Introduction
Friday, 8.30 pm: it is night-time in Buenos Aires. Luis, a cartonero in his forties, pushes his half empty cart among the cars in a street in the posh neighbourhood of Belgrano. With both hands pushing the cart, a cigarette dangles from his mouth as the ashes drop between his legs. He arrives at the door of a large building and leaves the cart next to a parked car. He drops the cigarette on the floor and approaches Walter, the doorman. The men greet each other and Luis offers Walter a cigarette, which he accepts and puts in his pocket. In just a few days, on Sunday, River and Boca will play the Argentine classic football match. Sunday is the night Luis will return and the two men start talking about the game. One of them supports Boca, the other supports River. They tease each other and make their bets. Then Walter fetches several black bags full of garbage. Luis takes them, opens them carefully, pulls out what he needs and loads it onto the cart. He then closes the bags and leaves them next to a tree. In a while, the municipal garbage truck will pick them up. The men say goodbye. A little further on, Luis parks his cart and asks a ‘neighbour’ if he ‘has something to give him’. The young man, about 35 years old, says no, but tells him that there is some cardboard in the bag. Luis thanks him and takes the bag. As soon as the neighbour enters his home, Luis glances quickly inside the bag and pulls out a recently used pizza box, some mozzarella cheese still glued to it. He drops the box onto his cart and continues on his way. He still has 12 blocks to go to complete his route.
Just like Luis, thousands of people live off informal waste collection in Buenos Aires, an activity known as cartoneo. Although this activity is not a ‘novelty’, it became unusually visible in the late 1990s. Many cartoneros come into the city from the second, third and even fourth ring of Greater Buenos Aires.Footnote 1 They travel into the city by train, truck, horse or by foot. Many others live in the city's slums, villas, or in what today are known as New Precarious Settlements (Nuevos Asentamientos Urbanos).
By analysing the presence, use and struggles over public space of cartoneros and vecinosFootnote 2 in middle-class and central neighbourhoods of the city of Buenos Aires, this article examines practices, moralities and narratives operating in the production and maintenance of social inequalities. Concentrating on spatialised interactions, it shows how class inequalities are reproduced and social distances are generated in the struggle over public space. We focus on interactions to account for the tolerance and the limits to possible spatial appropriations. We also highlight the role of the state, as a multiple and contradictory agent, in the production and maintenance of class inequalities.
The article looks at two social situations. First, we explore the way in which cartoneros build routes in middle-class neighbourhoods in order to carry out their work. Second, we present an analysis of the eviction process of a cartonero settlement in the city. The joint consideration of these two social situations shows that cartoneros manage to carry out their activity by adopting ways of doing that involve negotiating with moralities present in those neighbourhoods. These negotiations enable the construction of relationships between vecinos and cartoneros. In addition, through different agencies, the state also contributes to build these relationships. The state carries out strategic actions to transform cartoneros into ‘urban recyclers’ (recuperadores urbanos). However, the cases examined show that although cartoneros can legitimately use those spaces, their presence is accepted when conceived as urban recyclers, things change when they decide to settle in the city. The difference between passing through the city and inhabiting it sets a limit on the cartoneros' legitimised use of space.Footnote 3 They are accepted as workers but not as inhabitants. In Buenos Aires, middle-class neighbourhood cartoneros cannot become vecinos (neighbours). Here, once again the state operates by sealing with public strength the moral and aesthetic contestation of the cartonero's presence as inhabitants of this space.
The article is based on extensive and long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2002 and 2009 in different middle-class neighbourhoods of the city. It is framed within a larger project exploring popular sectors' webs of access to Buenos Aires and the ways in which social inequalities are reproduced. As Goldman points out, ethnography's central aim is to build a model of understanding.Footnote 4 For this, one of the most useful tools is to let people speak freely, while the ethnographer observes and is part of the situation. During our fieldwork, we mostly let people speak freely. Being there allowed us to comprehend and construct a model for understanding. When we deemed it necessary we asked cartoneros and vecinos to participate in more formal interviews, which were recorded.
Long-term fieldwork was conducted when the activity of waste collecting (cartoneo) was being (re)configured, which proved to be an advantageous moment in the study of the transformation processes that took place in the city.Footnote 5 We were able to understand how cartoneros and vecinos negotiated the place of the cartonero in the city. We followed the way cartoneros adapted to the prevailing moralities in different spaces and the way these changes impacted upon their activity and the cartoneros' identity. In sum, those seven years of work enabled us to understand how tolerance and limits to the use of the city were constructed. It has been an ethnography of processes and interconnection, to follow Mallki, where interactions have been one of the necessary dimensions to understand the ways in which relations (and limits) to the stability and access to the city are generated.Footnote 6
During the seven years of fieldwork, we carried out observations in different Buenos Aires neighbourhoods. We regularly walked with cartoneros to and from their homes, travelling with them into the city and through it. We participated in their collection routes, witnessing their everyday contacts and interactions with vecinos, doormen, police, and other actors. We also carried out observations in cartoneros' homes, as well as in the places where they sold the collected goods.
