Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America 9781477324974

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

Taking Form, Making Worlds Cartonera Publishers in Latin America

Lucy Bell A lex U ngpr ateeb Fly n n Patrick O’H a r e

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2022 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bell, Lucy, author. | Flynn, Alex Ungprateeb, author. | O’Hare, Patrick, author. Title: Taking form, making worlds : cartonera publishers in Latin America / Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Patrick O’Hare. Other titles: William & Bettye Nowlin series in art, history, and culture of the Western Hemisphere. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Series: William and Bettye Nowlin series in art, history, and culture of the Western Hemisphere | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021021110 (print) | LCCN 2021021111 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2495-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2497-4 (PDF library e-book) ISBN 978-1-4773-2498-1 (ePub non-library e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Cartonera books—Publishing—Latin America. | Cartonera books—Publishing—Social aspects—Latin America. | Cartonera books— Latin America. Classification: LCC Z231.5. L5 B45 2022 (print) | LCC Z231.5. L5 (ebook) | DDC 070.5098—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021110 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021111 doi:10.7560/324950

To cartonera collectives across Latin America

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

A Note on Translation Introduction

xvii

1

1. Histories: Tracing Trajectories of Resistance

43

2. Methods: Trans-Formal Research for Transformational Practice 3. Texts: Cartonera Literature in Action

110

4. Encounters: Existence as Resistance and Sites of Plurality

152

5. Workshops: Cardboard and the Material Sociality of Practice 6. Exhibitions: An Artistic Proposition to Reorder the Social Conclusion Works Cited

255 267

About the Authors Index

289

287

77

213

183

Illustrations

Figure 0.1. Lúcia and Maria constructing Arquipélago books in Dulcinéia’s workshop within the Glicério recycling cooperative.

2

Figure 0.2. Mixtec family making books with La Cartonera in

Cuernavaca.

7

Figure 0.3. Dulcinéia by Thiago Honório and Dulcinéia Catadora. Figure 0.4. The Glicério recycling cooperative in São Paulo. Figure 0.5. Dany and Nayeli of La Cartonera.

20

33

36

Figure 0.6. General view of La Cartonera’s tenth-anniversary exhibition in Cuernavaca. 37 Figure 1.1. Poster for the Seventh International Encounter of Cartonera Publishers in Santiago, Chile. 61 Figure 1.2. Eloísa Cartonera poster.

67

Figure 1.3. Andreia displaying her book Passagem at the Senate House Library in London, with Lúcia. 71 Figure 2.1. Espejo y viento book launch at Puente Grande prison in

Mexico.

78

Figure 2.2. Cartonera workshops in Puente Grande prison.

86

Figure 2.3. (a) Maria’s diagonal line technique and (b) Puente Grande

books.

88

Figure 2.4. Sonia’s front cover.

89

Figure 3.1. Four cartoneras, four binding techniques.

117

Figure 3.2. Maria in the Dulcinéia workshop, with Arquipélago

collages.

123

Figure 3.3. Seu Toco Pequi in his front room in Cordisburgo.

128

x

List of Illustrations

Figure 3.4. The cajado in action in the cerrado of Minas Gerais. Figure 3.5. Trazos de resistencia copublication.

132

148

Figure 4.1. Mirian “La Osa Poderosa” Soledad Merlo in

Eloísa Cartonera’s workshop in Buenos Aires.

159

Figure 4.2. Roundtable at the encuentro cartonero in Chapultepec Park

art gallery in Cuernavaca.

163

Figure 4.3. Temok Saucedo looking on during the encuentro cartonero

in Cuernavaca.

163

Figure 4.4. Encontro cartonero in São Paulo.

167

Figure 5.1. Sergio and Israel at the Ixtlahuacán del Río book festival

in Jalisco.

184

Figure 5.2. Cartonera bookmaking materials for the Ixtlahuacán book

festival.

184

Figure 5.3. Sergio sourcing cardboard in Guadalajara. Figure 5.4. Cochineal workshop in Guadalajara.

197

207

Figure 5.5. Children experiment with cartonera and cochineal in

Guadalajara.

208

Figure 6.1. Andreia reciting at the 2019 São Paulo Virada Cultural.

226

Figure 6.2. Dulcinéia Catadora’s installation in the exhibition O abrigo

e o terreno at the Museu de Arte do Rio.

227

Figure 6.3. Solange with Brasinha in his community museum in

Cordisburgo.

232

Figure 6.4. Júlio with Seu Manoel in Cordisburgo.

235

Figure 6.5. Poster for the Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas

exhibition at Casa do Povo in São Paulo.

239

Figure 6.6. Staircase module in the Cartoneras exhibition. Figure 6.7. Workstation at the Cartoneras exhibition. Figure 6.8. View of the Cartoneras exhibition.

240

241

242

Figure 6.9. Andreia and Maria with members of Warmís, MILBI, and

the Colectivo Feminista de Argentinxs en São Paulo. Figure 6.10. Somos mulheres imigrantes.

244

248

Figure 6.11. “No Woman Is Illegal” placard held during the Women’s

Day demonstration, São Paulo, March 8, 2019.

250

Figure 7.1. Scenes from the London Cartonera Book Festival.

258

Figure 7.2. Sol and Júlio with Catapoesia books in the Senate House Library, London. 259

Acknowledgments

In the years following her first encounter with a cardboard book in Buenos Aires in 2011, Lucy sought out cartonera publishers, workshops, and books wherever her academic work took her. In Mexico City in 2013, Lulú Lecona and Ocelotl Galván met her at a café to talk cartonera and student protests and share the cardboard-bound books they produced as La Verdura Cartonera. Later the same year, Juditzin Santopietro took Lucy to her favorite Coyoacán market stall to eat pozole (corn soup) and tell her about Iguanazul Cartonera, a community publisher she had set up in 2010 to revitalize Indigenous languages from Mexico through literature and the oral tradition. Enjoying Juditzin’s company and stories too much to say goodbye, Lucy suggested they meet up the following Saturday at La Cartonera’s bookmaking workshop to which she had been invited in the nearby city of Cuernavaca. And so it was that Lucy painted her first cartonera cover (badly), with the warm welcome of Dany, Nayeli, and friends. Special thanks go to Juditzin, Lulú, Ocelotl, Dany, and Nayeli for these first encounters that would lead Lucy to travel across Mexico and Brazil to begin connecting the dots of Latin American cartonera publishing networks. Thanks are also due to the Mexican collectives that shared their stories and books with Lucy in the early days of the research: Shula Cartonera and La Regia Cartonera (Monterrey); La Rueda Cartonera, Viento Cartonero, Ediciones el viaje, Ediciones del Varrio Xino, and El Pato con Canclas (Guadalajara); Mamá Dolores Cartonera (Querétaro); Nuestro Grito Cartonero and Pachuk Cartonera Editorial (Pachuca); 2.0.1.2 Editorial (Mexico City); and La Ratona Cartonera (Cuernavaca). For Alex, the initial connections to cartonera were proposed by artists with whom he was working in São Paulo: Thiago Honório, Maíra

xii Acknowledgments

Dietrich, and Ícaro Lira. And it was as a result of Ícaro’s project as part of the Residência Artística Cambridge and his invitation to contribute to a cartonera book that Alex began working directly with the collective Dulcinéia Catadora. This contact soon expanded to other collectives in Brazil and beyond, and he would particularly like to thank Lúcia Rosa, Andreia Emboava, Maria Dias da Costa, and Eminéia Santos of Dulcinéia Catadora for their unfailing friendship and support; Solange Barreto and Júlio Brabo of Catapoesia for taking him into their home in Minas Gerais; and many other cartonera publishers for sharing their particular worlds and practices. Among them are Douglas Diegues of Yiyi Jambo, Washington Cucurto, María Gómez, Alejandro Miranda, and Mirian Soledad Merlo of Eloísa Cartonera; Idalia Morejón Arnaiz of Malha Fina Cartonera; Wellington Melo of Mariposa Cartonera; Gaudêncio Gaudério of Vento Norte Cartonera; Edmario Jobat of Universo Cartoneiro; and Ademar Marchi of Sereia Ca(n)tadora. The Guadalajara-based publishers Sergio Fong and Israel Soberanes and the wider community at La Rueda Cartonera and café first took Patrick under their wing, making him feel immediately welcome and at home there. In just a few weeks, Sergio had not only entrusted him with the creation of books in his catalogue but also invited Patrick to live at his home and regularly took him out for pozole after late-night discussions between friends at La Rueda. A few months later, Patrick was welcomed by Nayeli and Dany into their beautiful cultural world in Cuernavaca after an experience at another field site took an unexpected turn. We are eternally grateful for their warm welcome. La Cartonera’s wider community also brought Patrick into the fold, with Mafer and Victor Hugo particularly deserving of a shout-out. We are also indebted to Oscar Edgar López for his work with Patrick in Zacatecas. Oscar showed open-mindedness and kindness as they collaborated on the creation of a short film with Marco Casillas Jácquez (2018) and delivered workshops in Oscar’s lovely school in San José del Carmen and other rural schools in the Zacatecas region. Finally, Patrick would like to thank Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, who played an important role in bringing him into the research team, and her wonderful mother, Rosario Ezcurra, who generously provided a home for him and his family on their stopovers in Mexico City. The research team’s journeys were separate but also linked, and one person in particular brought them together: David Lehmann, a friend and emeritus reader in social science who introduced Lucy to Alex. We are extremely grateful to David for his insight in bringing our research

Acknowledgments xiii

paths together and for his continued support throughout the research. Other academics have also been key to the success of the project. We would like to extend our most heartfelt thanks to Érica Segre and Ben Bollig, who were involved in early discussions about the project. Many other academic colleagues helped by reviewing early funding applications and publication drafts, including Lúcia Sá, Yulia Egorova, Nayanika Mookherjee, Hannah Brown, and Jonas Tinius, as well as the four anonymous reviewers of our book project. Our greatest debt in this sense, however, is to our editor at the University of Texas Press, Kerry Webb. Kerry’s enthusiasm for the project was evident from our first exchanges, and we would like to offer our thanks to Kerry and the team at Texas for their knowledge, expert reading, and all-around support, which in turn allowed us to be more confident about the kind of book we wanted to write. We would also like to thank the librarian and curator Paloma Celis Carbajal, who is a point of reference for cartonera publishers around the world. Paloma has been crucial to our research throughout the project, a key guest at our events, and an expert interlocutor in our discussions, always happy to answer our questions. One event that was important for this research project was a panel on “Informal Economies of the Book” convened by Magalí Rabasa at the 2018 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference, held in Barcelona. There we would meet Marcy Schwartz, whose Public Pages (University of Texas Press) has been an important point of inspiration and reference for this book. Along with Marcy, Jessica Gordon-Borroughs and Magalí offered advice, support, and friendship that have been vital throughout and beyond this research project. The transnational collaboration from which Taking Form, Making Worlds resulted would have been impossible without the support of our own institutions and UK funding agencies. Between 2017 and 2020 we were able to develop the Cartonera Publishing project as a collaborative, action-based project through two Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grants, “Precarious Publishing” and “Activating the Arts,” both funded under the Global Challenges Research Funding stream, and an additional grant from Durham University’s Higher Education Funding Council for England allocation. We are deeply grateful for the generous support we have received from these research councils and from our respective institutions: the University of Surrey, where Lucy has been based throughout the project and Patrick was employed for the first phase of the project; Durham University and UCLA, where Alex

xiv Acknowledgments

has been able to pursue his research; and the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge, and St. Andrews, where Patrick has developed his academic career following his time working with Lucy and Alex. We would particularly like to thank our colleagues in the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey for their invaluable input into and feedback on our research plans, drafts, and activities: Diane Watt, Adeline Johns-Putra, Ana Frankenberg García, Stephen Mooney, Sabine Braun, Justin Edwards, Oliver Bond, Greville Corbett, Matthew Baerman, Bran Nicol, Alison Stubley, and two wonderful Hispanists, Catherine Barbour and Julia Ker. We are also grateful to a fantastic group of Hispanic studies students—Gemma Drake, Anna Fisher, Georgia Green, Ellie Hamill, Annie May, Isabella Panayiotou, Paloma Sanz, Georgina Sutton, and Chrissy Waymark—for bringing all their energy and imagination to the community translation project for Espejo y viento (Wind & Mirrors), a collection of writings by imprisoned women. One of the practical aspects of this project has been building cartonera collections at three of the most important libraries in England: Senate House Library (London), the British Library, and Cambridge University Library. For their time, energy, and commitment to the project, we are extremely grateful to our project partners María Castrillo, Rebecca Simpson, and Richard Espley at Senate House Library; Elizabeth Cooper, Philip Abraham, Iris Bachman, and Andrew Rackley at the British Library; and Sonia Morcillo García and Clara Panozzo Zénere at Cambridge University Library. Cartonera is a Latin American phenomenon, and throughout the project, we were fortunate to be able to count on the support of Latin American institutions that opened their doors and generously hosted the project’s events. We would like to thank all the staff at the Casa do Povo in São Paulo, particularly Benjamin Seroussi, Laura Viana, Laura Daviña (who also was responsible for the graphic design of the Cartoneras in Translation coedition), Marilia Loureiro, Ana Druwe, and Alita Maria, all of whom welcomed our project and helped to make the exhibition such a wonderfully convivial space. Thanks are also due to the curation and education team for the exhibition, particularly the curator Beatriz Lemos, and to Pombo de Barros, for their work on production, and the Grupo Inteiro (Cláudio Bueno, Vitor Cesar, Carol Tonetti, and Ligia Nobre) for their exhibition design. We are also grateful to the education team, David Rubio, Tabita Lopes, and Maria Paula Botero, led by Graziela Kunsch, for their wonderful public program and to everyone who participated in the workshops and events. We would like to ex-

