workday,” they also use these same carts as “improvised houses for sleeping”: underneath the downtown viaducts, asserts De Lucca Reis Costa, it is possible to see entire families who use carts in different ways, whether as a support structure to hang material for tents or as a roof or even a bed (2007, 49–50). As De Lucca Reis Costa suggests, bearing in mind “mobility” and “displacement,” two of the characteristic traits of the street situation of the catadores, one can say that “this way of life amounts to a type of urban nomadism” (2007, 50). Clandestine dumps and the scrap dealers who purchase the material collected by the catadores are located in this same zone. Brazil was recently listed among the major aluminum recyclers in the world and it owes this

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position and merit to the “exploitation” of paper by catadores, whose urban activity sustains the recycling process of various national industries; among these, besides paper and aluminum, are plastics and glass. However, the catadores are in the middle of an extensive network of intermediaries who position themselves between the collection of waste and the recycling industry. The latter carefully keeps the catadores on the margins of the distribution of any of its considerable earnings. Furthermore, the catadores do not have access to any type of social security. They are devoid of any protection when having to confront various diseases and of any assistance as they age. Therefore, they are unable to offer any type of protection to their families. Their work, typical of work carried out in “underdeveloped” countries, is inscribed in a larger and more common context in Latin America, one that is characterized by the existence of few official recycling programs and few laws that promote them. According to Martín Medina, in “underdeveloped” countries, informal recyclers carry out the majority of recycling, and it is in those countries, in turn, that industrial demand for recovered materials is significantly higher. As a consequence, recycling in these nations exists because it generates earnings for all those involved in the activity (Medina 2007, 230).24 De Lucca Reis Costa points out that the perception of the work of the catador in the streets as a marginal practice that, as it deals with remains, must be hidden from view denotes the great lack of self-reflection and consideration regarding the path of a society that is increasingly more consumer-oriented and inhabiting on the abyss between the private and the public (2007, 59). The distribution of urban space allocates the catador farther away, segregated socially to the point of invisibility. Therefore, when the catadores turn trash, poverty, and their bodies into something public they are also rendering visible the undesirable Other: that “out of place” component that, while it originates in the very innermost space of our most private and intimate practices, is constitutive of contemporary urban-industrial society with its continual production of waste (De Lucca Reis Costa 2007, 59). Urban trash, poverty, and the environment are directly connected global problems. In Rubble, Gastón Gordillo proposes a study that moves from ruins to rubble, drawing from Anna Tsing’s 24  Medina is inaccurate, however, when he points out that informal recycling is important and beneficial for society and the environment (2007, 231). Although it is “beneficial” for the environment, it is not beneficial for society, as this labor of last resort places men, women, and children in unsanitary, precarious working conditions (De Souza 2007, 141).

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(2005) work on friction and how “ruptured geographies produced by capitalist forms of global connectivity, generate material frictions” that create waste: “When the spectacle passes on, what is left is rubble and mud, the residues of success and failure” (74, quoted in Gordillo 2014, 10). Urban trash situates at the core that which is marginal, public, visible, and excess in society. Waste not only serves as an indicator of the triumphs and defeats of society, as Tsing pointed out, it also works as a category to define what is human and what is not.

4  Cartoneros The most impoverished residents of the slums in the city of Buenos Aires and the surrounding province or outskirts are the ones in charge of collection and recycling in the very heart of this port metropolis.25 Cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and historians are not in agreement about the exact date when this phenomenon emerged. While some works refer directly to the economic collapse of 2001, others have suggested that the practice of collecting waste had already begun in the mid 1990s. This points to the fact that it is extremely difficult to calculate the precise number of cartoneros who circulate in the streets of Buenos Aires, given that, for many years, their ambulatory profession has not been monitored or legally sanctioned. A study published in 2007 by Schamber and Suárez estimated that the number of cardboard collectors fluctuated between 25,000 and 100,000 (13). Because of this notable visible presence, the cartonero has generated growing interest in a range of academic and art disciplines, from social sciences to literature and visual media. César Aira’s novel, La villa [Shantytown] (2001), as well as the documentaries Cartoneros [The Cardboard Collectors] (2006) by Ernesto Livón-Grosman, Los cartoneros/The Cardboard People by Michael McLean (2006), and El tren blanco [The White Train] by Nahuel García, Ramiro García, and Sheila Pérez Giménez (2003) are some paradigmatic examples of the cartoneros’ growing visibility as an object of cultural inquiry. These works are

25  In Eduardo Anguita’s journalistic chronicle, Cartoneros. Recuperadores de desechos y causas perdidas [Cartoneros: Those who Recover Refuse and Lost Causes] (2003), Quique Pesoa suggests that to be a “cartonero is to be there because there is no other way to exist…there is no other source for work, because you are excluded from society. Society, as it is, is increasingly smaller and increasingly excludes a larger quantity of people” (155).

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representative of a growing number of early twenty-first century novels, short narratives, and poems whose main characters are cartoneros/as.26 In César Aira’s novel, La villa (2001), waste connects an entire community mobilized across a fragmented urban space. It brings together the most impoverished and the richest by displaying the contradictions of global consumption and a culture of continuous disposal: not only does waste assign a specific temporal condition to a discarded object, it also underscores the discarded condition of certain lives. In the novel, the cartonero is the most commonly portrayed figure who, along with thousands of men, women, and children, wanders through the streets of the capital city to rescue the remains and traces of what society has consumed and thrown away. Already, in La guerra de los gimnasios [The War of the Gyms] (1993), Aira referred to this “strange population” that, following its own laws, would leave the faraway suburbs at twilight, the slums, the “unimaginable desert”: They were the cirujas, the cartoneros, who moved with the wooden carts they dragged behind them, always with women and children. Their moment was nightfall, between the time when people took out the trash and when the trucks would take it away. They’d open all the trash bags and look for what they could use; they examined them with a precise gaze as the ashy light of day was ending and the shadows of night began. (Aira 2012, 74)

For Ferdie, the main character, “the invasion had a menacing aftertaste,” and it was “as if [the cartoneros] had come to consider a matter of life or death” (2012, 75). In the same way, and one year before Aira’s text was published, Sergio Chejfec describes in his novel El aire [Air] (1992) a city that grows from rubbish, alongside great economic projects and splendors, where discarded elements, such as glass bottles, constitute the money that flows from “floating tribes” (54, 121, and 145). The mobile and unstable condition that characterizes the geography of the characters confers upon them a vaporous, fragile, “airy” quality that fluctuates within spatial interstices, human hierarchies, possessions, and deficiencies. In La villa, nonetheless, this gesture of economic self-preservation involuntarily becomes a valuable and important element for the cleanliness and betterment of the environmental conditions of the city.

 See note 8 of this chapter.

26

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Aira’s novel narrates the story of Maxi, a middle-class teenager, who helps the cartoneros pick up trash every night in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Maxi’s body, described as athletic and healthy, contrasts notably with those of the cartoneros, who appear as silent and weak, searching and rummaging through the trash every night on their itinerant journeys from the slum to the city and vice versa. On one hand, while the traits of Maxi’s personality are defined from the beginning of the narration, the cartoneros make up an anonymous mass, without traits, dark like a shadow displaced against the even more notable darkness of the night and, at the same time, frightened and suspicious. According to the story, the cartoneros of Buenos Aires are a marginalized group that, paradoxically, becomes increasingly more invisible as they grow in number. This lack of visibility is caused by the citizens having become insensitive to the urban landscape, that daily rummaging through the trash has become natural. What is natural and what is the nature of “naturality”? As Val Plumwood suggests, in the economic rationalistic sphere, dualism and rationalism “yield a recipe for polarising structures of radical inequality based on those who are winners in terms of a mechanism for distribution” (2005, 17). And such systems, she underlines, “are highly functional for naturalising oppression” (2005, 18). Aira’s novel consists of a critical reading of the disastrous consequences neoliberal economic policies have wrought in Argentina, rendering a metamorphosed urban space into a compartmentalized territory, which— although it is near other sectors of society—corresponds to a completely different socioeconomic and cultural condition, one that marks a border between spheres and territories but still lies within the capital city’s map. In this way, a divided and segregated urban geography appears through and beginning with different social classes. After collecting cardboard, the cartoneros return to the lower Flores slum in a sort of mass exodus. Ironically, while Aira’s cartoneros contribute to improving the environment in Buenos Aires, their very neighborhood slum is confronted with a real and ecological threat stemming from its demographic explosion. Its precarious and continuous growth reflects the absence of any social assistance organization and delegates this responsibility to neighbors and random citizens. Therefore, the novel registers a deeper phenomenon insofar as the middle and upper classes not only dispose of waste, they also throw away the very cartoneros. This is another irony in a persistent sequence of

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paradoxes that are inserted into a broader community, defined by deficiency, where the border between human and non-human is blurred, transforming the cartoneros into waste material. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s La virgen cabeza (2009) and Ricardo Strafacce’s La boliviana (2008) articulate the relationship between the environment and poverty that is at the very heart of the slums. In La virgen cabeza, the neighborhood community raises fish that are fed by waste and that feed the inhabitants of the slum, creating a symbiosis that equates fish with slum dwellers and a nutritional chain that begins and ends with the idea of waste (the end of the novel mentions that the residents are evicted with bulldozers, promoted by new urban projects). In La boliviana, the community is fed and it subsists through the consumption of toads that reproduce in the contaminated riachuelo that flows along the borders of the neighborhood. Although these texts problematize the disposable condition of their subjects, assigning them to the space of institutional policies of abandonment and neglect, it is important to read them from a global perspective. Consumerism and disposal—two of the principal pillars of contemporary societies—leave their profound marks on the inhabitants of these new precarious universes, motivating and molding their daily pilgrimages to and from the slums. Aira tells us: they have “become invisible” because they discreetly inhabit a space and a reality that “most people prefer to ignore” (2012, 7). Confined to the territory of the slum, the cartoneros abandon their assigned daily place, in the constant and perpetual pilgrimage through which they carry out their business in any other part of the city, but under the implicit condition of returning later to the limits or borders of those confines in which they live. At the same time, the cartoneros’ recycling activity exhibits the circuits of a precarious, uncertain, and informal economy that exploits them as they sell a kilogram of cardboard at a very low price. The cartoneros’ recycling encompasses other objects such as furniture, old mattresses, and all types of artifacts that they sell to their neighbors in the slums, or exchange for basic goods. Aira’s novel not only portrays the cartoneros, it also reveals one of the largest social and economic problems in Argentina and Latin America: the inequality gap between the rich and the poor is so severe that it is practically impossible to bridge, and it establishes a static social equilibrium in which the rich remain rich and the poor remain poor. If the cartoneros are “invisible,” by the same token, poverty has become

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invisible. Maxi, the novel’s protagonist, does not try to instill a class consciousness in the cartoneros and make them aware of their status as socially exploited. His help amounts to” a sort of charity that, instead of challenging the status quo, simply preserves it. In other words, beyond the comings and goings from the slum, the inexorable social abyss between one world and the other remains intact. The documentaries of Eduardo Livón-Grosman, Michael McLean, and Nahuel García et al. also exhibit the abrupt social change that has occurred and has interrupted the course of the lives of the most ordinary people in Argentina, emphasizing the transformations within the members of the middle classes who have been reduced to rummaging and digging through trash in order to survive. As in Aira’s novel, Livón-Grosman problematizes the (in)visibility of these subjects. Baudelaire’s chiffonnier—examined earlier in this chapter—resembles the ciruja, as both are anonymous subjects lost in the big city whose work is to pick up everything that is discarded, disregarded, lost, or trampled. Besides portraying the daily lives of the cartoneros and their wandering through the city, the documentary exposes how they establish an intimate relationship with other main characters who survive similar experiences and share the difficulties experienced since the 2001 collapse of the Argentine peso and the national economy. In a similar vein, McLean’s documentary portrays abrupt social change that has left thousands of people out of work; it has forced them into roaming the city, scavenging and digging through refuse in search of cardboard that will be sold to big paper recycling companies as their only and last means of survival. Like Livón-Grosman, McLean highlights how displacement characterizes this work and emphasizes the mobile—and displaceable—condition of the cartoneros, accompanying them on their routes through an urban maze where every street constitutes a jurisdiction that collectors have pre-established and set apart. In contrast to these two documentaries, El tren blanco focuses on the route that transports the cartoneros from José León Suárez, in the province of Buenos Aires, to the Retiro train station, in the capital. This service, set up by the transport company Trenes de Buenos Aires (TBA) in 2000, takes the cartoneros from the urban core of Buenos Aires to collect trash in the Buenos Aires neighborhoods of Palermo, Belgrano, Carranza, and Núñez. In exchange for this service, the cartoneros must pay a monthly

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fee.27 The documentary draws a portrait of the subjects who use this means of transportation to carry out the collection of garbage in the capital. It principally foregrounds the testimonies offered by the main characters of El tren blanco, whose personal experiences include issues that range from work to family problems and everything in between. Capturing this phenomenon from inside the train, during its route from station to station, El tren blanco exposes the subhuman labor conditions and displacement in which the cartoneros carry out their work, which involves entire families, including minors and newborns. Unlike Livón-Grosman and McLean’s documentaries, the film focuses on the specific conditions in which the cartoneros move across the city, emphasizing the permanent conditions of risk on the trains where entire families travel from dawn until their return, at dusk, practically always living outdoors in the elements. Significantly, a considerable number of cartoneros presented here originally had up until recently been part of the middle class and even possess college degrees, but they have sunken into poverty due to the post-2001 economic and political collapse. As sociologist Horacio González correctly points out, cartoneros are also witnesses and protagonists of one of the most important Argentine crises (Livon-Grosman 2006). Livón-­ Grosman’s visual work, on the other hand, shows evidence of the profitability of cardboard collection, and how, as a consequence, a conflict emerges when private companies as well as local authorities consider the potential gains that such a lucrative business can yield. The documentary depicts how an unresolved conflict divided the cartonero community that had been working peacefully until then under a tacit agreement regarding their distribution and circulation in the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. This dispute over cardboard and other recyclable materials, which finally resulted in the founding of numerous cooperatives, brings with it a major question centered on the individual practice of the cartoneros, amplifying it on different levels by exposing its connections to local, national, and global interests. In sum, the dynamics of market and profit raise the issue 27  The service was discontinued in 2002 at the Carranza del Ferrocarril Mitre station because of neighborhood complaints regarding the presence of the cartoneros (Calello 2007, 210). One of the primary objections to the cartoneros was that a number of important real estate projects are located within this area of Buenos Aires. After holding a general meeting and collecting signatures for a petition that was given to the manager of the Suárez del Ferrocarril Mitre train line, the Tren Blanco returned to service (Calello 2007, 211–212).

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of property—to whom does trash, refuse, and what no longer works belong?—as well as a theme that runs through multiple configurations of power—who administers or takes care of all this garbage? Livón-Grosman’s documentary also points out issues other than the victimization of the cartoneros, such as the reconstruction of the journeys of transformation that trash takes from the time someone leaves it on the sidewalk until it becomes a consumer product. At each step in the process of recycling, there is a web of unconventional entrepreneurs who operate within a micro-society, with their own codes and hierarchies. Livón-­ Grosman’s perspective serves as a point of departure for other contemporary representations of poverty in Buenos Aires and distances itself from those that tend to focus on and limit their scope to misery and suffering. His objective is to reverse the invisibility of the cartoneros, particularly at the peak of the 2001 financial crisis. At that time, most people could think of the cartoneros as part of the workforce. That’s what we mean by invisibility. The media and news coverage of cartoneros did not say much about the way they worked or what they did for a living––they were mostly focused on their personal misfortunes and represented through a diminished sentimental perspective. On the contrary, the film addresses the complexities of the recycling process, the social dimension of the characters, and what their existence meant when the country’s financial and political stability collapsed because of the 2001 crisis. What’s more, it showcases “how people were able to pool resources and out of their own creativity, establish a new sort of an income based on this informal recycling.”28 For this reason, it evidences the effort of understanding their daily lives, thoughts, and emotional life. The interviews of “La Colo,” the first spokesperson for cartoneros who work independently, illustrate the obstacles that they must confront and their continuous struggle to instill a “sense of dignity” in garbage collection. The documentary expresses the complexity of Argentine society, exhibiting what the citizens have been able to achieve since the beginning of the 2001 crisis. It equally raises 28  See the interview with Ernesto Livón-Grosman: “Trash to Treasure: A Story of Economic Survival” (April 1, 2007) at http://www.newenglandfilm.com/news/archives/2007/04/ cartoneros.htm. Accessed 2 February 2022.

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awareness of the figure of the invisible cartonero. It gives them back some traces of humanity that they seem to lose when they put themselves on the public urban scene where society is accustomed to ignoring them.29

5   Pepenadores The novel Mis amigos los pepenadores (La vida de un Maestro de Banquillo), by José Luis Parra (Mexico), was published in 1958, one year after Verbitsky’s novel Villa Miseria también es América. Like Villa Miseria, it is a precursor of contemporary depictions of poverty and destitution. Unlike Verbitsky’s novel, however, here the characters survive from collecting trash and scraps. After they classify, sort, and catalogue them, 29  From the social sciences, anthropologists such as Verónica Paiva, Pablo Schamber, and Francisco Suárez have also begun to challenge this paradigm. Their work has emphasized the honesty of the cartoneros’ work, in opposition to the criminal and illicit activity that has been assigned to them, as well as the hardships they face, their dignity, and the solidarity network established between the cartoneros and political activists. In this context, the famous phrase “todos somos cartoneros” (“we are all cartoneros”) eventually became a national symbol of a generalized crisis that has affected the majority of the Argentine people. Beginning in 2002, a number of investigations have also shown the positive impact that cartoneros have had on the urban environment from an environmental perspective through the collection of discarded items and trash. A new term accompanied this growing legitimacy before the eyes of the general public: “recuperadores de residuos” (“refuse recoverers”). As Verónica Paiva points out (2008), this term has migrated from the discursive academic field to the mass media, putting the environmental problem at the very heart of public debate (101). The cartoneros’ beneficial impact that on the environment has taken form and impacted law and public policy in Buenos Aires, beginning with the creation in 2003 of the Program of Refuse Recoverers of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires (Programa Recuperadores de Residuos del Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires). The public visibility of the cartoneros has provided them a new space to develop their local organizing capacity, to obtain access to diverse information (for example, identifying already existing opportunities for recycling), and to create public forums where they can discuss everything from daily problems to political and social responsibilities. What originally consisted of an urgent effort to survive economically—not just a gesture towards preserving the environment with a certain ecological base—has become one of the most active administrative garbage management industries in Argentina. This phenomenon has led to the creation of cooperatives such as “El Ceibo,” in the capital and “Nuevo Rumbo,” “El Orejano,” and “Alicia Moreau de Justo” in the greater province of Buenos Aires. The emergence of the cartonero has consequentially reconfigured the traditional figure of the ciruja. After the crisis of 2001, the cartonero became the most visible emblem of poverty, a reflection of social, economic, and political chaos that has submerged millions of people into a situation of unemployment and poverty. Nonetheless, and through the appropriation by environmental organizations and city government, the figure of the cartonero has recently been portrayed in a more dignified manner.

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extracting the “useful” and “valuable” elements that remained invisible to the people who got rid of them, they sell what is leftover to wholesale warehouses. According to the story’s narrator, the poor load “their filthy cargo on a continuous and ambulatory route: they took all the leftovers they found in the trash to the warehouses to sell after they had taken them home to see what they could use” (Parra 1958, 48).30 Mis amigos narrates the story of Mr. Domínguez, a teacher who has been assigned to a very poor school where most of the students are children of pepenadores. The school has no water since the pumps stopped working quite a while ago. Thus, the tale refers to water as a “miracle” (52). The unequal distribution of natural resources is further highlighted when one compares the section of the neighborhood where these children live to the other wealthier ones. In fact, the neighborhood is divided between the middle-class section and the remaining areas, where the pepenadores reside in subhuman conditions. According to the narrator, “it was impossible to believe that those two communities were part of the same neighborhood” (50). Because there is no furniture in the school, the students recycle and reuse things that, from the perspective of the social 30  From 1950, Indiana Nájera’s short story “El pepenador” [The pepenador] (in Pasajeros de Segunda [Mexico]), tells the tale of a pepenador who, one day, digging through the trash, finds a pile of objects that had just been thrown away. Some of them concern his delinquent and “shameless” past. Curiously, a girl goes up to this pile of trash, looking for a ribbon that belongs to her. The pepenador then remembers that he had given that same ribbon to the girl’s mother, which makes the girl his daughter. Overcome with emotion, he tries to give her a hug, but a guard, who thinks the pepenador wants to rob her, takes him to jail. Some significant aspects in this story appear in the description of the process of separation and cataloguing that the pepenador makes between useful and useless when he begins to dig: “Certainly this wasn’t your typical trash; he knew all too well what the other piles were like, full of flies, peels, and filth, especially because of the nauseating odor they gave off even before you got to them” (Nájera 1950, 24). Another important aspect is the problem of ownership and jurisdiction—to which we have previously referred: when the pepenador takes from everything that has been discarded, he maintains that since he had found it first, no one else could claim ownership. Finally, there is the aspect that is characteristic of discarded objects, which preserve the patina of their life and past that is adhered to them, connecting the pepenador to something that goes beyond its material value, since it belongs to his own past. The past mixes with the present in this garbage can, or deposit of junk and discarded objects, and as a consequence, temporalities and spatialities also blend: “Then he came upon a cardboard box, and when he took it in his hands, it gave off a perfume he was familiar with. […] And when he brought it closer, he smelled its strong aroma. This happens often when, suddenly, a smell reminds us of forgotten or distant memories from our life. The man closed his eyes, removing himself from the outside world; and when he opened them, tears ran down his wrinkled cheeks, and he almost cursed when the back of his hand had to dry them” (1950, 25).

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classes that can afford to throw objects away, are only trash: so, “everyone had their own chair and desk or at least something they could substitute for them: an empty soap box and four big bricks to sit on; a three-legged table leaning against another so it wouldn’t wobble and an old shoe-­ shiner’s bench” (57). When the teacher arrives at the neighborhood, the first thing he sees are children and dogs fighting over food: Kids with worms, incredibly filthy and exhausted, made up the school population he had to work with […] prostitution, vice, degeneracy, and abandonment: based on all that, they had formed certain habits and customs. Every day it was nothing unusual to find out that an older brother had been thrown in jail for stealing or that someone’s father hadn’t come home because he was surely lying drunk somewhere in the street (49)

Just as in Ícaro Cisneros’s film Los pepenadores de acá (1982), analyzed in the previous chapter, the portrayal presentation of the pepenadores produces certain stereotypes associated with poverty, which, significantly, do not appear in Verbitsky’s novel, which makes more of an effort to humanize the characters and to avoid preconceptions or generalizations. This is particularly revealing if we bear in mind that Cisneros’s film, like Parra’s novel, obviously distinguishes itself from contemporary stories and textual and visual representations in which sorting through trash constitutes an alternative to vice rather than being part of it. Explicitly stated, in all these depictions, garbage scavenging is done as a last resort and at a moment when social acceptance has stopped being a promise or possibility and has become a bygone dream.31 In the previous chapter, we suggested that perceptions about different levels of poverty can vary drastically, and that representations can also vary according to the time of their production. In this sense, this novel, like Verbitsky’s, positions itself vis-à-vis the future, as the teacher’s mission is 31  In the novel Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (1969) [Here’s to You, Jesus], Elena Poniatowska references a universe of inequality in which the practice of “pepenar,” or digging through the trash, is one of many frequent activities in the daily task of survival. In fact, “Doña Encarnación makes a pretty penny” doing this work (Poniatowska 1969, 269). One can find many examples of this work in the following novels: Los de abajo [The Underdogs] (1969) by Mariano Azuela, Hombres de maiz [Men of Maize] (1949) by Miguel Ángel Asturias, and ¡Los de hasta abajo! (Los pepenadores) [Those at the Bottom! (The Scavengers)] (1963) by Armando Pareyón; as well as Juan Rulfo’s short story “Nos han dado la tierra” [“They Gave Us the Land”], in El llano en llamas [The Burning Plain] (1953).

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to help his students and their families be accepted socially and economically, in spite of their difficulties and general abandonment. Another fundamental distinction in comparison to the contemporary textual and visual narratives is that the children in Parra’s novel (as they do in Verbitsky’s) do not work—instead, they go to school. In this sense, the families, at least in this instance, do not seem to rely on the children’s work for the household economy. Most recent narratives not only situate the cartoneros, pepenadores, or catadores at the very center of their representations, they depict how the entire family is involved in the labor of scavenging and digging through waste: from breastfeeding mothers to teenagers and children who must pick up trash together, which keeps the youngest from going to school. The novel also delegates a large part of the responsibility for its characters’ situation to the official authorities. In this way, it marks an important difference in how this problem is portrayed in recent narratives, which tend to place more emphasis on the consumption and disposal that are an integral part of contemporary societies, as well as the scale and magnitude of these mechanisms. After alluding to “how the Government had abandoned us,” Mr. Domínguez refers to the difficult conditions—an “extremely miserable existence”—that teachers face, without any resources or means to implement or improve new teaching methods—a result, once again, of “how teacher education has been abandoned” (105). Garbage and trash collection are not associated with an ecological practice and, in this sense, the novel establishes a clear link between discourses related to social justice and those who demand environmental justice. These themes, which appear explicitly in Homero Aridjis’s novels—that I will examine in the next chapter—, place a historic dystopian and ecocidal reading at the core of their textual and visual manifestations, beginning with a well-defined political agenda and dealing principally with issues related to public programs that focus as much on the environment as on racial, ethnic, and class issues. As has been indicated in the introduction, the environmental justice movement constitutes as much a political movement as it does a social one interested in issues of ideology and representation. One of its most distinctive aspects is its way of placing subjects—especially racialized communities and urban spaces, generally with segregated populations—at the very center of the environmental problem, nature, and the equal distribution of resources. In general terms, these demands aim to show how specific notions of race, ethnicity, and poverty affect culture and urban environmental policies, and they do this by

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drawing connections between the historical exploitation of natural resources and the subjects who are in a disadvantageous position (Sze 2002, 164).32 Joan Martínez Alier defined this reality as “environmentalism of the poor” singling out how the conflicts caused by economic growth and social inequality are experienced and paid for by marginal social groups (2009a). These conflicts produce negative effects on the environment when resources are extracted and the residue and refuse of societies are displaced and evacuated.33 In general, these subjects find themselves segregated and, likewise, inhabit spaces of disadvantage—desert or infertile land prone to constant flooding and/or mudslides, and so on. These specific situations frame their activities for survival. Mexican pepenadores are inserted into this larger urban and environmental problem, specifically as it pertains to the production of waste. At present, large human settlements are the greatest generators of trash due to their urban condition as artificial spaces. Environmental movements emerging within cities have not tackled this problem of waste in any sustained way because most discourses and projects centered around sustainability have yet to move beyond the embryonic, utopian stage (Cornejo Moreno-Valle 2010, 243). In an ever-urbanizing world, the vastest demographic concentrations occur primarily in cities that are incapable of surviving in isolation and “have to go beyond their limits for supplies, but also to deposit all the residues generated by their disproportionate consumption” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle 2010, 243–244). Bearing in mind that the percentage of the world population living in cities greater than 100,000 people increased from 16% in 1950 to 50% in 2000, dependence on other ecosystems, which did not exist in pre-modern societies, has increased due to “[m]assive urbanization and the accelerated consumption that characterizes modern societies” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle 2010, 244). Within these dense urban settings, an “insatiable” throwaway culture based on the proliferation of poorly made objects (such as electronics) has taken 32  For a more general idea of the emergence of this movement in the 1980s and its relationship to literary and cultural environmental discourses, see Julie Sze (2002). 33  According to Martínez Alier, besides being known as “environmentalism of the poor” and the “environmental justice movement,” this trend has been called “livelihood ecology” (Gari, 2000), as well as “liberation ecology” (Peet and Watts, 1996) (2009a, 26-27 [Spanish]; 2005, 10 [English]). See also Joan Martínez Alier (2009b): “El ecologismo de los pobres, veinte años después: India, México y Perú,” a paper presented on 3 November 2009, CEIICH-PUMA-UNAM, México. In http://www.noalamina.org. Accessed 4 December 4 2021.

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hold legitimated by the underlying logic of capitalism along with clever marketing strategies. These goods pose a threat to the environment since their production and transportation pollute and deplete natural resources, while inadequate waste disposal means that they will continue to contaminate the natural environment well after their obsolescence. From this perspective, we agree with Gonzalo Ortega that cities symbolize a “paradox” as they are both stunning achievements “regarding the systematization of services which allow for a massive transit of people,” and sites where waste is produced on an unprecedented scale (2010, 229). Even more conflictive, modern societies of consumption have grown accustomed to ignoring the immense quantity of packaging materials that indiscriminately end up buried underground, when they could be recycled or reused. But what is not visible to some is certainly visible to others who—as has been occurring in Mexico since the second half of the twentieth century—have made a living “by digging into mountains of dirty mixed waste to extract whatever can be saved and sold” (Ortega 2010, 230). The pepenador communities are made up of “second class citizens” whose lack of educational opportunities and low life expectancy condemn them to misery (Ortega 2010, 230). Indeed, although current societies believe they are getting rid of the problem when they hide it and the trash “disappears” from the public space, this action renders invisible not only the waste but also large groups of people whom the rest of society is no longer able to see, as in Aira’s novel. In fact, the literary, visual, artistic, and performative productions surveyed here confer upon—and restore—a forbidden visibility to a significant group of subjects who, without it, would remain confined to an invisible space, both literally and metaphorically. Maxi, the main character in La villa, constitutes an exception to this sort of self-imposed blindness that the people in these societies prefer to put up with—although, paradoxically, Maxi suffers from an abnormality in his vision that keeps him from clearly seeing nightfall, the time when he goes out to help the cartoneros. However, the main character in Parra’s novel also stands out because he lends a hand to the pepenadores and, therefore, interrupts the cycle that naturalizes and neutralizes their existence, giving them visibility even though it may be within an enclosed space confined to that small forgotten universe:34 34  On the invisibility of the pepenadores, see Gonzalo Ortega, “The Era of Waste and Emissions” (2010) and Paulina Cornejo Moreno-Valle (2010).

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How many times have I seen a pepenador busy at his daily grind; I felt a need to lend him a hand and then, when I could, I’d let his son know that he should be proud of his father, who, in such a terrible way, had to fight with his very life to earn a daily existence. (1958, 153)

The difference between Maxi and Mr. Domínguez is that Maxi limits himself to helping the pepenadores, almost mechanically, without trying to intervene in how they view their world, the equities and inequities of their situation, or the simple problem of the shame and humiliation that many perceive as they do this work. Mr. Domínguez, perhaps due to his position as an “educator,” tries to make the pepenadores aware that they aren’t condemned to do this work, and therefore, there is no reason to be embarrassed. In turn, he instills in them a feeling of pride and dignity. Nevertheless, it is possible that his efforts to raise their consciousness is due to the certainty that, in the end, his friends, the pepenadores, became “good men, and although they continue to do very lowly work, they do it with dignity” (1958, 173).35

6  Catadores This section analyzes the problem of garbage collectors from a dissimilar point of view to the ones analyzed above. The narrative perspective changes greatly because we observe a work of theater and listen to the voices of the catadores, and their stories, without visual or narrative mediation. Homens de papel is a two-act play, published in 1978, by the playwright Plínio Marcos from São Paulo, Brazil. In this piece, we see a group of catadores who survive by collecting cardboard in different areas of the city. Just as for the cartoneros and pepenadores, their identities are affixed— paradoxically—to a moving and itinerant condition since their displacement and work as catadores across the urban territory allow for their daily survival. Nonetheless, and in contrast to the previously analyzed texts, these catadores work for an intermediary, Berrão, who exploits them by 35  Ultimately, the novel makes a moral and value judgment on the pepenadores because if they are now “good men,” this means that they were not so before, even when their “bad” condition was due not to working as a pepenador but to the “depraved” life they led, which we described above. Such a medicalized rhetoric regarding the “healthiness” of the characters resonates with a late eugenic discourse. To give one example, when Mr. Domínguez takes over as teacher, he orders a massive vaccination of all the children, thus preventing the spread of diseases that they could potentially carry (Parra 1958, 66-67).