The article is divided in four sections. The first section explains the emergence of cartoneros in middle-class neighbourhoods, as well as certain structural changes that took place in the city of Buenos Aires. The second presents the significance of understanding the construction of inequalities in interactions. The third section focuses on the tolerated presence of cartoneros in middle-class neighbourhoods. Finally, the fourth section highlights the limits of tolerance by addressing the eviction of a cartonero settlement.
Recent Transformations in Buenos Aires
Among the recent transformations of the Latin American metropolis, many studies have highlighted the increase of urban poverty, the widening of social gaps and how this is expressed in the form of land occupation. Certain scholars refer to the emergence of a new urban setting of ‘fragmented metropolises' or an urbanism of ‘isolated worlds’.Footnote 7 These concepts have been coined to account for a lack of unity and social integration in the cities.Footnote 8
In line with these diagnoses, some authors argue that in Buenos Aires processes of social polarisation are expressing a new spatial redistribution leading to new urban forms with a marked insular character. Footnote 9 Thus, research has focused on studying the rise of urban poverty and its new forms, as well as the uses of ‘their space’;Footnote 10 other investigations focus on new residential strategiesFootnote 11 and consumption forms of the middle classes and elites.Footnote 12 As poverty is mostly concentrated outside the city, studies that tend to problematise the territorial dimension often focus on life in poor suburban neighbourhoods or the city's slums.Footnote 13
These lines of investigation have contributed, even without intending to do so, to the idea of a decrease in interactions between social groups: large cities are going through a process of urban ‘decay’, inhabitants are increasingly unable to ‘live together’ and the city as a place of meetings and exchanges is ‘dissolving’. In addition, and as important, another line of research refers to the ‘crisis’ of public space, abandoned by the middle classes, and the emergence of a new ‘safe, secure’ private-run public space ensuring sociability for middle sectors.Footnote 14
In addition, two processes also contributed to bringing poverty closer to the city. One of these was the appearance of the activity of cartoneo. As unemployment and poverty soared during the 1990s, thousands of people turned to informal activities to make a living. With the implementation of neoliberal policies since the last civil-military dictatorship (1976–83) and intensified during the governments of Carlos Menem (1989–99), unemployment reached unprecedented levels in a few years: from 2.4 per cent in 1975 to 21.5 per cent in 2002.
The end of the fixed one-to-one parity between the Argentine peso and the US dollar and the devaluation of the peso caused the price of certain recyclable materials (such as cardboard) to rise over 100 per cent. It became increasingly frequent to see people surrounded by piles of collected cardboard in the streets. The Spanish word for cardboard, cartón, led to the denomination of people carrying out this activity as cartoneros. These cartoneros collect from city streets, especially in the richest neighbourhoods where the amount of waste and its quality are high. Collection is mostly a nocturnal activity: according to the formal collecting system, waste must be taken out on the street between 8.00 and 9.00 pm. The garbage truck then picks up the bags, compacts them and takes them to be buried in sanitary landfills outside the city.
This way of collecting differs significantly from the waste management system in force until 1977, when open dumps were shut down. Until then, cirujas (name by which waste collectors were known at the time) gathered and sold the collected materials in dumps located at the city margins. With the change of waste management system, collectors were compelled to look for waste in the streets instead of waiting for it. During the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, cirujeo was a barely visible activity. However, at the dawn of the twenty-first century it became a massive phenomenon: men, women and children were seen walking the city streets pulling carts and going through garbage bags, searching for any recyclable material.Footnote 15 For the middle class, the presence of cartoneros represented the manifestation of poverty in their daily lives: on their doorsteps and on their way to work. The presence of cartoneros questioned the imagined city free of poverty (or with territorially segregated poverty in villas miserias (slums)). It was seen as a new flood of ‘cabecitas negras’ (black faces) in a white city.Footnote 16
Another process that took place was the growth of the villas (slums) and increase in the number of settlements in the centre of the city. Since 2001, in the context of a deep social and economic crisis, the number of occupations of public and private properties located in central areas soared. These settlements were denominated New Urban Settlements (NAU, for its Spanish initials) to distinguish them from villas (the name for historical settlements of poor people in the city). Most villas are located in the south of the city, have a more or less stable frame, some basic infrastructure services and are recognised on official maps. The New Urban Settlements by contrast, are forms of poor urban settlement with a marked interstitial character and distributed in different parts of the city.Footnote 17 Their location generates physical proximity between socially distant groups. Moreover, it reinforces a ‘blurring of the villa – barrio [neighbourhood] opposition as main organizer of the frontiers between safety [the barrio] and dangerousness [the villa]’.Footnote 18 While middle-class neighbourhood residents experience villas as dangerous but distant places. NAUs emerge as an otherness that is all too close and dangerous.