Acknowledgments xv

tend our thanks to the State Libraries of Jalisco and the Department of Culture and the Department of Security in Jalisco. A significant part of this project has been about bringing cartonera to a wider audience, and we were fortunate to work with talented fi lmmakers who helped achieve this goal. We are very grateful to the director Isadora Brant and editor Marcelo Delamanha for their brilliant work on the documentary Cartoneras (2019), filmed in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. We would also like to thank Carolina Caffé for her videos with Andreia and Maria, and Julia May for her filming in London. Another strategy for bringing cartonera to a wider audience was a website for the project, and Federico Martínez Montoya is to thank for this. On any collaborative project such as this, some all-around great people accompany you along the way. We would like to offer our special thanks to these interlocutors for their insightful and provocative perspectives: Javier Barilaro, Cecilia Palmeiro, Mariela Scafati, and Pablo Rosales in Buenos Aires; Isabella Rjeille, Yudi Rafael, Thais Graciotti, Juliana Caffé, Júlia Ayerbe, Ícaro Lira, Thiago Honório, Maíra Dietrich, Flavia Krauss, and Camila Maroja in São Paulo; Ricarda Musser and Ulrike Mühlschlegel at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin; Raúl Silva de la Mora in Mexico; Tim Ingold, María Soledad Montañez, Linda Newsome, and Jo Bradley in London; and a special mention for Emma Balch, who helped us put on the alternative festival Hay Cartoneras! in Hay-on-Wye, England, at the Story of Books. We would also like to thank the friends, family, and partners who have supported us as translators, panel moderators, workshop facilitators, critical friends, interlocutors, proofreaders, and cartonera bookmakers. Lucy would like to thank her partner, Marco, for always being up for painting cardboard book covers, hanging out in Sergio’s café, venturing to some unusual holiday destinations, and generally putting up with a large amount of cardboard over the years of the project. She is extremely grateful to her parents and sister—Roger, Sheena, and Katie— for their unconditional support and for helping out so much over the years of this research. She would also like to thank her friends Chandra Morrison, Elsa Monique Treviño, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, Ana Frankenberg García, Ricardo García, and Joey Whitfield for providing huge amounts of academic and moral support throughout the project. Three remarkable women deserve a particular shout-out for their ongoing, unwavering support and friendship: Catriona McAllister, Alice Swift, and Paola Ugalde.

xvi Acknowledgments

Alex would particularly like to thank Beatriz Lemos, with whom he curated the cartonera exhibition in São Paulo. Beatriz was a constant inspiration and wonderful critical interlocutor; no thanks can do justice to having the opportunity to learn and work together in her extraordinary curatorial practice. Alex’s greatest debt, however, is to his wife, Noara Quintana, whose own artistic practice and theorization offered such an important point of reference to the modes of work that cartonera encompasses. Noara’s reflections brought questions of positionality and hierarchy to a sharp focus and drove the need to conceive of better modes of collaboration, to which we hope this book makes a contribution. Patrick is grateful to his partner, Mary, and daughter, Rosie, for their wonderful company in Cuernavaca. Starting at two Mexican nurseries in the space of two months must have been tough for Rosie, but she took it in her stride, rewarded by the nursery staff with incredible hairdos and even more incredible school lunches. After having followed Patrick to a landfill in Montevideo, Mary found in Mexico a slightly more comfortable experience, albeit with the added difficulty of supporting Rosie, which she managed with great dedication and care. Mary has since surpassed Patrick in cartonera craft, grasping the method as a way of continuing collaboration with her dispersed artistic collective, Lost Properties. Finally, we would like to dedicate these pages to the four cartonera collectives to whom we owe the book: La Rueda Cartonera and La Cartonera in Mexico, and Dulcinéia Catadora and Catapoesia in Brazil. Without any exaggeration, it is their passion, energy, dedication, and openness that have made this book possible. From an early stage, these publishers have been so much more than research participants; we are proud to count them as friends, compas, and coconspirators. We hope this book does them justice and that they might think of it as forming part of their colorful and eclectic catalogues. We likewise hope that these pages will inspire readers to delve into the wider cartonera back catalogue and emergent publications and to get involved in creating two, three, many more cartoneras!

A Note on Translation

For reasons of space, only the translated English versions of all Spanish and Portuguese quotations are included in the text. All translations are our own, unless stated otherwise. Titles of literary works, exhibitions, and installations are provided both in their original languages and in translation.

Taking Form, Making Worlds

Introduction

It is March 9, 2018, and we are in downtown São Paulo making a book. Above us, traffic thunders down a four-lane highway overpass in a constant flow on the Radial Leste, one of the principal arteries of this metropolis of twenty million people. We are at the Glicério recycling cooperative, where recyclable refuse arrives every day on carts pulled by catadores (waste pickers) to be sifted, cleaned, sorted, crushed, packaged, and then sold on up the chain.* One kilo of cardboard collected from the street is worth five US cents; with prices low and volumes high, the site is stacked with piles of cardboard and metal and bales of crushed cans and plastic bottles. In 2007, waste pickers at this recycling center, in collaboration with the artist Lúcia Rosa, formed an art collective they named Dulcinéia Catadora. Inspired by an emerging publishing phenomenon originating in Buenos Aires, the collective began making cartonera books in the coop using cardboard recovered from the street. The book we are making is called Arquipélago, the result of a collaboration between Dulcinéia * Throughout this book we use the term “waste picker” to describe those who make a living from recovering recyclable and reusable material from trash. In Spanish the terms reciclador and reciclador de base are often used, although each Latin American country tends to use a different word, such as cartonero in Argentina, clasifi cador in Uruguay, and catador in Brazil. In this choice we are guided by the decision to adopt the term “waste picker” by the First Conference of Waste Pickers in Bogotá to supplant derogatory terms such as “scavenger.” Although waste pickers go by different names in different countries and might work individually or in collectives, they have in common the use of waste as a source of basic necessities and/or recyclable materials to be sold to intermediaries and industry.

2

Taking Form, Making Worlds

Figure 0.1. Lúcia

and Maria construct Arquipélago books in the Dulcinéia Catadora workshop. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

Catadora and the artist Thais Graciotti. The collective invited Thais to bring her artistic practice into dialogue with their work. We join them at a meeting of worlds, techniques, and forms. Within the Glicério recycling cooperative and built along the perimeter wall is a row of simple structures. There is a meeting room and bathroom for the co-op’s workers and adjacent to this, the Dulcinéia Catadora bookmaking workshop itself. Inside this cramped space is a waist-high trestle table and a large graffiti-style mural, the result of a previous collaboration. Shelves box in the space where the collective stores its stencils, tools, paper, stamps, and all the other paraphernalia accumulated in creating more than 150 titles over the collective’s first eleven years. It’s a relief to get inside, where the roar of traffic is less overwhelming, but even here perforations are visible: the joint between the corrugated roof and the wall, the gaps around the windows, the little holes

Introduction 3

where mosquitos enter. In a heavy storm, rainwater will gush from a fissure in the overpass, depositing thousands of liters of asphalt runoff into the space of the collective below. It is impossible to keep the sheer density of São Paulo’s urban reality outside and similarly, despite the barriers and walls, the stigma and violence, as the cooperative’s members leave their base to circulate across the city every single day collecting recyclable materials. This is circulation under duress, as they have to weather the daily challenges of life on the streets. All over São Paulo we encounter Dulcinéia Catadora’s books, in a housing occupation under daily threat by the police and in a prestigious private art gallery, placed carefully on the shelves of independent bookstores in middle-class neighborhoods, and circulating freely on the streets off the back of a waste picker’s cart. But the recycling co-op is the point of origin. Dulcinéia Catadora’s manifesto (2015) argues that the encounters and exchanges between participants from different strata of Brazil’s highly unequal society that take place in the creation and consumption of the collective’s books are more important than the books themselves. The books are conceived of as “objects of resistance” that “dismantle prejudices” and destabilize the canon (Dulcinéia Catadora 2015). As we researchers work side by side with the waste pickers in the co-op, the theoretical notion begins to take form of “calling into question aesthetic concepts connected to a world that’s still being built on inequalities and privileges” (Rosa 2018). As she works with Lúcia to put together fifty unique copies of Arquipélago (figure 0.1), Maria tells us that many people have passed through Glicério: university professors, PhD students, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, and cartonera publishers from across Latin America. “You’re not that different,” she says with a laugh. Later, Ademir Demarchi, a cartonera publisher from the city of Santos, will tell us that Dulcinéia is the “mother” of all Brazilian cartoneras. We hear this repeated from the southern city of Florianópolis to the most rural corners of Minas Gerais, from the northeastern city of Recife to Copacabana Beach in Rio. Dulcinéia’s fame precedes them. Readers across the country and the world have been enticed by their catalogue, a diverse collection of aesthetic forms, including neoconcretist poetry, experimental artists’ books, children’s fiction, and community-led advocacy. But readers have also been seduced by the many social forms through which Dulcinéia operates: workshops, exhibitions, and encounters involving presentations, book fairs, conferences, talks, and training sessions. These women have inspired collectives across an entire continent

4

Taking Form, Making Worlds

to work in vibrant communities, creating voracious readers and vivacious publishers. Work finishes, for now. Tomorrow we will make fifty more books, completing a series of one hundred. Maria walks us to the large front gates. As we are leaving, it is impossible not to notice how the aesthetic of Dulcinéia’s published work is present in the wider Glicério compound and vice versa. All around, we see graffiti art, the industrial, machined stencils of the recycled cardboard, and the spray-painted labels that identify equipment as belonging to the Glicério recycling cooperative. Stacked inside the collective’s workspace, these motifs are echoed through the collective’s books, and we think back to how Lúcia and Eminéia, another member of Dulcinéia Catadora, when cutting the cardboard to size, took care to make sure that the industrial stencils remained visible. This way, Lúcia explained, “you know that the cardboard is reused and not somehow fake,” that is, a representation, a mock-up of a very particular aesthetic that comes directly from the street. The environment of Glicério is inextricably tied to the social dynamics present therein, and this same interweaving is also present at every stage of the aesthetic process of making the books. As we say goodbye, Maria, the recycling cooperative’s president, lights up another cigarette. Looking around her workplace with fondness, she tells us that the whole co-op is actually an occupation, a way of making productive use of dead space, and as such, under constant threat of eviction. We walk off down the streets of this tough, inner- city neighborhood, our eyes drawn to the many signs of the remainders cast aside by the endless churn of market economies, and Dulcinéia’s choice to work with cardboard makes more sense: recovering material that has been discarded is a powerful statement. Art, poetry, advocacy, prose, all emerge from beneath the weight of that overpass, from within a complex sociality. We wonder how to begin to read a cartonera text, where every page seems to enclose both an aesthetic gesture and a social proposition, bound together by recovered cardboard and colored thread. A month later, a world away. It is April 1, 2018, and in Mexico’s “City of Eternal Spring,” Cuernavaca, a diverse group of adults and children is gathered around a table in the center of the city’s ravine park, the Barranca de Chapultepec. The park, with its centuries-old fig and ahuehuete trees, is the most beautiful reminder of what Cuernavaca once was, the lush garden city that Malcolm Lowry describes in his 1947 magnum opus Under the Volcano. Nowadays, the pure water that runs