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changing the weight of each bundle of cardboard, lowering it as he chooses. The intermediary has an agreement with the wholesale dealer to not buy directly from the catadores, just as the transporters have an agreement to transfer cardboard from the local warehouse to the wholesale buying center on the outskirts of the city. As in the previous cases, this play concerns socially fragmented subjects, decentralized human beings who live in the underworld, along a spatial, discursive, and, above all, social border (Alexandre and Rojo 2007, 64). In the play, the catadores are looking for a way to change their luck by rebelling. To do this, they decide to stop collecting cardboard for a few days so as to ruin the business and reputation of Berrão in front of his clients. Nevertheless, like so many other subjects who wander through the large urban areas of Latin America in search of scraps to sell—their only means of available survival—the characters end up accepting their unfortunate destiny. “What is a ‘paper man?’” asks Paulo Vieira in his study of Plínio Marcos: The first answer is obvious, because it refers to the most immediate action in the play: a person who lives by picking up paper in the streets. But it also can very well mean a man who’s weak, ephemeral, or uncertain. A man whose destiny will be written, or about whom a project will be scribbled down. Or a man who’s insignificant. (1994, 88)

Alberto D’Aversa suggests that, on one hand, the play is brutally social, and that its political allusions refer—through the references to paper men—to the “sad parable of South American peoples.” It also refers to the “beaten down” for whom the only means to survive are to “gathe[r] empty sacks and trac[k] through the streets of the city to pick through the filth and trash of the human condition” (cit. in Viera 1994, 88). Just as we suggested about Aira’s novel (2001), this play concerns a static condition, as there is no possibility of making a change, at least on the most immediate horizon. Any change that would imply a transformation at the structural level is far removed from the spectrum of possible future changes since it would suppose going from a “crisis-generated restructuring” to achieve a “restructuring-generated crisis,” as Edward Soja suggests about the post-metropolis that is Los Angeles (1996). Nonetheless, since this crisis seems to be permanent, catadores continuously occupy public space and, in this sense, they reinvent it daily—just like those who live in the streets. They create new functions for this disputed space, because, as Loschiavo dos Santos suggests, public exposition and continuous poverty

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introduce an experience of “another” space—that is, a new way of inhabiting and using the city (2000, 40). In this sense, one of the most important aspects of the catadores who wander through the streets is that they introduce a culture of poverty and alterity into the view of the dominant culture. In addition, they incorporate a “cultural mestizaje” for which the catador becomes an important indicator of the metamorphosis underway in postmodern cities.36 At the same time, these urban loci are central spaces where strangeness and anomie emerge. Therefore, Loschiavo dos Santos wonders how this space might be conceived of as both central and marginal. If we again take up Foucault’s notion of heterotopias in “Des espaces autres” (1967), it is possible to conceive this quality of juxtaposition as a heterotopic space since it supposes the existence of multiple spaces, of diverse sites in the same “real” place that are not only contradictory but also incompatible with each other (Foucault 1986, 25). For Loschiavo dos Santos, “catador culture” unfolds in the relationships among space, knowledge, power, and cultural policy that must be understood as simultaneously oppressive and open to change; these relationships must also include the authoritative threats to which the catadores are permanently subjected, as well as possibilities of resistance (2000, 40–41). This same idea of superposition, contradiction, misfortune, and resistance appears in Plínio Marcos’s play. When Nhanha, Frido, and their daughter, Gá, arrive at the already established circle of catadores, a story begins to unravel that will bring its characters both intransigence and oppression. The three strangers arrive from Brazil’s hinterland with the aim of earning enough money to send the child to a doctor because she is having attacks. Although the type of attacks is not specified, she needs to be medicated, and according to her parents, there are no doctors in the interior. The contrast between the rural characters and those who live in the city is premised on a morality that isn’t typical of the urban space. The recent arrivals do not drink and disapprove of the life that the catadores lead. Also, they collected six bags of cardboard in the streets without permission from Berrão, which are later disputed—not without physical violence—by the rest of the catadores: Bichado – Hey guys. Look what we found. Poquinha – Some new faces. 36  Loschiavo dos Santos (2000, 40) uses the expression “cultural mestizaje” (“mestizaje cultural”), echoing Henri-Pierre Jeudy. See Henri-Pierre Jeudy (1999).

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Bichado –Looking for cardboard, without Berrão’s permission. Poquinha –They got six sacks. […] Giló – These are the ones who collected at our spots. Pelado – That’s why we didn’t get as much as usual. Noca – Damn, we thought something like this would happen. Tião – Those sacks are ours. Chicão – They’re for whoever collected them. (Everyone goes after the three new ones. Frido and Nhanha try to stop them; they’re overtaken; Gá screams. There’s a lot of confusion. The old catadores grab the sacks and violently fight amongst themselves. Frido and Nhanha try to get their bags back, but they are beaten back. Berrão enjoys it.). (Marcos 1978, 28) The problem arises because Berrão assigns the catadores collection “spots.” Without knowing the jurisdictional stipulation of the pre-established routes throughout the city and who can collect where, the newcomers collected trash in “prohibited” zones. Therefore, they broke the implicit rules of the catadores. This problem raises a more important issue found throughout the visual and literary stories analyzed here: the ownership of trash. We already touched on how, for the cartoneros and the pepenadores, this issue cuts across social, political, and economic spheres and establishes conditions for an informal economy that, by its very nature, confronts an institutionalized and official economy. Who owns the objects that are thrown out, especially if these objects are found in public spaces?37 Who has the right to appropriate these objects in the first place—those who go through the streets daily, striking up friendly relationships with the business owners who often deliberately separate recyclable material for the poor to collect, or those who, without knowing about these implicit

37  In the United States, a police investigation in which evidence of criminal activity was found in the garbage cans of an individual who belonged to the mafia created a polemic about whether trash left in the street could be examined or if such an examination violated constitutional rights. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that trash, once discarded, belongs to the public order. See William Rathje and Cullen Murphy (1992, 19–23). Contrarily, landfills are “private,” and this allows their owners to fence them off and, thus, prevent people from establishing places to live in them, as occurs in “underdeveloped” countries, like those of Latin America or Asia and Africa.

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arrangements, go out in the street looking for what can also be a source of survival for them?38 Bearing in mind the lack of an agreement as to who owns trash, as indicated above, and that trash collection is a lucrative business, we find that despotism, or “caciquismo,” abounds. It is depicted in Marcos’s play through the character of Berrão and through disputes between different catador groups, just as in Livón-Grosman’s documentary about the cartoneros of Buenos Aires.39 In the case of the catadores of São Paulo, Marcos’s vision is set against the sociological and anthropological studies that refer to their work as that of an individual, supported, in some instances, by the formation of cooperatives (Costa 1986a, b; Bloch et al. 1998; Vicente Muñoz and Rech 2000). The family’s arrival at the moment when the catadores decide to boycott Berrão generates a conflict of interest among the catadores and Gá’s mother, Nhanha, who does not want to join the boycott because she needs money for her daughter: Chicão –Hold on, people! (All murmur.) Giló –What was that! Chicão –(Frido signals.) And that one over there? Tião –So, what about it? Are you with us? (Pause. Frido looks at Nhanha and lowers his head.) 38  The short story “El cartonero” [The cartonero] (2008) by the Paraguayan author Lisandro Cardozo illustrates the relationship established between a trash collector and business owners. The story relates Francisco Ortellado who goes every morning “from store to store, asking for used cardboard. He’d pay a few cents, smile as he said goodbye and go out to the sidewalk to break down the boxes. He’d easily flatten them so they would fit into the bags of his cart” (15). His son Rubio helps him. Francisco typically drops off his load at “Big Mongelós’s house.” “Big Mongelós,” the intermediary, who pays by the kilo, “takes the merchandise in his old Ford to the paper factory after picking up what the other cartoneros had collected” (2008, 15). Lorenzo, who works as a sacker at the market and collects “scraps” and “damaged fruit,” wants to take over Francisco’s business and one day shows up collecting cardboard after Francisco mysteriously disappears (2008, 16). As luck would have it, Lorenzo does not get along well with the business owners. It is impossible to collect the cardboard, and his short time as a cartonero ends in failure. Finally, Lorenzo is found dead, and in the end, the cycle starts again with Rubio, Francisco’s son, who replaces his father in the task of cardboard collection. 39  Eduardo Anguita’s journalistic investigation also refers to the fights that occur among cartoneros (2003, 113 and 117).

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Maria-Vai – Yeah, what about it? Are you with us? Frido –Yeah. All –Good! Great! Let’s go! Let’s stick it to Berrão. Chicão –And your wife? Frido –She’s with me. All –Great! Berrão’s going down! Good! Nhanha –Wait! (Pause) I’m with my daughter. I’m with her. I came here to get money to take her to the doctor. And I’m gonna get it, whether you like it or not. I only came to this god-forsaken place for her. I don’t have anything to do with you other people’s lives. I want everyone to deal with their own shit. But I’m taking care of my daughter. If everyone here is good for nothing, well, I’m not. I’ve already lost one day, I’m not gonna lose the night. I’m gonna get the paper for my daughter’s sake. She needs it. (Marcos 1978, 57) Nhanha’s declaration only aggravates the conflict between the newcomers and the catadores, which leads to a physical and verbal fight with Noca. Things begin to unravel quickly when Nhanha decides to go out and look for paper, leaving her daughter alone and asleep in the cardboard warehouse. Coco, one of the catadores, waits until everyone has left to wake her up and try to rape her. His failed attempt culminates in the girl attacking Coco and him strangling her. When the catadores return, they all kill Coco. Then, Berrão arrives and refuses to pay Nhanha and Frido for the six bundles of cardboard that the family had collected, and now they need to bury their daughter: Nhanha –Berrão, this child had a dog’s life, but she’s gonna have a human’s death. I’m talking to you. The paper is there. It was collected under your orders. (84)

Berrão not only refuses to pay them, he forces them to work, while insulting them and grabbing a gun. Then, once again, Nhanha resists, confronting Berrão and challenging his despotic power: Nhanha –Shoot! Are you afraid, you fag? Give us the money! (Pause) Come on, give us the dough or shoot! Shoot! Kill me. What will that do? I don’t give a shit about dying. I’ve been dying for a long time now. You get it? I died from hunger, I died from cold, I died from fear, I died from seeing my daughter die. And now it’s your turn. Shoot! Shoot! Go ahead, shoot!.... (86)

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Her resistance works. Berrão pays Nhanha and Frido so they can bury their daughter. Nonetheless, in spite of this isolated moment of resistance, Berrão restores his authoritarianism. The catadores, who try to take advantage of Nhanha’s small victory and increase their demands for general work conditions, end up giving in, fearful of Berrão’s violent authority: Chicão –And us? What does all this mean? (All the catadores begin to talk at the same time, inciting each other to take the initiative and grab Berrão. At the height of the commotion, Tião pushes Chicão who falls in front of Berrão. Berrão kicks him and hurls him away. The others try to advance, but Berrão shoots into the air. All stop talking and back down fearfully.) Berrão –Pick up the sacks and get them in the truck! (One by one, slowly, the catadores start picking up their sacks and leaving. Nhanha’s prayers grow louder, mixing with the noise of the big city that increases as the curtain closes). (88) The incompatibilities, contradictions, and fluctuations that weave this space of simultaneous resistance and subordination—part of the Foucauldian heterotopic proposal—are imprinted on Homens de papel by means of contradictory, questioning, and subaltern actions by the characters. Paulo Vieira refers to a collective “evil” to define the “social misery” that characterizes the lives of all the subjects in Marcos’s play who are the victims of deplorable living conditions (Viera 1994, 85). And yet, the fate written on these fragile characters—against their will—contributes to a certain environmental betterment by means of collecting trash for sale and later recycling. Doing the job of a catador, as well as that of a pepenador or cartonero, begins to fill the void of formal garbage collection. Likewise, their actions stress a more important problem: if the catadores, pepenadores, and cartoneros survive from collecting discarded materials, then the link that they establish with trash leads us, perhaps, to wonder how urgent it is to implement an ethical principle that keeps the State—as well as any other form of power that embodies that authority—from indistinctly treating garbage pickers as elements analogous to waste? That is, we must single out the fact that surviving off of the collection of discarded material does not entail that the collectors are conceived of as human waste.40 Such 40  See María Carman (2011): “La máxima intrusión socialmente aceptable” [The maximum intrusion that is socially acceptable], 167–196.

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a need arises because this community is definitely growing, and although it is not “recycled,” it is constantly replenished through its continuous proliferation as well as its disposal. This fate, as Vieira proposes, is written on the bodies of those who pick up trash, which become “natural resources” for greater exploitation in the profitable business of recycling that, far from being an environmental proposal, is inserted into a larger practice in which human beings become one more thing to throw away, an easily replaceable link within the world-wide machine of production, consumption, and disposal. In this sense, the “paper men,” like trash itself, constitute a “paratext” in which abundance is rewritten by means of decadence and filth, and in which natural substances rot together with the images of art printed on discarded packaging, although, from an inverse perspective, they constitute a limit or border between what is useful and what is useless, unusable, and threatening.41 But, even more, they are a visible contact zone—and rendered invisible—between daily life and deeper horrors. Through what is discarded, we read not only the logic of industrial capitalist society but also its relationship to nature and human labor. In sum, this is a contact zone of inclusion and separation in which everything is confused and mixed together at the same time: work, nature, land, production, consumption, past, and future. Perhaps we could define this contact zone more correctly as an intersection zone as it begins to crack and come apart, a zone made of splinters that travel in different directions, responding to different interests and whose components, instead of coming together, reciprocally repel one another. As Heather Rogers suggests in Gone Tomorrow (2005), a material and irrefutable proof appears in waste, as it reveals that there is no plan to administer the Earth’s resources or even to preserve them. Waste and destruction are two analogous elements that are part and parcel of contemporary consumer society. How does the labor of the “paper men,” whether catadores, cartoneros, or pepenadores, conciliate with their labor of environmental preservation? One could argue that they make their contribution to the ecological betterment at the cost of gradual self-annihilation. The very project of environmental preservation therefore paradoxically entails the conservancy of 41  I refer to paratext—and not text—in the sense that paratext is, as Genette writes, “dedicated to the service of something other than itself that constitutes its raison d’être. This something is the text” (1997, 12). In this sense, it is worth wondering, what exactly is the text? The text is the center, the human, that which enjoys rights; the “paper men,” on the contrary, are subordinate to it.

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the natural world through non-natural means, such as the human workforce and its resulting devastation. Perhaps we can venture that these traits become more evident in Latin America due to the precariousness of the environmental praxis. These practices are sifted through a rhetoric linked to the labor of collection on the part of subjects who, when they interact with trash, become a fundamental element of this contact zone—of exclusion and inclusion of what functions and what is discarded, preserved, destroyed, seen, and unseen—but the rhetoric displaces the very question of environmental preservation with that of human preservation. This is what I call bioecocriticism—a concept that enables us to visualize human and non-human obsolescence by reflecting upon how consumerism and daily disposal has unleashed one of the main present crises. Analyzed from a different angle, it is imperative to ask to what extent the adoption of an ecocritical approach implies—in most cases—avoiding the problem of human degradation and objectification. In this sense, ecocriticism, and, in broader terms, environmental studies, must address this problem from an even-handed, alternative, and unprecedented perspective. Therefore, a new critical episteme, necessary for understanding the dynamics of Latin American aesthetic praxis, cultural figurations, and sense of immediacy, must consider—and incorporate—a bioecocentric perspective from the outset, since only through new concepts and epistemologies we will be able to adequately engage with its artifacts.

7   Diving in Havana: Dream or Nightmare? I am going to refer briefly to a fascinating case of “diving” in Havana from Eduardo del Llano’s short story “Greenpeace” (2000).42 I call this case “fascinating” because it considers environmental issues in a completely different way from the cases analyzed above. Due to specific political and economic conditions, it removes the established paradigms of the previous representations. The story begins with Rigoberto Molina, “alias Gravilla,” Prisciliano Jiménez, “alias Sangre’e mono,” and Bárbaro Casas, “alias Negroemierda,” 42  In Cuba, the term “diving” equates to the actions of the cartoneros, pepenadores, and catadores. Those who “dive” are called “divers” or “buzos,” as I will refer to them in my analysis. Significantly, and unlike the cases studied above, there are practically no studies dedicated to the practice of garbage scavenging in Havana or other Cuban cities.

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huddled up in a corner of a cell as the lawyer who has come to defend them asks why they are in jail (del Llano 2000, 107). According to the lawyer, they are accused of an “attack on cultural heritage, sabotage, distribution of enemy propaganda, attempted illegal sacrifice of livestock, physical aggression of the administrator of a state farm, and overtaking a public office, just for starters” (108). According to this last accusation, the three characters had been found “dressed as militiamen” when they were getting ready to kill a cow, although “Sangre’e mono” clarifies that they were not about to kill “no fucking cow,” but that, on the contrary, they wanted to “save” it (108). The events that led to the three friends being incarcerated takes us back to the Belén neighborhood of Havana. This neighborhood is situated geographically in the “most densely populated zone of the city” where “the poorest people” live: far away from “nature, no trees, no flowers, not enough water,” and although it is considered a “historic district,” its residents live “from hand to mouth” (109). Gravilla gathered his buddies to talk about the T.V. program they had seen the night before about “the destruction of the environment” (110). In a parodic tone, Gravilla’s two friends toss out ideas about possible clandestine businesses for the activity that Gravilla had in mind—for example, “selling ferns to strangers”—although Gravilla shoots down their ideas, telling them that his objective is to “found an Ecological Commando Group” (110). Moreover, Gravilla assures (and guarantees) his friends that this project “has nothing to do with politics,” and he instructs them that “every day thousands of animals and plants disappear” (110). The need to specify the absence of politics in the Ecological Commando Group politicizes the project from the outset (as does the fact that it is called a “Commando Group”), especially when the proposal is followed by the term “disappear,” a term inscribed in an extremely politicized rhetoric within Latin American discourse. On one hand, the ingenuity of this group of friends reveals the real and metaphorical isolation of some Cubans with global environmental projects and reinforces the criticism that the text slips in via satire. When “Sangre’e mono” naively asks whether the reason for the disappearance of animals and plants is because they are stolen, Gravilla answers with another question: How long has it been since you’ve seen a parrot flying free? There aren’t any left on Isla de Pinos. My grandpa hunted deer in the mountains; see if you can find one there now. […] There are hardly any more whales, for example.

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No tigers, or that big Chinese bear, the black and white one with the big ring around his eye. […] Do you think the Almendares River is clean? Well, is that what the sea’s like wherever you go? […] And the trees? Without trees there’s gonna be no air; that hole in the ozone’s gonna get bigger and we’re all gonna burn to a crisp. (111)

Confronted with this picture, the two friends again object, this time making the case that this is all “something for the government to deal with,” and therefore controlled by the government. Gravilla promises them again, contrarily, that the Commando Group will do “nothing bad”: whenever “someone shows signs of knocking over a plant just for fun, we’ll come in and discuss it with him. If a guy plans to mess with an animal or make one suffer, we’ll pull out his tooth. The government doesn’t have to find out about it” (111). Therefore, the environmental sustainability project will consist of an endless number of activities that begin with the establishment of the “first independent Ecological Commando Group in the country, or the city, or at least in the Belén neighborhood” and the announcement of an “offensive” to “help street animals” (112). While the practice of the collection of animals in the street broadens the work of the Cuban diver, or buzo, to include animated beings (the work of the cartoneros, pepenadores, and catadores is limited to objects), this causes some ethical dilemmas for the characters. On one hand, for Gravilla, “cockroaches are harmful bugs,” but on the other hand, one has to “save the jicotea turtles” since they could become extinct, and they will need to “throw the mice to the cats” (113). For his part, “Negroemierda” maintains that the latter means “promoting the death of mice,” and, consequently, the three friends and ecologists will inevitably alter “the ecological balance, causing the death of five rodents” (113). Facing these unresolved issues, the Commando Group decides to establish a “policy” with respect to “local fauna” that will consider “animals larger than five centimeters, mainly mammals and birds, domesticated or not,” as protected species “as long as they are not disease carriers or being raised for end-of-year festivities” (114). Some of the “operations” that are carried out, two months after the inauguration of the “foundational assembly,” include: “repeatedly beating an old man” for abusing his horse that he used to take children for a “recreational ride around the block”; shearing “a husky, a neighbor’s pet, considering how an animal from Alaska must be suffering in the full dog days of the Havana summer” (although when the owner protests, they gave him “an explanation and a blow with the fist, though not in that order”);

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and planting trees in “excessively urbanized and polluted zones,” although seeing that there was not sufficient “ad hoc space, the Commando Group decided to break up some sections of sidewalk, bring in vegetable soil from a barren plot, cover the holes with the soil, and plant shoots there. Especially ferns” (114–115). But it is trash collection that interests us here, given that its practice in this story differs considerably from the textual and visual representations considered previously. To this end, the Ecological Commando Group programs an excursion to a coastal resort to pick up “cans and trash”: Trash, in six big nylon bags, was carried by the three members of the Commando Group and a few other girls, occasional beach acquaintances, to a clandestine dump in the middle of the neighborhood. Then, they set it afire, with collateral damage to two scorched clotheslines and three completely carbonized cats: among them, Sangre’e mono’s aggressor. The cat cadavers were surreptitiously taken to the zoo and thrown as an offering to the tiger cage. (114–115)

Over time, these efforts at environmental practice become more radical and, additionally, reveal that good intentions, when combined with ignorance and a lack of planning can have unforeseen effects. But, since we are dealing with a satirical text, this activity can be read on different critical levels. In the neighborhood, the Commando Group distributes “handwritten signs saying TO LIVE IN THIS COUNTRY, YOU FIRST HAVE TO CLEAN IT UP,” for which they are seen as “informants and agitators” (117). They had already tried to change the image of the Commando Group, dressing in green uniforms and letting their hair grow long. Also, they became vegetarian. The population did not take these transformations well, and three months after the founding of the Ecological Commando Group, “some crazy long-haired guys with beards, dressing in tailored olive-green uniforms, began to achieve legendary status in the city” (116). This parody allows us to read the impact an environmental policy has in the Cuban context, in which the difficulty of translating and transferring projects like “Greenpeace” to a regulated, monitored social model can pose challenges for the fulfillment and legitimacy of such projects. In addition, the Ecological Commando Group becomes a caricature of the institutional government itself since, as a micro-replica of its social structure taken to the broadest level, it reproduces some of its most distinctive characteristics: not only do they dress in military uniforms, they

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also decide to open an “Office of Public Services” in their “General Headquarters” where anyone can go to “report a case of cruelty to animals or plants” or “irresponsible damage to the environment” (116). But, although the Commando Group “was not a political faction,” “they were the only ones to know this” (116). In this way, an ecological praxis, perceived as a politically subversive activity, is punished in the story with at least “sufficient charges for ten life-terms” (118). Curiously, trash collection in Latin America is an activity that stems more from the need to survive than it is an ideological crusade. Yet, in the case of Cuba and in del Llano’s short story, setting out on a task of this nature has inevitable consequences. Prison is one of them. Nonetheless, if what is discarded constitutes a fundamental component of the system of production and consumption (within the global capitalist system), then the problem of property (who owns trash?) as well as the question regarding the configurations of power (who administers trash?) vary in this context in which the State is the absolute owner and administrator of all the discarded objects—and also of the lives of the subjects who are dedicated to this practice. The ambiguity of the regulatory policies responding to the emergence of the cartoneros, pepenadores, and catadores becomes, in the context of Havana, authoritarianism, even though it is met with rebellion, insubordination, and resistance. On a smaller scale, these acts appear portrayed with stark realism in the documentary De buzos, leones y tanqueros [Divers, Lions, and Tankers] (2005), by the Cuban filmmaker Daniel Vera. Made independently, this film has been shown in Cuba and aired on television in Miami. Different articles published online point out that, since the film’s screening in Cuba, authorities have reinforced oversight of the practices of trash and leftover collection that were considered “harmful to health and the touristic image of the country.”43 According to one of these articles, the Penal Code (in force since 1987) established a sanction of privation of freedom for three months to a year, a fine of 100 to 300 Cuban pesos (3 to 9 U.S. dollars, according to the official exchange rate), or both for those who practice the task of garbage picking. The article also warns that, along with the practice of “diving,” “Public Health authorities have alerted the population that the ‘buzos’ can inadvertently transfer a pathology to any neighborhood,” 43  “Lanzan ofensiva contra los ‘buzos’ de la basura.” In Cubanet.org (10 June 2008). See: http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y08/junio08/10_inter_3.html. Accessed 27 September 2012.

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and, in this way, foster “its proliferation, which can reach your family unnoticed and have a fatal result on the individual” (“Lanzan” 2008). Most of these press articles suggest that the buzo phenomenon is concentrated in the Cuban capital city, especially in neighborhoods where foreign residents or people with a higher purchasing power leave their trash. The buzos, who range from the physically challenged to university graduates, repair and sell many of the objects rescued from the garbage. Nevertheless, a large part of the articles available online about buzos were published outside of Cuba, either in the United States or in Spain, and most of them criticize the persecution of those who engage in this practice.44 A brief report, from a more reliable source, was published on June 9, 2008, in the Agence France Presse with the headline “Autoridades sancionan a ‘buzos’ de la basura en La Habana” [Authorities sanction garbage “divers” in Havana].45 The report declares that, according to the weekly Tribuna de La Habana, the “Cuban authorities developed an offensive against the illegal collectors of materials and waste in trash cans, popularly called ‘buzos,’ some of whom will be taken to court for reoffending” (“Lanzan” 2008). A “total of 365” people who were found carrying out this activity and those who “persisted […] were given warnings, forced appearances in front of the community, fines, seizure, and finally, penal measures” (ibid.). According to the Cuban newspaper, out of the total number of people, “290 were fined, 20 had to appear in front of their communities, and 45 returned to their province of origin,” while 11 “re-offenders” were “sanctioned to correctional work without detention in green areas of the city, with the charge of ‘propagation of epidemics’” (“Lanzan” 2008). Not only does the association between waste, trash, and illness reappear in this press coverage—that is to say, the bodies of garbage pickers are symptomatic of a contagious evil that can spread and multiply, and, therefore, must be isolated or removed—but it is the only analyzed case in which the measures coming from the State are applied explicitly and deliberately for the purpose of segregating sick and/or impure bodies from the rest of society (instead of, for example, integrating them or, as we have seen in the corpus studied earlier, ignoring them). If, in the 44  However, it is difficult to verify to what extent these reports are reliable. Some titles fluctuate between “El gobierno persigue a los ‘buzos’ de la basura,” at Cubaencuentro.com (26 March 2007) and “Declaran la guerra en Cuba contra los ‘buzos’ de la basura,” at Univision.com (26 March 2007). Accessed 21 January 2013. 45  “Autoridades sancionan a ‘buzos’ de la basura en La Habana.” In Agence France Presse – Spanish (9 June 2008). Accessed 28 September 2012.

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representations examined above, the attitude of the State is characterized by a passivity that is reflected in the negligence and abandonment of social and humanitarian assistance policies, here the State’s attitude becomes an active and energetic posture and implements discriminatory measures with the excuse of avoiding the spread of epidemics carried not only by waste but also by the subjects themselves who, in their very contact with waste, have also become infected. Already, in Histoire de la sexualité (1976), Foucault pointed out that the concept of the body is captured in all its display of power; in this sense, the presence of these individual, movable, and unstable geographies directly dialogues with another form of authority: one that is fluctuating and imprecise, and that signals the contradictions of a government that debates between a past promise and an uncertain future. By means of a considerable number of interviews with buzos who are collecting trash in the street, Vera’s documentary composes a critical visual narrative that noticeably contrasts with the discourse of official representatives. As in the case of the cartoneros in Argentina, there are also buzos in Cuba with university degrees. One of the first ones interviewed points out that he works for the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos) (Cuban Institute of Art and Film) as a movie extra, he has been working as a lighting assistant for fifteenth birthday parties (quinceañeras), as well as a camera assistant; similarly, he also studied at the University of Havana, and is a computer specialist, but the job of picking up trash brings in a bit of extra cash. While some buzos maintain that they cannot live off what they earn from collecting, others clarify that, for them, it’s how they make a living, especially for those who don’t have any opportunity of finding a job. If—just as in Argentina, Brazil, or Mexico— the practice of collecting trash to later sell either as secondhand articles or to recycle (depending on what’s found in the mound of detritus) is a symptom of an economic model based on the increasing production of objects and subjects for consumption and immediate disposal, then Cuba––despite its political singularity––also falls into these global dynamics, although with different modalities. First, opportunities for work exist for many of the buzos who collect in the streets. However, the problem is that what they earn is not sufficient to subsist. The second distinctive feature, and perhaps the most significant, is the fact that Cuba throws out as much as other Latin American countries, and therefore, the number of buzos has increased dramatically in recent years. This condition of social disparity that fluctuates between lack and abundance reveals that Cuban

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society has become hierarchized and has reorganized itself according to different economic classes, demonstrating that, as another interviewee says, “there are the haves, and the have-nots… so when you find shoes that have only come unglued… you glue them back together and keep on walking.” One buzo puts together little cars that he gives to his nieces and nephews with collected objects from the cans and trash bags; another buzo shows the camera a pair of reading glasses with a case and a clock that only needs one battery; one buzo refers to a naked-lady magazine, which was sold together with other objects. Another shows two alarm clocks—one wind-up type—and he says they find mechanics and watchmakers who can repair and sell everything: radios, calculators, flashlights. They also collect empty bottles of all sizes, boots, books, and other things to sell or re-use themselves. A third difference should be pointed out regarding the aforementioned depictions of cartoneros, pepenadores, and catadores: the State-­ sponsored repression and penalization of garbage picking as well as the public denigration of the work. Furthermore, the very State that appropriates waste and has the power to take charge of its content also administers the bodies—and the garbage they collect—confining both to territories of invisibility. Returning to Benjamin’s essay on Eduard Fuchs, this begs the question: if the action of collecting disposed objects and again putting them in circulation constitutes a socially dissident activity—insofar as the act of taking objects from the world of use takes issue with one of the principal values of the bourgeois—then what function does this practice represent in an official system that denies the existence of a bourgeois class (and other social classes)? That is, against whom or what is the dissidence? Or, put another way, is it even possible to be a dissident? In Cuba, the representations of waste collection create a paradoxical effect when compared to those of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Here, the subjects “dive” because in this way they can “earn more,” or accumulate capital. As one of them explains, this is a more profitable task because it is not possible to live on what the State provides its citizens with. So, the dissidence is not against a mechanism that reveals a lifestyle characteristic of the capitalist machine (as Benjamin had put it)—rather, the dissidence is in favor of this economic and social model. Dissidence in Cuba, in this case, means—as much as possible—accumulating capital and becoming “bourgeois” if possible, although, in more realistic terms, dissidence is the dream of becoming bourgeois and accumulating capital by means of garbage collection: A dream of a nightmare. In the final analysis, as the young buzo who studied at the University of Havana and is a computer specialist said:

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the future is increasingly uncertain […] the world has gotten to a level of total destruction because you see what wars are like, epidemics, diseases […] there are a lot of us, and very few of us can get ahead.