Taking into account this context, it is necessary to complicate the previously mentioned diagnosis of the city as fragmented and ‘dissolved’ into unconnected worlds, where different social groups would hardly interact, exchange or meet.Footnote 19
Urban Space and Social Inequalities
Interactions and encounters do not speak directly of a more ‘open’ or more egalitarian society. Rather than an exercise of measurement, our proposal is to consider how social inequalities are (re)produced in certain territories. According to this perspective, and in line with previous research concerned with accounting for popular sectors' differential access to the city of Buenos Aires,Footnote 20 we aim to understand how inequalities are produced and examine the strategies that agents deploy in their use of urban space.
Focusing on the construction of social inequalities entails thinking of processes as relational, complex and as products of long-term historical development. According to Tilly, inequalities are persistent and translate into pairs of social categories that in turn reproduce and reinforce social inequality.Footnote 21 In a recent book, and drawing from Tilly's contributions, Gootemberg and Reygadas affirm that inequalities are ‘indelible’ in Latin America: they are based on long-term processes and produced multicategorically.Footnote 22 According to Reygadas inequality is also (re)constructed upon a network of disadvantages, a ‘network’ with a long-standing structural basis.Footnote 23
To understand how inequalities are produced it is necessary to focus on the relational level and observe interactions as well as narratives legitimising these relationships. Narratives are often based on ‘individual’ attributes of the agents. By examining interactions it is possible to appreciate the moments where these narratives are brought into play. Above all, analysis of interactions in the territory is key to understanding the role of space in the production of inequality.
The asymmetric distribution of territory, among other valuable assets, is at the centre of social conflicts and of the (re)production of urban inequalities. Territories and space are both socially constructed by power relationsFootnote 24 and are contested areas in terms of historical tensions and experiences. Space is the result of spatially materialised and embodied social relations.Footnote 25 Spaces are constructed by discourses that construct inequality. However, space also plays a central role in the production of subjects and identities. Cartoneros are cartoneros in a given space, while they might be vecinos in another.Footnote 26 The same is true for vecinos. Thus, mutual recognition in a given space is what produces identifications that in turn produce inequities. Hence, it is necessary to examine the practices and technologies through which given social groups materialise their legitimate presence in space. In this process, behaviour, based on moral values, becomes central.
A perspective attentive to territory as a contested space and a producer of meanings and subjects leads to the examination of negotiation processes regarding access to the city. Furthermore, it enables the visibilisation of the strategies deployed by subaltern sectors to become part of the city.
Tolerated Presence: Cartoneros as Workers
This section focuses on how cartoneros build routes through neighbourhoods in order to carry out their activity. We want to emphasise that their presence is possible through everyday arrangements that in turn are the result of actions, manoeuvres and negotiations over the use of public space.Footnote 27 Cartoneros are poor and live in what can be considered segregated neighbourhoods and travel into the city on a daily basis in search of their means of subsistence.
One afternoon, Pedro, a 45-year-old cartonero, told us ‘It is not easy to walk down the street. People look at you with contempt, they move over when they see you, they avoid you or cross the street, and when you want to talk to them they hurry on’. In certain areas of the city, while walking through the streets, cartoneros are often challenged due to their status of ‘foreigners’. Although this is not always the norm, it seems to be a burden they carry with them as soon as they leave their homes and that is exposed daily on the streets.Footnote 28
Another afternoon as we were walking through Florida Street (the city's main pedestrian street and which once represented an icon of Argentine progress), Osvaldo told us:
I wanted to undergo training and I completed secondary school; if I could now continue studying I would do it. I'd train in any field; I no longer want to be labelled as ‘negro’ (literally, black). Because, in truth, you are branded as negro. It's even worse when you are provinciano like myself.Footnote 29 I was so happy when a friend of mine my same age finished her studies. She made me see the difference. Before having a degree, people used to shut the door in her face. Now she has a bachelor's degree. So everybody calls her Licenciada (graduate) this, Licenciada that … So if it is necessary to gain a degree in order to stop being a negrito… so be it. They say there is no discrimination, but this is false. When you drop to the level that I am at now, I can see that there is discrimination.