Introduction 5

through the park is polluted almost as soon as it reaches the city, and the ravines that grant a confusing, spectacular topography are strewn with plastics. Yet around the table, a workshop coordinated by the cartonera publishers Dany Hurpin and Nayeli Sánchez is playing its small part in tackling the city’s contamination. Instead of littering the streets or weighing down the landfill, sheets of recovered cardboard are being transformed into the colorful covers of new books. The 2018 workshop in Chapultepec is one of several offered to the public as part of an exhibition held in the park’s art gallery to celebrate ten years of La Cartonera, Mexico’s first cartonera publisher. Alongside the authors are members of the public who have come to take a look and cartonera publishers from Mexican states including Sonora, Tabasco, and Jalisco as well as Mexico City. Some of these publishers grew directly out of La Cartonera; others could be considered thirdgeneration Mexican cartonera publishers, having been taught by those who had been instructed by Dany and Nayeli; some had picked up the practice autonomously. This workshop is thus a reencounter for some, while for others it is the first opportunity to meet their cartonera publishing peers and plan future collaborations. They are a diverse bunch, from middle-class professionals from the provinces to tattooed punkanarchists who have  taught bookbinding but also Molotov cocktail– making in the heat of occupations. The publishers all set out to learn La Cartonera’s way of doing things, a two-stage process that first involves painting pieces of cardboard that Dany has already cut to size using a stencil and a retractable blade, then assembling the books by ordering, perforating, and stitching their pages, before gluing the back pages onto the inside of the cardboard covers.* Today, as ever, the covers of the books are being painted by workshop participants inspired by the texts they will be binding, the palettes that Nayeli lays out in front of them, and conversations with neighbors. The book is the 2018 volume of Kosamalotlahtol: Arcoiris de la palabra (Rainbow of words); Kosamalotlahtol is a series of bilingual Spanish-Nahuatl texts, begun in 2014, that La Cartonera brings out every year at the Festival of Mother Languages in Xoxocotla, an Indigenous village a short drive south of Cuernavaca. Its diverse contents include a recipe for traditional mole sauce and poetry lamenting the gen* A video showing La Cartonera’s method of making books and many other videos commissioned and created by this research project can be seen on our website, http://cartonerapublishing.com.

6

Taking Form, Making Worlds

trification of Mexico City and the disappearance of native fauna. We read some of the poems aloud with the group that has gathered, opting for Spanish rather than Nahuatl, and soon we also hear an Indigenous language being spoken at our table. It comes from a family of six siblings ranging in age from infancy to late teens who have been drawn to our activity (figure 0.2). Immigrants from neighboring Guerrero state, they greet the friendly gallery guard with a familiar salute: he’s partial to a raspado, the colonial-era ice slushy that their parents sell in several stalls around the center of the city. The children speak Mixtec rather than Nahuatl, so they will look to the book’s Spanish translation if they decide to try out any of the recipes. Even so, it is important that they will take home a book in the most widely spoken of Mexico’s seventy-two or more Indigenous languages. Part of La Cartonera’s commitment is to promote Nahuatl as a written as well as a spoken language. One of the poets published in Kosamalotlahtol, José Carlos Monroy Rodríguez, told us, “The decision to write and to publish in a minority language is in itself a political act.” Just as the recovery and reuse of cardboard acts to shame unimaginative wastedisposal methods, so too does the decision to seek out and publish Nahuatl poets challenge commercial Mexican publishing that reserves so little space for such linguistic diversity. Cover-painting is a free-for-all with La Cartonera. The pre-Hispanic language inspires someone to paint the Xoloitzcuintle dog, of the hairless Aztec breed, which is a much-loved mascot that can be found wandering around the park. The boyfriend of one of the Mixtec sisters adopts a different aesthetic entirely, painting a rose and chains onto a black cover as though it were a tattoo, and he declares his love in gothic font for the teenager by his side. The younger siblings, meanwhile, seem more concerned with painting their hands and the soles of their shoes. This playful spirit is encouraged by Dany and Nayeli, who always tell participants that they can paint covers that relate to the inside texts of the books or that bear no relation to them whatsoever. The variety is borne out in the display of cartonera covers that form the main exhibit inside the gallery, where a range of abstract and figurative styles can be found, painted by diverse artists. In making the selection, Dany told us, he wanted to ensure a balance between inclusivity and excellence, choosing the most accomplished pieces but also at least one from each friend and collaborator who would visit the exhibition. In this way, La Cartonera’s social relations and aesthetic values and its social val-

Introduction 7

Figure 0.2. Mixtec family with Nayeli and Dany in the Parque Chapultepec workshop. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

ues and aesthetic relations can be found both inside on the gallery walls and outside in the lively painting and bookmaking session. The painting session reveals an important aspect of cartonera: an open-ended plurality, a refusal to prescribe value or predetermine meaning. April is experienced differently in separate hemispheres. The spring of Cuernavaca is not the autumn of São Paulo, and the bilingual Spanish-Nahuatl texts of La Cartonera’s Kosamalotlahtol could hardly be more different from the visual collages of Dulcinéia’s Arquipélago. So, what connects cartonera publishers over thousands of miles, beyond the simple material of cardboard? What is the magic of a cardboard-bound book that allows for such diversity of practice and form? And how does that magic weave its way into the stories told in cartonera books? In passionate discussions all across Latin America, these questions have variously puzzled and fascinated us, left us doubtful or inspired, and taken us to convivial and surprising places. Some of the most fleeting encounters have led to lifelong connections, and we hope that through the pages and chapters of this book and as we set out to answer these questions, more people will fall in love with the rich and unexpected world of cartonera.

8

Taking Form, Making Worlds

Looking Back to Look Forward: Key Ideas Cartonera is a grassroots Latin American publishing movement that has grown from a single collective in Buenos Aires to hundreds of practitioners around the world. Since its beginnings in 2003, a rebellious DIY spirit has underpinned the production of affordable cardboard-bound books in the publishing of marginal poets, voices from the peripheries, children’s literature, Latin American classics, Indigenous scholars, and almost everything in between. An aspect of cartonera that makes it unique is the way the books are bound. The cardboard used in the binding process is collected from the street, and each book is individually painted or otherwise adorned before sale. Cartonera is also tightly networked in specific communities, and publishers often reflect local concerns. Through a type of workshop practice, cartonera creates a space between visual art and literary narrative for people to tell their own stories by making their own books. Before we began thinking about a collaborative project on the cartonera phenomenon, Lucy, a literary theorist, had gained an initial insight into these unusual grassroots publishers. In the early 2010s she read some of the earliest books published by the fi rst cartonera publisher, Eloísa Cartonera, in its birthplace in Buenos Aires, took part in one of La Cartonera’s Saturday workshops in Cuernavaca, interviewed cartonera publishers in Mexico City, and started a small collection of cardboard-bound literature. But she knew that to fully engage with cartonera, it would be necessary to approach these texts through a different kind of reading. This conviction only grew when, in April 2014, she set foot in the Glicério recycling cooperative for the first time and was shown round the space and publishing workshop by Maria and Lúcia. Books being published in this way, over months of manual work, social exchange, and intellectual labor, clearly demanded a mode of engagement that lay outside the modus operandi to which she was accustomed as an academic coming from a literary-studies background. Working with this kind of literature meant engaging with an ongoing, living, and lived process of writing, making, and editing. It meant talking with people who answered back and refused to kowtow to academia, and it meant working with rather than on these publishers. That’s why Lucy reached out to Alex, a social anthropologist who, back in 2016, was in the middle of a hands-on collaboration with Dulcinéia Catadora in an occupation of the former Hotel Cambridge in downtown São Paulo. Brought together by serendipity or perhaps by

Introduction 9

the strong undercurrents of contemporary Latin American artistic and literary practice, Lucy and Alex began putting a project together that would not only bring literature and anthropology into dialogue but also challenge both disciplines from their relative epistemic standpoints from the perspective of cartonera. Working with Patrick, who joined the team, bringing with him a deep understanding of recycling and materiality in Uruguay, we quickly understood that no one remains an island once they engage with cartonera. Rather, in Thais’s terms, an archipelago is created, and academia would inevitably be brought into the cartonera world and subjected to the gaze of artistic practitioners and social actors just as we as a research team were seeking to exit the library, “reading along the Latin American streetscape,” as Schwartz does so deftly in Public Pages (2018). Navigating the seas of these archipelagos was not always peaceful, however. There were gales, storms, and the odd volcanic eruption. In the early days of the project, when we were still trying to understand the most fundamental question—what is cartonera?—we became obsessed by what we soon realized was an overly binary question: is it a literary movement or an artistic one? This tension led to some rather impassioned arguments. The most memorable erupted on our walk to a reading group with one of our interlocutors, Marcela Vieira, who as a specialist in modern Brazilian literature engaged with us in highly productive discussion sessions on some of the most complex texts published by Dulcinéia. Raising his voice to be heard above the traffic, Alex argued in no uncertain terms that cartonera was an artistic movement. He pointed out that one of its founders, Javier Barilaro, was an artist; Eloísa Cartonera, the first cartonera collective, was born in an artist’s studio; Dulcinéia Catadora, the fi rst collective in Brazil, came about directly as a result of the 27th Biennial de São Paulo (São Paulo Art Biennial) in 2006 and the spread of cartonera across Latin America was in many ways attributable to the transmission of an artistic method. For Lucy, who had already written two papers on cartonera in the context of literary and cultural studies, cartonera as an artistic practice seemed preposterous. Eloísa Cartonera, the pioneer of the cartonera movement, was cofounded by Washington Cucurto, now a cult Latin American writer. As a collective, they had published more than two hundred titles by well-known Argentine writers such as Gabriela Bejerman, Dalia Rosetti, Néstor Perlongher, Ricardo Piglia, César Aira and indeed, Cucurto himself. They had been to every book fair in Argentina and sold their books internationally, not to mention inspiring hundreds of col-

10 Taking Form, Making Worlds

lectives to set up their own publishers, each with its own primarily literary catalogue. The argument continued in the elevator up to Marcela’s flat and outside her door, accompanied now by Marcela’s equally animated Dachshund Mia. “Shall I give you some more time?” Marcela asked us as she opened the door. She offered us glasses of water and ushered Lucy toward a hammock to swing off her grievances. But it took more than a quick hammock time-out to overcome these conflictual moments. Working closely together, engaging with one another’s mode of research across three continents, and balancing institutional demands with cartonera’s lived realities gradually convinced us of the simultaneous validity of our seemingly divergent perspectives. By getting our hands dirty with recovered cardboard and rainbow-colored gouache, we have come face to face with the meaninglessness of such arguments in a world of cartonera defi ned not by straight lines and strict contours but by wonky edges and permeable textures. But only later would we understand that these initial arguments, entrenched in our academic disciplines, did not account for the joyfully irreverent and forcefully undisciplined nature of cartonera practice, which sees no boundaries between literature and art, books and barrios, publishing and politics. It was a respect for the undisciplined, playful, and innovative nature of cartonera that led to our own methodological innovations in approaching the research challenge. At a basic level, this involved employing anthropological and ethnographic methods to study the social relations and communities involved in the creation of cartonera books as well as literary and cultural analysis in the readings of cartonera texts. Yet, rather than a multidisciplinary endeavor in which we remained in our disciplinary silos (Alex and Patrick in anthropology, Lucy in cultural studies), our research involved a breaching of the disciplinary divisions that separated us and that were born of a coloniality of power that cartonera forcefully rejected. Patrick’s and Alex’s backgrounds in both anthropology and literary studies were relied upon, while Lucy conducted ethnographic fieldwork in her engagement with cartoneras. The diversity of interlinked cartonera forms called for new modes of reading that went beyond studying the text and its contexts and sought to engage processually with cartonera publishers to gain a deeper understanding of the impact their modes of literary and artistic production and forms of living and working in community had on each other over time. The cartonera books that emerged from the intervention at Puente Grande women’s prison in Mexico, for instance, trans-