8  Intermission II: Berni For years, men, women, and children have collected paper, old rags, cans, glass, and even bones, piling them up to use as a source of heat and warmth in their precarious homes. The Argentine painter Antonio Berni (1905–1981) portrayed the misery of garbage collectors in the lower Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires through the invention of the character Juanito Laguna, a young man who must dig through the waste that the city discards daily in order to survive (Fig. 3.1). With the creation of Ramona Montiel, another of his most well-known and beloved characters, Berni refined his imprints, creating xilo-collages-­ reliefs and assemblages, a process that consists of recycling materials that pertain to Ramona’s daily life—from cloth, wigs, and artificial flowers to old brooms, used clothes, trinkets, coins, and buttons—with which he created molds that would later be printed in a technique like woodcutting. The result is a composition of elements in high relief on handmade paper, which creates a thick and firm texture printed on the surface (Fig. 3.2). Through the unique combination of everyday materials and brutal realism, Berni tried to express the harsh reality resulting from unbridled urban growth in Argentine society at the beginning of the 1960s. For the painter, “[Ramona] is the symbol of another social reality also filled with misery, as is Juanito” (1984, 25; cit. in Giunta et al. 1999, 191). The use of trash and obsolete objects to create aesthetic artifacts that combine the labor of recycling with denunciation was a precursor to the increasingly broader phenomenon that became a distinctive component of Latin American cultural reality at the turn of the twenty-first century. Berni’s work takes a specific sociocultural activity and develops an innovative aesthetic from it. What’s more, it functions as a device that connects two different dimensions, insofar as it responds to interests that are dissimilar but share the practice of recycling discarded and obsolete materials, waste, and trash. Using trash and obsolete objects is also at the origin of cartonero publications, which are produced with recycled cardboard that was collected by the cartoneros, catadores, pepenadores, and buzos. From their founding in Buenos Aires, cartonero publications have grown and expanded throughout Latin

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Fig. 3.1  Juanito va a la ciudad [Juanito Goes to the City] (1963) by Antonio Berni (1905–1981). Reproduced with permission from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, 2007.1167 © Luis Emilio De Rosa, Argentina. Photograph © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Thomas R. DuBrock

America. In a similar vein, the cultural and urban installations that were undertaken by eight Mexican and German artists with the aim of attaining “more efficient environmental management systems” produced works

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Fig. 3.2  Ramona costurera [Ramona the Seamstress] (1963) by Antonio Berni (1905–1981). Reproduced with permission from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, 2007.1167 © Luis Emilio De Rosa, Argentina. Photograph © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Thomas R. DuBrock

related to the management of waste, which, by means of different aesthetic proposals, were able to educate “the community regarding necessary changes in our consumption habits,” while generating “a new vision of social responsibility” (Duckwitz 2010, 8). Along these same lines, we can

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include the eco-furniture produced by the designer Santiago Morahan from Entre Ríos, Argentina, or the socio-cultural environmental sustainability projects carried out by the Brazilian artist Águida Zanol, among many others.46

9   From the Street to the (Art) Workshop and Back Again Contributions from the social sciences, especially from cultural anthropology and ethnography, have helped to positively change the meaning of the labor of garbage collectors and to clarify some of the related aspects of their history, their modes of organization, the tension and results of their work, and their hopes. The transcription of fieldwork undertaken by various researchers offers a personal perspective on the difficulties and challenges that cartoneros, catadores, pepenadores, and buzos have confronted and continue to confront.47 Nonetheless, these works do not consider the labor of writers, visual and plastic artists, and designers who, through creative and innovative initiatives, reveal the emergence of other networks and forms of “solidarity.” Although these aesthetic efforts take place in the city, they occur in a specific spatiality, such as a museum, a bookstore, a

46  Increasingly, more artists in Latin America, as well as other parts of the world, are using waste with the objective of transforming it into art. One notable example is the Belgian photojournalist Huguette Roe. See http://www.hroephoto.com/recycle/recycle.html. Also see Kelly Wood’s exhibition, Continuous Garbage Project (1998–2003), in which the artist photographed trash and waste for five years. Other diverse ways of addressing the relationship among waste, trash, and art can be seen in the following works: Chris Driessen and Heidi Van Mierlo (1999): Tales of the Tip. Art on Garbage; Lea Vergine (2007): When Trash Becomes Art: TRASH Rubbish Mongo; Ana Cardin (2009): Garbage Pin. Project: “Worth VS Waste.” 47  Other works I have mentioned tangentially but also constitute an important contribution for a reading and deeper analysis of this issue are the investigations of Idalina Farias Costa (1986a): De lixo também se vive [You Can Also Live from Trash]; ÍD (1986b): O povo do lixo: um estudo sobre a estratificação social da favela Cidade Nova [Trash Dust: A Study of the Social Stratification of the Cidade Nova Favela]; Marcos Pacherres Ramírez (2003): Señora ¿ese cartón le sirve? Los niños y niñas cartoneros de Cercado de Lima [Ma’am, Do You Need that Box?: The Cartonero Boys and Girls from Cercado de Lima]; the already cited work of Eduardo Anguita (2003): Cartoneros. Recuperadores de desechos y causas perdidas; and Valeria Esclair, Valeria Mutuberría Lazarini, María Florencia Rodríguez, and Paula Rodríguez (2007): Cartoneros: ¿una práctica individual o asociativa? [Cartoneros: An Individual or Group Practice?].

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workshop, or the streets—as a platform for social performance. These spaces become stages for exchanges of value and for cultural transactions. In Argentina, together with the emergence of the figure of the cartonero as a massive phenomenon, Eloísa Cartonera simultaneously appeared. Eloísa Cartonera is the first press that produces books whose covers are completely made of cardboard collected by cartoneros. Founded as an independent project, Eloísa Cartonera has published more than 200 titles, with some by lesser-known authors as well as established ones. Ricardo Piglia, one of Argentina’s most celebrated writers, has donated a story to Eloísa Cartonera for its publication, as have Rodrigo Rey Rosa and César Aira, whose unpublished nouvelle Mil gotas [A Thousand Drops] has sold at least 800 copies. This unprecedented editorial experiment has had unexpected results, connecting the seemingly distant and irreducible limits that separate intellectual production from the street and from poverty. While this publication phenomenon began in Buenos Aires in 2003, headed by writers and artists interested in reconfiguring the conditions in which literary art is produced and consumed, it also established a model for similar projects throughout all of Latin America that looked for ways to challenge neoliberal economic politics that were being implemented and leaving large portions of the citizenry in growing poverty. Eloísa Cartonera was followed by Animita Cartonera (Santiago de Chile), Dulcinéia Catadora (São Paulo, Brazil), Felicita Cartonera (Asunción, Paraguay), La Cartonera (Cuernavaca, Mexico), Mandrágora Cartonera (Cochabamba, Bolivia), and Sarita Cartonera (Lima, Peru), among many others (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4). Along these same lines, the Argentine designer Santiago Morahan has also created and designed a wide range of eco-furniture and utilized recycled cardboard as his primary raw material. His project Diseño Cartonero (Cartonero Design) embodies the same spirit of solidarity that led the Eloísa Cartonera press to embark upon its editorial project. Morahan buys cardboard from the cartoneros at a higher price than the recycling companies would normally pay. Then he makes all of his pieces by hand, transforming each one of them into a unique creative expression. The efforts of the Brazilian artist Águida Zanol go back to 1992 when the art educator, eco-designer, and agent set out to make diverse clothing designs with recycled elements and objects. Her project, Art Wear (Wearables), besides founding a school of design using recyclable and reused materials, two years later established the “Carnaval dos Catadores de Papel” for whomever designed and made all of their clothes with

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Fig. 3.3  Book covers from Eloísa Cartonera Publishing House (Buenos Aires). Courtesy of Eloísa Cartonera Ltda. Cooperativa de Trabajo Gráfico, Editorial y de Reciclado

discarded materials. In fact, the “Projecto Reciclar – T3” started the first design school of reuse and recycling in Brazil, which was definitively established in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais) in 1998. Besides its aesthetic approach, Zanol’s project seeks to generate a certain sensibility regarding what is discarded, and also to motivate and awaken an awareness of waste and, above all, of the available ways to transform trash and waste into sustainable products—processes of exchange that likewise incorporate community labor in a broader sense. Although one could very well include a large part of Latin America, in Argentina and Brazil recycling has become an issue that is not only environmental but also social. It has given and continues to give rise to the emergence of a wide network of joint efforts in which poverty and creative imagination intersect. In contrast to what occurs in the majority of “developed” societies, these aesthetic-social proposals emerge as a possible example of how to reimagine policies as well as demands formulated by environmental justice movements by staging the set of relationships that

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Fig. 3.4  Book covers from Eloísa Cartonera Publishing House (Buenos Aires). Courtesy of Eloísa Cartonera Ltda. Cooperativa de Trabajo Gráfico, Editorial y de Reciclado

the community itself reveals in order to approach the recycling process through more group efforts—and less individual ones—that are more aligned with the practices of labor organizations. According to the creators of Eloísa Cartonera in their “manifesto,” this began in 2003 during those furious days when people took to the streets, protesting, struggling, putting neighborhood assemblies together, popular assemblies, bartering clubs. […] In those days men and women had lost their jobs, and they spilled into the streets en masse looking for bread and ways to fill the pot, as they say, and we met the “cartoneros” […] Then, the price of paper to make books increased, along with the number of unemployed, the bartering clubs, and the “cartoneros” who were wandering the streets with their carts full of cardboard; and the idea was born, as well as the need to change the system (cit. in Bilbija and Carbajal 2009, 57; original emphasis)

In Mexico, the case of Residual involved an art project that, beginning with collective interaction, aimed to act as an agent for change or to

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propose alternatives that contributed creative solutions for responsible waste management and, in turn, to operate in certain social contexts in Mexico City. According to the curators, this artistic undertaking set out to generate “a sense of shared responsibility at all levels instead of attributing the situation to government failures and neglect” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 24). As actions related to the practice of public art are broad, the project had to take another shape than that of an “ornamental” urban sculpture whose function was exclusively aesthetic and contemplative; it had to be an “artistic intervention” that developed with the active participation of the community and with the goal of posing a collective problem. Thus, again taking the initiatives generated by what is known as “site-specific art, public art or contextual art,” the project was particularly interested in practices that “had been developed during the last few decades by individual artists in different places and were not continuous in time” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 24). There was increasing diversification and even approaches based on processes in which “artists had started creating particular situations that gave place to a process of dialogue. Thus, the content of the work was whatever happened during this process” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 24). The process followed the model of the German artist Joseph Beuys, which looked to shift attention toward community action and whose symbolic reach resulted in what was called “social sculptures”: “constructions where each individual was regarded as a sculptor or architect insofar as he or she actually shaped the collective order” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 25). One example of this artistic practice was the 7,000 Oaks project, which took place for Documenta 7 in 1982: “In it, the condition of sculpture as an object was diluted by the participation of the audience, for the oaks were actually planted by the visitors of the exhibition” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 25). Following this approach, the projects that formed Residual had to turn art into a tool for communication and negotiation, inviting participation, dialogue, and intervention from various actors in society, revolving around the situation of waste and trash. They also had to serve the purpose of locally building sustainable and effective models: “Thus, the projects had to be inserted in specific social contexts, and aimed at triggering specific changes in them” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 25). The projects had to have characteristics of participation and process, and form necessary and important components in the communities in which they were placed.

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The Residual project took place in the Delegación de Cuauhtémoc and at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with eight invited artists—four Germans and four Mexicans—assigned with the purpose of fulfilling constructive proposals that could lead to dialogues as well as exchanges. The proposals’ impact should also contribute to improving waste management as well as recovering public spaces and strengthening the sense of belonging to the community. Because of its collective character, it was defined as a social and community insertion project, which had to translate into proposals for public artistic interventions—physical, in the media, or in print—through the participation of different groups. The groups ranged from university researchers interested in the study of waste, residents of zones where the urban interventions would be carried out, civil servants with decision-making power posts, or even public service employees who cleaned and swept the streets. It is important to emphasize the collaborative and transdisciplinary character of this project: not only did the participants share a common objective related to the social and cultural impact of the initiative itself, but what had originally been thought of as a work of art would end up cutting across multiple academic disciplines as well as social spheres, classes, and genders, and, in the same way, spatial limits, practices, and origins. Although each one is different, the eight projects put forward eight ways to approach the problem of waste and its impact and relationship to environmental issues, from an aesthetic perspective and also with a transformative component. Eduardo Abaroa was in charge of the “Carnaval de la basura/Garbage Parade,” which consisted of a community event to reflect on the possibilities for the reuse of diverse materials that are habitually thrown out. The “Garbage Parade” was based on the idea of storing (collecting and gathering) and community cooperation. It was proposed to raise “collective awareness” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 43). For this project, a five-meter-high dinosaur was constructed with plastic PET bottles, two giant spheres covered with Tetra-Pak packaging, and a medusa with six tentacles made of colored plastic bags, among other things. The event was held on Sunday, 4 July 2010, in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico (Historic Downtown). Raúl Cárdenas’s project “Torolab. Instituto de la basura/Embassy of Waste” was an “architectural intervention” on the Museo del Estanquillo’s terrace, and it consisted of reusing 10,000 Tetra-Pak cartons and wooden crates no longer in use that had transported important works of Mexican art and that, according to their characteristics, were redesigned to be

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“tables for the working sessions, as well as filing cabinets” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 56). Recycling—and therefore transforming—these materials previously used for moving artworks, Cárdenas’s project suggests an important inversion of the transfer value of an object that previously lacked value. His project takes an object through, according to Thompson’s theoretical proposal, a transitory category to a new “durable” value. But the most significant transformation came about from the fact that, while the work of art implies something that is priceless, the packaging is a periphery and marginal element. By utilizing this waste material, Cárdenas confers it a durable, vital, and permanent role, superseding its originally ephemeral, secondary, and temporary role. This changes its complementary and incidental category to a primary and important one. What existed before as mere packaging—a sort of shell or outfit that covered the central body of a piece whose value was estimated as incalculable—becomes, through this initiative, a work of art, although it has a double and simultaneous functionality: through the creative imagination of the artist it becomes a table, but it also becomes a vehicle of dialogue and exchange, refuting the implied unidirectionality in the relationship that is established between the work of art and the subject who contemplates it. Even more, the art object atomizes this limited relationship and transforms it into one of multiple dimensions: a constellation of possible relationships, interactions, exchanges, meanings, and even negotiations. The metamorphosis carried out through this process sparks possibilities in an object or material that seems “dead” in appearance, turning it into a new and sophisticated one, whose multiple meanings were latent and hidden up to that moment. It is, nonetheless, the artist who sparks these capacities that emerge with a new, more profound, and innovative value and scope. Another original initiative was Minerva Cuevas’s proposal “MVC.  Biotec—Proyecto de biorremediación/MVC.  Biotec—Biorepair Project.” Interested in the almost imperceptible microbiological phenomena that are generated around trash, as well as the possibility that these phenomena contribute to a natural form of biorepair of the environment—that is, “to return it to its original condition”—Cuevas presented a multidisciplinary approach that was inserted into the line of works made for the Mejor Vida Corp (MVC) (Better Life Corp), which focused on the “study of biodegrading microorganisms and the possibility of regenerating affected soils” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 62). Beginning with an investigation that included visits to the Bordo Poniente

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sanitary landfill in Mexico City, where she collected soil samples and plastic objects that were later analyzed at the UNAM laboratory, she presented her results at an installation at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes (Arts and Sciences University Museum) in Colonia Roma (2010). She visually displayed part of her research and documentation, along with “plastic objects, bags, and bones extracted from the Bordo Poniente landfill” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 65). One of the most singular aspects of this proposal was Cuevas’s interest in deconstructing the embedded organic complexity of elements that take more than 500 years to disappear. The aim was for these objects to return to their initial state as much as possible. We can suggest, therefore, that this cultural intervention project intended to promote a temporal ellipsis (or a pause in the teleological rhythm) that omits or makes the industrial production and the accelerated consumption of present-day societies invisible. In other words, the project suppressed the teleological rhythm or flow that implies progress and a return to more basic, primitive, and presumably intact forms. Nonetheless, as Bruno Latour (2004) suggests, there is no such thing as a non-mediated “nature,” whether socially or culturally. Nevertheless, Minerva Cuevas’s proposal is interesting because, although the general tendency is to perceive the problem of trash on a “macro-scale” and to think, therefore, about solutions of such magnitude, the project went in a diametrically opposite direction, which is equally important, since microorganisms naturally decompose and degrade plastic trash, among other types of refuse (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 65). Therefore, this initiative not only tried to deconstruct the processes deeply entrenched in industrial production, it also altered the focus of attention by shifting the gaze to what one does not generally see. It continued to show that the problem of waste, trash, and garbage is an environmental one, intimately linked to what is there and, at the same time, what is not exposed. When the waste problem is confined to an invisible space, it becomes difficult to clearly perceive its dimension and magnitude as well as its impact and effect on a global scale. Claudia Fernández, with “Prototipo de campaña educativa para la separación y reciclaje de residuos/Prototype for a Residue Separation and Recycling Education Campaign,” was in charge of a “pilot project” for the management and separation of inorganic residue generated at home, susceptible of “being replicated in other communities inside and outside of Mexico City” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 74). Fernández chose the Alameda of Santa María la Ribera (a central plaza with a park) to

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carry out her project, which turned into a “visual educational campaign” that took advantage of commercial publicity resources, although “based on the antagonistic discourse of consumer society,” to describe the “existence of the universe and the origin of life, proposing a change of awareness” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 74–75). This initiative also established an instrumental investment of resources that are generally used to further consumerism and, thus, neglect (or destroy) the ecosystem. Beginning with an operation that recycled discursive strategies, it was possible to conceive the act of recycling as a figure, image, and metaphor. Fernández did this by creating an anti-consumerist consciousness that generated, at the same time, a practice among the population that focused more on ecological preservation than on thoughtless and impulsive ecological destruction. Accordingly, besides fomenting the practice of recycling and reusing of discarded elements through commercial reuse, Fernández’s intervention showed that one can reuse and recycle the same mechanisms and devices for opposite purposes—in this case, education and implementation of a more sustainable praxis within the map of our daily actions and activities. Ulrich Genth and Heike Mutter’s proposal, “Puesto precario—El balance entre el confort y el esfuerzo/Precarious Stand—The Balance Between Comfort and Effort,” started with the premise that the food stands of Mexico (as in other parts of the world) have a precarious status. They proposed to “subtly disrupt the illusion” that people have of living in apparently stable conditions. This same illusion takes them away from an in-depth understanding of current dangers and threats to humanity (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 86). The project generated a large quantity of “biodegradable packaging for food made with local materials […] such as corn or sugar cane residues” (Cornejo Moreno-­ Valle and Ortega 2010, 86 and 89). One of the most suggestive initiatives was Tue Greenfort’s “Energía residual/Residual Energy,” whose intention was to align with the interests manifested in previous works in which specific contemporary urban life conditions were critiqued: those that have fundamentally negative repercussions on the environment. In this sense, Greenfort again takes up artistic proposals that seek to generate awareness of all available options for addressing and solving the present problems. Greenfort examines those who cause the problems as well as those who suffer from them, focusing principally on the gradual transformations of a system starting with small

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changes that act as sparks to modify urban conditions in certain places.48 Also, this project had a double objective: to inform the inhabitants of Mexico City about the final destination of the waste they generate and the grave consequences that irresponsible management represents for society in terms of subsoil water contamination, the loss of biodiversity, and wasteful management of common resources; and also, to offer a possible solution to the growing problem of waste and trash. When organic and inorganic waste is deposited in open-air dumps or sanitary landfills every day without regulation or oversight, bacteria begin to decompose it and produce highly explosive methane gas, and, as we have previously mentioned, this gas constitutes a risk to people who live or work in or near these dumps. Likewise, these uncontrolled gases make up one of the principal causes of present-day global warming. Nevertheless, the commercialization of biogas (methane) can have notable benefits and provide a “sustainable source of energy.” Following this logic, Greenfort constructed a lighthouse powered by methane from trash (Cornejo Moreno-­ Valle and Ortega 2010, 100).49 This approach reunited two fundamental characteristics that bring us to question the importance of art in the context of environmental threat: first, as an artistic effort, it consists of a direct intervention with and in the urban environment through a proposal that bridges a broad and varied number of categories, which include social, economic, cultural, and poetic ones; second, there is a link to the creation of an updated awareness regarding the dangers of irresponsible and ignorant behavior. Simultaneously, this approach generated a concrete response to two contemporary problems: one, what to do with trash; two, what trash can be “recycled” as energy, thereby helping to preserve finite natural resources, prevent global warming, and avoid soil contamination, as well as potential explosions and fires caused by the high content of flammable materials in garbage dumps. A direct result of trash and waste, Greenfort’s lighthouse illuminates—literally and metaphorically—the

48  Regarding this type of transformation, Paulina Cornejo Moreno-Valle proposes “theories such as Jaime Lerner’s urban acupuncture or Raúl Cárdenas’s (Torolab) molecular urban planning” that contrast notably with the attitudes of a population who “no longer feels attached to its city and the social fabric is torn.” These attitudes facilitate the deterioration and transformation of common spaces into a veritable “no man’s land” (2010, 240; original emphasis). 49  This option regarding waste management and the use of renewable resources is beginning to be implemented in Sweden. See note 5 in Chap. 1.

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ominous darkness of all those discarded and eliminated elements, and the lives that have ended due to the persistence of these conditions. Other works developed within this proposal were Pia Lanzinger’s “Tres piezas para barrenderos—De lo invisible a lo visible/Three Pieces for Sweepers—From Invisible to Visible,” and Thomas Stricker’s “La tierra nueva de Tlatelolco/Tlatelolco’s New Land.” The first tried to revert—or propose a change of meaning for—the general perception of the cleanliness of Mexico City’s “Centro Histórico” and the work of its street sweepers. To do this, Lanzinger carried out a performative intervention that returned a certain visibility to them (as trash becomes invisible, so do the efforts and work of those who sweep the streets and keep the city clean). Lanzinger created these “three pieces” so that “through staged performances, the street sweepers” and sanitation workers would attract the public’s attention and consideration for the value of the job they do as well as for their “worth as persons” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 110). Lanzinger’s dramatic proposals were set up on three different stages. This project to give visibility to urban trash collectors in Mexico City— even though it dealt only with “official” collectors—connects Lanzinger’s work to the works of Aira, Livón-Grosman, Mclean, the directors of Tren Blanco, Parra, Marcos, Vera, and the Brazilian designer, Águida Zanol. Their narratives confer a certain visibility to these subjects and shift attention not only to the important work they carry out, but also to the very problem of looking at trash itself and those who work with it and, in turn, to the scale of the problem. This change in the way one looks at trash, therefore, constitutes a new production of meaning, which, through a rhetoric of waste, functions as a tool of criticism and cultural inquiry. Stricker’s project consisted of a “replicable and decentralized model for an autonomous composting plant” in which those who lived in the surrounding area and those interested could process the organic residue they generate (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 123). Also linked to the problem of visibility, this project was set up as an “invisible social sculpture” that, through “integrated” and “almost sculptural” planning, transformed space in Tlatelolco (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 123–124). The proposal was symbolic, insofar as it generated a “positive” image in an area of the city that is generally associated with a negative past, such as the massacre of 1968 and the earthquake of 1985, as well as its “decay and crime rates” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 124). Even more importantly, Tlatelolco was precisely where the pre-Columbian bartering market was held—Tlatelolco means “the art of exchange” in

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Nahuatl—so that this project would be located amid “the social sculpture” (Cornejo Moreno-Valle and Ortega 2010, 124). This proposal was suggestive as much for its symbolic character as for the idea that when one gives a new use and life to organic waste, one reinforces the notion of recycling as a conceptualization of an order that regenerates and is reborn. Recycling gives a second or new life that guarantees the continuity of the ecosystem and solves—or at least tentatively considers a solution to—the daily problem of the destination of organic waste.

10  By Way of Conclusion: A Bio/ Ecocritical Reading The significant and distinctive traits analyzed throughout the various sections of this chapter suggest that, within an ecocritical framework, it is necessary to turn to a number of concepts drawn from diverse critical and theoretical perspectives in order to understand the labor of cartoneros, pepenadores, catadores, and buzos, as well as the production of artistic artifacts and urban performative interventions that use recycling as one of the principal vehicles of expression for their production. In the context of Latin America, the concepts of “environmental justice,” “environmentalism of the poor,” and “globalization” encapsulate the most important positions from which to understand and illuminate many of the aspects that we have pointed out and emphasized over the course of this chapter. Environmental justice as much as environmentalism of the poor are linked to the claims of social justice movements and, by extension, environmental movements that question the disproportionate impact that environmental dangers can have on diverse social sectors and their ability to further inequality. They likewise claim the need to confer a certain ability for political “empowerment” to unrepresented subjects who are exposed to such dangers (Wenz 1988). This fundamentally relates to the first part of this chapter in which the textual and visual narratives examined represent the collective effort that is born out of the most basic needs for survival. Unlike Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, or the majority of Latin American countries, in “developed” countries the social justice movement generally consists of an ideological position. Some examples are civil rights movements, anti-toxicity movements, Indigenous struggles, labor movements, and environmental and academic activists. These differ from the situation and condition of the cartoneros, pepenadores, catadores, and buzos who,

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through their practices, have become a paradigmatic model of how a political gesture involving the environment comes about as a result of pressing economic needs, which are devoid of an a priori political ideology.50 Regarding the concept of “globalization,” I understand this term to refer to the mechanisms and institutions through which a distinctive form of “first-world” capitalism has been imposed upon the Global South where labor rights and environmental protections are lax, unenforced, or non-­ existent (Merchant 2008, 20–21). Therefore, this new form of colonial imperialism has resulted in greater impoverishment and environmental peril, and the archetypes of these dire conditions lie at the heart of the textual, visual, and cinematic representations analyzed throughout this chapter. In the context of ecological and social inequity, I evoke a final distinctive trait of the Latin American phenomenon: the creation of a type of grassroots activism that generally occurs on a chaotic stage where the national economy lacks stability and State-sponsored policies of social assistance are, if not completely, at least partially absent. This continuous crisis of representation allows for new forms of communal work through which networks of solidarity emerge. One wonders to what extent these extreme and difficult conditions are necessary preconditions for an eco-­ consciousness that advocates for a radical social and political transformation. Like the Yerba Mala (another cartonero press) manifesto suggests, a book “made of cardboard is something that is repeated, a material that gives back, and a thing that transforms” and it is something that at one time was a tree from whose bark the cardboard was made and then transformed into a box to carry bottles of wine, detergent, or chocolates; now it has a prolonged life because those who did not have another source of income picked it up with the intention of selling it to a recycling factory. Thanks to an idea and a lot of determination, what was going to be trash is now a book. (cit. in Bilbija and Carbajal 2009, 22; my emphasis) 50  To the question of the significance of the Argentine “crisis” of 2001, Paiva suggests that, on one hand, it influenced the growth of the activity of waste collection as unemployment rose and raised the price of recyclable material, although fundamentally it was a decisive element in the reconfiguration of the traditional figure of the ciruja into a new social subject known as the cartonero. On the other hand, besides being the most visible exponent of the high levels of poverty in the country at the time, the figure of the cartonero was dignified while, at the same time, environmental discourses were activated and associated with this labor (discourses that, for a time, were kept at the academic level and at certain sectors of the legislative corps of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires) (2008, 103).

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The practice of recycling and reuse of discarded objects can be read as a vehicle of transformation, but also as a device for investing, questioning, or reassessing or, simply, as an ideological intervention or an act of insubordination. If capitalist logic promotes more accelerated consumption and disposal by means of the industrial machine, which, in turn generates a crisis of “expiration” related to objects as well as subjects, then, in the same way, a political position, a value, a vision, or a world view can also be transformed. The environmental crisis urgently demands a deceleration of consumption in tandem with the imperative to reuse already extracted and manufactured resources. That is to say, it demands that we recycle. In the same vein, there is a need to recover discarded and displaced ideas and relocate them into the center of critical and theoretical inquiry, promising them a new life––a world-making approach, as proposed recently by Mary Louise Pratt (2022)––that does not confine them to a unidimensional path of thought and logic that closes off all possibilities of discussion or alternatives (including the marginalization and invisibilization of waste as well as of residual humans and human ruins).