Osvaldo refers to being ‘negro’, ‘provinciano’, ‘poor’, and to ‘not having a degree’. Discrimination is constructed upon these categories in Buenos Aires. They are powerful narratives that construct inequality categorically: the condensation of an ‘other’ that is out of place in the city.
Many cartoneros wish to go unnoticed. However, there is no place for anonymity in the city. First, because cartoneros pull huge carts full of garbage through the streets. Second, because personal relationships are essential to guarantee that they are able to carry out their work. Thus, although it has been said that streets are the place of anonymity, for cartoneros they are the place of contact and recognition.Footnote 30 Because recognition takes place in specific ways, during interactions it is possible to see the way that boundaries are produced. In the city's urban space it is possible to recognise the existence of symbolic boundaries produced by social actors to categorise objects, people, practices and space itself. Boundaries create order in urban space, generating distinctions and classifications.Footnote 31 These categorisations, based on moral values, produce identification within a group and differentiation from ‘others’.Footnote 32
There is nothing new in saying that people behave differently according to context. What we wish to emphasise is that by analysing people's different ways of behaving it is possible to understand spatially symbolic universes, moralities and power relations. Cartoneros are accepted in middle-class neighbourhoods so long as they are recognised as potential ‘workers’ and they ‘behave properly’ according to what is considered ‘appropriate’ in those spaces. Waste pickers need to access these spaces in order to obtain garbage, a resource they transform into merchandise. Cartoneros' ‘appropriate’ behaviour is not understood as such in terms of a personal assessment (of the researcher). Rather, we reconstruct the idea of correct behaviour through our ethnographic fieldwork.
The transformation of the poor-cartonero stigma into a worker was favoured by the Buenos Aires city government with its implementation of a series of policies aimed at transforming, at least discursively, the cartoneros into recuperadores urbanos (urban recyclers).Footnote 33 However, since garbage seems to belong elsewhere,Footnote 34 and cartoneros seem to be out of place, acceptance of waste pickers is only guaranteed if they comply with spatially proper behaviour.
In hostile territory, cartoneros must transform stigma into trust, paradoxically, by making themselves visible. By creating established collection routes, they are able to enter a circle of trust that depends largely on ‘being there’. The need to obtain a certain degree of material security, required in activities that are so unpredictable, can only be achieved through reversing anonymity. Cartoneros' activity of moving through the city that causes rejection by part of its population also enables forms of affinity with other subjects. However, the production and maintenance of personal relationships also depends on the behaviour displayed by both actors (cartoneros and vecinos) that show mutual acceptance; this generally takes place when and if the ‘foreigner’ respects the social and spatial codes of the territory through which they circulate.
In order to build trust, cartoneros must accept the behaviour code that they acknowledge when walking through a space that is alien to them. It is in this space where these people searching though garbage bags for something to collect become cartoneros.
In the relations that the collectors construct with others they distinguish vecinos from clientes (clients).Footnote 35 This distinction also shows the varied acceptance of cartoneros by city inhabitants. In an interview, Julio (a 68-year-old collector) highlighted the significance of being known, where
People must know that you are well-meaning, correct, that you're not a thief, nor a drunk, that you're not a drug addict or a rapist. You must meet all these conditions or you cannot walk the streets. Then, a moment arrives when people know that you're a guy just trying to make a living and that you're not a thief. So people start separating and saving bottles, glass, newspapers, magazines, cloth and mattresses for you […] Walking these streets you have to be clean, shaved […] and above all, you should respect women, because there are ten witches on each block, and if a beautiful girl passes by and you just say hello, there will be 9 or 10 women asking her, ‘What did he say?’; [Then he laughs, and goes on] they're gossips, but in a good way. And if you cross the line, then you're crap and not a cartonero […] and although you walk those blocks, the vecinos close the curtain on you and say ‘there goes that slime’.
From Julio's point of view, trust emerges in personal recognition. Vecinos ‘saving’ materials is proof of this as well as of the fact that he is seen as a ‘worker’. As it is impossible for Julio to go unnoticed, he attempts to treat vecinos kindly, making the unfamiliar place a more familiar one. As already mentioned, trust is based on reciprocal acts.
For vecinos, trust is made possible through the daily presence of people that should not be there. When faced with otherness, poverty, the fear of being robbed or raped appears; however, the personalisation of the relationship enables trust and the certainty that ‘nothing will happen to them’, because cartoneros are ‘good people’. Trust is also constructed in everyday gestures on the street. Maintaining stable relationships requires specific behaviour such as ‘not getting drunk’, ‘not being stoned’, as Julio noted. In short, cartoneros must not behave in ways that can be perceived as unacceptable in the context where they collect.Footnote 36 Thus, the relations established between cartoneros and clientes implies that cartoneros acknowledge the existence of boundaries based on moral grounds that should not be crossed.