Introduction 11

mute social forms of enclosure into aesthetic designs, while the prisoner voices found in cartonera texts go on to campaign for prison reform and against patriarchal violence. Cartonera inspired us as researchers to engage with the methods of its practitioners. We thus embarked on a journey that culminated in the development of what we call a “trans-formal methodology.” This term denotes the possibility, and in the case of cartonera, the necessity, of researching across social, aesthetic, literary, material, and other forms. This approach is inspired by Caroline Levine’s rethinking of form (2015) yet goes beyond her privileging of textual analysis to embrace an ethnographic methodological approach grounded in the forms employed by our interlocutors. We were invited by cartoneras to adopt and adapt these forms; Patrick contributed a short story to one of Sergio’s publications, Alex curated a cartonera exhibition, and Lucy organized and participated in multiple cartonera workshops and encuentros (encounters). Working with cartoneras as theorizing agents rather than on cartoneras as a traditional subject of research inquiry also required our working as cartoneras, just as we recognized cartoneras as intellectual guides to their own movement. Yet, wary of the possibility of appropriation, we sought to remain true not to a formulaic model of cartonera that does not actually exist but rather to the creative, open-ended spirit of the cartonera gesture. We would produce knowledge for the academy, certainly, but also from and for the cartonera community in which we embedded ourselves. Looking back to a time when we had only met a couple of times in person to work on the funding application, we were interested in more typically theoretical questions: How might cartonera publishers inform our understandings of social movements and activism? Was cartonera a social movement of sorts, and if so, what kind? What held this diverse network of collectives and individuals together, if indeed, there was anything at all beyond the commonality that they produced some kind of cardboard-bound, artisanal book object? And perhaps, if there was something that underpinned cartonera as a network, how might that allow us to rethink the way traditional movements tend to be structured, generally more centralized and top-down? We were also interested in the idea of “precarity.” The Glicério recycling cooperative, the small workspace in which Dulcinéia members produced their books, and the type of rough-and-ready publication that cartonera proposed seemed to conform to notions of precarity that we had picked up from our readings of David Harvey (2012), Michael Denning (2010), and Lesley Gill (2016). Perhaps we were in that academic space in which we did not fully

12

Taking Form, Making Worlds

understand how such a term, technocratic to us and trendy among our peers, could become a value judgment to the people we work with. At this stage, we could not quite grasp Lúcia’s response to our forty-page project proposal, that she found the term troubling as a description of the collective’s practice. It was all too easy to be influenced by prevailing social stigmas, but as we started to work more closely with cardboard publishers, we began to understand the complex role of the book in the world of cartonera. An art object, a text, a token of exchange, a pamphlet, a teaching aid, a means to come together, an advocacy tool, a protest object, an income generator—this seemingly simple artisanal object could be all of these things at once. Thinking with this plurality, we wanted to know how the cartonera book might act to create new relations and communities. We leafed through texts in portunhol selvagem, a poetic language invented by the cardboard publisher Douglas Diegues, incorporating Spanish, Portuguese, Guarani, English, German, and Italian. We read through bilingual editions of Nahuatl and Spanish poetry. We delved into oral histories describing the endless biodiversity of the sprawling hinterlands of Minas Gerais state. All these readings filled us with the growing conviction that beyond the relational aspect of sitting down with other people to make a book, important meanings were being generated in the process as well, meanings bearing a rebellious and irreverent relation to mainstream discourse, as if the very cardboard from the street, discarded and unwanted, had come to frame a kind of knowledge that had been overlooked or even deliberately made invisible. This dimension of meaning came to shape the work we did every step of the way. In this book we reveal the ways cartoneras shape and create new meaning, relations, and communities, giving rise to plural forms of living, being, and resisting that answer to the specific contexts in which they are created. How does this happen? Cartonera is premised on a specific artistic model that foregrounds not only the creation of texts— cartoneras are publishers, after all—but also the intervention of bodies in this world, which we refer to as a “material sociality of practice.” Key to this process is a very particular “double fold,” a term we use to describe the way the aesthetic hinges on the social and crucially, the social hinges on the aesthetic. This double fold has been at the center of cartonera’s dissident practice right from its beginnings. We trace the (hi) stories, methods, and forms of cartonera, exploring what it means when cartonera publishers describe themselves as belonging to a wider move-

Introduction 13

ment while embodying a fierce autonomy through their diverse modes of working and living.

Cartonera Questions In our work across Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico to research this book, it soon became apparent that cartonera had little respect for national, linguistic, or cultural barriers. Over cachaça, mezcal, coffee, tacos, empanadas, or whatever else was being passed around, we came to understand how, in its short yet colorful history, cartonera has shifted and transmuted, allowing diverse individuals and collectives to articulate and engage a range of tones and modalities, from overt political activism to much more restrained modes of social intervention. We also quickly realized that in hanging out, traveling, and working with cartonera practitioners, conversations on such topics were reflexive and deeply self-analytical. Interlocutors alternately engaged with our questions, rephrased them, directed them back to us, rejected them, or just politely ignored them and sent us back to making books. That, after all, was what cartonera was all about. The nagging question of what cartonera is, however, kept coming back, both for our interlocutors and for us. After all, what is cartonera beyond simply making books with cardboard? How did an experimental initiative kick-started by three young artists in a small Buenos Aires studio space come to spread across four continents, creating hundreds of cartonera publishers in less than twenty years? To answer these questions, we position ourselves at the intersection of a number of different theoretical and critical paradigms: the pluriversal and decolonial, (micro)political theory, new materialism, formalism, art and aesthetic theory, and anthropological work on social justice. We work with, across, and beyond each of these areas, engaging with important contributions by thinkers in these fields and subfields, including Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Jacques Rancière, Tim Ingold, and Néstor García Canclini. However, our inspiration ultimately comes from the practitioners alongside whom we worked; they were discussing what it means to be cartonera long before we showed up and will be reigniting such debates long after our research has come to a close. We thus take our lead from the cartonera publishers, four of whom became our research partners on the project: Dulcinéia Catadora and

14

Taking Form, Making Worlds

La Cartonera as well as La Rueda Cartonera in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Catapoesia in Gouveia, in the Brazilian state Minas Gerais. In each case, their day-to-day practices constitute a research process in itself. Dulcinéia, working in São Paulo’s Hotel Cambridge occupation over several months, carried out a reflexive exploration of the subjective interpretations of housing-related terms by people with lived experience of homelessness and life in occupations. The result is an important piece of activist inquiry, a publication entitled Vocabulário vivido (Rosa 2017, translated into English as Lived Lexis), where lived definitions are juxtaposed provocatively with dictionary entries and words are materialized through embodied meanings and affective exchanges. Guided by the work of Dulcinéia and others, we locate ourselves not outside but within the complexities of a set of practices that lies somewhere at the intersection between publishing network, artistic practice, cultural activism, community movement, and collective inquiry. Through our immersion in cartonera, we have found what Schwartz pertinently refers to as a “new ecology of reading” (2018, 151), or rather the multiplicity of ecologies that cartonera offers, comprising processes, people, materials, environments, and texts. Vocabulário vivido was one of Alex’s first encounters with cartonera. The text came about almost by chance. Dulcinéia Catadora was invited to collaborate by the artist Ícaro Lira during the latter’s residency within the Residência Artística Cambridge program. Alex was one of the curators of this project (Flynn 2018); it was based in the former Hotel Cambridge in downtown São Paulo and organized and run by the Movimento Sem Teto do Centro (Downtown Homeless Movement), a direct-action social movement driven by São Paulo’s housing crisis and the fundamental right to a home. Beyond its work with Ícaro’s project, Dulcinéia wanted to engage with the contested ground of the occupation itself: What did housing mean to the leaders of the movement, to the people carrying out the occupation, to the third-sector professionals supporting the occupation? What did it mean to the wider public, hostile to a movement that had been and remains today almost entirely criminalized? Proceeding in an autonomous manner, Dulcinéia set to work on Vocabulário vivido, interviewing people occupying the building and creating stark contrasts between competing defi nitions of words such as “housing,” “struggle,” “fight,” and “justice.” At stake here was the right to create meanings contingent on one’s own context, meanings that come not from the dictionary but from people’s lives and experiences. Vocabulário vivido also makes plain through

Introduction 15

its cartonera form that the right to one’s own defi nitions, meanings, interpretations, and values might amount to a mere solitary cry if they are rendered inaudible amid the deeply unequal chatter of global meaningproduction. This became clearer to us as we meandered our way through the different walks of cartonera life, whether the streets of São Paulo and Guadalajara, the paths of the Indigenous village Xoxocotla, the rural trails of Minas Gerais, or the corridors of Puente Grande women’s prison. Cartonera, in all these diverse and divergent contexts, enacts the possibility of welcoming dissident interpretations and the means to intervene, to transform what the imprisoned Enedina alludes to as “voces sin voz” (voices without voice) into voices with deep resonance, affective power, and an ingenious mode of travel—a cardboard book.

Plurality, Pluriversality, and Materiality Exploring these issues of meaning, voice, and value brings our research on cartonera into dialogue with recent theoretical work on pluriversality and attendant schools of decolonial thought. While “decolonial practice” may not be an emic description for all of the cartonera publishers with whom we worked, for many of our interlocutors it is part of their everyday life. During our fieldwork we encountered many texts, meetings, and community activities that were either directly inspired by or explicitly articulated with artistic, Indigenous, and non-gendernormative movements that resist modernity as understood by the modernidad/colonialidad group that includes Arturo Escobar (2007, 2008), Aníbal Quijano (2000, 2007), and Walter Mignolo (2007, 2009, 2011). As the modernidad/colonialidad group has made plain, modernity is at once an epistemological frame and ontologically speaking a “coloniality of being” (Maldonado-Torres 2007) that is inseparably bound to the European colonial project. Such a modernity has achieved its present hegemony through European territorial and political expansion, and an important part of this has occurred through the mobilization of epistemic violence, that is, the impossibility for truths and narratives to exist that do not consolidate this modernity. In this context, putting forward alternative ways of being in the world is not just about carving out a place and time from which to mobilize resistance. It is also about being able to tell a different story in a different way. The manner in which cartonera practices and narratives challenge Eurocentric concepts of urbanization, industrialization, and natural re-

16 Taking Form, Making Worlds

source use allows us to think productively with the pluriversal in various distinct senses. Cartonera came into being as a project of necessity, its very existence a defiant gesture to the conditions of precarity that had intensified in Buenos Aires at that time. As highlighted by Tanya Núñez Grandón in Animita Cartonera’s 2009 manifesto, it is a distinctly Latin American phenomenon. Grandón puts this Latin Americanness down to a unity across diversity: “While these Latin American publishing houses all share features of a common identity,” they “have different points of view because they are separated by mountain ranges, deserts, and kilometers that form social identities.” Mignolo, in an email to Escobar, calls attention to this significance: [C]oloniality is the site of enunciation that reveals and denounces the blindness of the narrative of modernity from the perspective of modernity itself, and it is at the same time the platform of pluri-versality, of diverse projects coming from the experience of local histories touched by western expansion. (Cited in Escobar 2004, 218)

Cartonera emerges in a context where the production of different, dissident types of stories is both most necessary and yet rendered most challenging by a prevailing one-world ontology. Its commitment to pluriversality is found in its refusal to accept that there is only one Euromodern world, articulated through one set of dominant (European) languages, structured by a single system of thought, and projected through one apparatus of production. By publishing alternative narratives, in alternative forms, from alternative materials, cartonera resists the supposed universality of Euromodernity and the correspondingly normative ideas of what a book is or should be (Bell 2017a). Mario Blaser has written of the potential of stories in this decolonial struggle, highlighting how “ontologies perform themselves into worlds,” how it is through stories that any given ontology’s presuppositions about the kinds of things and relations that make up a given world can be understood (2009, 877). What we see in cartonera is a fundamental understanding of the importance of stories in creating more equality, autonomy, and freedom from the strictures of colonialism. In a significant way, colonialism is the product of one very long, very painful story, what Jean-François Lyotard has called a “metanarrative” (1984), and therefore it is the creation of alternate stories from within a matrix of coloniality that can redefine, reconfigure, and remake the world; it is a pluriversality that challenges hegemonic modes of being, knowing,