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Ortega, Gonzalo. 2010. La era de los residuos y las emisiones. In Residual: Intervenciones artísticas en la ciudad, 215-223. México D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / Museo Universitario Contemporáneo de Arte. Pacherres Ramírez, Marcos. 2003. Señora ¿ese cartón le sirve? Los niños y niñas cartoneros del Cercado de Lima. Cercado de Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Paiva, Verónica. 2008. Cartoneros y cooperativas de recuperadores: una mirada sobre la recolección informal de residuos. Área metropolitana de Buenos Aires, 1999-2007. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros. Parra, José Luis. 1958. Mis amigos los pepenadores. (La vida de un Maestro de Banquillo). México: J. Pablos. Peet, Richard and Watts, Michael (eds.). 1996. Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements. London; New York: Routledge. Plumwood Val. 2005. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Florence: Taylor and Francis. Pomian, Krzysztof. 1990. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800. Cambridge: Polity. Poniatowska, Elena. 1969. Hasta no verte, Jesús mío. México: Ediciones Era. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2022. Planetary Longings. Durham: Duke University Press. Rathje, William L., and Cullen Murphy. 1992. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Rogers, Heather. 2005. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York; London: New Press. Schamber, Pablo. 2008. De los desechos a las mercancías: una etnografía de los cartoneros. Buenos Aires: SB. Schamber, Pablo, and Francisco M.  Suárez. 2007. Prólogo. In Recicloscopio: Miradas sobre recuperadores urbanos de residuos de América Latina, ed. Pablo J.  Schamber and Francisco M.  Suárez, 9–15. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la UNLa / Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento / Prometeo Libros. Schmidt, Sabine Maria. 2010. Acerca de arte y basura. In Residual: Intervenciones artísticas en la ciudad, eds. Duckwitz, Edmund, and Sabine Maria Schmidt, 255–263. México D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / Museo Universitario Contemporáneo de Arte. Shanks, Michael, David Platt, and William L.  Rathje. 2004. The Perfume of Garbage: Modernity and the Archaeological. Modernism/Modernity 11 (1): 61–83. Baltimore, MD. Smith, Douglas. 2010. Scrapbooks: Recycling the Lumpen in Benjamin and Bataille. In Trash Culture: Objects and Obsolescence in Cultural Perspective, ed. Gillian Pye, 113–128. Oxford; New York: Peter Lang. Soja, Edward. 1996. Los Angeles, 1965-1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-Generated Crisis. In The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Edward Soja and Allen J. Scott, 426–462. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Strafacce, Ricardo. 2008. La boliviana. Buenos Aires: Mansalva. Sundgren, Johan, and Stefan Jonsson. 2003. Los pepenadores = The scavengers = Sopsamlarna. México, D.F.: Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares. Sze, Julie. 2002. From Environmental Justice Literature to the Literature of Environmental Justice. In The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy, ed. Joni Adamson and Mei Mei Evans, 163–180. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Thompson, Michael. 1979. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Vautrin, Jean. 1997. Le roi des ordures: roman. Paris: Fayard. ———. 1998. El rey de la basura: novela. México, D.F.: Edivisión; Editorial Diana. Verbitsky, Bernardo. 2003. [1957]. Villa Miseria también es América. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Vicente Muñoz, Jorge, and Daniel Rech. 2000. O catador de papel e o mundo do trabalho. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Pesquisa e Assessoria em Educação. Viera, Paulo. 1994. Plínio Marcos: A flor e o mal. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Firmo. Viney, William. 2014a. Waste : a Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2014b. T.S. Eliot and the Textualities of the Discarded. Textual Practice 28 (6): 1057–1075. Wenz, Peter. 1988. Environmental Justice. Albany: State University of New York Press. Windmüller, Sonja (2010). Confrontaciones entre el hombre y la basura: La investigación sobre los deshechos en los estudios culturales, o lo que la basura nos dice sobre nosotros mismos. In Residual: Intervenciones artísticas en la ciudad, 159–163. México D.F.: Universidad 361 Nacional Autónoma de México / Museo Universitario Contemporáneo de Arte. Wohlfarth, Irving. 1986. Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier. New German Critique 39: 143–168. Wolin, Richard. 1982. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. New York: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Preservation: Nature and Urbanism from Utopia to Dystopia

…there is nothing like a single fixable utopian content […] Thus I’d say that what is essential about the concept of utopia is that it does not consist of a certain, single selected category that changes itself and from which everything constitutes itself, for example, in that one assumes that the category of happiness alone is the key to utopia. —Theodor Adorno, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing” [1964] (1988, 7)

1   Utopian Imaginaries and Urban Territories To trace a genealogy of the intersection between the utopian imagination and the configuration of urban spaces would exceed the scope of this chapter. I will therefore limit this section to the twentieth century, and discuss some more recent texts in the last part of this chapter. I agree with David Harvey (2000) that most of modernity’s great urban planners, engineers, and architects embarked on projects that combined a varied imaginary of alternative worlds both on a physical and social level. They also showed practical concern about the engineering and creation of urban and regional spaces according to the most radical designs. Some examples are the paradigmatic Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright, who laid the foundations for both an imaginative concept and a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Heffes, Visualizing Loss in Latin America, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28831-9_4

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creative imaginary. At the same time, many professionals focused on the task of making their dreams a reality with bricks and mortar in highways and towers, cities and suburbs, and they created and erected new metropolises, intimate communities, and innovative urban areas. The most evident—and clearly necessary—reason for these components to be articulated in such an orderly way is that a large amount of these alternative proposals of social interactions had to take place in specific physical structures. Harvey defines these as “utopias of spatial form” that denote an emphatic relationship with geography and history, space and time (2000, 160). In these spaces, the temporality of the social process, that is to say, “the dialectics of social change—real history—are excluded while social stability is assured by a fixed spatial form” (Harvey 2000, 160). These utopias stand out significantly from the utopian theories and ideas that Harvey calls “a particular conception of historical process,” singling out how “[w]hereas More gives us the spatial form but not the process, Hegel and Marx give us their distinctive versions of the temporal process but not the ultimate spatial form” (2000, 174). These two aspects of the same utopian tendency constitute a contradiction, even more so when it comes time to formulate a theory of utopia: the problem arises because spatial utopias generally look to stabilize and control the very processes that must be set in motion in order to construct them. In the act of materializing, therefore, the historical process acquires control over the spatial form that supposedly must shape and steer it. For Harvey, ultimately, both aspects must be considered simultaneously: “Given the defects and difficulties of utopias of both spatial form and social process, the most obvious alternative […] is to build a utopianism that is explicitly spatiotemporal” (2000, 182). The utopian representations to which I will refer in this chapter coincide in their way of privileging the urban territory over other spatial variables.1 In this sense, it is important to underscore that, since classical 1  Besides focusing on spatial utopias, the narratives analyzed here are inscribed within the category of “abstract utopias,” according to Ernst Bloch’s definition in The Principle of Hope (1986) [published originally in German as Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1938–1947)], that are represented by a space whose transformation is integral, to the extent that it becomes irreconcilable. To the contrary, “concrete utopias” propose a less abrupt vision and transformation of space and society, betting on a restored present and, therefore, a possible and achievable horizon—that is to say, within the confines of reality. This specific case concerns spatial, abstract, and even “evasive” utopias, if we also consider Lewis Mumford’s proposal in The Story of Utopias (1922), insofar as they consist of proposals whose purpose substitutes the exterior world or, as Bloch proposes, transforms the attainable horizon.

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antiquity, urban space has functioned as the preferred locus where the dreams and visions of societies and citizenries different from those that conceived of them are expressed: while Plato defined urban space from a moral perspective, Aristotle did so politically, summarizing the tripartite idea of polis as that of urban agglomeration, the political unity made up of the State, and the group of citizens. Roman culture later redefined the concepts associated with the city and established new categories, such as urbs, cives, and civitas, which correspond, respectively, to the physical city, political unity, and citizenry (Caride Bartrons 2004, 6). The great contribution of the Roman Empire, however, was in establishing a “formidable” apparatus for founding cities and defining “the rationality of a geometric tracing that permitted its continuous replication independent from its location” (Caride Bartrons 2004, 6). This spatial form (or portable model), reproducible in different demarcations and in all imaginable dimensions of time and space, favored the articulation and, above all, the vision of a possible confluence between the utopian component and the urban configuration. Therefore, from this intersection to the proposal of a “no-place,” following the traditional utopian model, the specific place, oikos, or urban space in which these replicas are situated will be one from which particular political, social, and economic solutions can be inferred. Nevertheless, other less visible articulations—although no less important—also have recurred and continue to recur not only in the literary imagination, but also in the cinematic, architectural, cultural, social, national, and global utopian imaginations. One aspect of the representations of these futurist narratives, which is less explored but significant as well as urgent, is the dimension that invariably refers to the environment, nature, and even the use and preservation (or not) of natural resources. Another equally important aspect is that these utopian imaginaries hope for a promising future resulting from a balanced and prosperous association between nature and human beings. They also explore the relationship between science and technology through their implementation in natural space, which often puts forward a model of restoration and environmental improvement. It is precisely in this context that ecocriticism can function as a tool of both literary as well as cultural inquiry to address a problem that involves urban, literary, and ecological disciplines, as well as many others, and promotes a reading (or re-reading) of texts from new constellations not yet considered within the critical Latin American tradition.

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As we already pointed out in the introduction, ecocriticism is an emerging discipline within literary and cultural studies. It has been gaining a more predominant role within current literary and cultural criticism, insofar as the questions it asks are reflected in (or are the result of, or even both) some current environmental problems and issues. Although its pertinence for reading a broad production of literary, visual, artistic, and performative representations has been questioned throughout this book, I would like to suggest, nonetheless, that an ecoreading of utopian narratives can provoke a deep reflection on this rarely addressed aspect, as well as help us understand an entire tradition that is broader than a mere reference to “ecotopias.”2 Additionally, this approach allows me to emphasize that in many cases an ecological imagination has accompanied a simultaneous utopian imagination, even before literary institutions coined terms like ecocriticism and ecotopia. By the same token and as one might imagine, the blueprint of an urban space does not respond to these projections and alternative visions by assimilating a predictable series of associations such as those equating city and industrialization with corruption, vice, pollution, and contamination, among many others features. These green utopias do not postulate a natural space, or “nature,” as a refuge or magic spell with respect to the present predicament, generally inscribed in urban territory, where the living conditions are in effect detrimental and insalubrious. Moreover, these fictions do not promote the idea of a “pure” and flawless nature; on the contrary, they propose a synthesis whose result consists of greening the city, thus demonstrating that urban planning and environmental concern are not mutually exclusive, nor do they necessarily go against each other within the imaginaries of alternative worlds. Read from the current perspective of debates about urbanism, nature, and environmental sustainability, a distinctive and special element of these utopian narratives is that they propose and provide different variables and solutions with the aim of creating a habitable and sustainable green space within the very heart of the city.

2  The most popular novel among environmentalists is Ectopia (1975) by Ernest Callenbach, which, as one can tell from the title, synthesizes the utopian and ecological referents to which we have already alluded. The objectives and ideas presented in the text are also significant insofar as they combine an ecological economy with libertarian anarchism and sustainable technology. Nonetheless, as is characteristic in many utopian texts, the characters are weak, the narrator is tedious and didactic, and the plot is almost non-existent.

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2  Green Utopias, Ecological Utopias In his important book, Ecocriticism (2004), the British scholar Greg Garrard refers to the different “positions” that make up this emerging discipline. They range from the “cornucopia” position, which presupposes an inexhaustible abundance of natural resources, to positions that correspond to environmental activism (often related—although not limited— to environmental justice), deep ecology movements, ecofeminism, eco-Marxism, and social ecology, among others.3 Besides these positions, Garrard’s analysis focuses on different thematic points, such as Earth, animals, apocalypse, bucolic literature, and natural landscapes. However, a chapter that that was left out of the book is called (or would be called) simply “Utopias.”4 In this chapter (or essay) he suggests that utopian fictions show evidence of concerns regarding ecological sustainability, from the earliest examples of the genre to the most recent, and, to an extent, he proposes that utopias have always been ecotopias. According to Garrard, More’s utopia started a relatively honest tradition in the genre: while the majority of political philosophers agreed with Marx and were opposed to writing “recipes” for those in charge of crafting the future, the writers of utopias who came after More accepted the challenge of imagining the daily consequences and even the emotional and spiritual dimensions of political change. Likewise, More’s text began a genre that is probably unique in the “intertextual dynamic” of disagreement, appropriation, modification, and debate that this long tradition exhibits, insofar as each contribution refers retrospectively to previous ones and provokes new responses, from satire to alternative visions. It is important to clarify that in the Latin American utopian tradition this intertextual dynamic did not take the same shape as in the Anglophone tradition to which Garrard later refers. The Latin American tradition has more discontinuities than dialogues and dissensions, more isolated and deafer (or blinder) texts with respect to others that were produced simultaneously, or that had been written a short time before. This discontinuity even extends to simultaneous and similar publications in other languages. In the Latin American tradition, the utopian element appears much more 3  A more detailed description of all these “positions” can be found in the introduction to Ecocriticism (2004). 4  I found this chapter through the academia.edu platform, and it can be downloaded from the website . I am grateful for Garrad’s courtesy in directing me to this reference.

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deliberately as part of an entire trend of political and cultural thought in which the utopian impulse has worked principally as a “motor” of history (Aínsa 1999, 14). Garrard gives examples of this “intertextual dynamic” through a sequence that could be of particular interest to ecocritics, and they include Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), H.G.  Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) (n.d., 2–3). Although all of these utopian texts register a sort of Romantic proto-ecological concern with respect to the fate of the planet Earth, they additionally offer different responses. In Bellamy’s case, one of the first things that the main character notes when he wakes up in the year 2000 in a new city that is no longer Boston, but a technological New Jerusalem, is the absence of chimneys and smoke. At the same time, the potential association between advanced technology and organized social work also fascinates him, and he can confirm that the environmental problems of the future do not constitute a threat to the natural or rural landscape. Using the same technique as Bellamy, Morris has his main character William Guest wake up in “Nowhere” in the year 2102. However, for Morris, only an anarcho-­ communist society would be able to liberate humanity as well as nature from the tyranny of industrial capitalism. Thus, Morris’s utopia consists of a biting criticism of the oppression of humans as well as nature under increasing capitalist production: a perspective espoused by contemporary eco-Marxists and social ecologists.5 Morris differs from Marx in that he 5  Social ecology and eco-Marxism establish that environmental problems are caused not only by anthropocentric attitudes with respect to nature, but also by systems of domination and exploitation of humans by other humans. This movement is explicitly political and goes back to the nineteenth century, with origins in the anarchistic ideas of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) and Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921) and the communism of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Garrard (2004) suggests that “Eco-­ Marxists and social ecologists are therefore neither monists nor dualists” but come from a dialectical perspective that “envisages the evolution of human culture, or ‘second nature,’ from ‘first nature,’ in an ongoing process in which each defines and transforms the other.” Likewise, they do not separate environmental problems from social ones, “such as poor housing or lack of clean water.” As we have already indicated in the first chapter, they have “a clear affinity with environmental justice movements that protest the common association of acute environmental degradation and pollution with poverty.” Nevertheless, while the eco-Marxists propose achieving a communist classless society in which all other problems would disappear, “social ecology promotes a decentralized society of non-hierarchical affiliations avowedly derived from an anarchistic political tradition” (Garrard 2004, 29).

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offers the revolutionary a long recipe for change and demonstrates that change is not exclusively about a dream, but also about a plausible vision for an alternative future. In the case of A Modern Utopia, H.G. Wells’s commitment to the environment adopts another perspective. Instead of creating an anarchy that emphasizes things on a small, immediate, and local scale, as Morris does, Wells explores a parallel Earth and proposes an explicitly global utopia based on a worldwide State, governed by the monastic order of a scientific and creative samurai. Beyond the reevaluation of the place that science and technology occupy in utopia, anthropocentric imperialism is preserved, which is less than attractive for ecocritics, especially if one considers the ties that technical-scientific knowledge has had with eugenics and the international socialist State. This phase of the utopian tradition concludes with the combination of the totalitarian brutality of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which describes an oppressive state regime in which the main character has a recurring “vision” of a gilded rural space, a pastoral paradise that contrasts with the totalitarian architecture of a dystopian London, providing an imaginary escape. Garrard points out that, although the dystopian tradition is a long one and can be traced back even to Swift, the association between utopian politics and genocidal repression, stemming from a specific interpretation of European history, annihilated the socialist utopian imagination for a long time (n.d., 9). In the Anglo-American context, for example, utopian fiction only gained popularity again in 1970, although socialism replaced anarchy as a favorite political and utopian theory. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), the Earth appears as the backdrop for a world completely ruined and destroyed by the human species. Less successful, but with a better reception among environmentalists, is Ernest Callenbach’s previously mentioned novel Ecotopia (1975). In this text, an equitable society appears in which workers own and control businesses. In fact, this ecotopia emerges from a profound break with respect to the consumerism, production, and individualism that characterize US society, insofar as the government has introduced important regulatory measures to protect the environment. In this way, “governmental structures have been reorganised to relate better to regional ecological systems, in accordance with the bioregionalist understanding of how human beings belong to the part of the earth they inhabit” (Mathisen 2001, 59).

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One of the most influential utopias of the 1970s was Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). It developed a radical ecofeminist vision through a mobilizing and effective contrast between the insane asylums of New  York City and the utopian community of Mouth-of-­ Mattapoisett in the imaginary year 2137. As in Ecotopia, this community combines advanced technology with decentered and anarchistic communalism. Likewise, both utopias are similar in that children are created according to practices derived from the Indigenous peoples who once lived there. According to Garrard, a qualified enthusiasm toward science as a means of understanding and rectifying environmental and social problems makes Piercy’s utopia stand out as “a naïve contribution to ecofeminism” (n.d., 14). Consequently, the rejection of a critical commitment to science was detrimental to true ecological feminism—in her novel, Piercy makes an acute criticism of true ecological feminism as well as masculine domination (Garrard n.d., 14). Garrard’s analysis of his proposed “intertextual dynamic” concludes with the example of Margaret Atwood and her novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), whose origin as a response to an ecological crisis is rarely emphasized. The intertextual dialogue that Garrard proposes sometimes lacks coherence and justification in its selection. Additionally, the simplification of utopian variables to a unique discursivity hinders him from fully differentiating the multiple facets that encompass the genre. That said, this preliminary intent is notable because it generates an association between utopia and ecological sustainability and this linkage is much closer than what had previously been considered and studied. In this sense, it is unfortunate—and counterintuitive—that this chapter was not incorporated into the published manuscript.

3  Green Utopias in Urban Venues Since the 1516 publication of More’s Utopia, utopian fictions have combined a vision of prolepsis or a prophetic function with a satirical or critical reflection about the society from which they emerge. Therefore, utopias have offered an ambiguous history of the Earth in social and political thought for more than 500 years. In this chapter, we are initially interested in those utopian figurations that arise from the Latin American cultural and literary tradition and second, in those that privilege urban space as a

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site for reflection and critique with respect to the order and structure in which they have emerged. At the same time, these utopian depictions share a concern about ecological use (and abuse) that has not been considered, analyzed, or addressed in a systematic way. In the first section of the chapter, I will contrast two utopias from the beginning of the twentieth century to illustrate how the convergence between urban planning and environmental protection has been an integral component of the modern Latin American imaginary. I will demonstrate how this intersection has even proposed plausible alternatives to detractors from the city who equated this space with the same core of vices derived from growing industrialization (predominately in Europe) and, thus, how it has achieved a synthesis between two forms of conceiving social, metropolitan, and, above all, ecological betterment. This section, linked to the trope of environmental preservation, will later be contrasted with a corpus of textual and visual works from the beginning of the twenty-first century that again take up the utopian proposal, but with different characteristics. Ultimately, I will question the very nature of contemporary utopian formulations and compare these spatial proposals to a cluster of aesthetic expressions that are diametrically opposed to them, as if this mechanism enabled the exploration of the other side of the coin. Thus, I will contrast urban, closed, and restricted (dys)topias—very much a part of the representative corpus of the early twenty-first century—with the open and likewise urban (dys)topias from the same time frame. Considering the portrayal of spaces “external” to utopian spaces—which have remained outside of clearly demarcated configurations—the last section of this chapter will problematize the viability of these utopian proposals in a context of socio-economic (self-)segregation and disparity. The texts analyzed in the first section are Enrique Vera y González’s A través del porvenir. La estrella del sur [Through the Future: The Star of the South] (1904) and Pierre Quiroule’s (pseudonym for Joaquín Alejo Falçonet) La ciudad anarquista americana [The American Anarchist City] (1914). The first is set in Buenos Aires in 1903, and it opens with the introduction of its main character, Luis Miralta, a disillusioned skeptic whose disbelief corresponds to the very disenchantment of modernity so well expressed by Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du mal (1857). In the novel, this translates as disenchantment with respect to “Western” values: Miralta is a

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“worn out” and “used up” man who goes back to the spiritualism and esotericism of Haraontis, originally from India, who, with exotic narcotics, helps him set out on a trip that will transport him to the future (Vera y González 2000, 37). According to the fakir, Miralta is a man who is “outof-date, inadaptable to the reality of the moment,” due to the fact that he was born “before the time that was appropriate for him” (42). For this reason, the fakir proposes a trip or “transmigration” (47) through time, although Miralta remains in Buenos Aires. The procedure that allows Miralta to break with the present and embark upon a different temporality is the same one we saw in Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and in the context of Argentine literature, it was used 5 years later in another utopian novel, Buenos Aires en el 1950 [Buenos Aires in 1950] (1908), by Julio O. Dittrich. In both novels, the characters wake up in an unrecognizable Buenos Aires (Fig. 4.1). In this way, Buenos Aires becomes the epicenter of the utopia, a condition that corresponds to the attributes inherited from the urban model defined by Sarmiento: It is “the first city in the southern hemisphere, the first Spanish-speaking city, the second among cities of the Latin race, the third largest in the world in surface area” (Vera y González 2000, 53).6 In demographic terms, while the population “of the rest of the Argentine nation decreases,” the population of “Buenos Aires goes up and up,” and although there is an ecological concern about the increase of this “monstrous congestion,” the splendor that the city irradiates is emphasized (and justified). For this reason, it attracts the multitudes, becoming overpopulated (Vera y González 2000, 53). If, for Sarmiento, “city” equals “development” and “progress,” then—given its dimensions and scale—Buenos Aires embodies the abundance and prosperity that the Argentine nation needed to transform itself into a powerful nation, with Buenos Aires representing the “liberating, generous, and opulent city” (Vera y González 2000, 54). The astronomic breadth of Vera y González’s city contrasts with Pierre Quiroule’s urban proposal, as do the devices represented in the text that enable the foundation of this space. If Vera y González’s city embodies 6  In Argirópolis (1850), Sarmiento proposes that the titular urban utopia should become the capital of the “civilized State,” and the discourse that it produces simultaneously functions as a rhetorical and political device and strategy to populate the splendid Argentine nation and create wealth—which it would achieve by attracting immigrants from Europe.

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Fig. 4.1  Map of “la ciudad anarquista americana” [the American anarchist city”] (1914). Included in the first edition of the book. Photo taken by the author

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what today is defined as a megalopolis,7 Quiroule’s, contrarily, represents what would currently qualify as a suburban paradise. The megalopolis and the suburban paradise are two active paradigms in the current debate about the ecological sustainability of urban models.8 Martin Lewis’s book, Green Delusions (1992), serves as an example of a defense of the urban position. Lewis attacks the most radical environmentalists’ perspective through a program of reform that emphasizes the role of science, technology, and governmental policy change. He opposes the “Arcadian” posture that argues for the dispersal of city populations, the use of non-synthetic products, and non-technological solutions; on the contrary, for Lewis, cities are vital cultural centers and less costly than the suburbs, from the environmental point of view. Likewise, he argues that capitalism guided by educated voters and consumers can provide technological solutions to many of the problems related to the depletion of resources and pollution. 7  Curiously, Jean Gottman used the term “megalopolis” in his book Megalopolis (1961) and later, in the volume The Challenge of Megalopolis: A Graphic Presentation of the Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (1964), directed to a broader and more general audience, this term was used to define not only grand metropolitan cities, but especially grand urban regions highly connected among themselves, principally in the northeastern United States. Although this text appears as if signed by Wolf Von Eckardt, it is believed that Gottmann was involved in the book’s preparation (Baigent 2004, 690), and frequently it is erroneously attributed to Gottmann. Additionally, it is worth clarifying that the first uses of the term go back to Patrick Geddes, who, in Cities in Evolution (1915), predicts the emergence of these urban concatenations, although negatively, and associates them with economic exploitation and spiritual atrophy. According to Elizabeth Baigent, the term appears for the first time in print in 1927 (although it appears in manuscript form in some of Geddes’s essays in 1904). It will be used again later by Lewis Mumford, who also insisted on its destructive character, in The Culture of Cities (1938) and The City in History (1961) (Baigent 2004, 689). 8  Pierre Quiroule had been inspired by the “garden city” model, developed by Ebenezer Howard toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, in his book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform (1898), in which he pushes for the establishment of autonomous communities in open spaces as an alternative to disordered and unhealthy urban working class neighborhoods (Heffes 2008). Nonetheless, although the “similarities with Buckingham’s Victoria Town layout published in 1849,” an urban paradigm that influences Howard’s proposal, “are as striking as the ideological differences in [Quiroule and Buckingham]” (Armus 2011, 312–313), the “garden city” movement, as Le Corbusier expected, would unavoidably result in a continuous expansion of suburban space. On the contrary, Le Corbusier’s project for the “vertical garden city” would avoid this “horizontal” urban unraveling, and it would serve as a modern urban alternative with natural and green elements in spaces that had more human density. See Le Corbusier (1929): The City of To-morrow and Its Planning.

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Along this same line of thought is Richard North’s Life on a Modern Planet (1995), which proposes a moderate “manifesto for progress.”9 Quiroule, an anarchist activist born in France who immigrated as a child to Argentina with his father, maintains that for “human happiness to come to pass,” it is necessary to reverse modern civilization and progress” (1914, 9). Quiroule levels a sharp critique of industrialization, attacking “its immense cities and its huge speculative businesses, factors that mandate destitution and ruin” (9). Likewise, he perceives these spaces as hubs plagued with indigence and desolation. As a correction, he considers it urgent “to live a more harmonious, natural, and free life, but not in the big cities of today, nor in the bosom of this fictitious civilization, but in the new mansion” that “sensible men in the happy communist society” will build (9). Quiroule’s urban and anarchist utopia moves to the New World, America, and more precisely, Argentina, in a place called “Ciudad de los Hijos del Sol” (“City of the Children of the Sun”). For Vera y González, another foreigner who chooses Buenos Aires as the site for his urban utopia, the process of “transmigration”—a device that allows for time travel—transports his main character to a key moment: the Bicentenary of 2010.10 Unlike New York, Buenos Aires is the “city of cities” and the “capital of the southern hemisphere” (Vera y González 2000, 77). The hemispheric perspective refers, in turn, to the competition and rivalry between Buenos Aires and New York as two spaces that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, promised “development” and monumental growth, although Vera y González devalues New York and considers it “antiquated” (77). The idea of the urbanization of the world, which in recent decades has caught the attention of critics and academics starting with the emergence of megacities and global cities (Canclini 2004; Davis 2004; Sassen 1991; Soja 1989, 2000), is exemplified in Vera y González’s utopia which takes shape through the paradigm of these two rival cities: the east coast of the United States, which has been shaped into a “continuous totality” of cities that spread from Massachusetts to Virginia and whose capital is New York, and Buenos Aires. The demographic difference is that while 80 million people live in Buenos Aires, 62million live in 9  These texts suppose a posture that is also extreme. They associate the most urgent ecological problems with myths and disproportionate reactions to reality. 10  As with Quiroule, we know little about Enrique Vera y González. Hebe Clementi points out that he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1896 from Cuba, where he had emigrated from Spain in 1891 and where, 10 years earlier, he had published two “ultra radical” essays: one against those who condemn abolitionism and the other in favor of the revolution (2000, 15–16).

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New  York, and its metropolitan continuum encompasses the cities of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and all the “neighboring cities” (Vera y González 2000, 77). What counteracts all foreseeable (and legitimate) environmental concerns is the abundance in Buenos Aires of “very vast extensions of space to grow crops” and that the “air is purer” and, unlike in New York one lives with “more space, more light, and more cleanliness” (78). Although Quiroule’s utopian project, as we suggested above, is more similar to the current model of the American suburb than the ideal urban proposal that Buckingham and Howard had imagined and designed, this paradigm poses crucial problems from an ecological perspective (Ross and Bennett 1999, 18) that are counteracted through the importance of making a city green.11 In this sense, the urban projects of Vera y González and Quiroule similarly emphasize the need to clean the territory of the city through the creation of green spaces and urban “lungs,” which allow the inhabitants, as well as the city, to breathe. In the same way, and as we will see below, science functions in both utopias as the principal instrument, although not the only one, that transforms these territories into green, demographically sustainable cities, in continuous contact with nature. How do we read this effort from an ecocritical perspective? This approach certainly establishes a conflictual relationship for some ecocritics, insofar as it preserves an anthropocentric position that enables the dominion of nature by humans and, therefore, maintains an unequal relationship between both sides. From the subfields that have emerged within philosophy in recent years, environmental ethics, ecofeminism, social ecology, and deep ecology have made a significant effort to understand and critique the causes of ecosystem degradation and formulate “an alternative view of existence that will provide an ethical and conceptual foundation for right relations with the earth” (Glotfelty 1996, xxi). Nevertheless, the deep ecology position, which we already pointed out, “calls for profound changes in human lives and public policy” (Love 2003, 21). Given that human domination of the biosphere is a fundamental problem for which not only those who live in “developed” countries are responsible, and also 11  Nevertheless, in recent decades this model began to reproduce through the increasing creation of private urban enclaves, also called “luxury closed communities.” This process began much later in Latin America, as we examine in the second part of this chapter. For a general and continental perspective, see Luis Felipe Cabrales Baraja (Ed.) (2002): Latinoamérica: países abiertos, ciudades cerradas.

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given the fact that these conflicts are urgently revealed in the context of an Earth that is quickly shrinking while it is also increasingly interconnected ecologically, Love speaks of a conflict between global, ecological, and national agendas. In academic terms, he critiques the lesser role that the disciplines of the humanities assign ecology because of their anthropocentric perspective, “divorced from nature” (2003, 23). If anthropocentric thought maintains that society is complex and nature is simple, Love appeals to what Robinson Jeffers calls an “inhumanism” which entails a rejection of anthropocentrism and shifting focus from “man to not-man” (2003, 23). Furthermore, for Garrard, it is precisely the deep ecology movement that has the most influence beyond academic circles and is the inspirational force of organizations like Friends of the Earth, Earth First!, and Sea Shepherd, as well as the posture that ecocritics refer to either explicitly or implicitly. They are unlike other environmental activists in that the deep ecology movement demands acknowledgment of nature’s intrinsic values and stands in stark opposition to the conventional separation Western philosophy has erected between humans and nature (Garrard 2004, 21). Like deep ecology, Indigenous cosmogonies in Latin America ascribe intrinsic meanings independent of human value to all the entities and forms in the ecosphere such as rivers, landscapes, and non-human animals. Marisol de la Cadena’s “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes” (2010) demonstrates how contemporary Latin American Indigenous politics consist of a different and pluralistic practice that, in turn, incorporates the non-human as a fundamental actor in the political and activist arena. Additionally, Ronald Nigh and Nemesio Rodríguez’s work on territoriality, environment, and development in Latin America (1995) reexamines Indigenous representations whose cosmogonies are founded in the belief that humans are an integral and active part of the cosmos. By the same token, the most insignificant actions of humans influence everything, which contrasts with the classic Western view of “man versus nature.” Likewise, de la Cadena maintains that the Indigenous understanding differs from one that considers that our acts (for example, dumping toxic waste into the ocean) do not have an impact on ecosystems. In the Indigenous understanding, even ritual acts are judged necessary to regenerate the world to the extent that these acts are believed to influence the cosmos. This explains why the prominent figure of the shaman (the man or woman of knowledge) embodies a cultural institution that almost all native cultures in the Americas share. Their belief is based on the premise

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that the shaman operates as a privileged communicator between human beings and nature, ensuring continuity between these (Nigh and Rodríguez 1995, 68). It is worth adding to the emergence of these environmental movements and activist efforts the emergence of a philosophy that advocates for animal rights and proposes to cite only one example, extending the moral considerations attributed to humans to certain other mammals. The spiritual dimension of this “ecocentric” notion extends from Eastern religions such as Taoism and Buddhism, to heterodox figures of Christianity, and to modern reconstructions of native and Indigenous religions in the Americas. That said, the current debates about the most pertinent stances within (eco)criticism forget (or fail to consider) that the scientific component as well as the anthropocentric perspective, fundamental and inherent elements for the utopian elaborations analyzed here, have equally promoted an alternative, inclusive, collective and open imaginary through the incorporation of positions and traditions coming from not only dissimilar, but even contradictory, origins. Despite their lack of consistency, they propose disparate accounts of the green future of cities that must also be considered.