Cartoneros return the good disposition of certain neighbourhood residents by behaving properly in the street: cleaning up after collecting, not occupying spaces with their carts that might annoy people and treating people cordially. This behaviour is highly valued by vecinos.
When we asked Fernando, a resident of the middle-class neighbourhood of Caballito, why he separated bags of waste for Fortunato, a cartonero, he responded that Fortunatos' behaviour was key: he left everything clean and he parked his cart in a place where it did not interfere with anything. Fernando also referred to Fortunato as a working person and that he was not ‘lazy’ like other cartoneros that ‘neighbours hate’ because they do not care about ‘hygiene’, who ‘leave dirty mess behind’ and ‘shout profanities in front of the kids’.
We oftentimes heard vecinos complain of cartoneros. Most complaints were based on arguments regarding the danger of collectors and their cleanliness (or lack thereof).Footnote 37 Whitson has pointed out that the (geography of) waste visibilises power relations, the construction of identities and meanings.Footnote 38 The increased presence of waste pickers in these middle-class neighbourhoods of the city intensified the idea that trash, as well as certain social actors associated with it, belong elsewhere.
Many vecinos complained of the mere presence of cartoneros in the neighbourhoods and blamed them of an increase in robberies: ‘Cartoneros are looking at the cars; when they see a chance to steal a stereo, they go for it’, ‘they come to steal’, ‘they carry stolen goods in their carts’, these were some of the phrases we often heard from neighbours.
Other neighbours blamed cartoneros for the streets' increasing filth: ‘they tear the garbage bags, leave trash all over the sidewalk, they don't care about anything’. ‘They are dirty, look at the state of the sidewalks! This is a disaster’, others complained. Carts were also a matter of dispute. Some vecinos complained of obstructions to driveways or crosswalks. Conversely, the cartoneros complained about the vecinos' lack of respect for their activity. Collectors said, for example, that while they are pushing their carts in the streets, many drivers ‘just drive their cars into us’.
Thus, we can distinguish between neighbours with whom cartoneros generate good relations, from those with which they establish conflicting relationships (that frequently remain only at the level of complaints), and the ones that try to exclude them from their territory, an issue that will be examined in the next section.
Complaints express behaviour imagined as appropriate by both groups. Once, a cartonero called Manuel showed us a page where he had written a series of ‘rules’ about how cartoneros should behave. According to him, many collectors were not acting properly and that had implications for all cartoneros. Manuel said that some of them ‘left everything dirty, they were drunk or poorly dressed’. Thus, Manuel was recognising that collectors needed to ‘behave properly’ in city streets and how space imposes behaviour. In their actions, cartoneros recognise this history of exclusion and stigmatisation in moral territories.
During fieldwork, we noticed that cartoneros behave differently when collecting (in middle-class neighbourhood streets) compared with the neighbourhoods where they lived, when they sold the collected materials or when they were travelling to or returning from the city by train.
While yelling, smoking, loud music and insults were common practices during these second moments, during collection cartoneros tried to behave less antagonistically: they avoided foul language; music was replaced by conversations with vecinos and cordiality prevailed. Our interpretation is that while streets appear as the territory of ‘the other’, the other places emerge as familiar territory or territory of their own.
Differential patterns of behaviour express symbolic boundaries that waste pickers experience in their everyday routes. Space embodies hegemonic moralities that govern the territory and guide ways of acting. But above all, these different ways of acting account for how subjects construct territories and territorialised identities.
Gloria, for example, is well known in the neighbourhood where she lives for being a social activist. She takes care of her neighbours, who go to her for help in solving problems. However, dealing with vecinos in middle-class neighbourhoods Gloria is a cartonera. While in her neighbourhood Gloria has a name, is well known, manages resources and has the ability to give orders, in middle-class neighbourhoods she adapts her behaviour according to the moralities and relationships prevailing in those spaces.
During fieldwork, we asked the vecinos how they saw Gloria. Most commonly we heard that she is ‘a working woman’, ‘friendly’ and that she ‘leaves everything clean’. However, her fellow neighbours did not refer to her as a cartonera or related in any way to garbage collection. Instead, she was seen by them as a referente barrial (neighbourhood leader). For these people the central characteristic was her ability to solve problems.
By understanding the ways in which people ‘behave’ it is possible to see the images, both explicit and implicit, groups have of each other, negotiations and adaptations of behaviour in terms of establishing and maintaining relationships.