Introduction 17

and thinking. Articulated against the backdrop of the supposed impossibility of its own existence, cartonera is in some ways a speculative endeavor—here today, gone tomorrow, each collective struggling to get by against the prevailing wind. However, in struggling each day just to get by, cartonera gives a practical example to Kimberly Hutchings’s work on pluriversal ethics: the emphasis on what it means to live with others without creating hierarchies of power, a practice that is less focused on fi nding answers and more intent on realizing experiments of “being with” and, importantly, questioning “how coexistence and collaboration work and the kinds of virtues and capacities they rely on and cultivate” (2019, 124). In Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar brings together these theoretical points into a practical challenge for change, asking his reader, “If we start with the presupposition, striking perhaps but not totally farfetched, that the contemporary world can be considered a massive design failure, certainly the result of particular design decisions, is it a matter of designing our way out?” (2018, 33) For Escobar, the concept and practice of ontological design affords possibilities of transitioning from the hegemonic one-world ontology of modernity to diverse configurations of being, that is, the pluriverse. What is especially interesting for us is Escobar’s mobilization of Anthony Dunn and Fiona Raby’s proposal that “critical design is critical thought translated into materiality” (2013, 35). Working with cartonera, we have seen how the construction of plurality is latent within the cardboard material and how the decisions that sit behind the choice to work in this way are based on creating new possibilities in the social world both located within but also projecting far beyond the cartonera book. It is in tracing these pathways to meaning that our work on the materials that underpin cartonera acquires a greater significance. In thinking with and through materials, we broadly consider three notions: first, the materials from which cartonera books are often made: cardboard, paints, lead pencils, and thread; second, the relations embedded in these materials and the tools employed such as bradawls and drills; and third, the resulting agency of the book objects themselves. Conducting participant observation with cartonera publishers involves engagement with a range of materials, objects, and tools. Some of these were already familiar, others became very familiar, and others still were made unfamiliar, or defamiliarized (Brecht 1964), through the process of viewing, holding, grasping, reading, and shaping them in novel ways. The most important material for cartonera publishers is of course

18 Taking Form, Making Worlds

that which unites them and identifies them as a network of publishers: cardboard. From its familiar role as commodity protector of secondary importance to the objects that it encloses, in the world of cartonera, cardboard becomes the protagonist. An instructive comparison, particularly in the global North, can be made with the now ubiquitous Amazon package, which customers tear through, often utilizing a stripping device because the cardboard is so resistant, to access, among other products, the books that lie inside. With cartonera, cardboard bears an entirely different relation to books by taking on a primary importance as their iconic covers. Cardboard is valued for its smoothness, its thickness, its blank canvas, or conversely for its rough edges, corrugated surfaces, and printed advertising that can be incorporated into new designs. In Cuernavaca, a gash on a cardboard rectangle becomes a gaping red wound, a memory device that materializes the trauma of Mexico’s disappeared. In São Paulo, exceptionally rigid cardboard that turns up in the recycling co-op becomes the centerpiece in a series of cartonera poem-recital performances as a wearable costume. In London, the packaging of publishing giant Penguin becomes a situationist statement when it becomes a book on which the penguin is turned upside down. In Los Angeles, the packaging for the Pink Lady apple brand becomes an ironic reference to heteronormativity in the binding of Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe (1987), Hortense Spillers’s seminal theorization of African American female gender construction. Cardboard, as our cartonera interlocutors taught us, is a resistant, flexible material with diverse affordances. It can bear heavy weights, absorb certain quantities of liquid, hold a shape, act as a conduit for air, and endure radical changes in temperature. These are some of the reasons that in 2020 more than 392 billion square feet of cardboard boxes were shipped around the United States alone (Waters 2020). In our exploration of cartonera publishing we have come to understand the importance of cardboard’s material properties not just as they serve but also shape the explicit and implicit acts of resistance in which cartonera publishers engage. Complementing the cardboard is also a whole range of tools, materials, and equipment that are mobilized, in cartonera terms, to “intervenir el cartón” (intervene on the cardboard), transforming it into a book cover but also an element of an assemblage that links radical writers, underground poets, Latinx librarians, conscious consumers, and more. Cartonera materials like paint, thread, and glue are democratic in their widespread availability and low cost as well as deceptive in their seeming genericness. Cartonera tools are themselves often re-

Introduction 19

engineered or at the very least bound up in the particular everyday routines and ambulations of their publishers, taking on elements of indispensability and irreplaceability. Nayeli and Dany of La Cartonera built their doctored drill and consistently bought their iconic cloth binding from the same store. Sergio and Israel of La Rueda and Viento Cartonero, respectively, crafted a “moto-tool” that has become a key means of speeding up the manual bookmaking process. Lúcia, Maria, Andreia, and Eminéia of Dulcinéia Catadora use the same workbenches Glicério recycling cooperative workers use to sort cardboard and other materials after they arrive from the street. For Júlio and Sol of Catapoesia, the most important input is a set of cheap tools—rulers, box cutters, and needles—that can be left with the members of the isolated communities with whom they work. Working processually with our cartonera interlocutors and understanding the seemingly endless possibilities of cardboard, we became sensitive to the properties of this special material. Tim Ingold’s call (2007) for the debates surrounding materiality and material culture to attend more closely to the materials themselves (and their transformations and affordances) became important in our work and research process. Ingold’s appeal is very straightforward: Might we not learn more about the material composition of the inhabited world by engaging quite directly with the stuff we want to understand: by sawing logs, building a wall, knapping a stone or rowing a boat? Could not such engagement—working practically with materials—offer a more powerful procedure of discovery than an approach bent on the abstract analysis of things already made? (2007, 3)

Cartonera offers two productive points of connection here. First, as Ingold notes, most material culture work has focused on processes of consumption rather than production—that is, on the objects themselves as opposed to the materials from which they are made. Dulcinéia Catadora’s collaboration with Thiago Honório for the book Dulcinéia foregrounds this tension through the creation of an art object stripped down to the bare materials: string, cardboard pieces as pages, and punctures in the cardboard to create letters that spell “Dulcinéia” (figure 0.3). Second, Ingold’s conviction that “materials always and inevitably win out over materiality in the long term” (2007, 10) is true in the cartonera world, where the acidity of cardboard and the technique of using cheap photocopies of printed pages means that the books have a lim-

20

Taking Form, Making Worlds

Figure 0.3. Thiago Honório’s Dulcinéia, 2017. In collaboration with the Dulcinéia Catadora collective. Pierced cardboard, string. Fifty signed copies. Photograph by Edouard Fraipont. Image courtesy of the artist.

ited shelf life. This material status came to the fore when European and North American libraries began to build cartonera literature collections, thinking through how they could slow the inevitable process of the books’ dematerialization to preserve an archive. And indeed, this fine-grained approach to the material properties of cardboard shows that the details matter in different social contexts, whether in special collections departments in large libraries or in middle-class book fairs, where buyers are sometimes daunted by the presence of seemingly unclean materials recovered from the street. What we realized through our day-to-day interactions in the streets, parks, cafés, cooperatives, and occupations in which cartoneras work and move is that our interlocutors were fascinated by the material, cardboard, but they were also interested in the cardboard book, the resulting object, and its capacity to act, to create relations, meaning, and community with each paint stroke, perforation, sale, gift, or turn of a page. Indeed, the work of cartoneras frequently involved abstraction and theorization which directly derived from their engagements with the “tangible stuff of craftsmen and manufacturers” (Ingold 2011a, 20). We took this as our inspiration and became competent, if not as talented as our cartonera friends, at making a variety of cardboard books. We learned binding techniques; working with different thicknesses; using a variety of paints, brushes, wash finishes, and varnishes; perforating with a range

Introduction 21

of tools; and binding with a wide selection of glue, staples, and thread. Grounding our academic work in making these books and learning how to use the materials, we sought to locate ourselves in a material sociality of practice. Such hands-on work reinforced our conviction that it is a mistake to assume that people who work with materials at such close quarters do not seek to theorize or abstract from what they are doing. Indeed, when they engage with theorists and more conceptual frameworks, as they often do, they do so from a position of tangibility, as they are embedded within the material context with which they work. In this manner, we attend to the material sociality of cartonera practice from the starting point of a methodology that requires us as researchers to work manually from within its forms. Paying careful attention to the way that the affordances and properties of materials form part of publishers’ explicit and implicit work within dimensions of sociality, in this book we reach out to new materialist scholars who are interested in widening the scope of the social and accounting for the way that materials have a propensity to be agentive, active, and even activist forces in shaping the current world and anticipating new futures. Engaging with this field’s key figures and ideas of constitutive “intraactions” (Barad 2007), “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010), and “transcorporeality” (Alaimo 2008), we point to the ways the movements and trajectories of cartonera publishing, publishers, and books (ideas, people, and things) have been impelled by other-than-human forces, corporeal encounters, and transcorporeal flows. For Karen Barad, meaning and materials are interconnected through “the process of mattering” (2003, 817). In the case of cartonera, this dynamic process involves exchanges, encounters, and movements that thread together social, artistic, and literary worlds. Ultimately, however, we are anchored by the cardboard, which in a very physical sense binds together cartonera publishers, their books, and their environments. In the world of cartonera, cardboard is, to borrow Susan Sencindiver words, “not only sculpted by, but also coproductive in conditioning and enabling social worlds and expression, human life and experience” (2017).

Movements and Forms A recurring subject matter while working with cartonera publishers was their network and whether, given that many collectives across Latin America had very similar aims and practices, they considered them-

22

Taking Form, Making Worlds

selves part of a cartonera social movement. In discussions from Guadalajara to rural Minas Gerais, common themes emerged as our interlocutors expressed discomfort with the idea. At one point, Sol Barreto of Catapoesia suggested that in a social movement, actors and actions had to be aligned to achieve predetermined objectives. Júlio, her partner at the time, agreed that in a social movement “everyone shares the same practice” to realize “an aligned collective, an aligned movement, not one of small groups.” Eminéia and Maria of Dulcinéia Catadora broadly agreed, arguing that in a social movement the defining characteristic was organization and size; everyone should have the same aim in order to bring about a change for a specific sector of society. Implicit for them was the key notion of cartonera rejecting a certain sense of discipline, fi xity, and teleology; different cartonera collectives might share common aims, but autonomy in their open-ended practices was paramount. As was often the case in such discussions, our interlocutors took the reins and repurposed the inquiry to something they felt to be more productive. So while our interlocutors generally rejected the need to be alinhados, in alignment with other collectives, Eminéia did consider cartonera as a kind of social movement because it worked within the dimension of the social. And for Júlio, although cartonera had come about in ways that contrast with higher-profile social movements, there was something interesting about the word “movement” itself: “But yes, each cartonera puts itself into movement in a social sense, to be able to put forward its own concerns.” Instead of referring to large-scale social movements and street protests, Júlio’s theorization asked us to reconsider the notion of a movement in terms of “what moves each and every one of us,” where “moves” contains an important affective dimension. He commented, “Something moves us, and it’s this that makes us work with cardboard.” The shift Júlio proposes from alignment, teleology, and unified goals to the terrain of affect, materiality, and autonomy is contextualized by the huge diversity of cartonera texts, interventions, and practices. Cartonera may seek to enact change, but its many actors are not generally interested in institutionalized politics or social movements. This brings us back to Escobar, whose ethnographic and theoretical work over two decades has involved articulating pathways to think beyond traditional social movements. Already in “Beyond the Third World” (2004), Escobar suggests we turn our attention to collectives that leave behind utopian imaginaries to work with practices of social, economic, and ecolog-