4  Science and Nature in Cities Remarkably, in one way or another, urban planning in A través del porvenir and La ciudad anarquista finds a viable way to “green” the cities through science. In Vera y González’s utopia, science has a principal role. Faithful to “scientific adhesion,” his utopian world finally achieves “the era of artificial intelligence” (Clementi 2000, 26). In the introduction to the 2000 edition, Hebe Clementi suggests that the “brain” constitutes “the great regulator, the big motor of the established society, the only means of excellence that, however, is always managed by those who know how to control it” (2000, 26). When error is taken out of the calculations, corruption, ambition, carelessness, ineptitude, and envy no longer count because they are suppressed, just like war, “because the impotence of the enemy is also universally controlled” (Clementi 2000, 26). The only aspect that remains is “adequate and positive use of what man has at his disposition for dominion: nature” (Clementi 2000, 27). Some of the key elements in the description of the city that work as scientific and technological implementations are the “autographic reproductions through electric currents modified through selenium” (Vera y González 2000, 68) (which we now call e-mails) that, in Vera y González’s

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novel, have created the “utopia of the suppression of space” (Vera y González 2000, 68). If space and time are “social constructs (implying the rejection of the absolute theories of space and time attributable to Newton and Descartes), then the production of space and time must be incorporated into utopian thought” (Harvey 2000, 182). This corresponds to the search for what Harvey calls “dialectical utopianism” (2000, 182). And, although there is still much to learn from those utopian histories and theories that concentrate as much on the spatial form as on the social or temporal process, it is in the spatial form that the idea of “imaginative spatial play to achieve specific social and moral goals can be transformed into the idea of potentially endlessly open experimentation with the possibilities of spatial forms” (Harvey 2000, 182). The manipulation of spatiality as well as temporality allows for the exploration of a large variety of “human potentialities (different modes of collective living, of gender relations, of production-consumption styles, in relation to nature, etc.)” (Harvey 2000, 182) and represents Henri Lefebvre’s idea (1974) of the production of space. Harvey presents Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the production of space “as a privileged means to explore alternative and emancipatory strategies” (2000, 182) in the configuration of a spatial form (something for which the defenders of the deep ecology movement would be profoundly grateful, even when the means used rest on the intervention and domination of nature through science), insofar as this configuration reveals why utopia is so important—including from the environmental perspective.12 Vera y González’s utopia takes place, as we already noted, in the symbolic year of 2010. In contrast, the nineteenth century consisted, in the narrator’s words, of a “period of barbarism in which humanity was scarcely beginning to spell with the scientific alphabet” (2000, 68). This utopia brings together science, technological progress, and industrial development in such a way that the speed of means of transport like ships and trains increases the extent that one could travel from Buenos Aires to New York—“the two major cities of the world”—in thirty hours (Vera y 12  In the elaboration of his proposal for a spatiotemporal utopian theory, Harvey points out that Lefebvre opposes a traditional utopian spatial theory precisely because of its “closed authoritarianism.” For Lefebvre, “the production of space must always remain as an infinitely open possibility. The effect, unfortunately, is to leave the actual spaces of any alternative frustratingly undefined.” Lefebvre opposes confronting the underlying problem as “to materialize a space is to engage with closure (however temporary), which is an authoritarian act” (Harvey 2000, 182–183).

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González 2000, 69). Solar and maritime energy resources were used, and alcohol and petroleum (which are synthetically made) substituted for the coal that already “was rarely used except in small industries” (69). The use and “escalation of mechanical engines had freed domestic animals from the slavery of the yoke and team, and only the inhabitants of very isolated regions, away from the population centers, rode horses” (69–70). Now there is a great variety of “automobiles” of all shapes and sizes, including the “lightweight type” and models for individuals that “could fold up so they took up less space” as well as “large flying machines” (70). As far as social organization, Vera y González’s project consisted of a totalitarian and positivist utopia, influenced by experimental psychology, that established a substantial differentiation between ordinary people (the “vast majority”) and those who “presented a markedly favorable character” and were the object of a “particular vigilance” (70–71).13 Nonetheless, the implementation of a—to a certain degree—socialist model links this novel to H.G. Wells’s utopia in A Modern Utopia, which, significantly, came out the following year.14 Unlike in the United States, in the utopia of the South, “a large dose of socialism has been applied,” and the “State is a very powerful machine here,” but it does not “inspire mistrust nor aversion of any kind” (79).15 The veneration of science arises from the belief that science, as a tool, can fix social problems, and the secularization of religious elements extends 13  Another paradigmatic case that establishes a distinction between people, not from experimental psychology but from a pseudoscientific discipline such as eugenics, is the Mexican novelist Eduardo Urzaiz’s Eugenia (1919), which I analyze in-depth in my book Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana (2008). 14  In A Modern Utopia, Wells suggests that science and technology are not good servants if their masters are not good (and vice versa)—therefore, they are not more determined to cause destruction or terror than any other instrument. And, as occurs in Vera y González’s story, beyond the re-evaluation of science and technology’s place in this utopia, the anthropocentric imperialism that Wells and Vera y González propose will be much less attractive for a more radical ecocriticism. 15  Throughout Vera y González’s text, the United States is the most important referent against which he contrasts Buenos Aires’s utopian traits. This comparative perspective, always to the detriment of the United States, can be read as resentment that is still present in the Spaniards after their defeat in the war of 1898, although it is also possible to read the influence of Rodo’s Ariel (1900) in reference to the threat of the “colossus of the north.” It is probably due to Ariel that, already in the twentieth century, Vera y González established his urban utopia, the “Latin American Confederation,” a geopolitical unit conceived precisely with the purpose of counteracting the growing power of the United States (Vera y González 2000, 79–80.)

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this transformation to the figure of the new priest, who is now the doctor. Therefore, those who govern are physicists, and in the process of scientific evolution through “solid and firm brains,” “tradition” was “losing all of its prestige” as well (72). In this version of the future that is imposed upon Luis Miralta, the story revolves around three main characters: the mayor of Buenos Aires, Mr. Renato de Villena, and his two children, Elisa and Augusto. Renato de Villena has just welcomed a group from Africa to “introduce them to the wonders of universal civilization”—wonders that are gathered in Buenos Aires (67). Augusto is an outstanding scientist who has just created a “gluten of analogous properties” through “direct synthesis” that not only lowers the cost of food but also makes it accessible to much of the population (73). In this way, science serves as an instrument capable of solving hunger in a world whose demographic growth (and fear about the consequent lack of natural resources) does not represent an urgent threat. Precisely due to science as well as industrial and technological production—through which artificial and/or synthetic alternatives will be created—it is possible to prevent the depletion of natural resources as well as the widespread shortage that currently characterizes many regions. The novel’s historical and geographical referents are, nevertheless, very significant. Principally, they relate to tangible qualities of the environment of Buenos Aires, they are premised on futurist technologies, and invoke a whole series of issues related to the domination of nature that has been so central to the modes of Western thought, from Francis Bacon and Descartes to the present. This idea is also central to Pierre Quiroule’s utopia, where the protagonist of the novel is an “inventor,” called, not by chance, “The Physicist.” Contrary to Vera y González’s protagonist, the main character of La ciudad anarquista americana tries to end “proletarian European slavery” by creating a weapon of mass destruction, the “Vibraliber”—a “terrible weapon” that allows “pariahs” to take revenge against capitalist oppressors and finally achieve their longed-for freedom. Thus, this “inoffensive apparatus” will end the slave-master system (Quiroule 1914, 23–25). The scientific creations in these two utopias have an ambivalent posture. In Quiroule’s novel, and against a backdrop marked by increasing industrialization, technological changes, and the ongoing exploitation of the anonymous masses, his fictional scheme consists precisely of a re-humanization of those ill-treated subjects through the creation of a natural space in which people recuperate elements lost with the advent of industrial development and other changes at the beginning of the century: nature,

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affection, and social interaction. Countering his urban model with those of gigantic capitalist and bourgeois cities, which are plagued by poverty and ruin, he suggests living in “small cities,” in harmony with open air and in intimate and continuous contact with nature (14). In turn, he opposes industrial city skyscrapers to communist houses in the shape of “beautiful chalets” (15). The landscape that surrounds the anarchist city is configured as a natural and harmonious space that contrasts with the image of the modern city: asphyxiating, dark, impure, and unhygienic. And, similarly to Vera y González’s novel, science and technology are at the exclusive service of the utopian community, its subjects, and the ecosystem that hosts them. It is worth mentioning that these two futurist projections are drastically different from the views of alternative worlds that appear in some of the contemporary narratives examined below. Recent writings take issue with the model of industrial and technological development, which argues that all nations should be able to achieve levels of economic welfare that “developed” countries enjoy; instead, they present a universe in decay, generally dystopian or adverse to the very idea of utopia. As Ramachandra Guha suggests, the optimistic followers of the idea of progress maintain that science and technology will take “developing” countries out of poverty (2000, 65). Nevertheless, in Latin America—as in most “underdeveloped” regions—corruption, poverty, debt, and growing ecological damage have increased in recent decades. A paradigmatic example of these dystopian views are the contemporary novels of Homero Aridjis, in which ecocide appears as the direct result of a disastrous alliance among individual and political interests, which are all apathetic and far removed from a genuine quest to increase the general welfare.16 In Quiroule, on the contrary, while dealing with a communal project that escapes the logic of capitalist accumulation, an early alternative model of social interaction surfaces: thus, examples and proposals that appear today, almost 100 years later, correspond to models of sustainable life and consumption. Not only are the “comrades” of the commune vegetarian (Quiroule 1914, 87), also all the “communists were farmers” who establish a close relationship with nature, which allows them to consume what

16   Laura Barbas-Rhoden extensively analyzes Aridjis’s novel in her book Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction (2011), mentioned in the first chapter,

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they produce (63).17 Another aspect of this alternative ecological proposal is the “reduction” of the “fabrication of paper” and “ink from the presses” (65). Similarly, “works of carpentry” had been reduced significantly, and the “houses were made of glass and no wood was used in their construction” (66). This avoids the cutting of trees and their shipping from one region to another while allowing the anarchist communes to be autonomous and self-sufficient, with the city located “in a part that is completely isolated from the noise of work” and vehicle traffic (63). Besides being “elegant, one-room, glass chalets, electrically cast in gigantic molds,” the houses had “double walls,” filling the empty space between them with “heat-resistant substances.” One of the principal advantages of the use of glass was cleanliness, apart from the fact that it was elegant, solid, and impermeable, thus eliminating various dirty and unhealthy jobs such as cleaning “noxious brick ovens” (75–77). This architectural design is advanced in that it efficiently preserves energy and avoids unnecessary waste. Electricity is used instead of coal; the inhabited city is also “green,” insofar as it forms an “immense park around the industrial city” (it functions as a “lung”); the streets are pedestrian and are surrounded by gardens; the city is clean and healthy, and the air is pure oxygen and not “a horrible compound of vapors and putrefaction” (75). Water, one of the most important natural resources currently, is one of the fundamental criteria at the time of identifying the place to build the city: through the use of a sophisticated technology, water was chemically purified and later used to water the crops (74). The energy sources necessary for society to function had been sought out in those “natural elements in perpetual motion: wind, rivers, waterfalls, solar heat, etc.” (260). In this way, Quiroule proposes different energy models: from wind to solar and hydroelectric. Quiroule’s tale lacks a complex fictional plot. On the contrary, it is highly descriptive of the three main characters, “Utop,” “Optimus,” and “Super” (or “The Physicist” mentioned above), communal anarchist life, and the specific reasons for its implementation. That is, Quiroule’s story lays out a detailed inventory of the program of social organization that foresees the future. In this sense, it is unlike La estrella del sur, 17  Tonje Hessen Schei’s documentary, Play Again (2010), investigates the consequences that living and playing without contact with nature have on children and adolescents, and she promotes a way of life that not only recovers a sense of nature but takes the side of creating a sustainable future.

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characterized by a more significant narrative effort. Nonetheless, the proposal of a sustainable model, the creation of an alternative vision, and the projection of these utopian elements in plausible spatial paradigms transforms both works into pioneering texts about ecological as well as urban issues.

5  Nature (Re)Appropriated: A Utopian Effort for Private Societies in the Twenty-First Century The utopian tradition as a literary effort—although also communal and social—dies away toward the end of the twentieth century. I have indicated elsewhere (Heffes 2008) that urban utopias in Latin America signal the century-long modernization process that began in the final quarter of the nineteenth century; once this transition was complete by the late twentieth century, the utopian narrative is largely absent. If urban and literary utopian imaginaries thus constitute a category of analysis in which utopian cities make up a chapter or episode that accompanies the process of modernization and industrialization (Beck [1986], 1992), does the urban utopian paradigm so characteristic of Latin American modernity reemerge at some later moment, or does this alternative model disappear entirely from the cultural imaginary? Moreover, do utopian formulations reappear in some form that offer a spatial and social configuration also aligned with ecological premises? The remainder of this chapter will focus on the emergence of a new, post-modernization variant of urban utopias in which the preservation of nature is also part of a “green” agenda, albeit through a completely different modality from the earlier urban utopias of the turn of the twentieth century examined above. In the era of neoliberal urbanization, discursive proposals situate their ecological imaginaries in an alternative urban effort carried out through private real estate projects and undertakings like those found in fortified enclaves (Caldeira 2000) and private neighborhoods. Promotional and advertising narratives describe these spaces in many different ways: urban farms, urban condominiums, residential communities, private city-towns, country clubs, and megaprojects (Rojas 2007, 15).18 18  This phenomenon is global, and similar communities can be found in the United States (gated communities), France (ensembles résidentiels sécurisés), Venezuela (alcabalas residenciales urbanas), Mexico City (fraccionamientos cerrados), Brazil (condominios fechados), and Chile (urbanizaciones cerradas o privadas) (Rojas 2007, 15–16).

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Additionally, the relationship between urban territory and the environmental agenda, when crystalized literarily in contemporary fiction, reemerges under the configuration of a different spatiality, generally dystopian, in which the idea of ecocide constitutes the epicenter of the stories. Two contrasting aspects within these contemporary figurations that mobilize the trope of ecological preservation will become apparent. First, the utopian, urban, and conservationist discourse from the early twentieth century has become, a century later, a neoliberal utopian discourse that commodifies nature (and “eco-friendly” cities) through private real estate projects. Second, beyond this socially (self-)segregated setting, another type of depiction unfolds in which any trace of green space has disappeared and where the prevailing perspective of these narratives is a dystopian ecotopia or a futurist ecocide. These works are also set within the urban space and their distinctive traits reconfigure the notion of what has been called “ecological citizenship” (Dobson 2003). The private utopias analyzed in this chapter are exclusive paradises, for if we carefully examine the satellite maps and blueprints designed by architects in charge of real estate projects, private cities, or gated communities, we can attest that a shift in the spatial imaginary has been produced that likens these gated communities to those urban models designed and proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century examined in the previous section. By the same token, these private enclaves are rhetorically promoted as green paradises, where natural and social space fuse together in an unprecedented way to form a refuge that shelters residents from the presumed and growing violence, marginality, insecurity, criminality, and pollution that contaminate and inundate society generally.19 The image of environmental preservation, as a trope, is evoked in these textual and visual narratives through a reconfiguration of the spatial imaginary— endemic to the economic tenets of the neoliberal model. This reconfiguration not only fragments the urban social fabric, it confronts the “inclusive” 19  I use “presumed” because, although violence has increased in Latin America in recent decades, many have attributed this growing perception of insecurity to the media, whose purposes, whether economic or political, are to accentuate it. This creation of fear and insecurity is not unique to Latin America, as it also lies at the heart of the gated communities in the United States. Within these structures, one finds that that the middle and upper classes share a penchant toward social exclusion from the rest of society which has become discursively framed as insecure and violent (Enríquez Acosta 2010, 2).

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with the “exclusive,” and intersects with this opposition through a “green” rhetoric in which different versions of human and non-human are likewise pitted against each other. In order to recount this shift in the configuration of spatial imaginaries and to analyze how an urban and environmental rhetoric can be appropriate for mercantilist discursivity, I will refer to Brazilian Moacyr Scliar’s short story “No Retiro da Figueira” [At the Fig Tree Retreat] (2001/1984); Mexican film La zona [The Zone] (2007) by Rodrigo Plá; Argentine Claudia Piñeiro’s novel Las viudas de los jueves [Thursday Night Widows] (2005); and the chronicle Mundo Privado. Historias de vida en countries, barrios y ciudades cerradas [Private World: Stories of Life in Private Country Club Communities, Gated Neighborhoods and Cities] (2007), by the also Argentine journalist Patricia Rojas, especially the paradigmatic case of the megacity Nordelta, in the municipality of Tigre, province of Buenos Aires. These textual and visual narratives all position themselves “within” privatized utopian formulations and expose the most significant traits of what has become one of the most exclusive paradises in Latin America. Scliar’s short story opens with a description of the place to which the main character and his family are going to move. According to the publicity brochure: The place was… marvelous. Just as the brochure said: marvelous. Full of trees, tranquil, one of the last places—so the ad said—where you could hear the song of a kiskadee. It was true. The first time we went there we actually heard a kiskadee. And we saw that the houses were sturdy and beautiful, exactly as the brochure had described them: modern, solid, and beautiful. We saw the lawns, the parks, the ponies, the little lake. We saw the airfield. We saw the majestic fig tree, the figueira, for which the condominium was named: Retiro de Figueira (“The Figtree Retreat”). (2001, 48; emphasis added).

This was the gated community which gave access to a lifestyle promising two characteristic elements of all these urban projects: nature and

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isolation.20 These two aspects are key since they prevent the “outside” from disturbing the “guaranteed” security and peacefulness of the “inside” residents.21 Scliar’s story recounts the fascination of the main character’s wife with all the typical elements of sophisticated security ensuring a protection that makes, hypothetically, its inhabitants as well as their belongings inaccessible: from the electric fence to the watchtowers, the spotlights, the alarm system, and, above all, the private security guards, who are always smiling and affable. The narrative emphasizes the sense of social and economic security for the people who decide to move to these gated communities: the publicity brochures, for example, are only sent to a limited number of people, and the main character is the only one at his workplace to receive one. It is this condition of distinction and exclusivity to which his wife attributes a “careful selection of future residents” that adds “another cause for satisfaction” to this new lifestyle (49). However, Scliar’s short story entails a fundamental paradox: the fortified enclosure in which they live turns into a trap since the very same security guards, who are “always smiling and nice,” use the residents of the gated communities as hostages to demand a ransom that will allow them, as the character says at the end, to perpetuate this real estate system of kidnapping and ransom: We never saw the boss or his men again. But I’m sure they are enjoying the ransom we paid. A sufficient quantity to build ten condominiums just like ours—which, by the way, I always thought was very good. (50).

20  In fact, in Brazil “Alphaville already exists, a private megacity; the oldest in South America: it was founded 30 years ago and measures 9,997,449.2 square meters (107,611,648 square feet)—or 997 hectares (2464 acres), 603 hectares (1490 acres) less than Nordelta— and 30,000 people already live there divided among 14 residential neighborhoods, two for business with various shopping centers, 11 schools and universities” (Rojas 2007, 16; original emphasis). The “philosophy” of this megacity is explained in the following way: “Alphaville creates spaces where you can live well. Spaces where projects and dreams become reality. Where your neighbors form real communities. Where looking after the environment is everyone’s right and task. Therefore, expertise becomes a balance between technology and nature, and excellence is continuous. [Alphaville] grows, bringing development to people, organizations, and to society. It connects with the people around it and keeps on top of the challenges of its time and future. Thus, Alphaville combines efforts to bring people and ideas together to make good living possible” (my emphasis). At http://www.alphaville.com.br/ institucional/filosofia. Accessed 25 July 2016. 21   The promise of security is key in these closed residences. See Enríquez Acosta (2010, 178).

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On one level, the story’s central irony resides in the fact that the persistent menace that dominates the media discourse is found outside, but it is also found inside, where the characters cannot leave, and it comes back to them in a boomerang effect. As happens in other recent texts and visual works, life in these green and protected spaces is presented as an attainable utopia, a dream come true: We moved. Life there was really a dream. The kiskadees were punctual: at 7:00 in the morning they started their concert. The ponies were gentle, the scrubbed tree-lined avenues were always clean. The breeze blew through the trees of the park—112 of them, just as the brochure said. Also, the alarm system was impeccable. The guards showed up periodically at our house to see if everything was alright—always smiling and nice. Their boss was a particularly dedicated person: he organized parties and tournaments; he worried about our well-being. He made a list of the relatives and friends of the residents—in case of any emergency, he explained with a calming smile. The first month went by—as the brochure promised—in a climate of dreams. Dreams, indeed. (49).

The paradox that this story entails, which establishes a disturbing relationship among utopia, green discourses and natural space, and security vs. criminality, also looms in Plá’s film. In fact, the opening image in La zona is a wire fence with electrified cables on the upper part, walls with cameras that carefully register the streets and houses, inside and out, and private security guards posted at the entrance gates in control booths paying close attention to the images that multiply on the panels full of monitors. The inside of the private city with its neighborhoods, schools, and communal spaces for residents appears as an ideal universe, an exclusive paradise with majestic houses, where flora and fauna live together in harmony with urban design and planning. The space is a territory that is at the same time exclusive and egalitarian. On one hand, it excludes the outside, but on the other, on the inside, everyone enjoys the same rights. However, the behavior of its inhabitants presupposes a level of civility that will be questioned by the end of the film. The tacit understanding that socially unifies the residents of this green paradise is broken when the outside permeates the inside: when part of the wall that surrounds the fortification breaks due to the collapse of a tower featuring an advertising billboard. Four young people from outside take advantage of the opportunity to penetrate the enclave, or la zona. The residents immediately kill

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three of them in the name of their right to self-defense while the other young person remains hidden, unleashing a manhunt. The conflict arises when the police from outside want to investigate the shootings, and the private security guards—with the support of the residents of la zona—stop them because of a problem with jurisdiction and the limits of power. Also, there is a distinctive tendency among the residents of these gated communities to avoid publicity at any cost, so as to also solve the problems of criminality and delinquency “within the gates” (Rojas 2007, 79).22 The initial understanding that united all the residents of la zona begins to break down further when the board of directors suspects that one of their own residents has violated the implicit pact and contacted the police. Then, an authoritarian system is set up in which neighbors begin to patrol and watch over their peers. The breakdown that began with the intrusion of the outside not only erodes the links established among neighbors, it also fractures the fabric of diverse family structures. Daniel, one of the main characters in the film and a member of the board of directors of la zona, is confronted by his wife, who questions the policies that the board implements in the neighborhood. Additionally, the relationship with their son Alejandro begins to deteriorate when Alejandro discovers that his father, along with the other members of the board, stops the political investigation by bribing a police representative. When the hidden sixteen-­ year-­old outsider is finally found, a furious mob beats him to death. He had repeatedly tried to escape, but the insurmountable walls and surveillance of la zona prevent him from doing so. The supposed level of civility that this lifestyle entails (which is conveyed not only materially through the mansions in which they live and the cars they drive, but also in the educational level of the residents whose children attend the most prestigious private schools) becomes undermined by the brutal actions of the “citizens.” 22  According to a psychologist who lives “inside a private city” and who was interviewed by Rojas, inside these enclosed spaces, “there are certain internal and social security devices that allow for the unpleasant to be hidden: not seen. […] It is known that there is juvenile vandalism…It is clear that the problem is the family and social structure. Here no one shares anything. Everyone does their own thing…No one respects any measure […] The kids do as they please. They wander around. They all know each other; they move in the same circles: they go to school, to the clubhouse, they play the same sports. There comes a moment when everyone has their label. These are this way, and those are that way. It causes a very big stigma for adolescents because it’s the stigma of the world. Because inside a gated community, their neighborhood is their world” (Rojas 2007, 79–80).

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At the end of the film, the residents throw the young man’s violently murdered body in the trash—just as they had previously done with his three companions.23 The nonchalantly performed gesture that characterizes a rhetoric of impunity inserts, once again, all these narratives into a broader phenomenon related to both environmental and urban configurations and that, from the point of view of a biopolitic of waste, complicates the borders between the human and the non-human, by equally demeaning each. As in Scliar’s story, the presumed impermeability of the walls, watchtowers, and private security does not guarantee the absence of crime and violence. On the contrary, violence is frequently unleashed in the very interior of the enclave, either by transfer from one zone to the other, by the “security” itself, or by the members of the closed communities. In this sense, violence is clearly found on both sides of the wall and there is no fence, wall, or wire that can keep it at bay since it is entrenched in the very structure of a society whose social fabric has not only been torn apart, but whose ideology has materialized through the installation of a model of urban parcelling and (self-)segregation that does nothing but further deepen social, economic, and environmental disparity. Beyond the different sides where people may find themselves, the film exposes how the deep-rooted corruption that characterizes the culture of this collective universe filters through every social membrane and breaks down intimate relationships and interactions among individuals, family members, and fellow citizens. The cover of the novel Las viudas de los jueves shares the image of the wire fence that we saw at the beginning of La zona, and it synthesizes life behind the wall, as one of the characters suggests. The novel tells the story of people who live in the closed community Cascade Heights, an exclusive neighborhood distinguished by its middle- to upper-class social values, although it is on the verge of collapsing: Cascade Heights is the neighborhood where we live. All us lot […] Our neighborhood is a gated community, ringed by a perimeter fence that is concealed behind different kinds of shrub. It’s called The Cascade Heights Country Club. Most of us shorten the name to “The Cascade” and a few people call it “The Heights.” It has a golf course, tennis courts, swimming pool and two club houses. And private security. Fifteen security guards 23  These are the same nameless bodies that, as we have seen in chapter II, appear in the garbage dumps. Discarded bodies that no one claims: anonymous, dispensable.

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working shifts during the day, and twenty-two at night. That’s more than five hundred acres of land, accessible only to us or to people authorized by one of us. (Piñeiro 2009, 21).

The story revolves around the lives of Virginia, a resident in charge of a real estate agency in the private community of Cascade Heights, her husband Ronie, unemployed for six years, her son Juani, el Tano and his wife, the Uroviches, and other inhabitants of this urban project. All of these characters not only fully identify with a lifestyle that accepts living in an exclusive enclave as natural, they also flaunt it extensively since, as the sociologist Maristella Svampa warns, living this way “full time becomes an invaluable source of social capital” (2008, 143). Crime here is domestic, and it occurs at the end of the novel when three of the husbands, who get together every Thursday to drink, play cards, and discuss politics and the economy, commit a murder-suicide staged to look like an accident so that their families can claim a considerable life insurance settlement. The novel, which takes place in Argentina at the paradigmatic moment of 2001, allows for a close look at the social framework that characterizes the deceptive lives of these people. Keeping up appearances of a certain standard of living begins to break down. Private neighborhoods are portrayed as exclusive utopias and the idea of “nature” symbolizes one of these neighborhoods’ most distinctive and, in turn, marketable traits, for which “potential buyers sometimes imagine they have landed in paradise” (Piñeiro 2009, 55). Much of the information about the characters of Cascade Heights, as well as the spatial configuration of the neighborhood, comes to us through Virginia’s “red spiral-bound notebook,” in which she keeps track of everything that happens in the neighborhood: The outflow of the irrigation channels. Which garden is prone to flooding. Who is the best electrician in the area. And the best locksmith. Which neighbor is impossible to deal with. Which one neglects his pet. Which one neglects her children. People say she even notes down the names of men who are cheating on their wives or who underpay their maids. […] Every house was indexed, whether it was for sale or not. (56–57).

The “inside” consists of an exclusive paradise, a walled utopia: “Three hundred houses, with three hundred gardens, with three hundred jasmine plants, contained in a five-hundred-acre estate with a perimeter fence and private security” (25). Every 50 yards along the perimeter fence, there are

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security cameras that can turn 180 degrees, and each home is separated by “living fences” of bushes: But these are not any old bushes. Privet is out of fashion, along with that erstwhile favorite, the violet campanula that grows by railway lines. There are none of those straight trimmed hedges that look like green walls. Definitely no round ones. The hedges are cut to look uneven, just this side of messy, giving them a natural appearance that is meticulously contrived. At first glance, these plants seem to have sprung up spontaneously between the neighbors, rather than to have been placed deliberately, to demarcate properties. […] Wire fencing and railings are not permitted, let alone walls. The only exception is the six-foot-high perimeter fence which is the responsibility of the Club’s administration and which is shortly going to be replaced by a wall, in line with new security regulations. (22–23).

The “nature” that separates and divides two opposing and exclusive worlds, inside and outside, is an artificial nature, but sufficiently convincing to attract investors, future owners, and all types of clients. The “green” of the golf course, for example, constitutes a “privilege” and an archetype of “natural beauty” that only the residents of the closed neighborhood can enjoy. Virginia, the protagonist, clarifies: “‘natural’ because it comprises grass, trees and lakes, not ‘natural’ in the sense of belonging to a landscape that was here before we arrived. This used to be a swamp” (70). Technology and urban design have transformed the swamp into an idyllic territory, to the extent that it is now impossible “to imagine that our fairways were once marshes” (70). Spatial metamorphosis, like in Vera y González’s and Quiroule’s utopias analyzed above, has turned the swamp into an unrecognizable territory: There are species of tree that had to be brought specially from nurseries in different parts of the country. The shrubs, planted by landscape gardeners, are tended every week and changed with the seasons. An automatic sprinkler comes on every night. And then there are fertilizers, insecticides, supplements. The river that crosses hole fifteen was here before we arrived. But we purified it. Now it’s a more turquoise green, thanks to water treatment, and the introduction of certain algae which keep the ecosystem aerated. The fish that were there before the purification have died. They were undistinguished fish, a sort of bream, brownish-colored. We put in orange perch, which reproduced and became the new masters of the stream. There are ducks and otters, too. (70–71).

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This procedure, a sort of involuntary socio-ecological Darwinism, ensures the preservation of the flora and fauna considered “apt” for living, resulting in a superior species, and its logic preserves animals and vegetation that are worthy of existence—although they are judged only by human aesthetic standards—allowing, as a consequence, “undistinguished” fish (the aquatic vertebrate “people”), who lacked the privilege of existence, to die. The “orange perch” completely take over their habitat, a practice that, it should be clarified, is instrumental in the name of a more “aerated” ecosystem. A similar event occurs later when “the undesirable presence of packs of stray dogs” that “are entering our communal property” generally alarmed the neighborhood (191 and 195): “these were dogs without owners, raised in the wild, who came into our compound looking for food. Feral dogs. Not like our dogs, our Golden Retrievers, short-haired Labradors”—that is, “the breeds most often to be seen out for a walk in Cascade Heights, wearing collars and identity discs engraved with a name and telephone number, lest they stray” (191–192).24 Both these “stray” wild dogs and those “undistinguished […] bream, brownish-colored” fish are incompatible with this utopian, “harmonic,” and artificially preserved universe. They are a part of the “outside” which is synonymous with chaos, barbarism and ugliness; this contrast between within and beyond Cascade Heights is intensified when we later read that the residents suspect that outsiders have somehow infiltrated their enclave and killed the otters and ducks for food. There is, however, some doubt about this matter since “[e]ven if someone tried to—the maintenance staff, caddies, gardeners, anyone who dared—it would be impossible for them to smuggle their catch past our security guards” (71). However impermeable Cascade Heights’ imposing security walls may be, they are not able to prevent the ceaseless flow of social and economic problems. As in Scliar’s short story or in La zona, the outside and the inside inevitably intermingle: therefore, it is not surprising that, beyond the security and the barriers, they find a “caddie throwing a dead duck over the perimeter fence to a woman on the other side” who “had all but brought her casserole dish” (70). Whereas the duck operates on a symbolic plane as a token of status intended solely for leisurely contemplation within this private community, it is a necessary food source for those on the outside. In this instance, the caddy functions as a go-between these 24  Ultimately, these “dogs without owners” show their condition of exceptionality in a socioeconomic system that is based exclusively on a private property model.