With this, we do not intend to imply that agents have a rational idea of the way they should behave. Instead, there is a sort of internalisation and conscious practices of the way of acting. Additionally, we do not mean that vecinos or cartoneros are per se a homogeneous class or group. But surely their everyday lives, and their experiences are different. On the one hand, vecinos and cartoneros when they interact are moral people. Thus, collectors are compelled to transform anonymity into trust. Anonymity works for neighbours, but not for cartoneros: they must be recognised individually and not as part of an ‘out of place’Footnote 39 collective.
These processes account for the mutual recognition of the presence of an ‘other’ with different capabilities for imposing meaning and appropriating space. The analysis of interactions in space enabled us to see how people collecting garbage are constructed as or become cartoneros and people living in the collecting territory, vecinos. Analysis of social relations enabled us to see vecinos' ability to control cartoneros' access to the territory in two ways: first, recognising the collectors (allowing them walk through, ignoring them or establishing a personal relationship with them) and second, by giving them material resources. Because the activity of cartoneo is an economic one, generating the possibility of collecting, either by granting the possibility of moving through the territory or by saving materials for them, is a very powerful form of control.
The Limits of Tolerance: The Morixé Settlement and Its Eviction
So far, we have analysed the ways in which waste pickers, as long as they are seen as ‘workers’, can deploy strategies that can reverse or curb the stigma they carry, thus enabling them to walk through the streets and collect garbage. In the interactions between cartoneros and vecinos we saw that the former seek to adjust their behaviour according to a hegemonic morality of the territory where they perform their activity. In this ‘imposition’ there is a space for negotiation.
This section focuses on a situation that illustrates the limits of tolerance to the presence of cartoneros in a middle-class neighbourhood. We will refer to the way in which vecinos, including those that are considered clientes, contested the presence of collectors when they became residents of the neighbourhood. When cartoneros as workers appropriate public space temporarily, they adopt specific ways of doing that allow them to negotiate. But when they become inhabitants of the neighbourhood and attempt a permanent and visible appropriation of space, their presence is contested by vecinos. We will address this question by analysing the case of the Morixé cartonero settlement.
The settlement was located in Caballito, a middle- and upper-middle class neighbourhood, located in the geographic centre of the city of Buenos Aires. Despite being a well-established neighbourhood, within it there is a vacant space, land owned by the federal government and that prior to the privatisations of the 1990s, was the goods yard for the Sarmiento railway. The Morixé cartonero settlement grew on a portion of this abandoned space. Cartoneros built their precarious homes on one side of the railway and on the other side they established a place to gather recyclable materials (bottles, tin, wood, or cardboard) collected on their daily routes.
The settlement had been there for several years when the problem became public.Footnote 40 In 2007, the construction of a bridge made the settlement visible; two years later, contending that it involved sanitary risk and a ‘public health and life hazard’ the city government issued ‘the immediate evacuation of the precarious houses’Footnote 41 and proceeded to evict the settlement. The bridge had been built for road and pedestrian traffic. However, as an unexpected effect, it made visible the settlement that until then had remained invisible because of the morphology of the area. The bridge created a contact zone, in Geertz's phrase, between different and unequal subjects.Footnote 42 It worked as an artefact that linked what was different and differentiated what was linked.Footnote 43
Unlike what happened in the streets where the presence of cartoneros was tolerated, the creation of the bridge activated a series of discourses and practices that allowed us to understand the limits of the relationship between cartoneros and vecinos. The local residents organised demonstrations, met with public officials and made several claims and complaints to the Ministry of Environment and Public Space in order to get the settlement evicted.
In this case, territory was also a key component in the construction of subjects. While collectors circulating through neighbourhoods were constructed as cartoneros-workers, the inhabitants of the settlement were seen as cartoneros-encroachers, which produced a delegitimisation of their presence.Footnote 44 During fieldwork in the settlement, we noted that the inhabitants’ behaviour was different from when they were collecting. These ways of acting referred to distinct modes of appropriation of space. In the settlement, for vecinos of Caballito not only hegemonic morality was at stake but also the possibility of controlling and dominating the space and the people. The settlement thus emerged as an ‘other’ moral territory, but within the neighbourhood. The cartonero settlement was then perceived as a threatening otherness that reinforced the imaginary construction of a sense of community of neighbours,Footnote 45 which was expressed in public demonstrations in favour of the settlement's eviction. What the public presence of the settlement produced, then, was the (re) construction of an ‘us’ and of an ‘other’. Vecinos began to identify and define themselves as residents, as a group that not only identifies in terms of their physical proximity, but also of their social and moral likeness.