Introduction 23

ical difference, a necessary step in a world where modernity no longer provides solutions to the problems it creates. Such movements “enact a novel logic of the social, based on self-organizing meshworks and largely non-hierarchical structures. They tend to show emergent properties and complex adaptive behaviors that movements of the past, with their penchant for centralization and hierarchy, were never able to manifest” (Escobar 2004, 210). Escobar’s analysis of nonhierarchical meshworks, “new horizons of meaning” (223), and pluriversality resonates with our work with cartonera practice and the shift its protagonists propose and embody. That shift is noted by both Raúl Zibechi (2008) and Júlio Brabo, from “social movements” to “the social in movement.” It is therefore productive to understand the cartonera meshwork in relation to the more decentralized networks with which they associate and with whom they have collaborated: Bordados por la Paz for our Guadalajarabased interlocutors; São Paulo’s various LGBT and housing movements in the work of Dulcinéia; quilombos (communities established by people who escaped enslavement) in Catapoesia’s past and present actions; and the Indigenous and Zapatista movements with which La Cartonera has engaged through publications and actions. The impact of such dispersed, decentralized, and diverse networks, whose emphasis is on creating radical pathways to envision new worlds as opposed to striving toward nineteenth- and twentieth-century models of revolutionary change, has posed a significant challenge to scholars. Elizabeth Povinelli’s work on “becoming otherwise” (2012), with its focus on diverse subjectivities, micropolitical actions, and complex transnational networks, is representative of a rich body of scholarship with which we engage. Included in that scholarship are Zibechi’s hugely influential work on Latin America’s “territories in resistance” (2008); Marina Sitrin’s book on horizontality in the new social movements in Argentina (2012); Macarena Gómez-Barris’s study of how political and aesthetic practices emerge from within the “extractive zone” (2017); and in relation to activism through print culture, Magalí Rabasa’s The Book in Movement (2019). Beyond Latin America, we have also been influenced by the work of Marianne Maeckelbergh (2009) and Jeff Juris (2008) on how alterglobalization movements engage with horizontal and networked organization and Maple Razsa’s account of political activism in postsocialist Yugoslavia and the importance of the “subjective turn” (2015, 11). Importantly, though, this book is inseparable from the Latin Amer-

24 Taking Form, Making Worlds

ican communities in which cartoneras live and work, four of which we foreground. Grandón highlights in Animita Cartonera’s 2009 manifesto that most cartoneras see their work as distinctly if not uniquely Latin American in practice and spirit. Júlio’s differentiation of cartonera from social movements, then, has to be contextualized by the situation in Brazil, where a social movement’s heft continues to be measured by its size. Its well-known landless workers movement, the Movimento Sem Terra, is proudly touted as Latin America’s largest social movement, with estimates of membership ranging up to 1.5 million people. Equally, at the time of our fieldwork, São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista was regularly the site of mass demonstrations by pro- and anti-Bolsonaro groups that were reported as comprising in excess of 100,000 participants. In this context, Júlio’s observation about rereading the word “movement” is an important challenge to older sociological paradigms that analyzed the mobilizations of large groups of people through concepts like “collective behavior” (Park 1967), “relative deprivation” (Gurney and Tierney 1982), and “mob mentality” (Arendt 1951). Even in work that has gone beyond those characterizations to develop notions such as resource mobilization (McCarthy and Zald 1973) or framing, there have invariably been implicit and explicit connections between the effectiveness of mobilization and unity and magnitude (DeNardo 1985; Oliver, Marwell, and Teixeira 1985). Although cartonera publishers and collectives remain resolutely small and community-based, the cartonera phenomenon has exploded since 2003, with hundreds of collectives popping up across and beyond Latin America, some here to stay, others vanishing from the scene almost as quickly as they appeared. A consequence of this rapid growth is that some researchers have framed it through quantitative measures. Read from this perspective, cartonera becomes a social movement aiming to bring about measurable change at a community level—an increase in the number of readers in rural settings or a decrease in the number of drug-war-related deaths in Mexico’s cities. This places cartonera under scrutiny through concepts of hegemony and extensive politics; scholars seek to evaluate the success of the movement, the degree of its impact, the areas it covers, and the degree to which it is able to fight against hegemonic cultural, economic, or political power. Jania Kudaibergen has commented on the democratizing potential of cartonera publishers. Their impact, she argues, “remains quite limited [because] the sphere of action is reduced in terms of the quantity

Introduction 25

and diversity of their audience” (2017, 16). We do not negate such a perspective; on the contrary, we agree that it is important to consider who is reading cartonera books and what kind of relations cartonera practice creates in the wider community. However, to conduct a productive analysis of cartonera, it seems necessary to explore the potential of its practices not in quantitative terms but rather by looking in detail at the nature and quality of their activities through the material processes in which they engage; by looking at what happens in specific spatiotemporalities between cartonera actors, materials, objects, texts, and environments; by understanding the proposal that is latent in the plasticity of their work between social and aesthetic form. Inevitably, given the cartón at the heart of cartonera, this brings us back to the question of materiality. In our consideration of the relations between forms and movements in cartonera practice, we engage with other scholars who have considered the role that tools and materials play in resistance acts and movements. Anna Johansson, Mona Lilja, and Lena Martinsson write, “The matter that matters in the moment of resistance involves, among others, books, paper, pavements, streets, public transport, buildings, taxis, as well as bodies, artefacts, gatherings, and economy” (2018, 5). Yet as Sarah Hughes notes (2019), perhaps we should go beyond the usual suspects, the forms that we expect to be implicated in acts of resistance. That we often limit our horizons of resistance to archetypal forms is, Hughes asserts, partly linked to a fear that in multiplying both the activities we consider acts of resistance (to include subtle, everyday, and quotidian acts) and the types of actants that are capable of resistance (from intentional humans to nonintentional coalitions, assemblages, and things), we dilute the concept to the point of meaninglessness or, perhaps worse, conceptual mediocraty.* Yet the obverse of this damage-limitation exercise is all too familiar to anthropologists and cultural scholars; we predetermine our object of study, ruling resistance in or out depending on predefi ned forms and losing our capacity to be surprised and let our fieldwork sites assist us in re-equipping our conceptual toolkit. * In this, Hughes echoes the recalibration that occurred during the boom that James Scott (1985, 1990) inspired in resistance studies, when scholars including Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (1991, 31) began to focus on the intentionality of those perceived as resisting. They questioned the extent to which people were consciously doing so, and if they were not, whether their actions really could be theorized as resistance.

26 Taking Form, Making Worlds

Like Hughes, we argue that it is necessary to rethink rather than jettison concepts such as resistance as they are unfolding in the twentyfirst century. In this book, our strategy is to focus on the notion of unexpected forms of resistance, forms that we have identified as being common to cartoneras across the breadth of Latin America and that express both social and aesthetic connotations. Throughout the chapters of this book we explore four prevailing cartonera forms: texts, encounters, workshops, and exhibitions. A key theoretical starting point here is Levine’s work. Two principal elements of Levine’s Forms (2015) are important for us in this book. First is her refusal to distinguish between aesthetic and social form and thus her embrace of the “relations among forms—discursive, aesthetic, conceptual, material, political” (36). Second is her argument that “what we are facing is not a single hegemonic system or dominant ideology [capitalism/neoliberalism] but many forms, all trying to organize us at once” (22), allowing a more flexible way of thinking around different opportunities for enacting change. Cartoneras, from our experience, also refuse to distinguish between social and aesthetic form. We engage closely with what Levine identifies as the need for “a fi ne-grained formalist reading practice to address the extraordinary density of forms that is a fact of our most ordinary daily experience” (22), but also take a step away from her proposed formalism through readings couched in hands-on action and practice. From a social sciences perspective, the puzzle that form presents to us has also been taken up by Kathleen Millar (2018) in her ethnography of Rio’s Jardim Gramacho dump, which until its closure in 2012 was the largest in Latin America. In analyzing the life and labor of the waste pickers who worked there, Millar develops the idea of “forms of living” to elide the problematic but stubborn formal/informal binary that usually provides the framework for studying such workers. Millar draws on the material affordance of plastics, one of the main materials she collected with waste pickers, demonstrating its capacity to give and receive form and using this framework to think about the social world of the landfill. Instead of understanding municipal attempts to introduce uniforms, regular hours, and clocking in at the landfi ll as efforts to formalize the informal, Millar understands plasticity as an “interplay between forms” (137), a perspective we develop throughout this book. This more capacious interpretation of form allows us to think carefully about the transformative potential of the double fold that lies at the heart of cartonera practice, a legacy of the artistic model from which cartonera fi rst emerged.

Introduction 27

Artistic Practice and Its Imbrication in the Social Javier Barilaro told us that Eloísa Cartonera was designed as an artistic intervention informed by the German artist Joseph Beuys and his notion of social sculpture. Beuys’s ideas, formulated in the late 1960s, center on a type of artwork that occurs in the social realm and can only be realized through collaborative, participatory engagement. In this paradigm, spectators would become participants as they actively modeled life as sculpture, and in doing so, they would bring about political and environmental transformation. Eloísa’s chosen artistic medium was the book, and Javier always envisaged the publishing proposition as a means of enacting possibilities and making worlds through hundreds of humble cardboard books that could take unexpected pathways toward reconfiguring relations. In this understanding, each book was not an artwork in itself but rather part of a wider proposal that could act upon society. We explore many such socially transformative artistic actions in this book, but in this specific instance, the very notion of social sculpture was construed as an intervention against the market’s tendency to fetishize individual objects rendered special because of their denomination as “works of art.” In 2006 at the 27th São Paulo Art Biennial, in which Eloísa Cartonera was invited to participate, a general line of questioning to Javier was how a project that involved waste pickers could be thought of as art as opposed to a type of social assistance project. When asked whether it was possible to separate aesthetics from social and political action, he responded, Not for me. But I’d like to clarify. We work within an aesthetic field; we are artists. And right from the outset, I say, my aesthetic supposes that it is more beautiful when there is inclusion.

To theorize a type of artistic practice that seeks a profound engagement with the social, we necessarily enter into dialogue with Beuys’s own writing as well as more recent theorizations from art history and curatorial writing. Such work as that of Nato Thompson (2012), Declan McGonagle (2007), and Paul Clements (2011) as well as attempts to create cartographies of this ongoing field of research (Finkelpearl 2014), offer productive points of intersection but often fail to interrogate the specificities of practice through analysis based on ethnographic detail, articulated as it is from a more panoramic perspective. Ruy Blanes and colleagues note that what is at stake in any anthropological analysis of

28 Taking Form, Making Worlds

artistic practice is questioning that which directly relates to a complex matrix of sociality, “notions of instantiation; axes of verticality and horizontality; political intention; and/or modes of practice/work” (2016, 137). Nicolas Bourriaud argues in Relational Aesthetics (2002) that art should be evaluated with reference to the relations that the work facilitates and the models of sociality it proposes. In this understanding, Bourriaud fi nds, an artwork “has as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context” (14), creating “micro-utopias” (31), temporary spaces in which people can enter into dialogue and create meaning in a democratic manner. Although Bourriaud’s position connects with our own in a theoretical sense, it is quite different in practice. Unlike cartonera books, the works he uses to exemplify relational aesthetics were generally conceived for gallery and museum spaces and thus different in the intention—shared by Eloísa and the hundreds of cartonera publishers that would follow in its footsteps—to make elite culture more accessible through distribution beyond spaces of privilege, including art galleries, bookshops, and national libraries. To understand the relationality of cartonera art practice, Grant Kester’s work offers a lens that is subtly different from that of Bourriaud. Employing the term “socially engaged art,” Kester’s analysis (2011, 2012) focuses on projects like Park Fiction in Hamburg, Germany, and Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas. These are long-term, pluralistic, and community-based arts initiatives that through collaborative practice are located on “a continuum with forms of cultural activism” (Kester 2011, 37). The projects are premised on a “dialogical aesthetic [that] suggests a very different image of the artist” from that to which we are accustomed—a conception characterized by openness, listening, and “a willingness to accept dependence and intersubjective vulnerability” (Kester 2012, 157). For Kester, the genesis of such initiatives is a deliberate gesture against schema of inequality driven by “a powerful neoliberal economic order dedicated to eliminating all forms of collective or public resistance (institutional, ideological, and organizational) to the primacy of capital” (2011, 5). It is significant that such socially engaged art centers on projects that sit outside mainstream arts institutions, generating their own, autonomous spaces of encounter. Of special interest to us here is Kester’s conviction that such projects cannot be productively engaged by the traditional approaches of art theory and criticism. Cartonera practices push back against a prevailing position within the art world exemplified in the following statement by the art critic Jonathan Jones:

Introduction 29

Participatory art is a denial of talent. It panders to a cosy lie, that everyone is equally able to create worthwhile art. What chance have we of nurturing those rare wonders in our midst, the born artists, if we claim this infantile right to put on a badge that says “artist”? (2010)

Through collectively produced texts, community-based workshops, colorful encounters, and challenging exhibitions, cartonera defies Jones’s overly narrow conception of what is worthwhile, the deterministic logic of the “born artist,” and indeed, the association of art with wonder and aura, notions challenged long ago by thinkers across Europe and Latin America, from Walter Benjamin to García Canclini, Beatriz Sarlo, and Carlos Monsiváis. In this book, we reject Jones’s view and align ourselves instead with La Cartonera’s desire to desacralize art and literature, which in turn corresponds to an important perspective voiced by Suzi Gablik, that certain forms of artistic practice can instigate dimensions of sociality “in which the paradigm of social consciousness replaces that of individual genius” (1992, 114), a practice that is premised upon “a significant shift from objects to relationships” (7). This shift, of which cartonera publishers are a powerful example, is related to some of the theoretical work conducted by artists, curators, and anthropologists since the 1990s. A prominent European example is Alfred Gell, who in Art and Agency (1998) explores how Melanesian artworks “mediate social agency” (7). Back in Latin America, García Canclini has theorized this sea change in terms of a process that has taken place over the past few decades in which art practices based on objects have increasingly been displaced in favor of practices based on contexts, to the point that works are now being inserted in the media, urban spaces, digital networks, and forms of social participation where aesthetic differences seem to dissolve. (2014, xviii)

This shift is key to understanding and working with the social dimensions and transformative potential of cartonera art forms, whether in texts, encounters, workshops, or exhibitions. The inherent sociality of  cartonera practice is made clear in Dulcinéia Catadora’s 2015 manifesto: Contemporary art must not exist at a distance from an “uninitiated” public. It must be in the midst of the people, within reach of everyone, with its interventions in the streets; it must occupy public space.

30 Taking Form, Making Worlds

Contemporary art must break the hierarchies of the spaces of the arts circuit; streets, squares, and “non-artistic” places like fairs, stores, and newsstands have the same potential as galleries, museums, and art spaces. Literature and art can play a role of resistance; nothing can justify an artistic position that is inconsequential and alienated.

These are powerful statements of intent that to a certain extent echo the voices of actors embedded within artistic practice in contexts of protest (Juris 2015; Loewe 2015; Serafi ni 2018). A lot of work has been done on the intersection of art and activism, and Peter Weibel, in his 2014 editorial and curatorial project “global aCtIVISm,” puts together a huge panorama of artistic work intended to intervene in the social. The project was conceived in the context of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, and Weibel argues that protest movements that work with forms of artistic expression constitute a “performative democracy,” and such “artivism” is “the twenty-first century’s first new art form” (2014, 23). In academia, the role of art within social movements has been studied by T. V. Reed (2005), Melody Milbrandt and Larry Milbrant (2011), and McCaughan (2012), among others, who use comparative frameworks, archival research, and interviews to demonstrate how mobilization and art have intersected in different geographical and historical contexts, from the civil rights movement to the Chicano movement. Weibel’s pointed use of the term “artivism” picks up on a series of events and actions by Chicano artists and musicians that sprang from an encounter with the Zapatistas in Chiapas in 1997. We position ourselves carefully in this regard. “Artivism” has become an increasingly catch-all label to describe any kind of political art, from street art and protest songs to culture jamming and subversion in global struggles against repression and injustice. Marcela Fuentes describes artivism as productions by artists who use their craft to mobilize concrete action in response to social issues. The term “artivism” characterizes a drive toward action in the making of an artistic intervention. In artivist projects, the main goal is to trigger responses and not merely represent a state of affairs. (2013, 32–33)

While cartonera may seem to fit such a definition, and some researchers have focused on cartonera’s activist proposal (Braga 2014),

Introduction 31

such a characterization leaves unanswered a series of important questions. How can it be the case that artivism is the first new art form of the twenty-first century if it can be traced back to the 1960s if not before? What kind of temporal duality does artivism presuppose in its arbitrary separation of art and politics, which have long been analyzed in conjunction with one another? And thinking more particularly with Fuentes’s definition, what kind of artistic work, even back in Renaissance Italy, would limit itself to representation and not seek to elicit a response in the person within its ambit? Cartonera’s engagement with art and the social is different from the performativity in protest that characterizes certain social movements, and its modest yet nuanced practice does not aspire to be classified as the fi rst neovanguardist art form of the twentyfirst century. Put simply, what differentiates cartonera from activist tropes embedded in mobilization is that enacting change may emerge from a cartonera intervention, but that change, and perhaps even the intervention itself, is never specified as a goal at the start of the process. But this is not either/or. A more nuanced review of “artivism” by Paulo Raposo presents plural and diverse interpretations of the term, recognizing that art and politics have always existed in a “relationship founded on dissidence and civic and artistic insurgency” (2015, 12). In this book, while recognizing the importance of such work, we show how cartonera’s very specific relation to art encompasses the creation of new relations and communities through particular forms that have both social and aesthetic connotations. Cartonera’s relation to art also provided the inspiration for our research methodology. Our work looks toward a growing body of scholarship that insists on art’s ability to prefigure and model in the exhibition space as opposed to approaches premised on art’s subjugation to mobilization, instrumentality, and efficacy (Nossel 2016).

Four Field Sites, Four Models Given the rich diversity of the cartonera world, one of the first challenges we faced on this project was deciding with whom to work. Mapping cartonera publishers was never our objective. In this book we mention numbers in the region of 250–350 publishers—some still in existence, others long gone—which is a figure based on Paloma Celis Carbajal’s database at the University of Wisconsin and our own research in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The reality is that cartonera publish-

32

Taking Form, Making Worlds

ers emerge, practice, hibernate, and dissolve in a highly dynamic way; a database of cartonera publishers is volatile, and even loose estimates of how many are active at any one time are very difficult to establish. At the same time, we wanted to engage with the wonderful breadth of cartonera literature and practice. Cartonera is a Latin America–wide phenomenon, and working in a traditional anthropological manner, constructing a very narrow field site and working in depth in one location, did not seem methodologically appropriate for a practice that in itself is defined by its portability and lack of respect for borders. We therefore elected to work in Brazil and Mexico, to gain a better understanding of the different social and aesthetic forms present in both these countries but also to investigate what bound cartoneras in these places together. In 2018–2019, when we conducted our fieldwork in Brazil, Solange Barreto and Júlio Brabo ran Catapoesia from their home in Barão de Guaicuhy, a picturesque hamlet with thirty-eight inhabitants on a deactivated railway line in Gouveia, northern Minas Gerais, with no internet connection and no mobile phone signal, ten kilometers away from the nearest asphalted road. Sol is a retired schoolteacher who taught literature in São Paulo high schools; Júlio trained as a geologist in nearby Diamantina and organizes hikes in the local area. Catapoesia emerged from a context characterized by garimpo (small-scale informal diamond and gold mining), quilombos, environmental degradation brought on by huge mining companies, and the powerful writings of João Guimarães Rosa, which are embedded in the folklore and landscapes of the region. The collective operates in various small communities with the aim of promoting minoritarian oral histories and local popular culture. Founded in 2009, almost all of Catapoesia’s fifty texts have been published in a hands-on, processual manner, with the members of the communities in question. Over a period of six months to a year, each project is elaborated collectively, both textually and aesthetically, to produce a cardboard-bound book. Their title Tia Tança, for example, is a quilombola child’s story of her community as told to her by community elders. Most of Catapoesia’s books are distributed for free in the small villages and towns in which they work, while others are sold for US$2 at local book fairs and artisanal markets. The price is in line with one of cartonera’s enduring features, rooted in Eloísa’s original insistence on making literature and art more accessible by selling it far below the market rate. Buyers include friends and family of those who have collaborated as well as an interested local public. Dulcinéia Catadora shares Catapoesia’s commitment to making

Introduction 33

Figure 0.4. The Glicério recycling cooperative as viewed from Dulcinéia Catadora’s workspace. Photograph by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

books more accessible and working in communities, but the two cartoneras’ practices have many important differences. Founded in 2007, the Dulcinéia collective emerged from a collaborative project between Lúcia Rosa, waste picker Peterson Emboava, and members of Eloísa Cartonera for the 27th São Paulo Art Biennial. And Dulcinéia is composed of full-time waste pickers; at the time of our research, three women were actively involved—Andreia Emboava, Maria Dias da Costa, and Eminéia dos Santos—plus Lúcia Rosa, an artist. Their space of production is embedded in the catadoras’ place of work, the Glicério recycling cooperative (figure 0.4). Their publishing process was initially focused on authors from urban peripheries submitting texts by invitation to the collective, whether poetry or prose. Very early in the process, however, Dulcinéia began to experiment with more collaborative forms, first embarking on projects in the community, which in Rio de Janeiro resulted in the books Providências, Soluções providenciais, De lá pra cá, de cá pra lá, and Nós, daqui. Then they created a series of artists’ books, many realized in collaboration with Dulcinéia’s members. Particularly in this latter mode, Dulcinéia has brought physical and creative production back

34

Taking Form, Making Worlds

within the recycling co-op, a key lens through which we view their practice. Perhaps owing to its origins in the São Paulo Art Biennial, Dulcinéia’s work has been exhibited many times in commercial galleries and institutional museums. Through a mix of book fairs and ad hoc encounters, the collective has sold books for US$4 to US$7. Unlike Catapoesia, whose members have relied in the past on cultural grants and awards for their continued labor, Dulcinéia has participated in a range of book fairs with international participation such as Feira Plana (São Paulo), Tijuana (Rio de Janeiro, Lima, and Buenos Aires), and Miolos (São Paulo). These are spaces to which most cartonera publishers do not have access; for that reason, Dulcinéia’s readership is broader than Catapoesia’s. Dulcinéia also distributes books that result from social interventions, and its books are known to art and literature audiences and therefore have a specific public beyond the groups and communities with which the texts are coproduced. In the often separate literature and art worlds across which Dulcinéia publishers move with seeming ease, the tension between cartonera book and art object perhaps fi nds clearest expression through the Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky’s collaboration with Dulcinéia, Um livro para desvendar mistérios (2011, A book to unravel mysteries), due to the value of Bruscky’s work on the international art market. As with Catapoesia, accessibility is a key principle for Dulcinéia, and the motives for sale are to maintain financial sustainability of the collective as well as to disseminate perspectives that have been marginalized, invisibilized, or silenced. Importantly, Dulcinéia seeks to create a supplementary wage for its members, and all activities are remunerated, as specified in a detailed pay model elaborated by the collective. In Guadalajara, Mexico, La Rueda Cartonera was founded in 2009 by Sergio Fong, Lorena Baker, and Fernando Zaragoza. Sergio, a generation older than Fernando and Lorena, had a background in alternative formats such as zines, student newspapers, and self-publication. Lorena was an artist and Fernando an aspiring publisher and writer. Before La Rueda existed as a cartonera publisher, it was a less defi ned collective with a cultural space in which the members presented books and magazines, organized small exhibitions of painting, photography, and sculpture, and, in Sergio’s words, “Nos embriagábamos y éramos muy felices” (we got drunk and were very happy). Sergio, Lorena, and Fernando, in this happy but underresourced setup, had tried to publish a title conventionally but found the costs prohibitive. In 2008 Sergio discovered cartonera when he was trying to secure a copy of Mario Santiago Pa-