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two worlds, one who breaches the wire fence that attempts to hermetically seal off luxury from necessity. Just as the garbage dump examined earlier in this study erases those subjects who live in and from trash, so too does the spatial disposition of these exclusive private enclaves render invisible and deny the existence of those subjects that are beyond this (self-)segregated space. And yet these fortified cities cannot completely operate in a vacuum, as they are dependent on the discarded outsiders to serve as domestic and maintenance staff. Through the wearing of uniforms, these workers are rendered as physically anonymous as possible, concealing their presumably “dark” origins. Thus, the discarded must not only be considered as irrefutable proof of the contradictions of an economic model based on a dynamic of social inclusion/exclusion, they must also be seen as constituting a different discursive phenomenon that must be addressed by mobilizing an alternative apparatus of critical inquiry: a model that incorporates other versions of history—the past, the future, and, above all, the present. Furthermore, this new paradigm not only integrates disciplines coming from dissimilar fields of study, it also focuses on what is particularly endemic to Latin America, especially the comparison between a socioeconomic—or political—model of total exclusion and new green narratives, which have become increasingly more present. According to the novel’s main character, the subjects who work at Cascade Heights live in the “satellite community”: a neighborhood with “simple jerrybuilt houses, almost all of them made by the people who live in them—or by their relations or friends” (91). Since the inhabitants of these poor neighborhoods depend on the work that Cascade Heights provides, they are examined daily as they enter and exit across the strictly controlled borders. It even “had been standard to request—confidentially—a criminal records check on gardeners, builders, decorators and any other workers who came regularly to our country club” (83). In effect, as time passes, the residents of Cascade Heights are protected “every more stringently behind bars,” and “[p]lans were afoot to replace the perimeter fence with a solid wall, ten feet high”: There had been talk of erecting a double fence: barbed wire on the outside, then something a little more elegant within it—but most of the members thought this inadequate. What we all wanted was a wall, so that nobody passing by could look in at us, let alone at our houses or cars. And also so that we did not have to look out. (83).

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This paradigm of exclusion and social (self-)segregation not only dilutes the supportive pacts between the subjects who live outside and inside the neighborhood, it, in turn, erodes the internal ties, since the moral models specific to these micro-communities are dramatically reduced and simplified, likewise reducing and simplifying any notion regarding what lies beyond the walls. Romina, a young woman whose real name is Ramona, tells Juani, Virginia’s adolescent son: “Are we shutting ourselves in, or are we shutting out other people so that they can’t come in?” (158).25 But, as in Scliar’s short story and the movie La zona, Piñeiro’s novel also concludes with a highly militarized confrontation that, in this case, happens with the guards who are “armed with rifles” (274): once again both the fear and threat that people from the outside will infiltrate and erase the borders that condemn them to live as second-class, third-class, or classless citizens emerges. In the turbulent year of 2001, as Virginia, together with Ronie, Juani, and Romina, move toward the security gate (Juani and Romina had climbed a tree and filmed the murder-suicide of the three men), they are stopped by the same security guards who had just shut down the highway and who inform the youths that the people who live nearby “are making barricades” (274). The guards even clarify that the people are frightened that “outsiders are going to come” (274). This is a fear that someone is coming, a fear of leaving, a fear of a menacing outside from which they must be protected at all costs because, if not, it will come to take everything away from them. One of the guards explains that, “[t]he people from the shanty towns, I suppose” are the ones who have been “looting places on the other side of the highway” (274). Although, to calm them down, he assures them that “we’re prepared for it here. If they come, we’ll be waiting for them” (274). Urban and social 25  The novel succeeds in portraying the values of the residents of the closed neighborhood in a way that I would call laughable: When Ramona is adopted, she becomes Romina. This change is due to the need, at least in her mother’s mind, to erase her origins as well as her dark skin color. In fact, Ramona’s mother embodies the prototype of the frivolous middle- to upper-class woman imbued with racial prejudice who, regarding adoption, cannot resolve her own conflicts and apprehensions with integrity and honesty: the girl’s hair “was black, glossy and thick as wire” (2009, 40): “The girl might be from Corrientes, but could also be from Misiones, El Chaco, or Tucumán. Mariana thought most likely Tucumán. She could imagine that in a few years she would be as sturdy and strapping as the Tucumana woman who cleaned her friend Sara’s house” (42). For the mother, the fact that her child cannot be genetically modified is frustrating and, “no matter how much you made her diet or killed her with exercise regimes, she was always going to have thick ankles and Mariana knew that there was no solution for that” (42).

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fragmentation overlap, in this instance, creating relentless enemies among those who technically share the same territory and national sovereignty. As if in an undeclared war, the barriers that divide, segregate, exalt, and minimize the categories and attributes of the inhabitants on both sides, confront them and impede all type of interaction, mobility, intersection, fluidity, and mixing. But the barriers are not so impermeable as one side inexorably infiltrates the other and, when this occurs, hate, vengeance, and resentment are so prominent that the outcome is generally traumatic.26 Life in these walled cities and private neighborhoods is the subject of Patricia Rojas’s Mundo privado (2007). This chronicle of interviews in country clubs and gated communities surrounding Buenos Aires explores how private real estate developers have promoted a new urban archetype where these closed, idyllic, and selective universes evoke “natural” spaces and new and ideal worlds, created and conceived of as green urban utopias. Unlike the utopian models from the beginning of the twentieth century, however, they are no longer inclusive but rather rigidly exclusive. And it is precisely in this exclusivity where strategies of social, cultural, and economic status are developed—and stimulated—and where specific forms of sociability are especially encouraged. In contrast to the socialist and inclusive utopian proposals from the beginning of the twentieth century that openly invited all subjects to live in the utopia based on a model of social equality and inclusion, these privatized utopian models, which liken urban space to nature, seek to achieve social exclusion and segregation. They physically and symbolically reinforce the differences between those inside and those outside. These reinforcements provide their urban residents a particular identity as a special, privileged caste, separated from the rest. Referring to the well-known work of Bourdieu (1979), Maristella Svampa (2008) maintains that “country club communities are spaces of production of ‘strategies of distinction’ par excellence,” in the sense of “social and cultural standards and practices that make up different status groups” (126; my emphasis). However, the crucial question that cuts through these formulations of urban paradigms is to what extent a city can be privatized and, as a 26  It is indeed possible that Luis Buñuel foresaw all of these enclosure allegories, together with the countless fantasies of the middle and upper middle classes in El angel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel) (1962). It is not by chance that he also made Los olvidados (The Forgotten a.k.a. The Young and The Damned) in 1950, a Mexican film that tells the tragic story of some children in a marginal neighborhood of Mexico City.

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consequence, close itself off and retreat into itself. If this happens, not only does urban space become fragmented, but also the very notion of citizenship is broken. In this sense, Svampa refers to “inherited citizenship,” which displaces a model of political citizenship, which is supported by universal criteria and therefore has a more general scope (2008, 204). Based on this transformation in citizenship, it is fitting to wonder whether it is possible to construct a true “social pact” based on inherited citizenship (2008, 205). The role of nature is fundamental in all of these projects, such as in the Nordelta real estate project in the district of Tigre. Inaugurated in 2000, Nordelta consists of a group of twenty private neighborhoods with a common infrastructure; it covers a surface of 1600 hectares (3954 acres). The megaproject contains education centers at all levels, spaces for recreation and sports, commercial areas, offices, and its own medical and cultural centers. Located 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the center of the port city, the project includes a toll way, two train stations, and a heliport, and its “placement on the edge of the Paraná delta allows for the planning of a navigable connection with Puerto Madero” (Berti and del Río 2005, 101–102). The narrative that promotes this private city stresses and flaunts its “gorgeous views” and “the native vegetation of the Delta” found in every nook of the community and ready “to be on the cover of a gardening or decorating magazine” (Rojas 2007, 22). Nature invades the urban space, but this is a pleasant, ordered, rationalized invasion: “the absolute silence is only interrupted by the goldfinches, the duck-like coots, and the quick dips of the otters in the lakes that surround the houses” (Rojas 2007, 22). According to the Argentine Federation of Country Clubs (Federación Argentina de Clubes de Campo [FFCC]), the “essential reason” for the establishment of these closed spaces—to which their members must adapt—must be “the defense and consolidation of a way of life” that is “not just about simple land speculation, but is more related to respecting ecology, tranquility, and the solace of its members” (Rojas 2007, 23). Curiously, beyond the innumerable allusions and references to terms like “ecology,” “nature,” “natural,” and “green,” these evocations function as signifiers that do not directly correspond to the typical elements within environmental discourse. On the contrary, this marketing rhetoric’s most immediate aim serves to attract new clients and potential property owners who, besides subscribing to this particular “lifestyle,” promote it through the creation of new spatial and social networks.

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According to Rojas, what most impressed her when she arrived in Nordelta was that it “was in another world” where one had the “sensation of walking in a different world” since in this city “there are no stoplights. There are no poor people. There are no sidewalks. There are no bars on the windows. […] The gardens have exotic flowers. […] There aren’t loose dogs running around. There are no clothes hanging on the lines either. There is no trash on the curbs or leaves that have fallen from the trees” (2007, 23; my emphasis). For Rojas, it is as if “someone had shuffled and dealt other cards to invent a new world without the uncertainties of the previous one, and then, given an order and a sense of meaning to life and to people’s behavior that was different from the way it used to be” (2007; my emphasis). The result of this “new world” is that, apart from “everything being new,” there are also “developers, ads in the newspapers, and clearly outlined imaginaries about what it must be like to live such a secure, green, happy life,” and, in some cases, even the very idea of nature was normalized (Rojas 2007, 26). One example is an advertisement that refers to “a population of ducks, geese, herons, and lapwings” that is “fed and protected so it doesn’t stop reproducing,” which also serves as a discursive strategy to attract new residents (clients) to the megacity (Rojas 2007, 26). It is always surprising that the entrepreneurs and investors are the ones who determine how the inhabitants of these private cities should live, as well as how nature is regulated—and therefore objectified. The subjects also become objects of manipulation and regulation on the part of the investors, whose purpose is purely lucrative. Contrarily, the utopias from the beginning of the twentieth century were premised on a “lifestyle”: a product, if not of general consensus, then at least of a select group whose purpose was the common good of all the inhabitants. Additionally, the alleged pledge of protecting the animals that dwell in the country club is not consistent with any ecological effort or sincere concern for the preservation of the environment, such as those promoted by grassroots activists and/or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that uphold the protection and conservation of biotic communities and ecosystems as their principal tenet. Rather, the promotion of these neighborhoods is the result of a practice that seeks to enhance the distinctive elements that continually attract new consumers and that, in commercial ventures, transform nature into an ornamental element, a surplus or an added and differentiating value. Rojas’s chronicle remarks on the origin of the name Nordelta, explaining how, to “christen this megacity,” a group of “experts was hired (not

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only specialists in marketing but also anthropologists, sociologists, and journalists) who were invited by the investors to think about what an ideal and possible city would be like and what it should have” (2007, 27; my emphasis). Here, all of the “specialists” define, and, to a certain degree, monitor the standard of living for the residents of the city—rather than the residents themselves—establishing a significant number of regulations whose inflexibility and rigidity seeks to guarantee the inhabitants’ coexistence. These norms are carefully crafted to predefine the behavior of those who reside within the perimeter of these fortified cities. Like in the utopian proposals, behaviors that do not have the common good of the community as their general base and foundation must be prevented. Such negative behaviors also carry the frightening threat of the community’s destruction.27 This is due to the fact that, as the sociologist Philip Abrams (1976) has appropriately pointed out, the affective and emotional links among the members of a utopian community are not a question of conditional negotiation, exploration, or tentative or occasional affirmation but, on the contrary, they result from deep commitment, self-denial, and resignation of oneself in the name of the highest and collective objectives. The “Rules and Regulations for Good Neighbors” was put together by the “Pro-Human Behavior League,” and most country club communities, closed neighborhoods, and private cities have some iteration of them (Rojas 2007, 49). Some of the rules fundamentally establish the need to “understand that peaceful coexistence is the legacy of evolved human beings and the basis for social happiness” (Rojas 2007, 49). This regulation is ironic when we recall that it was “evolved human beings” who beat a sixteen-year-old to death in the film La zona, who committed murder-­ suicide in Piñeiro’s novel which is also littered with references to domestic violence or verbal aggression, animal cruelty, racism, discrimination, and xenophobia. In Rojas’s chronicle, the brutality became evident through the juvenile vandalism carried out by the bored rich kids, and in “No retiro de Figueira,” it emerged again when private, educated, and certified security guards—“always smiling and nice”—formed a commando group 27  I have analyzed this problem in my article “Utopia, Anarchism, and the Political Implications of Emotions” (2010) and, in greater detail, in chapter two of my book Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana [Imaginary Cities in Latin American Literature] (2008). In both of these, I cite Eduardo Urzaiz’s Eugenia (1919) and Juan José de Soiza Reilly’s La ciudad de los locos [City of Fools] (1914) as examples of this plausible destruction.

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that kidnaps the inhabitants of gated communities, taking them as hostages and demanding a hefty ransom.28 Rule three of the “Rules and Regulations for Good Neighbors” maintains that one must repress “all attitude that alters the common order and could affect the tranquility of others,” and number six further suggests that it is important to “pay tribute to courtesy, showing it to your neighbors, helping each other out [in the spirit of] the ideals of service and the demands of permanent community support” (Rojas 2007, 50). In this sense, it is fitting to clarify that the “tribute to courtesy” regarding “neighbors” as well as the appeal to “permanent community support” refer exclusively to those who live within the fenced-in perimeter, fellow citizens of the closed territory whose ties extend (if they extend at all) to those who are considered equals or peers (“people like us”). The “other” neighbors do not qualify, such as those from the “satellite community” in Las viudas de los jueves or from the precarious houses leaning up against the electrified wall in La zona. They are in the “outside” category of otherness, and the wall obstructs their view or gaze. Sociologist Cecilia Arizaga points out that this fortification “keeps the ‘outside’ chaos from the residents” (2005, 113).29 It is also in this frame of constant reaffirmation, which defines itself by contrasting with the external wall––and everything that unfolds outside of its rigid demarcations––that the murders, vandalism, kidnappings, and corruption that originate in the private neighborhood, closed city, country club, or gated community, cause this utopian effort to falter. Despite all these measures, it will be imperative to counteract these negative events through either discretion or by appealing to a rhetoric that emphasizes these occurrences’ exceptionality.30

28  Celina Murga’s film, Una semana solos (A Week Alone) (2008) portrays the life of young adolescents who reside in these private paradises and who, suffering from apathy and boredom, amuse themselves by vandalizing and destroying their neighbor’s property. See note 40 of this chapter. 29  It is not by chance that Arizaga used the following title for chapter four of her book El mito de comunidad en la ciudad mundializada: estilos de vida y nuevas clases medias en urbanizaciones cerradas [The Myth of Community in the Globalized City: Lifestyles and New Middle Classes in Closed Urbanizations] (2005): “Imaginarios suburbanos: el advenimiento de la utopía burguesa en el suburbio degradado” [“Suburban Imaginaries: The Rise of Bourgeois Utopia in the Degraded Suburb”]. 30  It is worth mentioning that the murder of the Argentine sociologist María Marta García Belsunce in October of 2002, is one of the cases that have had the most repercussions to this day.

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This rhetorical mechanism frequently turns into a defensive discourse. According to the manager of the Pacheco Golf project, the “media believes that only members of the elite live in country club communities. And it’s not at all like that.” He proposes that we change this perspective and consider this phenomenon from a different point of view: Why don’t we look at it from a different angle? Why don’t we think about it as an open piece of land where they could’ve put a slum, some toxic chemical discharge, or a dump. Instead, they’ve turned it into a place where people can live peacefully and where jobs are generated. Here, there are all types of jobs: security, gardening, domestic help, architects and construction workers, pool maintenance workers, caddies… Many people don’t know that the 200 families who live here generate jobs for 700 people […] Tell me: How many factories generate jobs for 700 people without causing pollution and, instead, create green spaces for the area, sports, and living? (Rojas 2007, 144–145).

His invitation reveals how, from the perspective of investors and real estate entrepreneurs, “a slum” is the same as “some toxic chemical discharge, or a dump.” The subjects who live in a slum are, by contiguity, dehumanized and objectified, and they are ascribed the same contaminating traits as chemical products or trash. Real estate entrepreneurs, on the other hand, present themselves as altruistic and selfless in that they not only rescue green space—nature—from human and environmental contamination, but also promote economic (and environmental) development through the creation of jobs that do not pollute and therefore generate “green spaces for the zone.” This commercialization of nature disguised as beneficial investment for the economy and the environment, apart from being illusory, is dangerous because it legitimates a false ecological discursivity that labels the inhabitants of informal and precarious human settlements as contaminating elements. Therefore, their eradication or elimination is legitimated (Carman 2011). The continuous appeal to nature is one of the most distinctive traits of these discourses that stimulate and promote the consumption of exclusive paradises. The decision to christen Nordelta in this way is explained by the fact that, first, “Nordelta refers to nature […] water was the strongest symbol for this new town,” and second, the reference to a “northern zone” in Buenos Aires evokes the “preferential location of the upper classes” (Carman 2011, 28). As a utopian proposal, these spatial

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undertakings are anchored to a particular configuration, defined conceptually by its characteristic traits. Fernando Aínsa, in La reconstrucción de la utopia [The Reconstruction of Utopia] (1999), refers to five distinct aspects of utopia: the first is insularity, related to the geographic representation of utopia within an isolated space, a quality that constitutes one of its most important characteristics. The spatial archetypes most commonly used to describe this vast tradition are the faraway island, hard-to-access mountain plateaus and peaks, the desert, the forest, and all types of insular space that, by means of its distance, guarantees the ideal condition for a utopian territory. Within the urban utopia that is Nordelta, the “La Isla” [The Island] neighborhood embodies the most representative space. Here one finds. An avenue lined with palm trees. Great open green spaces. An enormous and silent reflection pool. Everything that design and comfort could create to live better. Every day “La Isla” invites you to live to the max and enjoy its intimacy and tranquility, two of the main qualities of this unique place. The land, between 1000 and 5000 square meters (10,764 and 53,820 square feet) provides the best access to the central lake and a sense of indescribable freedom. (Rojas 2007, 87).

The insularity of this neighborhood—and of utopian space in general— aims to protect by insulating a particular community from all contact with, and contamination from, the outside world. The utopian world is generally a closed world, a small universe ruled by its own laws that often skirt and defy the socioeconomic realities beyond its borders. From Thomas More’s utopian proposal onward, the island constitutes an archetype of geographical fiction. The second most characteristic aspect of utopia in the Nordelta project is autarchy—that is, political and economic organization that allows for self-sufficiency in a society, state, or community. It should be noted that Nordelta was initially conceived as more connected with the surrounding urban fabric, but evolved to be much more insular. The Nordelta project goes back to 1973, and its inception reflected much of the economic restructuring and state reforms of that era, most notably those proposed by Julián Astolfoni, a civil engineer and executive president of Supercemento S.A.I.C. and of Dragados y Obras Portuarias S.A. His dream was to turn these lands into a great project, inspired by Les villes nouvelles of Paris, in which the State would be the principal investor. In his own words, Astolfoni hoped to construct

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a new integral urban center stemming from private “commitment and responsibility”; not like a bedroom community that depends on the port city, but like a real city, with multiple functions, a city that creates its own centrality on the metropolitan periphery, a new form of decentralized re-­zoning. (Astolfoni 1999, cited in Berti and del Río 2005, 99).

On an urban level as well as a social one, Astolfoni conceived of this project not only as an alternative effort but also as a different option with respect to the dominant standards of the public and private sectors in the form of building and designing a city. Nordelta was presented as a “fusion of the tradition of rationalist urbanism and the Anglo-Saxon garden city,” looking to combine peripheral urban expansion with classic and green urbanism, to extend urbanism to the decentralized city, to provide security without ghettoization or enclosure, and to substitute the State, “offering open contexts and obtaining environmental quality and real estate profitability without speculation” (Astolfoni cited in Berti and del Río 2005, 99). Like other “utopias of reconstruction” (Mumford 1922), the spatial configuration of Nordelta, in its initial phase, proposed an elevated level of integration into the pre-existing urban fabric through the design of a grand avenue that led to a new high-density urban center, and the principal roadways yielded continuity to the urban limits. In this first stage, Nordelta was conceived as an open city project with “a civic center, various commercial hubs, a convention center, an industrial-technological park, and a large regional public park with 200 surface hectares [494 surface acres]” whose objective was to become the second-largest green space of the metropolitan region, after the Pereyra Iraola Park. Nevertheless, as Berti and del Río point out, during the 1990s, this undertaking “took a dizzying turn” beginning with the consolidation of the State’s process of reform and economic restructuring, which promoted the privatization of public space (Berti and del Río 2005, 101). Two fundamental changes were then made to the concept and execution of the project: first, the inclusion of Eduardo Constantini’s private investor firm, Consultatio, with fifty percent of the share package and Constantini himself assuming the presidency of Nordelta S.A.; second, the redefinition of the project made notable changes from Astolfoni’s initial proposal. Specifically, the “objective population” became more homogeneous (the engineer had imagined it more heterogeneous), and it concentrated on high-income sectors; “the service and commercial sector becomes more fragmented and located on the periphery, at the extremes of the property, where the

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proposed city intersects with external city” (Berti and del Río 2005, 101). Nordelta acquired a “pseudo-closed configuration as it substantially restricts public spaces and transforms the majority of the lots of twenty closed neighborhoods” (Berti and del Río 2005, 101). Besides being the largest real estate undertaking in Argentine history, Nordelta constituted a “symbol of how the absence or presence of the State allows for the creation of life environments entirely organized by private business” (Berti and del Río 2005, 102). In this sense, Nordelta can be categorized as an autarchy, not only for its presumably self-sufficient character, but because— as a utopian proposal—it constitutes the most “advanced” form of private organization of urban space, and in an autarchy, the inhabitants are arranged and distributed differently in social space, as Michael Janoschka describes (2003).31 With the threat located outside these isolated territories, most utopian conceptualizations advocate for self-sufficiency and oppose commerce and economic interdependence, since the origins of the evils of society are thought to stem from these interactions. According to Rojas, a covered 7000 square meter (75,347 square foot) shopping center with open-air sectors and a 500-car parking lot was built in Nordelta specifically so that its residents could avoid commercial contact with the outside. Likewise, a short distance away, a 1500 square meter (16,146 square foot) supermarket was built that set itself apart from others because it belonged to the “premium category” and here one could find “attractive as well as ultra-­ exclusive products” (Rojas 2007, 100). The supermarket proposed a “differential added value in its quality, service, proximity, variety, comfort, personalized attention, delicatessen, and pleasant environment” (Rojas 2007, 100). Its frozen meats section, for example, carries venison and frog meat, the latter being “the most expensive of all” (Rojas 2007, 100).32 Another distinctive aspect of utopias is achrony: one must add the absence of temporal factors to the absence of a historical dimension that characterizes utopian conceptualizations. Utopia happens in “another place,” and often, how one arrives there and one’s previous record of 31  For example, Nordelta has its own flag, (as does each micro-city within the megacity that is Nordelta). This element grants its inhabitants a sense of identity and belonging, although, at the same time, it confers an illusion of sovereignty, as if they could legally detach or separate themselves from the rest of the country and establish themselves as an autonomous political unit akin to the Italian city-states of the Renaissance. 32  It is curious that frog meat is the choicest of meats since that of the toad—as explored in chapter II—was the only available food source for the inhabitants of the slums.

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personal relations are unknown. This trait is evident in Las viudas de los jueves when Virginia thinks back to the first time she arrived, in a sort of origin myth: Those of us who moved to Cascade Heights say that we have come in search of “greenery,” a healthy life, sports, and security. Trotting out these reasons means not having to confess, even to ourselves, the real reasons for coming. And after a while we don’t even remember them. Entrance into The Cascade induces a certain magical forgetfulness of all that came before. The past is reduced to last week, last month, last year, “when we played the Inter-Club Challenge and won it.” Gradually we forget our lifelong friends, the places we once loved, certain relations, memories, mistakes. It’s as though it were possible, in mid-life, to tear the pages out of your diary and begin to write something new. (Piñeiro 2009, 26).

The utopia’s present is a definitive one that does not change and whose past is unknown; therefore, it is practically inexistent. Neither is there a future since there is no possible evolution. Utopias are concerned with an eternal present, time that rules perpetually once it is established. This time is thus ahistorical and is generally crystallized in textual as well as visual depictions of a perpetual Edenic condition, outside the laws of historical evolution. Urban planning constitutes another trait endemic to utopian conceptualizations: time and again, Utopian thought proposes the Ideal City as an alternative to the real city since in the latter all evils and threats are condensed and these wickedness are precisely what should be evaded. Frequently, this Ideal City projects a regular and geometric urban structure. The utopian city’s design harkens back to Hippodamus of Miletus in Greece (500 B.C.E.), who was in charge of designing new Greek cities (such as the port of Athens, the Piraeus, and the city of Rhodes) in harmony with the cosmogonist view of the universe (Aínsa 1999, 24). From this point on, the concept of humans living in an organized city remained inscribed within a geometrical representation. The work of Hippodamus represents the first time that legal norms as well as governmental authority were represented in a space that adequately inserts the inhabitant of the Greek polis into a political system and order. As we saw in the previous examples, Nordelta—as well as the vast majority of private neighborhoods—is the result of careful planning with the aim of crafting, according to a brochure of a country club near Nordelta, “a world apart […] A

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beneficial proposal for the most demanding. The most complete country club in the country, with maximum comfort, surrounded by green spaces and groves of trees that have been here for years…[with] [w]ide streets with all the services of permanent security” (Rojas 2007, 292; my emphasis). Besides “security,” as a guarantee that “evil” stays outside and does not permeate the closed and exclusive space of these enclaves, the two other most highly emphasized purposes of urban planning in this context are comfort, given that the spatial design guarantees ease of mobility, and the presence of “green spaces,” an element that seeks to counteract the urban unhealthiness of the capital port city.33 Finally, a high number of regulations distinguish utopias. Generally, utopia is totalizing in that it looks to organize social harmony through an integral theory in which all the aspects of collective and private life must be planned. Therefore, utopia tends toward collectivism, homogeneity (as a result of the rigid regulation of daily life, work, and free time), and authoritarianism. This regulation, a consequence of the search for something definite and stable and a result of the eternal and ideal present that we mentioned earlier, leads to the formulation of a social structure in which perennial social problems have been permanently resolved. This regulation reigns over public as well as private life, and its guiding principles often fall into dogmatism and/or totalitarianism.34 We must add an editorial signed by the Board of Directors of “El Carmen. Park Neighborhood” to the already mentioned “Rules and Regulations for Good Neighbors,” a series of regulations composed by the “Pro-Human Behavior League.” The editorial explains that Our beloved neighborhood has grown. There are many new neighbors and few empty lots. Therefore, there are more demands on services (security, maintenance, lighting). It is important for our neighbors to show even 33  In her research about life in private neighborhoods and closed cities, Maristella Svampa points out that “almost all the residents emphasize the great disadvantages that the city offers as far as quality of life” and that memories of the past evoke “days of enclosure in small apartments, public parks that were impossible to visit, noise pollution produced by automobile horns and construction work, [and] spaces brimming with people (the subway, for example)” (2008, 234). 34  In fact, this condition has provoked the inversion of utopian discourse into the so-called counter-utopias, anti-utopias, or negative utopias that proliferated during the twentieth century beginning with the writings of Eugene Zamiatin (We, 1924), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932), and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949).

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greater respect. Any infringement opens the doors for others to do the same. For this reason, we continue to urgently ask that you pay the social fee. […] The fulfillment of everyone’s responsibilities will help us continue to grow, not only in the number of people who live here, but in the general welfare of all, and why not, in the value of our property as well. (cit. in Rojas 2007, 177).

Given the characteristics of these fortified enclaves, we can suggest that—as an emerging model that has grown in recent years—they shape a new social paradigm in that they combine two fundamental spatial elements: the urban and the natural. This imagination, conceptualization, projection, and spatial configuration, when it becomes a specific discursive phenomenon, shares more significant and defining traits of utopian formulations, as we have already indicated. However, two significant characteristics differentiate the discursive rhetoric of these early−twenty-first-century utopian undertakings from those of a hundred years earlier: the initial formulation of these more recent proposals aspire to shape exclusive spaces where a select minority can live, and this minority constitutes less than ten percent of the national population. To be a “member,” one must be “admitted” by a board that interviews the interested families. If they are lucky enough to be accepted, they must pay a higher initial fee—in this way, families whose salaries cannot cover the costs of living in this upper-­class space are filtered out.35 It is evident at this stage that the ecological perspective articulated and promoted at the moment of defining and shaping the urban imaginary 35  “Through a code of restrictions,” the “conditions for admission, which are generally unwritten but basically known by all” make up “much more than explicit rules,” especially the “profiles of those who can belong” (Svampa 2008, 126; original emphasis). It is customary to add payment of a social entrance fee to the “unwritten conditions for admission, a sort of tuition that ranges from US$5000 dollars to US$30,000 for the most exclusive ones” (Svampa 2008, 126) According to Patricia Rojas, cases of anti-Semitism have appeared in some of these neighborhoods or closed clubs in which people of Jewish origin who applied for entry into the country club community, private neighborhood, or closed city were rejected. In cases in which people of Jewish origin were accepted, they were denied or kept from holding high offices such as president or director of the enclave. In Las viudas de los jueves, for example, Virginia explains that, “some of my neighbors do not welcome Jews. I’ve never written it down, but I have always been aware of it, which makes me complicit. It’s not that they openly denigrate them, but if someone makes a joke, even quite a harsh one, they laugh and applaud the humor” (Piñeiro 2009, 122).

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within these closed paradises is artificial. The ecological references turn the “green”—as well as all associations linked to nature—into a commercial rhetorical object that appeals to supposed ecological paradises with the exclusive purpose of profit. In this way, one can also legitimately question to what extent the appeal of these green models is sustainable, precisely from an environmental perspective. We find ourselves facing urban proposals in which each member of the family needs a car in order to get around, both inside and outside of their private city; additionally, unlike what we observed in Vera y González’s and Quiroule’s fictionalized efforts, the recent texts make no reference to promoting any kind of ecological endeavor, whether through the practice of recycling, the development and use of solar and wind energy, or the construction of houses and buildings with renewable and/or biodegradable materials. In fact, although most of the urban enclosures in Latin America are promoted as sustainable spaces to date, the vast majority utilizes a rhetoric that constantly deploys the interchangeable terms “green,” “natural,” and “nature,” in an effort to greenwash real estate developments. As a matter of fact, in the context of urban closed enclaves, the use of the term “green,” as an empty signifier whose referent (or lack thereof) is not anchored in a real ecological concern, shifts according to the possibilities that the market dictates. The term depends on supply and demand, transforming itself into a word that only serves the effects of economic profitability. If Lefebvre (1968) characterized the right to the city as an individual right to urban resources, then those who are excluded from these urban paradises not only lose the right and access to the city, they also lose the right and access to these utopian and urban initiatives. David Harvey (2008) suggests that the individual right to urban resources involves transforming space through the exercise of collective power, by which the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is one of our most prized and least appreciated human rights. Moreover, these very proposals from the early twenty-first century have been able to reconfigure the earlier proposals, transforming the latter (in Bloch’s terms) into “abstract” and irreconcilable utopian formulations—although contrary to Bloch’s thinking, they lack any drive to present a project of improving or perfecting the world that integrates all the city’s inhabitants.