Whitson's vision in relation to the geography of waste, as an organiser of social relations and where garbage is out of place, allows the understanding of the two cases we are analysing together. Both cases show how an acceptable relationship between space, people and garbage is constructed, as well as the limits that reposition garbage and people that deal with it as ‘out of place’ again. In the eviction process, the narratives produced constructed cartoneros as ‘invaders’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘polluters’, in addition to misusing public space. Although many of these collectors were constructed as cartoneros-workers by vecinos while they circulated, when they were seen as inhabitants of the settlement they became squatters.
A vecina wrote, ‘When the bridge was completed, it revealed a lot of precarious houses […] which were growing incessantly. Together with this precarious housing, burglaries, robberies in homes, markets, cars and passers-by began to appear […] (Letter from a vecina to one of the neighbourhood organisations, 14 January 2008).
As in this case and many others, cartoneros become thieves and illegal squatters. For neighbourhood residents ‘insecurity’ refers to the danger of damage to property, goods and people. The settlement was categorised as ‘source of crime’. This discourse is sustained and constructed not only by residents but also by the media.Footnote 46 In fact, several articles were published in the press that presented the settlement as linked to an increase in the number of robberies in the area.Footnote 47 In the narratives of neighbours, insecurity is explained in the transformation of the poor into a ‘dangerous class’.
There were several meetings between vecinos and public officials to achieve the evacuation of the settlement. During meetings, vecinos resorted to their own plebeian or immigrant origin to justify their objection to the cartonero settlement in the neighbourhood. They made a distinction between their European ancestors-immigrants who arrived in Argentina having ‘nothing’, and today's poor, which they linked to migration from bordering countries. As expressed by Rita, a resident of Caballito for more than 30 years: ‘my ancestors were also immigrants and were very poor; there is nothing wrong with being poor, but my grandparents worked hard, they struggled and were able to move upwards’. In the discourses of vecinos, the current poor have not incorporated the ‘culture of work and effort’, a narrative that has constituted Argentine middle classes.Footnote 48 To this ‘lack of effort’, middle-class residents oppose their own effort and the investments they have made to live in that neighbourhood.
The cartonero settlement, thus, represented a threatening otherness for vecinos; they perceived it as a ‘source of crime’ exposing them to potential dangers. Moreover, it was a threatening otherness experienced as illegitimate and illegal in that public space was being ‘usurped’ by people that ‘make no effort’ and ‘do not pay taxes’. For vecinos disorder in public space refers to disorder in social hierarchies. They distinguish themselves from the ‘encroachers’ as they consider themselves ‘taxpaying citizens’. As Enrique (who was completing his university degree) told us ‘we pay taxes, we move forward; it is not right that we should have to protect ourselves from squatters’. According to the discourses of the vecinos, they are the ones contributing to the maintenance of the community by ‘paying taxes and respecting the law’.
Complaints and upsets of the neighbours also referred to the changes in the neighbourhood environment brought about by the presence of the settlement. During the multiple meetings we attended, vecinos showed the government agents pictures and videos, to denounce that cartoneros living in the settlement generated ‘filth’ and ‘contamination’. In processes of urban segregation, as highlighted by Carmen,Footnote 49 contamination involves different meanings and always works intertwined with broader discourses such as the notion of citizenship, the appropriate ways of occupying spaces and interacting with the rest of the subjects in the territory, and so on. In one of the meetings, a neighbour, who a few months later won the Participatory Neighbour 2009 prize, said that
for months we, the neighbours of Caballito, have observed with great concern a new illegal settlement next to the new bridge and under it […]; this conglomeration is a source of infection and a settlement for rodents and vermin. Besides, it is obviously not a nice sight for those of us who comply with municipal ordinances […]. This new source of infection presents another set of potential precarious houses within only 50 metres from our homes […]. Caballito is a residential area and for its status as such we pay high taxes. These illegal and precarious settlements, as well as all the practices that come with them, lead us residents to see with displeasure these types of visual and environmental invasions that harm the place where we have chosen to live. […]. In this illegal settlement […] we see significant consequences regarding insecurity in the area as well as environmental damage.
Many vecinos shared this representation of the settlement as illegal, a producer of insecurity and pollution. As residents of the settlement, the cartoneros could no longer be seen as workers. While they walked through the streets looking for materials their effort was valued, as well as the idea that they were earning a living ‘working’; however, when they become ‘residents’ the notion of cartoneros as workers is totally abandoned. The different ways of using space, from momentary to permanent appropriation, took place in the same neighbourhood space, and produced different subjects: from cartonero-worker when they only collected to cartonero–invader when they settle.