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6  Dystopia for all and Futurist Ecocide in the Latin American City of the Twenty-First Century What do the concepts of “green” and “nature,” that are such a part of the rhetoric inherent to the representations of the closed and exclusive spaces which have been built across Latin America since the 1970s, look like when we read them from the reverse side, the outside, or even backward? What natural elements are visible in the Latin American narratives of the future whose epicenter, the open city—in opposition to the closed and fortified city—is available to everyone and produced by everyone? In the following section, I analyze two different texts: first the Argentine writer Ana María Shua’s novel, La muerte como efecto secundario [Death as a Side Effect] (1997); then, the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis’s novel ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? [Who Do You Think About When You Make Love?] (1995). I also compare both novels to the texts analyzed in the previous sections. Shua’s story is set in a transformed and futuristic Buenos Aires, possibly recognizable and therefore utopian. But, contrary to the textual and visual representations that we have just analyzed, this Buenos Aires evokes a dissimilar future with respect to any idea of happiness, refuge, tranquility, and safety, all features of the discursive phenomena related to privatized cities. The novel revolves around Ernesto Kollody and his tyrannical father who, old and infirm, must be admitted to a “Convalescent Home.” This space is obligatory for all the old people in the city, and additionally, illness and agony are prolonged in this facility exclusively for purposes of financial profit. The “Home” retains the material possessions of the surviving residents, and in order to get the greatest yield, it keeps them alive at any cost. In this imagined Buenos Aires, one cannot walk in the city, only in “shopping centers or in guarded neighborhoods”: there are many walking tracks in the city, secured places that pretend to be ordinary neighborhoods where, for a modest fee, it’s possible to wear yourself out walking, passing infinite—or finite—landscapes, almost real. Almost. Just like those artificial substitutes that replace natural foods. Good enough

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for those who never knew anything different, and for them, even better than the Real Thing. (Shua 2010, 7).36

Open space, or what is outside of the secure, natural, protected, and surveilled inside, consists of ruined, deteriorated, and dangerous areas that one can only cross in taxis and bullet-proof vehicles. The fenced-in and sealed-off city contrasts with what is outside, ruins and rubble, and makes the fortified space on the inside into a controlled space, free from any possible unknown incident. Just as Rojas described the spatial and social configuration of Nordelta, here also the perception of the main character, Ernesto, when he moves throughout the “walking tracks in the city,” focuses on the absence of all happenstance, on the lack of coincidence. At a moment of emotional confusion, he refers to the “desperate need to walk around the city, the real city,” not “some shopping center or along a safe, predictable pedestrian walkway” (67). Likewise, when he is invited to work as a screenwriter with a well-known film director, he is put through a brutal inspection upon entering the studio: “security guards surrounded the car, aiming their weapons at us from a careful distance” (13). This same workspace is “an enormous place, protected like a fortress, with reinforced doors and thick bars safeguarding all possible points of entry, in addition to the security guards who had been hired to watch over it night and day” (11). There is generalized violence; vandalism and crime have spread through the urban areas, and now the people who carry out such acts represent all ages and genders, as well as a huge variance in levels of professionalism and motivation. In this context, citizens—inhabitants of the open city—have become accustomed to attacks: “When I heard the banging and the 36  Paradoxically, and like the artificiality of urban life in Buenos Aires, the substitutes become critical when they refer to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as a tourist attraction: their “Thursday marches […] turned into a sort of pilgrimage destination for those generous, guilt-ridden, overburdened, well-intentioned creatures generally produced by wealthy nations. Over time, the Mothers degenerated into just another tourist attraction, like Bariloche, or Iguazú Falls. Tourist agencies assumed the responsibility of replacing those Mothers who died of illness or old age with substitutes. The marches became a daily, permanent event: they’re even included in daytime tours and Buenos Aires at Night excursions, so that even visitors with just a short time to spend in the city can take advantage of them” (Shua 2010, 67). In this version of the port city, memory and the past are also substituted artificially, transforming both into consumer products and, therefore, throw-away objects.

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explosions, I did what we all do: I made sure the security features in my apartment were working” (36). The target of this particular attack was Ernesto’s neighbor, one floor down, where two men had lived together for years. The future of this imaginary Buenos Aires has changed. Although, in the past, “they used to explain vandalism as a form of youthful rage,” now it is no longer carried out by “gangs of young addicts” as “there are entire families of vandals, men and women, all different ages. Sometimes the gangs even include children” (36). In spite of general confusion and the ubiquity of uncertainty and panic, in the narrative present, there is a “certain amount of respect in society today for a professional thief” (36). Therefore, the citizens would “rather be assaulted by someone who knows what he wants and how to get it” (36). Besides the possibility of openly traveling across the city, other things have been lost in this dystopian universe: “These days, the only thing they’re filming in this country is commercials. Just as at some point they stopped making umbrellas, they stopped making films” (9). The death of cultural production is paralleled by the rise of a language devoid of authenticity. The Convalescent Home, for example, is a way to euphemistically refer to what used to be old age homes, geriatric centers, and residences for senior citizens. This terminology has been eradicated with the expansion of “politically correct terminology,” although the old places and terms were not “exactly the same thing as the Convalescent Homes; they weren’t mandatory” (16–17). The Convalescent Homes, on the other hand, were “a world within a world” or a closed space inside the open space, where the elderly were forced to be committed, and where “[p]eople live a long time […], but nobody ever recovers enough to get out of one” (16–17). However, not all of the Convalescent Homes were the same. Just as closed neighborhoods boasted of vegetation and nature that were prohibited to those who remained on the outside, the Convalescent Homes also reproduced the private/public logic. Because Ernesto’s father enjoyed a privileged economic situation, he was admitted to one of the “nicest neighborhoods in the city, which will soon become a protected zone, in a Home that radiates well-being from the carefully tended front yard on in” (59). The “nicest neighborhoods” can no longer remain open or welcome all citizens: they also have to be closed to preserve not only their nature but also their exclusivity and select character. The spatial set-­up of the Convalescent Home also contrasts with similar public spaces: here there is

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no “smell of urine or filth; you don’t see those piles of rotting garbage that blocked the hallways” like the others (60). In contrast, the “walls are pleasantly papered in a bird motif, there are pastel-toned watercolors and wall railings, like barres in a ballet studio, for the old folks to hang onto and cruise along more easily” (60). But the Home’s primary objective, as mentioned above, is to keep the elderly alive with medication, I.V. drips, and all kinds of technological interventions so as to control the patients’ finances interminably. The longer they live, the more profits grow. In many of these cases, the Homes are complicit with doctors, who are in charge of prolonging the maximum lifespan of the elderly, no matter what condition they are in (even a vegetative coma) or the wishes of their family (who prefer not to deal with the final fate of their elders). In Shua’s tale, Ernesto rescues his father from the Convalescent Home by hiring a commando group who lives in another highly demarcated space, although this one—unlike the closed neighborhoods—is not found on any map: these spaces are called “occupied zones.” Not only has this symbolic and extra-official geography been removed from the most up-to-­ date urban maps, it now appears “as if they were parks or plazas that one has to circle around” (112). The natural space that remains for the wealthy is here transformed into another empty referent in that its cartographic demarcation does not correspond to its real condition (which is erased): Those of us who live in the no-man’s-land that a good portion of the city has become are familiar with gated neighborhoods, where our rich friends, or our clients, or our employers live. Even just as guests, we enjoy the relative security of those placid, tree-lined streets. But I didn’t know much about the occupied zones other than what I had read in the papers. People are aware that they exist; they talk about them, they read reports of crimes or police activity, and they carefully avoid those streets that cross them. (112).

The occupied zones are far from “parks or plazas,” false representations of green spaces that the city lacks or reserves only for those who have the economic means to live among their own. The occupied zones are characterized by “physical deterioration,” houses, and buildings that “experience a process of degradation that simple poverty can’t explain” (113). And it is here where “the thugs have the possibility of expressing themselves perfectly, completely, without fear of any sort of repression”

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(113).37 In the occupied zones “young and old alike destroy their own surroundings and systematically destroy themselves” and “they reproduce and grow like a dark, ragged-edged stain, one of the tumors invading the city” and whose “degradation” transforms “residences, shops, businesses, public or private agencies, plazas, streets” into “gray magma, broken down and filthy, where cables, garbage, weeds, walls, children, and animals swirl together in a confusion identical to itself, undifferentiated, useless” (113). The space represents a chaotic cartography that evokes a rhetoric of waste emanating from the folds and interstices on the edges and borders that limit the different zones of contact and intersection. The most recognizable opposite of these zones is the high-resolution map of the private neighborhoods, the “privatopias” conceptualized by David Harvey (2000),38 where the spatial configuration is clearly marked off and defined, always with the color green that surrounds all the urban constructions, as in the maps of utopias.39 With his father rescued from the Convalescent Home, Ernesto embarks with him on an escape that, after cutting through fragmented spaces of the city, ends in the northern zone of the province of Buenos Aires. In this city of the future, even outside the limits of the capital, the space was urbanized and “areas of no-man’s-land were practically nonexistent”; on the contrary, one could see “gated communities, occupied zones, villas, and 37  Paradoxically, this very typical characteristic is appropriate to define what happens in a private neighborhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in Celina Murga’s previously mentioned film, Una semana solos (2007). Besides articulating the traits we have analyzed in relation to nature and utopia in an exclusive spatiality, this film recounts the story of a group of adolescents who, home alone without parental supervision for a week, go around breaking into their neighbors’ houses and destroying them. Interestingly, by the end of the film, once the adolescents have been identified as the aggressors, they do not receive any punishment for what they have done. 38  “The geographical disparities in wealth and power increase to fashion a metropolitan world of chronically uneven geographical development. For a while the inner suburbs drained wealth from the central city but now they, too, have ‘problems’ though it is there, if anywhere, where most new jobs are created. So the wealth moves, either further out to the ex-urbs that explicitly exclude the poor, the underprivileged, and the marginalized, or it encloses itself behind high walls, in suburban ‘privatopias’ and urban ‘gated communities.’ […] The rich form ghettoes of affluence (their ‘bourgeois utopias’) and undermine concepts of citizenship, social belonging, and mutual support” (Harvey 2000, 148–150; my emphasis). 39  As in the films La zona and Una semana solos, and also in Ariel Winograd’s Cara de queso [Cheese Face] (2006), nature appears, characterizes, and defines one of the most important specificities of country club communities. The repeated traveling aerial shots expose a sort of precise map on which each house is surrounded by a lush lawn.

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nothing else” (Shua 2010, 151). Compared to one another, all of these territories were different in that, while in the closed neighborhoods “the owners didn’t like to hire local people” and “[t]hey brought in personnel from the city,” in the occupied zones, “[t]akeovers generally started from within, led by service workers, sometimes with the help of security guards if they hadn’t been chosen carefully” (151). Ernesto and his father go to another exclusive space, another green utopia, which is also a mythical space inhabited by “Old Runaways,” old people who have escaped from the Convalescent Home and who have founded their own utopian community. In fact, this “community of Old Runaways,” is made up of “people who, with or without the help of relatives, succeeded in escaping from the Homes, old folks who were never heard from again, not even a death notice” (73). However, no one seems to know exactly where or how they survive, although it does not seem that anyone has any real interest in finding out. This “ancient myth” invites belief in a gerontopia, a “marginal community of free, happy people, united in rebellion,” something “more than freedom,” an “illusion of independence and power, a sort of country of their own where they themselves ruled but where no one but they could attend to their needs: a mythical paradise where they were monarchs and slaves” (145). Here the elderly would no longer be economically exploited, cloistered off, medicated, and rendered invisible within the Convalescent Homes––a place singled out in the novel for, after all, concealing a social and cultural gerontophobia. Ernesto and his father eventually find this gerontopia of “The Old Runaways.” They have taken over the prestigious and exclusive Highland Country Club, turning it into an occupied zone, a utopia only for themselves: At the guard station, we were greeted by a couple of old women with Uzis. […] They made us get out of the car, and the one who was closer to us ­patted us down, fairly perfunctorily, with her stiff, clumsy hands, while the other one stood at attention. (153).

Significantly, however, in this closed space, green and natural become functional and necessary elements for the survival of the elderly, in the same way as Vera y González and Quiroule had envisioned. The space loses its characteristics as a mere aesthetic object whose most immediate function was profitable or ornamental: the soccer field was “planted over,” the gardens “had changed,” the “large living-dining room had been

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converted into a storage area for fruit and vegetables,” the “bags of potatoes were stacked in the cold fireplace,” together with “several barrels of apples,” and a “gigantic pile of onions” that “reached almost to the ceiling” (153–154). The parks, gardens, and fields had been turned into extensive plots for growing grains, the Old Runaways turned the “Highland quintas” into “real country estates,” with “magnificent orchards” (157; original emphasis). If, in these contemporary textual and visual representations, the open and available space of the city is a dystopian space plagued by violence and insecurity, then in Shua’s narration, only private neighborhoods consist in urban and green utopias, increasingly resembling the exclusive paradises of private neoliberal utopias. The open dystopian space is marked by both the absence of nature and greenery as well as the constant wars between private militias that have replaced the completely absent State. The reference on the maps to the color green only disguises the continuous degradation to which one is subject in this possible future of Buenos Aires. Just like another artificiality among all the illusions that abound in this text, green stands in for what actually unfolds in the occupied zones. The city now divides urban space into green and private territories for the few and leaves gray and degraded spaces “democratically” open and available for all, as Ulrich Beck (1992) ironically refers to poverty and pollution. Therefore, these spatial representations must be read in the same way as in previous chapters: from the demands of environmental justice, in which ecological disparity combines with social, cultural, and economic inequality. The only exception regarding this urban paradigm is the community of the Old Runaways: a utopia that, due to its mythical condition, only exists ambiguously. To this contrast, we must add that the outside, besides being permanently exposed to continuous deterioration and attacks, is plagued by persistent climatic peril. Shua’s text frequently refers to excessive heat and drought, along with the depletion of the ozone layer. The corrosive effect of high temperatures paradoxically permeates the characters’ lives, but is at the same time absent from the discursivities of closed cities and fortified enclaves that promote green spaces and nature. It thus appears that private utopias, because of their very condition as paradises, can nullify or ignore global problems such as climate change, global warming, pollution, deforestation, desertification, or the problem of endangered species. In fact, the

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aspect of imminent ecocide links Shua’s text to Homero Aridjis’s novel ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? (1995).40 The novel takes place in 2027 in Ciudad Moctezuma, an urban territory whose immediate referent is present-day Mexico City. This megalopolis represents the epitome of a city in ruins, polluted and continuously sinking. It is an open and accessible urban space, and it unequivocally represents the outside of closed, exclusive, and limited spaces. Unlike in Shua’s text, here there are no gray or ambiguous zones or open spaces that contain other closed spaces or vice versa. This is everyone’s city: “an intricate mass of concrete, iron, glass, and other materials that contamination eats away and time undoes” (Aridjis 1995, 111). Here there are no parks, there are no lawns or gardens, there is no “green” because “vegetable and animal life—and cultural life—has been almost entirely exiled. Bookstores, libraries, lawns, concert halls, theaters almost didn’t exist” (111). As in La muerte como efecto secundario, culture has been extinguished along with nature, and urban space has been transformed into an “interminable scheme of roads, alleyways, and intersections where the pavement […] always seemed blacker and stickier than the asphalt it was made from” (111). The story revolves around an “I,” the main character of the novel, and her friends María, Facunda, and Arira. Arira is a well-known theater actor, but given the abandonment and the “material deterioration of the National Theater Company’s buildings,” her plays “stayed stuck on theater marquees” (35). “I” is a lighting designer, and Facunda is a makeup artist. Nonetheless, “theater has died,” and the auditoriums of the theater company are all “in ruins,” although “few people are sorry about it” (35). If in the Buenos Aires of the future the characters’ brains are “fried by drugs, or hatred, or boredom, and a frustration born of unemployment” (Shua 2010, 113), in Aridjis’s story, it is the television network of “Circe Communication” that “has turned human beings into mental pigs”: Any fucking cannibal spent hours and years asleep with his eyes open devouring the sounds and images that Circe incessantly threw at him and his progeny. […] Circe Communication had cut everybody off from the people around them, and her hundreds of channels could rarely be defended against. Many men and women got lost not only in today’s shows but also

40  In the context of ecocide, it is fitting to mention César Aira’s novel Los misterios de Rosario [The Mysteries of Rosario] (1994) and Pedro Mairal’s El año del desierto [The Year of the Desert] (2005).

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in tomorrow’s and yesterday’s, which were shown over and over again ad nauseam. (1995, 176–177).

Deranged, the characters in Ciudad Moctezuma inhabit a space that, like their own reality, is about to collapse: in recent years, “hundreds of historic buildings had been demolished” and in their place were “contemporary ruins” (35). But the most significant and influential aspect of the characters’ lives is environmental pollution, coupled with constant demographic growth. Ironically characterizing the entire literary condition that writers from Alfonso Reyes to Carlos Fuentes had imposed upon Mexico City (and in particular the Anáhuac valley) with the epithet of “where the air is clear,” one of the characters proposes: —Before returning home, go down Gladiolas Street. There’s a hill where you can watch the dusk come over the Anáhuac valley, a twilight made of confused lights, dirty colors, oozing shadows, and fetid odors. (34).41

The story begins with “I” and her friends returning to Ciudad Moctezuma from Ciudad Netzahualcóyotl, where the wake of María’s twin sister, Rosalba, has just taken place. These two cities, apart from sharing a border, are united by “patches of asphalt and layers of smog,” and are similarly “atrocious” (41). Although they are permanent rivals, there is practically no difference between them. Both urban spaces’ “competitive mayors are equally dedicated to feverishly cutting down trees, flattening hills, filling ravines, channeling rivers, demolishing historical monuments, 41  This is in sharp contrast to the well-known description of the Anáhuac valley and Mexico City that Alexander von Humboldt purportedly offered in 1804: “Traveler: you have reached the region where the air is clearest.” In 1917, Alfonso Reyes used this phrase as an epigraph for his book Visión de Anáhuac (1519) [Vision of Anáhuac], and in 1958, Carlos Fuentes titled his first novel, whose main character is the city itself, La region más transparente (Where the Air is Clear): “Fall with me on our moon-scar city, city scratched by sewers, crystal city of vapor and alkali frost, city witness to all we forget, city of carnivorous walls, city of motionless pain, city of immense brevities, city of fixed sun, ashen city of slow fire, city to its neck in water, city of merry lethargy, city of twisted stinks, city rigid between air and worms, city ancient in light, old city cradled among birds of omen, city new upon sculptured dust, city in the true image of gigantic heaven, city of dark varnish and cut stone, city beneath glistening mud, city of entrails and tendons, city of the violated outrage, city of resigned market plazas, city of anxious failures, city tempested by domes, city woven by amnesias, bitch city, hungry city, sumptuous villa, leper city. Here we bide. And what are we going to do about it? Where the air is clear” (Fuentes 1995, 4–5).

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and making archeological ruins disappear” (42). As the characters wander about the city—whose end and limits are undefinable—they weave their stories into the urban and open space, which has its own story. As she moves through the city, the protagonist describes the space where she lives. The “contaminated light” is so thick that “you can almost touch it with your hands” (39). The prediction of disaster, destruction, and the imminent disappearance of the city is much more explicit than in Shua’s novel. Principal allusions refer to the ecological disaster in a context of increasing pollution, which adds to persistent governmental corruption (the “political system that misgoverns us” [48]). In the center of Ciudad Moctezuma Square, a “metal tree” with “artificial” flowers has been planted and “automaton birds that opened and closed their beaks and wings with every tweet” sing in its “tubular branches” (48). Also, the news reports the “latest obituaries: the extinction of the Mexican wolf, the end of the Nakax palm in Sian Ka’an, the disappearance of an orchid in Los Tuxtlas, the death of Butterfly River” (48). Human impunity, dizzying demographic growth, and continuous pollution are elements that hasten the end of time.42 Unlike other stories, Aridjis’s eschatological novel reveals all the detrimental aspects that run through the human, social, and environmental fabric of Ciudad Moctezuma. As we have analyzed in previous chapters, trash is one of the most urgent problems related to environmental pollution and increases difficulties on an ecological level, and it is represented not as an isolated element but rather as embedded within a web of political corruption. When “I”‘s father dies, she, along with her step-mother Dulcinea, empty the “leftovers” and “shadows” of his life from his apartment: Monday at 8:00 a.m., my father’s material world, already removed, already disconnected, anonymous in the street, was picked up by a garbage truck from Ciudad Moctezuma’s Metropolitan Department that, true to a third-­ world tradition, didn’t have license plates and transported trash in an uncovered bed. This way, the useless treasures of the author of my days were thrown onto Santa María Toci’s scrap heap, the largest open-air dump in the Americas, and young pepenadores quickly finished them off. (84; my emphasis). 42  Héctor Abad Faciolince’s novel Angosta (2004) predicted the eschatological outcome for a city that, although it could have been become a lush garden, instead has been transformed into a true hell due to urban development, continuous corruption, and symptomatic abandonment by the State.

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“I,” who is over six feet tall and is pejoratively called “giraffe woman,” can appreciate a different perspective from her elevated position. Her romantic relationship with Baltazar, another “giant” in Aridjis’s tale, plays out as the events of the city hasten toward the final apocalyptic outcome, which clearly ensues from growing ecological catastrophes. Water is scarce since the “Lerma and Cutzmala Rivers, which used to provide the precious liquid to the metropolitan area, had dried up years before;” the “people’s protests” were now about “water” (186). The use and abuse of natural resources makes the urban space unstable, marked by a continuous lack of supplies. Thus, the inhabitants of twenty-first century Ciudad Moctezuma seem to be living in a “time before electricity and fresh drinking water,” and the water rations that “the piperos used to bring twice a week, now came every two weeks, monthly, every two months or six months” (186; original emphasis). Hundreds of men and women waited in “lines with pots, buckets, and clay jars for the water vendors,” and after a long wait, “they would be given water that was somewhere between the color of urine and chocolate” (186). In addition to this water shortage, the dissolving ozone layer unleashes the destructive power of the sun’s rays, which have become completely “harmful”: one can no longer look at the sun, “straight on or out of the corner of your eye; human skin can no longer take the sun’s rays, as in antiquity” (186). Adding to this, as in Shua’s novel, there are no longer seasons and “the cold and heat come and go whenever they want” while cities “die of thirst” (186). When facing “general infición, some pedestrians covered their faces with masks,” although the “quality and shape of the masks corresponded to their economic resources” (186).43 The poorest, for example, cover their nose “with their hand, a piece of plastic, a dirty rag” (187).44 The outside of closed neighborhoods is diametrically opposed to ideal, urban, green, and exclusive spaces. If the inside of fortified cities is synonymous with nature and tranquility, the outside, or the city made for everyone and by everyone (Lefebvre 1968; Harvey 2008), which is where the 43  In the Mexican urban context, where the use of terms like “contamination” and “pollution” is frequent, the word “infición” is “according to the dictionaries” an “antiquated word, synonymous with infection, that, in turn, becomes the ‘action and effect of infecting’” (Moreno de Alba 1992, 224). 44  The first “Ecological Short Story” competition in Mexico (1991) awarded the third prize to Antonio Ortiz’s “El ZX-56.” This dystopian short story describes a completely polluted city (presumably Mexico City) in 2199, where one cannot go out on the street without a breathing apparatus due to environmental toxic gases that intoxicate people immediately.

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vast majority of the citizens reside, is gray and artificial, and its deterioration occurs so quickly that it is practically in ruins. The cartography of private neighborhoods and city maps contrasts with the inconsistent, undefined, and diffuse map of the open city, whose imprecise edges and borders do not account for how this space is in perpetual transformation and movement, contracting, expanding, and remaking itself again with each collapse instead of carefully adhering to the spatial arrangement of urban design, and revealing, on the other hand, its lack of responsiveness and limitations. In Shua’s Buenos Aires of the possible future, the borders of the occupied zones are deceptively marked—or demarcated—on maps, becoming parks and squares that one should avoid, although these parks and squares do not actually exist. “Green” interiors of city blocks, which are also illusory, falsely substitute and negate their ominous existence. In Ciudad Moctezuma, the city maps have “definite limits,” although “in reality no one knows where the smog ends or how deep the drainage channels are, which are the most popular cemeteries of this abnormal conglomeration” (216). The space of majestic nature, a green set of lungs that oxygenate and benefit the entire citizenry, remains reserved for the wealthy and powerful. The feral dogs that were mentioned in Las viudas de los jueves and remained outside of the wire fenced perimeter appear here, in the space that is the reverse of that outlined and exclusive inside space, inundating the totality of urban geography. The perspective that surfaces from this open territory that is the planet-city, the megalopolis of the future, consists of an urban dystopia in which flora and fauna are on the edge of extinction. This perspective consequently proposes an ecocidal reading of the city of the future—even when this future is recognizable and, therefore, not very far distant. In Aridjis’s near future, the Amazon region has become “the largest desert in the world” (259). Ecological mayhem is the direct corollary of human actions that, whether through negligence, ignorance, or apathy, have decisively transformed the planet. —With the fields overcome by drought, no water in the cities, oil wells dry, mines closed, businesses paralyzed, the government has declared a moratorium on payments! (238)

Not without humor, the calamity of the Anthropocene era, to which we alluded at the beginning of this book, finally arrives in Ciudad Moctezuma: the characters scream that, “the city is ending” from all around (273). And

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in the “moment of mass destruction, of general confusion, of tremors and turmoil, animated by confused light, all the birds began to sing, thinking it was the dawn” (273). Aridjis’ novel outlines a contrary perspective to the texts depicting closed and exclusive urban worlds. His novel concerns the vast majority of subjects that linger outside the social and economic map of neoliberalism, those who lack privileges and survive detached and alienated behind the wire fence fortifications, the barrier, the wall, or the entrance to paradise— that exclusive space reserved for the few.45 It is clear that if massive environmental destruction occurred, no one would be exempt from its scorching power. Nonetheless, it is curious that, in the stories about private spatialities, a rhetoric appears that is characterized by the deliberate absence of any reference to these problems, as if, in effect, the two opposing worlds and their ecosystems were not only mutually exclusive but also divided by high, invisible walls. One wonders to what extent these formulations of exclusivity are legitimate and what theoretical and practical devices allow for the belief that such a perception resembles, to a greater or lesser extent, a presumed objectivity.

7  Coda Two people from outside of Latin America, Enrique Vera y González of Spain and Pierre Quiroule of France, take up the topic of America as utopia and project the dream of establishing an alternative social model on the American continent. The tradition is long; nonetheless, the concern for a model that seems to be guided by ecological principles allows us to inquire whether it is possible to speak of eco-narratives or even ecotopias. Without a doubt, today it is easy to assign the prefix of “eco” to any text that incorporates an ecological dimension into its narrative or poetics. In this sense, Andrés Bello is an eco-poet in the same way that some texts and collections of poetry by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Jorge Isaacs, Alfonso Reyes, Ricardo Güiraldes, and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada have 45  In the already mentioned Angosta, for example, three worlds are outlined and separated by technological fortifications: Cold Earth, or Paradise, where the gifted live; Warm Earth, where the seconders reside; and Hot Earth, the lowest part, where millions of thirders live, stacked on top of each other in subhuman conditions (Abad Faciolince 2004, 19). Because each one of these sectors relates to different “worlds,” the citizens cannot freely and openly circulate among the other spaces: as a consequence, they implement urban “check points” and access visas within the urban geography, and the military enforces a policy of exclusion.

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eco-­themes. Some critics in the Latin American disciplinary field prefer to use terms like “ecological imagination” (Barbas-Rhoden 2011) to refer to narratives in which the environmental component is stated explicitly. Others directly allude to concepts such as the “Latin American landscape” (Rivera-Barnes and Hoeg 2009) or the “natural world” (Kane 2010). If we consider that the works of Horacio Quiroga and José María Arguedas are among the first wave of Latin American eco-narratives, this is because they formulate a deliberate critique or proposal regarding the problem of ecological sustainability, the use of natural resources, and the protection and/or destruction of nature. Similarly, Vera y González’s and Quiroule’s utopias prefigure this critical and theoretical conceptualization. However, they could be incorporated into a tradition of Latin American ecotopias (a tradition that, it is fitting to clarify, has not been catalogued until now) in the same way that the Anglophone Romantic tradition re-reads Thoreau, Wordsworth, and Coleridge to create its own ecocritical literary genealogy. As we have explored over the course of this chapter, the narratives of Vera y González and Quiroule contrast with other futurist visions in that they foretell a glorious future resulting from the balanced union between human and non-human beings. More recent iterations of the utopian proposal, such as the work of Shua and Aridjis, instead propose an apocalyptic vision as a product of that same union and interaction. All of these utopian proposals are framed as a critique of the present but their visions of the future vary, as do the meaning of science and technology, the search (or lack thereof) for an alternative social model, the implementation of these imaginaries in a natural space, and the uses (or lack thereof) of its resources. In the first two novels, the relationship between science, technology, spatial configurations, and sustainable social efforts solves problems (the removal of trees, world hunger, energy conservation); within Shua’s and Aridjis’s novels, this interaction creates further problems. Vera y González and Quiroule shape a fundamental contribution to the betterment of citizens and their quality of life; Shua and Aridjis envision a destructive and alienating alliance. In all of the novels, the city lies at the epicenter of these transformations, but only in the first two does the urban territory constitute the paradigm of an ecologically sustainable model. In this sense, the first two escape the widely circulated stereotypes—already available in the mid-nineteenth century—that confer countless negative values upon urban space, categorically opposing it to any notion of nature. Therefore, these narratives offer a more attenuated reading of the city, with its contrasts and gradations, but simultaneously in confluence with nature. An

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archetypical case comes from England at the time when Quiroule writes his texts. It begins when William Morris elaborates a sharp criticism of big cities where the lives of workers are degraded to the point of absolute alienation.46 In Latin America, Bello, among others already mentioned, constitutes a paradigmatic example. This contrast is paradoxical and significant because the tradition of green utopias at the turn of the twenty-first century has taken a radical turn and reemerges in a completely different form: now, urban, green, and exclusive proposals are conceptualized—and commercialized—as utopian spaces where the dream of openness and social inclusion remains truncated. In spite of being urban, these spaces are characterized by being reserved for an exclusive minority, and by equating nature and an ecological discourse with aesthetic, commodifiable and profitable traits. These late-twentieth-century texts do not complement or connect these aspects in any meaningful way to a more critical method of ecological inquiry. This is no longer Vera y González’s and Quiroule’s nature of orchards and gardens. Nor is it a nature whose environmental agenda seeks to implement a sustainable urban model that enhances awareness of the possibilities of improving its physical surroundings—in broader terms, the ecosystem. Therefore, the concept of nature functions as an empty signifier whose possible referents vary in accordance with first, the supply and demand of the market; second, the development of real estate projects; third, the exacerbation of problems such as (the lack of) security portrayed through mass media and alliances of economic and political power among entrepreneurs and exploitative public officials; and fourth, the imposition—through mechanisms of social distinction—of a change in the supposed “lifestyle” of consumers (who, besides consuming Coca-Cola, consume nature, among many other things). The early twentieth-century urban ecotopias of La estrella del sur and La ciudad anarquista americana propose a poetics of environmental preservation through narrative strategies and devices that synthesize a large number of disciplinary perspectives, visions of the future and world-­ making as well as political positionings and activisms. They are the beginning of a literary and cultural genealogy that has yet to be explored in the Latin American context. They constitute an effective effort with respect to an attainable future through proposals that open infinitely, as David Harvey appropriately suggests, counteracting a dystopian and apocalyptic  For example, see “Art, Socialism and Environment” (1934 in Coupe 2000, 32–36).