State agencies also contributed to the production of this difference. In the previous section we mentioned that the state, through various actions, operated in the construction of cartoneros as workers (as ‘urban recyclers’). This attempt to manage otherness enabled the legitimate presence of cartoneros while they were doing their job. The settlement shows, however, the limits of state tolerance. On 8 October 2008, in one of the ten meetings that neighbours had with public officials, Pablo Fornieles, the general director of recycling policy, was in charge of explaining to the neighbours the legal process and timetables for the settlement's eviction. The public officer's intervention started with a phrase that guaranteed resident's attention for quite a long time without interruptions. Fornieles began his presentation by saying that he was there to ‘explain the plan regarding the Caballito eviction’. His audience listened carefully. ‘The Government's position is [the residents of the settlement] can no longer be there – in the barrio – they must leave. Public space is non-negotiable. We will get them out on good terms or we will apply the law. Public space should be used and enjoyed by residents, not usurped’.
Both cases show that a geography of waste creates social relations based on the notion that garbage is ‘out of place’: but they also show that ‘the place’ can be negotiated. Cartoneros and garbage are out of place. Nevertheless this ‘out’ territorially includes and excludes cartoneros simultaneously. In addition, it is possible to say that the exclusionary inclusion has its limits. As in the second case analysed there is no possible negotiation. Although it can be said that the settlement is part of the geography of waste there is a process of narrative shift to other geographies that makes cartoneros undesirable invaders. The eviction thus put cartoneros ‘in their place’ as legitimate users of the neighbourhood only when circulating, but not as full residents, as vecinos.
Conclusions: Tolerance, Inequality and Public Space
During recent decades the growth of urban poverty and social inequalities along with the implementation of new forms of urban policy and promotion of certain discourses regarding ‘violence’, ‘insecurity’ or ‘environment’, merged with old discourses of segregation to produce new ways for popular sectors to access the city. These same processes also produced new ways for popular sectors to be denied access.
In the same way as in other cities, socio-territorial inequalities have increased in Buenos Aires. These processes are deeply rooted in specific historical processes. Access to space produces social inequalities; however, due to specific historical processes that have occurred in Argentina, its analysis should not be approached from the perspective of citizenship.Footnote 50 For the case of Buenos Aires, this approach allows us to understand how social belonging is also spatial and how this creates privileges and rights. However, citizenship and citizenship rights in Argentina are linked to a series of processes that overlap with the right to the city. Although some (few) actors might refer to this category, as was the case with some residents of Caballito, it is not anchored in spatial relationships nor does it always produce expulsion. The actors' rhetoric tends to be more linked to ‘work’ (given the Argentine historical conditions in relation to citizenship) than to citizenship, as both residents of the city or of the nation (among other inscriptions).
Furthermore, the city of Buenos Aires is still dominated by the presence of ‘open’ neighbourhoods.Footnote 51 The article seeks to contribute and complicate the existing literature on the production processes of inequality and how they generate social segregation. As we stated, many articles account for the increased production of social and urban inequality in Buenos Aires. Much of this work has focused on studying the processes of socio-spatial segregation and exclusion in segregated neighbourhoods. This research has contributed to the understanding of processes that occurred during the last decades: social inequality that took the shape of socio-spatial segregation. Our article focuses on less studied processes: the analysis of the constant and everyday production processes of inequalities through interactions between territorialised social groups.
The analysis of two parallel situations allowed us to show how relationships are built daily in a given territory. We focus on relationships that are produced around garbage but that go beyond it, anchored in broader processes. Whitson analysed the existence of a geography of waste, where garbage and the cartoneros are ‘out of place’ in certain areas of the city. While this is a starting point for behaviour, we show it is possible to negotiate that place. Everyday interactions and negotiations are what enable cartoneros to use the territory (as workers). Analysis of interactions allows us to account for the negotiable character of space and the production of actors’ multiple identities. In any case, ethnographic analysis clarifies how place is negotiated and identity is not defined only by the activity itself. This is why we focused on practices and narratives and the efficacy they have for influencing cartoneros' behaviour when passing through the neighbourhood or for excluding them from it when they attempt to stay permanently.
We were able to account for the limits of the presence of cartoneros who are not always seen only as cartoneros. Identities do not precede practices, nor do they precede relationships in the territory. Cartoneros can be ‘urban recyclers’ (meaning, precarious workers) or invaders, according to the moment and to the ways of using the territory. Nevertheless, cartoneros' access, even as workers, to the territory is problematic and unequal. This is precisely what led us to examine the case, to show how inequality is produced on a daily basis. Thus, investigating the processes of exclusion in open neighbourhoods not only enables complicating the construction of social inequality but also illuminates processes that otherwise cannot be understood. Interactions, moments of contact, are fertile ground to show how inequalities are constructed and reproduced. It is in the territories delimited by symbolic and moral boundaries where discourses and narratives of inequality make sense. In this line, we were interested in showing the historical character of territories and the daily process of production and (re)production of power relations in the territory.