46

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future that recurs in texts of this tradition. For this reason, they deserve not only recognition but also assimilation into the—still unwritten—pages of Latin American eco-narratives.

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Kane, Adrian Taylor. 2010. The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth Century Writings. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co. Publishers. Le Corbusier. 1929. The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning. London: J. Rodker. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1974. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New  York: Harper & Row. Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos. ———. 1974. La production de l’espace. Vol. 31, 15. Paris: Éditions Anthropos. Lewis, Martin. 1992. Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Love, Glen. 2003. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Mathisen, Werner Christie. 2001. The Underestimation of Politics in Green Utopias: The Description of Politics in Huxley’s Island, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Callenbach’s Ecotopia. Utopian Studies 12 (1): 56–78. Moreno de Alba, José G. 1992. Minucias del lenguaje. México D.F: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Morris, William. 1890. News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from A Utopian Romance. Boston: Roberts Brothers. Mumford, Lewis. 1922. The Story of Utopias. New York: Boni and Liveright. ———. 1938. The Culture of Cities. London: Secker & Warburg. ———. 1961. The City in History. London: Secker & Warburg. Murga, Celina. 2008. Una semana solos. Argentina: Vanguard. Nigh, Ronald, and Nemesio J.  Rodríguez. 1995. Territorios violados: indios, medio ambiente y desarrollo en América Latina. In Dirección General de Publicaciones del Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes; Instituto Nacional Indigenista. México, D.F. North, Richard. 1995. Life on a Modern Planet: A Manifesto for Progress. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press. Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel. London: Secker & Warburg. Piñeiro, Claudia. 2005. Las viudas de los jueves. Buenos Aires: Clarín-Alfaguara. ———. 2009. Thursday Night Widows. Trans. by Miranda France. London: Bitter Lemon Press. Plá, Rodrigo. 2007. La zona. Houston, Tex: DistriMax. Quiroule, Pierre [Joaquín Alejo Falçonnet, pseud]. 1914. La ciudad anarquista americana. Buenos Aires: La Protesta. Rivera-Barnes, Beatriz, and Jerry Hoeg. 2009. Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rojas, Patricia. 2007. Mundo privado: historias de vida en countries, barrios y ciudades cerradas. Buenos Aires: Planeta.

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Ross, Andrew, and Michael Bennett. 1999. The Social Claim on Urban Ecology. In The Nature of Cities. Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, ed. Michael Bennett and David W. Teague, 15–30. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. 1916 [1850]. Argirópolis. Buenos Aires: La Cultura Argentina. Sassen, Saskia. 1991. Global City: New  York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schei, Tonje Hessen. 2010. Play Again. Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films. Scliar, Moacyr. 2001 [1984]. No Retiro da Figueira. In Contos brasileiros contemporâneos, ed. Julieta de Godoy Ladeira, 47–50. São Paulo: Editora Moderna. Shua, Ana María. 1997. La muerte como efecto secundario. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. ———. 2010. Death as a Side Effect. Trans. Andrea G. Labinger. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Soja, Edward. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London; New York: Verso. ———. 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell. Svampa, Maristella. 2008. Los que ganaron: la vida en los countries y barrios privados. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos. Vera y González, Enrique. 2000 [1904]. A través del porvenir. La estrella del sur. Buenos Aires: Instituto Histórico de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Wells, H.G. 1905. A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman & Hall.

CHAPTER 5

Bioecocriticism: A New Critical Episteme

Our Mother Earth––militarized, fenced-in, poisoned, a place where basic rights are systematically violated––demands that we take action. Let us build societies that are able to coexist in a dignified way, in a way that protects life. —Berta Cáceres, Acceptance Speech of the Goldman Prize (2005)

This book covers a wide range of textual, visual, artistic, and performative works viewed through the lens of three specific environmental tropes that function as three categorizations each of which evokes three distinct images. These tropes are formulated in response to environmental concerns and to the very notion of nature and the configuration of Latin American urban space from a biopolitical angle. Each section follows its own argumentative thread, inserting the discussion into a much broader field in which ecocriticism has been the point of departure, although not the end point. By way of conclusion, I would like to take up the distinctive aspects of the Latin American phenomenon studied here and offer a final reflection about the limitations of ecocriticism as a theoretical device of analysis and the consequent need to propose a new critical episteme that helps us read this aesthetics alternatively, allowing us to grasp the scope and breadth of its specific traits.

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After having introduced the establishment of ecocriticism in the United States and Great Britain and its later development in Latin American studies during the last 10 years, I examined figurations of the garbage dump in Chap. 2, which explored the relationship between the human and non-­ human. Principally, I argue that to grasp the extent of this literary and visual production we must conceive of this phenomenon as a process characterized by the politics of bioenvironmental destruction. As I understand it, the missing piece within ecocriticism is that it failed to articulate an approach capable of addressing the destruction of human and non-human beings in the same degree. While ecocriticism has done a remarkable job in addressing the non-human dimension of the environmental catastrophe, it neglected to account for the dehumanized subject which, on the other hand, is an integral piece in the overarching machinery of imperial extractivism. Through these ongoing processes, the human subject has been atomized, degraded, and objectified. Humans are depicted here as a marginal component within the overall mechanisms of exploitation that subjugate and oppress natural resources (non-human beings) as well as human resources (human beings). The works discussed in this chapter notably lack any representation of a “green,” “natural,” and/or “healthy” environment. Contrary to this absence, they bluntly portray a landscape where human and non-human lives are encircled with trash, decomposition, rubble, and ruins. The following chapter evokes the image of material transformations through the practice of recycling. These figurations have in common their concern for a wide range of subjects that relate to material objects from a different angle. These material objects compose a realm of both processed and discarded objects—resources that by way of appropriating, assorting, and imbuing them with a “new value” were transformed into new raw/ amended matter for daily survival. On a different level, these resources were metamorphosed into an artwork through artistic and performative productions that go beyond linguistic and audiovisual narratives. In turn, this artwork becomes an aesthetic cultural artifact that operates distinctively, as a vehicle to generate a robust and participatory ecological and social awareness. Due to the socioeconomic conditions endemic to Latin America, the trope of recycling appeals to a sustainable environmental imaginary, but only tangentially since it does not first respond to an “ideological” posture as does environmental activism found within “developed” countries. It nevertheless does entail an original and innovative gesture

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whose final effects and impacts can be gauged within an inadvertent ecological agenda. The figurations studied in the last chapter refer to a poetics of preservation that springs from the utopian imaginary specific to two different and contrasting historical moments. When confronted with each other, these two visions establish distinctions and demarcations in function of the use and enjoyment of the natural world. In literary works from the early twentieth century, the trope of ecological preservation was all-encompassing and available to all human and non-humans equally. A 100  years later, however, this image of equity has fractured and given way to nature as the exclusive commodity of an elite, a commercialized inheritance inaccessible to those subjects who lack social or economic means. Through a dynamic that confronts an inclusive spatiality with an exclusive one, the last section of this chapter demonstrated how an operation of this type is ecologically unsustainable and argued that the very idea of “environmental preservation” is limited and amounts to a purely discursive rhetoric. In other words, the idea of preservation has been hollowed out and converted into a discourse of economic profitability that appeals to the “natural,” “green” environment as a lucrative strategy, and, through the recurring use and broader implementation of this narrative, these terms have become empty and replaceable signifiers. This study reveals that the environmental tropes examined here shift the debate focused on the built environment toward an ontological plane in which the very humanity of the subjects inhabiting those urban spaces remains a key issue to be addressed. This distinctive aspect, as I announced at the beginning of the book, reconfigures the boundaries of ecocriticism as a discipline stemming from the Anglo-American academic fields. Furthermore, it uncovers its limitations by determining the specific features of what is unique and particular to Latin America, rather than contesting ecocritics’ groundwork. In this sense, the aesthetic productions analyzed in this book mobilize a sense of urgency and immediacy that appeals to readers’ sensibilities, perceptions, (pre)judgments, and underlying premises. One prevailing characterization of these works is that, as Mary Douglas (1966) has demonstrated, the socially elaborated configuration of what is dirt, and therefore of what must be removed, consists of, after all, an operative attempt to arrange, classify, and establish an unmistakable social order. Both human and non-human beings, analyzed in this study, are continuously enacted as “dirt” within a peculiar order that will define them in contrast to “purity.” Visualizing loss, then, is a vital

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imperative, because, as I argue throughout the book, the myriad imageries of waste assemblages, whether dispersed and scattered or concentrated and compressed, single out a voracious consumption pattern, of which they are the reverse as well as the necessary condition of its existence. Indeed, this pattern could not prevail if it were not for the insatiable aspirations of our modern world, along with its cultural, social, and economic values. These imageries embody the ultimate metaphor of the ongoing ecological depletion and devastation, one that sweeps along humans and non-humans alike, engraving them in the growing strata of imperial expansion and dispossession. If one of the central questions of this study is how we can construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus that can further advance our understanding of an environmental phenomenon that is unique to Latin America, I will contend that the aesthetic praxis analyzed here is informed by a critical framework that results in a new epistemological paradigm. As I have tried to demonstrate, these literary works, visual narratives, material artifacts, and art installations are informed by a rhetoric of waste. This line of inquiry also attests to how this cultural production intersects ongoing debates related to environmental justice and the environmentalism of the poor by portraying a unique landscape, a wastescape, where the very idea of nature is absent or, more accurately, restricted. Consequently, the garbage dump operates as a prosaic emblem that renders the human into a state of decomposition and dehumanization. Recycling, for its part, emerges as a transformative labor across spheres, borders, and territories that, although it is “sustainable,” reduces the subject’s practices to unsustainable lives. The utopian imaginary of the early twenty-first century materializes through a “natural” urban and commodified discourse that, from its very inception, articulates the physical and symbolic limits of a select minority while leaving a large number of subjects outside its walls. In the framework of contemporary Latin American cities, nature and the built environment have not only become objects of limited and exclusive consumption, they have been transformed into an “object” whose value exceeds that of human beings themselves. This unprecedented aspect is one of the most specific marks of contemporary Latin American environmental representations within an urban space, and this new dynamic established between a dehumanized humanity—which is discarded—and a humanized nature—which is appropriated—forces us to no longer reflect on an ecocentric standpoint, but rather on a bioecocentric one. The new critical episteme for this perspective lies in the convergence of ecocriticism

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and biopolitics which serves as an inter- and trans-disciplinary catalyst that moves beyond the theoretical apparatus coming from Anglo-American scholarship in order to formulate new practices of knowledges in the context of Latin American environmental cultural and aesthetic works. I define this episteme as bioecocriticism. Here I would like to point to a great paradox: If between the mid-­ nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth nature is represented as an indomitable element that must be contained, domesticated, and dominated (Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845), Eustacio Rivera’s La vorágine [The Vortex] (1924), and Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara (1929) are typical examples), at the turn of the twenty-first century, not only does nature appear as a domesticated and dominated element (ruled and rationalized), but it has once again been included in a specific political and economic agenda. Nonetheless, the programmatic objective of this agenda is no longer linked to a project of nation-building but, on the contrary, to the implementation of closed and independent urban territorial models whose inhabitants dream of removing themselves from national politics. These models are utopian, and, in them, nature is no longer equated with barbarism and otherness. Nature has been appropriated and incorporated into this socioeconomic program; “barbarism”— or the Other—contrarily, has been taken out of this equation, becoming a synonym for the increased precariousness of life through the “neoliberal political-economic regime” (Masquelier 2017, 82), a mechanism that renders the vast number of the population reproducing in the “exterior” space, beyond the private cartographies that are demarcated by physical and emblematic edges.1 For this new elite, the imminence of this new “barbarism” represents, as we have seen in the examples mentioned here, a new type of threat that must be quashed at whatever cost and that is now associated—ironically—with the space of urban overcrowding that can be considered the “open” city: informal, gray settlements, in all their plausible forms, or degraded territories now rendered invisible in a third space, or a space of “exception,” such as the garbage dump. To summarize, the aesthetic works examined in this book operate at the intersections of biopolitics and ecocriticism, foregrounding questions of 1  In Frames of War, Judith Butler notes that “arbitrary modes of maximizing precariousness for some and minimizing precariousness for others both violate basic egalitarian norms and fail to recognize that precariousness imposes certain kinds of ethical obligations on and among the living” (2009, 22).

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spatialities and temporalities, of the scope of waste, and of the all-­ encompassing significance of wastescape. By placing Latin American figurations within a bioecocritical paradigm that accounts for the material conditions of human and non-human relational networks––especially those at the convergence of what’s discarded and what isn’t, what’s valuable and what is not––we can foster alternative meanings and enable new forms of understandings. That’s why in Latin America, the very scheme of ecological preservation implies another paramount paradox: While this environmental praxis is performed by the human workforce, the same subjects that come into contact with trash are subsumed by a rhetoric of waste, rendering both undistinguishable. And this rhetoric of waste, therefore, inverts the very question of environmental preservation with that of human continuance. Hence, I propose bioecocriticism as a concept that enables us to visualize human and non-human obsolescence––loss––and by doing so, to examine the ontological impact of consumption and expendability in both subjects and objects, human and non-human beings alike. Only then will it be possible to revert the fallout of the increasing disenfranchisement, ex/ appropriation, and concealment of human remains and residual humans.

References Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge Classics edition (originally published 1966). London; New York: Routledge. Masquelier, Charles. 2017. Critique and Resistance in a Neoliberal Age: Towards a Narrative of Emancipation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor?, 237, 244 A Abaroa, Eduardo, 177 Abject ruins, 97 Achrony, 232 Adorno, Theodor, 37, 122, 123 Agamben, Giorgio, 11, 43, 56–60, 56n2, 57n3, 57n4, 57n5, 58n6, 69–71, 75, 77, 80, 85, 106 Aira, César, 100, 124, 140–144, 152, 154, 173, 182, 244n40 Alaimo, Stacy, 40, 84 Amazon, 30, 35, 38, 248 Amazonian cosmologies, 25 Amerindians’ ontologies, 25 Androcentrism, 16, 17, 20

Animal rights, 206 Anthropocene, viii, 2n1, 10, 28, 32, 42, 248 Anthropocentrism, 16, 20, 205 Apocalyptic future, 251 Arcades Project, 121 Aridjis, Homero, 150, 210, 210n16, 237, 244, 246–250 Assmann, Aleida, 117, 118n3 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), 5n6, 15 A través del porvenir. La estrella del sur, 199, 206 Autarchy, 230, 232 B Bare life, 56, 57, 57n4 Basuriego, 130n14, 131

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Heffes, Visualizing Loss in Latin America, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28831-9

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INDEX

Bataille, Georges, 122 Baudelaire, Charles, 120, 121, 144, 199 Bauman, Zygmunt, 43, 56, 58–61, 75, 100, 100n43, 102, 106 Beck, Ulrich, 82–84, 84n33, 243 Belli, Gioconda, 66, 77, 88, 89, 93 Benjamin, Walter, 44, 121, 122, 168 Berni, Antonio, 31, 77, 125, 169–172 Beuys, Joseph, 176 Bioecocentric, 161 Bioecocentric [standpoint], 260 Bioecocritical, 41, 262 Bioecocritical paradigm, 41, 262 Bioecocriticism, 42, 80, 161, 257–262 Biopolitical, 42, 57, 71, 80, 257 Biopolitic of waste, 218 Biopolitics, 7, 41, 57n4, 58, 90, 103, 106, 261 Boca de lixo, 31, 66–69, 66n16, 77 Botellero, 132 Boundaries of ecocriticism, 29, 259 Buell, Lawrence, 5n7, 13, 14n14, 18, 18n16, 43n36, 82, 107 Buzos, 64, 80, 86, 88, 131, 161n42, 163, 165–169, 172, 183 C Cabezón Cámara, Gabriela, 94, 95, 95n38, 97, 98, 143 Capitalocene, 2n1, 28 Cárdenas, Raúl, 177, 178, 181n48 Carman, María, 85, 95n38, 229 Carson, Rachel, 40n35, 74 Cartography, 58, 133, 241, 248, 261 Cartoneros, 64, 124n8, 125, 130, 131, 133, 140–147, 145n27, 147n29, 150, 152, 153, 156, 157, 157n38, 157n39, 159, 160, 161n42, 163, 165, 167–169, 172, 173, 183, 184, 184n50

Cartoneros [the film], 124, 140 Catadores de lixo, 64, 66n16 Chejfec, Sergio, 141 Cirujas, 64, 64n15, 79, 100n45, 132, 141, 144, 147n29, 184n50 Cisneros, Ícaro, 66, 75, 76, 149 City in ruins, 124, 126, 244 City of the future, 241, 248 Climatic peril, 243 Closed and exclusive urban worlds, 249 Closed neighborhoods, 220, 223n25, 227, 232, 239, 240, 242, 247 The collapsed city, 128 Colonialism, 28, 34, 40, 59n9 Coloniality, 27, 34, 59n9 Commercialization of nature, 229 Commercial rhetorical object, 236 Commodifiable, 251 Commodified discourse, 260 Commodifies nature, 213 Contaminated, 63, 69n17, 81n28, 88, 93, 101–103, 105, 143 Contamination, 4, 33, 38n34, 39, 39n35, 42, 60, 64, 81, 82, 87, 93n37, 94, 99, 100, 103, 106n51, 107, 124, 128, 129n13, 181, 194, 229, 230, 244, 247n43 Contreras Castro, Fernando, 66, 77, 80, 81, 82n30, 85, 87, 88 Country club, 212, 222, 224, 226–229, 233, 234, 235n35, 241n39 Coutinho, Eduardo, 31, 31n27, 66n16, 67, 70 “Covert” value, 117, 120 Critical plant studies, 35 Cuevas, Minerva, 178, 179

 INDEX 

D Davis, Mike, 43, 72, 107, 108, 128, 128n12 De buzos, leones y tanqueros, 165 Decolonial turn, 23 Deep ecologists, 16 Deep ecology, 16, 17, 195, 204, 205, 207 Dehumanized humanity, 260 De-humanized subject, 258 Del Llano, Eduardo, 124, 161, 165 Demographic growth, 2n1, 16, 32, 64, 128, 209, 245, 246 Douglas, Mary, 44, 55, 63n14, 71, 72, 92, 97, 259 Dystopian, 12, 150, 197, 210, 213, 239, 243, 247n44, 251 (Dys)topias, 191–252 E Ecocidal, 150, 248 Ecocidal reading of the city of the future, 248 Ecocide, 210, 213, 237–249, 244n40 Ecocritical film theory and criticism, 21 Ecofeminism, 13n11, 16, 17, 40, 195, 198, 204 Ecological disaster, 246 Ecological justice, 108 Ecological mayhem, 248 Eco-Marxism, 17, 195, 196n5 Ecotopias, 194, 195, 197, 213, 249–251 El aire, 141 Eloísa Cartonera, 125, 173, 175 El tren blanco, 124, 140, 144, 145 Environmental destruction, viii, 8, 10, 32, 88, 107, 249 Environmental humanities, 5, 20, 21, 25, 29, 31, 35, 36, 41

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Environmentalism of the poor, 33, 66n16, 151, 151n33, 183, 260 Environmental justice, 16–18, 28, 31, 33, 38–40, 43n36, 44, 73, 81, 150, 174, 183, 195, 196n5, 243, 260 Environmental justice movement, 16, 17, 33, 39, 43n36, 150, 151n33, 174, 196n5 Environmental peril, 184 Environmental pollution, 63, 63n13, 82, 84, 245, 246 Environmental preservation, 95n39, 160, 161, 199, 213, 251, 259, 262 Environmental risk, 82, 82n29, 83, 99 Environmental suffering, 67 Environmental survivors, 34, 34n29, 39, 39n35 Environmental turn, 18, 27, 34 Escobar, Arturo, 23, 24, 31, 36 Estamira, 66, 72–74, 77, 83, 84 Exclusive space, 234, 235, 237, 242, 247, 249 Extractive agro-imperialism, 38 Extractivism, 35, 258 F Farias, Marcos, 66, 75 Fernández, Claudia, 179, 180 Foucault, Michel, 7, 43, 56, 155, 167 Frankfurt School, 37 Furtado, Jorge, 31, 31n27, 70–72 G Gaard, Greta, 16 Garbology, vii, 32, 61 García, Nahuel, 124, 140, 144 García, Ramiro, 124, 140

266 

INDEX

Garrard, Greg, 15, 195–198, 196n5, 205 Gated community(ies), 12, 212n18, 213–215, 213n19, 217, 217n22, 218, 224, 228, 241, 241n38 Genth, Ulrich, 180 Gerontophobia, 242 Gerontopia, 242 Giménez, Sheila Pérez, 124, 140 Globalization, 9, 28, 58–60, 59n8, 66, 89n35, 99, 128, 130, 137, 183, 184 Global South, 19, 28, 32, 33, 42, 64, 76, 89, 102, 129, 184 Glotfelty, Cheryll, 5, 5n6, 13, 18, 26 Great Pacific Garbage Patch, 2 “Green” as an empty signifier, 236 Greenfort, Tue, 180, 181 Greening the city, 194 Green space/greenpeace, 99, 124, 161, 164, 194, 204, 213, 229–231, 234, 240, 243 Green urban utopias, 224 Green utopias, 194–206, 242, 243, 251 Guha, Ramachandra, 33, 210 H Haraway, Donna, 2n1, 20, 28 Harvey, David, 11, 43, 191, 192, 207, 207n12, 236, 241, 251 Heise, Ursula, 32, 34, 74, 74n22, 83 Hippodamus, 233 Homens de papel, 124, 153, 159 Human obsolescence, 80 Human ruins, 60, 64–65, 86, 95, 98, 185 Hyperobjects, 4

I Ideal City, 233 Ilha das flores, 31, 66, 70, 71 Imperial extractivism, 258 Increasing pollution, 246 Indigeneity, 24, 35, 38, 38n33 Indigenous cosmogonies, 27, 205 Indigenous criticism, 35 Insularity, 230 L La boliviana, 100, 101, 132n16, 143 La ciudad anarquista americana, 199, 209, 251 La guerra de los gimnasios, 141 Laguna, Juanito, 31, 77, 125, 169 La muerte como efecto secundario, 237, 244 Lanzinger, Pia, 182 Las viudas de los jueves, 214, 218, 228, 233, 235n35, 248 Latin American ecocriticism, vii, 6 Latin American eco-narratives, 250 Latour, Bruno, 20, 22, 23, 179 La villa, 124, 140, 141, 152 La virgen cabeza, 94, 97–99, 101, 143 La zona, 216–218, 221, 228 La zona [film], 214, 223, 227, 241n39 Lefebvre, Henri, 207, 207n12, 236 Liboiron, Max, 40 Livón-Grosman, Ernesto, 124, 140, 144–146, 157, 182 Lo indígena, 24, 38, 38n33 Los cartoneros/The Cardboard People, 124, 140 Los pepenadores de acá, 66, 75, 149

 INDEX 

M Macheteros, 135 Marcos, Plínio, 124, 153–155, 157, 159, 182 play, 124, 155, 157, 159 Martínez Alier, Joan, 33, 43, 151, 151n33 Material ecocriticism, 26 McLean, Michael, 124, 140, 144, 145, 182 Megalopolis, 202, 202n7, 244, 248 The megalopolis of the future, 248 Melosi, Martin, 64, 103–105 Merchant, Carolyn, 22, 36, 37, 37n32 Mis amigos los pepenadores (La vida de un Maestro de Banquillo), 76, 77, 124, 147 Montiel, Ramona, 31, 77, 125, 169 Morahan, Santiago, 125, 172, 173 More, Thomas, 195, 198, 230 Moreno, Rafael Gutiérrez, 135 Morton, Timothy, 23 Multinaturalism, 25 Mundo Privado. Historias de vida en countries, barrios y ciudades cerradas, 214 Mutter, Heike, 180 N Nature functions as an empty signifier, 251 Neoliberal economic policies, 142 New critical episteme, 12, 43, 44, 130, 161, 257–262 New epistemological paradigm, 41, 260 New materialism, vii, 5, 35 Nordelta, 214, 215n20, 225, 226, 229–233, 232n31, 238 Nordelta real estate project, 225 “No Retiro da Figueira,” 214 Novela de la selva, 30, 31, 34

267

O Obsolescence, 11, 32, 73, 80, 152, 161, 262 Occupied zones, 240–243, 248 Olfactory and noise pollution, 83 Ontological turn, 23–26, 28 Open city, 231, 237, 238, 248, 261 P Parra, José Luis, 34, 76, 77, 124, 147, 149, 150, 152, 182 Pepenadores, 64, 75, 124n8, 130, 134, 135, 147–153, 153n35, 156, 159, 160, 161n42, 163, 165, 168, 169, 172, 183, 246 Piñeiro, Claudia, 214, 223, 227 Planet-city, 248 Plantationocene, 2n1, 28 Plá, Rodrigo, 214, 216 Plumwood, Val, 16, 17, 142 Pluriversality, 28 Pluriverse, 24 Poetics of preservation, vii, 259 Political ecology, 22–24, 36, 89n35 Pollution, 4, 15, 17, 27, 31, 33, 40, 44, 63, 63n13, 69n17, 71, 79, 82–84, 82n29, 82n30, 128, 194, 196n5, 202, 213, 229, 234n33, 243, 245, 246, 247n43 Pomian, Krzysztof, 118, 118n4 Post-anthropocentrism, 22 Postcolonial criticism, 35 Postcolonial ecology, 19 Postcolonial studies, 18, 19, 40 Postcolonial theory, 34 Posthumanism, 5, 18, 20, 22, 35 Post-2001 economic and political collapse [Argentina], 145 Prado, Marcos, 72, 75, 84 Pratt, Mary Louise, 27, 90, 185

268 

INDEX

Private neighborhoods, 12, 212, 216, 219, 224, 225, 228, 233, 234n33, 235n35, 241, 241n37, 243, 248 Private neoliberal utopias, 243 Private spatialities, 249 Private utopias, 213, 243 Privatized utopian models, 224 “Privatopias,” 241, 241n38 Q Queer ecology, vii, 35 Quema, 64n15, 100n45, 132, 132n15 Quiroule, Pierre, 199, 200, 202–204, 202n8, 203n10, 209–211, 220, 236, 242, 249–251 R Rathje, William, 44, 55, 61–63, 96n40, 97, 126n10 Reciclar–T3, 174 Regulation, 16, 40, 63, 128, 136, 181, 220, 226, 227, 234 Residual/Artistic Interventions in the City, 125, 175–177 Residual condition, 58, 87 Residual humans, 58n7, 60, 64–65, 70–72, 75, 79, 80, 86, 90, 94, 95, 98, 99, 105–106, 108, 185, 262 Resource extraction, 28, 30, 36n31, 42 Rhetoric of waste, 9, 32, 43, 77, 182, 241, 260, 262 Risk(s), 7n9, 33, 39, 63, 63n14, 64, 77, 81–84, 82n29, 84n33, 99, 100, 107, 145, 181 Risk society, 83, 84n33 Rojas, Patricia, 214, 217n22, 224, 226, 227, 232, 235n35, 238 Rubbish Theory, 55, 115

S Sarmiento, Domingo F., 200, 200n6 Scientific Revolution, 8, 36 Scliar, Moacyr, 214, 215, 218, 221, 223 Shua, Ana María, 237, 240, 243, 244, 246–248, 250 Silent Spring, 40n35, 74 Sobras, 66, 75, 77 Social ecology, 17, 43n37, 195, 196n5, 204 Soper, Kate, 14, 22 Strafacce, Ricardo, 100, 132n16, 143 Strasser, Susan, 91, 92, 103 Stricker, Thomas, 182 T Thompson, Michael, 44, 55, 115–117, 116n1, 117n2, 118n3, 178 Throwaway culture, 91, 151 Toxic discourse, 43n36, 82, 100, 107 Toxicity, vii, 9, 18, 35, 39n35, 60, 71, 73, 82, 83, 107 Transcorporeality, 40 Trapero, Pablo, 66, 75 Tsing, Anna, ix, 28, 64, 139, 140 The 2001 collapse [Argentina], 144 The 2001 crisis [Argentina], 146 The 2001 financial crisis [Argentina], 146 U Um Favelado, 66, 75, 76 Única mirando el mar, 31, 66, 77, 80, 86, 88, 106 Urban closed enclaves, 236 Urban dystopia, 248 Urban ecocriticism, 43, 44

 INDEX 

Urban spaces, 12, 43, 70, 95n39, 103, 127, 128, 138, 139, 141, 142, 150, 155, 191, 193, 194, 198, 202n8, 213, 224, 225, 232, 243–245, 247, 250, 257, 259, 260 Urban utopias, 200n6, 203, 208n15, 212, 224, 230 Use and abuse of natural resources, 247 Utopian, 8, 9, 89, 93, 94, 107, 151, 192–200, 194n2, 204, 206, 207, 207n12, 208n15, 212–237, 250, 251, 261 Utopian community, 198, 210, 227, 242 Utopian imaginary, 191–194, 212, 259, 260 Utopian imagination, 8, 12, 191, 193, 194, 197 Utopias, 12, 35, 90, 93, 95n38, 191–252 Utopias of spatial form, 192 V Value, vii, 6, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 44, 55, 69, 72, 82, 87, 88, 91, 92, 97, 104, 105, 107, 115–117, 120–123, 121n6, 127, 130, 148n30, 153n35, 168, 173, 178, 182, 185, 199, 205, 218, 223n25, 226, 232, 235, 250, 260 Vegetal turn, vii, 35 Vera, Daniel, 165, 167, 182 Vera y González, Enrique, 199, 200, 203, 203n10, 204, 206–210, 208n14, 208n15, 220, 236, 242, 249–251

269

Verbitsky, Bernardo, 76–79, 94, 132n15, 147, 149, 150 Villa Miseria también es América, 76, 77, 94, 132n15, 147 W Wallerstein, Immanuel, 8, 8n10, 9, 59n9 Waring, Colonel George, 104, 136 Waslala, 66, 77, 80, 88, 90 Waste, vii–ix, 2, 8–11, 31–33, 34n29, 39, 41–44, 43n37, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60n10, 60n11, 61, 64, 65, 67, 69–74, 72n21, 76, 80, 81, 82n29, 87, 91, 93, 94, 96n40, 100–105, 102n47, 103n49, 108, 109, 115–185, 205, 211, 218, 260, 262 Wasted humans, 58, 59, 81 Waste injustice, 69 Wasteocene, 2n1, 8 Waste pollution, 64 Wastescapes, 41, 42, 260, 262 Williams, Raymond, 13n12, 19, 20, 43 Wolfe, Cary, 20 Y Yusoff, Kathryn, 40, 41 Z Zanol, Águida, 125, 172–174, 182