Introduction 35

pasquiaro’s book Respiración del laberinto (2009) and found that it was being brought out in a cartonera coedition. The following year, La Rueda Cartonera was born, cautiously choosing as its first title one of Sergio’s texts in case the whole enterprise flopped. On the contrary, La Rueda has survived several changes of location and editorial team to endure, clocking up a catalogue of more than fifty publications along the way. By 2020 La Rueda was being run out of Sergio’s bookshop and café also named La Rueda, a countercultural hub in Guadalajara, and he has been assisted by his son, Pavel, fellow cardboard publisher Israel Soberanes, and other passing travelers while also counting on Lorena’s remote design input from Mexico City. La Rueda is committed to publishing new voices as well as republishing established authors. In 2018 it brought out Rancheros vs gángsteres, an anthology of new writers who have attended Sergio’s writing workshop, and Los solos, an out-of-print book of poetry written by Raul Bañuelos, a consecrated Guadalajaran poet and Sergio’s former maestro. Sergio’s attitude, energy, and humor are visible in his appearance; a wispy, thin beard, baggy double denim, and a wide-rimmed hat complete the look. In fact, Sergio wears many hats, as president of Guadalajara’s Second-Hand Book Sellers Association, father, grandfather, writer, bookshop owner, barista, and activist. La Rueda’s aesthetic has varied according to its collaborators; while Sergio happily wields a felt-tip pen to decorate books he pirates, Lorena prefers collage; Jacobo, stickers; Israel, a splash of paint and serigraphy. The titles are sold out of the bookshop, at book fairs, and through word of mouth. Sergio leads cardboard-bookmaking workshops throughout the city for children, adults, passersby, AIDS sufferers, prisoners, and those with learning difficulties, enabling them to tell, write, and publish their diverse stories. Cuernavaca was our last chosen location. Back in 2013 Lucy met Nayeli and Dany, cofounders with Raúl Silva de la Mora and Rocato Bablot of Mexico’s longest-standing cardboard publisher (figure 0.5). She met them at one of their Saturday workshops, her attendance marked in print in the detailed acknowledgments in a beautiful book that Dany gave her years later. The wider project team met them in 2018 at a workshop they gave in Cuernavaca’s Chapultepec Park. Neither Dany nor Nayeli writes prose or poetry or has a background in publishing. They are trained in geology, biology, and mathematics. And unlike the three other collectives, La Cartonera is a strictly extracurricular endeavor carried out on top of their professional lives. Their shared background in quantitative research is perhaps reflected in their careful craft and

36 Taking Form, Making Worlds

meticulous bookkeeping. Separate accounts ensure that La Cartonera is a self-financing, sustainable endeavor, while thin strips of multicolored cloth set their books apart, showing that they come not from “a cartonera” but from “La Cartonera.” Every collaboration, title, expenditure, and sale is carefully filed away by Dany. La Cartonera and its catalogue emerge from Cuernavaca’s historical role as a city of artists and writers, national and international, émigré and Indigenous. The catalogue is partly the product of chance encounters encouraged by the multinational, bilingual couple. One day they will be meeting with a poet at a book festival in the south of France, and on another they will make contact with a visiting artist in Cuernavaca. And as they take people around the winding streets of their beloved city, they introduce them to another friend at every turn. They do not only engage with writers from the metropole, though. On the contrary, they are committed to publishing recognized national authors like Javier Sicilia, local collaborators like Rémi Blanchard, and new authors publishing in Indigenous languages such as José Carlos Monroy Rodríguez. As they highlighted with pride in their tenth-anniversary

Figure 0.5. Dany Hurpin and Nayeli Sánchez of La Cartonera, in Dulcinéia Catadora’s workshop. Photograph by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

Introduction 37

Figure 0.6. General view of La Cartonera’s tenth-anniversary exhibition in

Cuernavaca. Photograph by Noara Quintana.

exhibition in 2018 (figure 0.6), La Cartonera had published more than 60 works from at least 170 authors in 70 languages and had created more than 10,000 books out of 3,000 cardboard boxes recovered from local communities. La Cartonera’s most familiar spaces are cultural, such as the Casona Spencer museum, where they hold weekly workshops, galleries with whom they collaborate, and bookshops where they sell their books. They also have a long history of commitment to social and political struggles. One is the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, a campaign against the brutal war on drugs that began in Cuernavaca in 2011 with the disappearance of the son of Javier Sicilia, poet and friend of La Cartonera (O’Hare and Bell 2020). Another engagement has been with the nearby Indigenous community of Xoxocotla and its members’ struggle for land, water, and democracy.

Structure of the Book The book is divided into six chapters: “Histories,” “Methods,” “Texts,” “Encounters,” “Workshops,” and “Exhibitions.” Chapter 1 addresses Ja-

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

vier Barilaro’s light-hearted comment in the film Cartoneras commissioned by our project and directed by Isadora Brant (2019): “It’s incredible, none of us have any kind of university degree and I went to Harvard to give a lecture.” The chapter presents the tales of these unexpected journeys and the stories of how cartonera was imagined and reimagined by diverse actors across Latin America. We begin by describing its origins in Buenos Aires, explaining how Eloísa Cartonera came about as a response to the specific conditions in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina and as a development of connected artistic-literary initiatives that had been brewing in postdictatorship years there. The political climate of the time is brought to the fore as a means of contextualizing how cartonera, at the point of its creation, was a marginalized and controversial way of thinking about aesthetics and politics. We then describe its subsequent explosion, explaining how the model spread so widely across Latin America and beyond. Cartonera as a transnational movement took form through distinct yet connected social and aesthetic forms, from the 2006 biennial that led to the birth of Dulcinéia Catadora, through a copublication of infrarealist poetry across six Latin American countries, to international encuentros that continue to take place across the world, spreading the cartonera word. This brief history of cartoneras is accompanied by a parallel history closely inter woven with the ebbs and flows of cardboard publishing: the diverse modes of resistance that have been central to the evolution of cartonera conceptually and practically from 2003 to this day. Reflecting on its history as an anthropological concept in Latin America and beyond, we examine how the open-ended—sometimes playful and cheeky, other times deadly serious—notion of resistance has moved and morphed across Latin America since its heyday in the 1960s, leading to the distinct dissident positionality that characterizes cartonera today. Chapter 2 focuses on our methodology, demonstrating how the indivisibility of social and aesthetic form upon which cartonera is premised presents unique challenges in working across disciplines and modes of thought. Following calls to rethink social science methodologies by scholars including Anand Pandian (2019), our contribution here is to put forward a methodology that engages with artistic practice and literature in a more dynamic relation with the social and political processes in which they are embedded, through a hands-on, experience-based, and collaborative journey. The methodological framework we have developed has emerged through cartonera practices and collaborations such as the Puente Grande prison program that is put under the spotlight in

Introduction 39

the chapter. We highlight this particular project to show how the practices and texts of the new prison-based publisher Bote Cartonero (Cartonera in Confinement) have disrupted the colonial hierarchies and divisions that are brought into sharp focus by the prison system, inspiring us to develop new methods for working and thinking with cartoneras as interventions in, with, and between artistic, literary, and social forms. Building on these hands-on experiences and in dialogue with Rancière (2004, 2009), García Canclini (2014), and Levine (2015), we propose a “trans-formal” methodology composed of innovative ethnographic methods based on gesture and new reading practices that build on emerging postcritical approaches to literary and cultural studies. Such a framework offers the possibility of researching and experimenting with contemporary cultural practices—located at the interstices of art, society, and politics—in a way that departs from a different understanding of the relations between ethnography, literature, and art and opens up new possibilities for research that aspires to be collaborative, multidisciplinary, transnational, horizontal, and participatory. Chapter 3 invites our readers on a journey through cartonera texts and thus makes a new contribution to the academic scholarship on cartonera publishers, whose contents remain largely untouched by scholars attending more closely to everything outside the text: cartonera’s unusual forms of production, consumption, and distribution. We give this chapter special status as the first of the four cartonera forms to begin to redress this balance, highlighting the literary, cultural, and social value of cartonera catalogues as a vast body of texts that are principally literary but also stretch out into other territories of expression, from artists’ books to political essays. Our understanding of cartonera is as a publishing movement rather than a literary movement, group, or genre, yet most cartonera books contain literature in its broadest and most inclusive sense, in contrast to and defiance of definitions of literature such as written works of superior or lasting artistic merit. We therefore begin by contextualizing cartonera writings and writers in relation to their literary predecessors, with a discussion of the relation between cartonera and an earlier form of high-profile, politically engaged literature that also stretched the boundaries of what is normally considered literature: the distinctly Latin American form of writing known as testimonio. In contrast to testimonio, we read cartonera texts as part of a more collective, horizontal, and hands-on process of writing, producing, and publishing books, and we explain how our methodology allowed us to engage and read them through these processes. Given the impossibil-

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

ity of doing justice to cartonera literature as a continental and transcontinental body of thousands of unique and diverse works, the chapter proceeds through four close-up readings, with a section dedicated to each of our project partners and a focus on the texts they have generated since we began working with them in 2017. What comes to light through these readings is the diversity of cartonera forms and worlds but also an important commonality: a shared desire to articulate an alternative, pluriversal politics of poetic, literary, and creative practice to resist and reconfigure deeply entrenched colonial forms of meaningmaking, knowledge production, and research. In chapter 4 we focus on the second of the cartonera forms we have identified, the encounter. Cartonera forges relations, meanings, and communities and provokes the intervention of bodies in this world. Here we focus on the way diverse types of encounter bring cardboard books, authors, and artists into dialogue with local communities in public spaces and, in that process, how the political is contested through a very specific form. We begin with a discussion of different types of encounter, calling attention to two important characteristics, the encounter’s tendency toward open-endedness and its role in public space, and the encounter as site of inscription in which a collective writing practice enables actors to challenge and destabilize established categories and truths. The chapter then turns to ethnography, focusing on two international encounters of cartonera practitioners that occurred during our project, one in Cuernavaca and the other in São Paulo. We highlight the differences between the Mexican and Brazilian contexts and the underlying concerns that emerged through lively conversations, before moving to the capaciousness of the encounter, the sheer multiplicity of relations that can emerge, from the playful and convivial to the more dissident and hard-hitting. In the final section we focus on the São Paulo encontro (encounter) and how its program was altered at short notice due to the electoral victory, just two weeks before the event, of farright presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. In these difficult moments we offer the capaciousness of the encontro as an example of what Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser’s theory of uncommonality (2018) looks like in practice and what it can do. In chapter 5 we highlight how the cartonera workshop as a fundamental form allows publishing collectives to reconfigure the social and cultural worlds they inhabit. We trace the ways the material transformation of cardboard, the artistic processes of stitching, decorating, and repurposing, enable cartoneras to create new communities of writers, publishers, artists, activists, and readers. We sketch the characteristics

Introduction 41

of cartonera workshops, situating them in the context of artist, activist, and artisan workshops in Latin America and beyond. We also focus on the material properties of cardboard itself and the way that cartoneras reform a material that is so often associated with a single form, the box. Taking discussions of workshops and materials beyond the European and humanist tradition, we argue that cartonera involves a material sociality of practice that goes beyond the human, assembling in the process expected materials like cardboard and unfamiliar materials like cochineal. Such communities, often seen by participants as utopic in a world of cut-throat commercial publishing, differ substantially from each other precisely because they are intensely responsive to the unique rhythms of their largely urban environments. By examining the connections and contrasts between cartonera workshops in our different field sites, we explore the different possibilities they open up for crafting community through collective manual and intellectual labor in timespaces that constitute forms of resistance to hegemonic modes of contemporary labor and sociality. Chapter 6 centers on the form of the exhibition as a mode of political intentionality, characterized by a commitment to accessibility and a determination to subvert existing categories of meaning. Starting with Eloísa Cartonera’s original understanding of its practice as social sculpture, the chapter demonstrates how Eloísa’s stance influenced the work of other collectives. In keeping with cartonera more generally, such influence was never prescriptive; over time, different collectives came to their own understanding of how to create a cartonera exhibition. And yet, a commitment to an artistic practice that seeks dialogue with the social remains clear. We understand cartonera’s rough-and-ready aesthetic and its practitioners’ preoccupation with relations and encounters as key to the exhibition form; when exhibiting work, cartoneras propose a movement away from the fetishized and auratic and toward the convivial and process-based. Returning to ethnography, we describe how, based on the method of referring to gesture, we co-organized a cartonera exhibition in São Paulo. In this exhibition space, unexpected encounters occurred that led to socioaesthetic interventions. The cartonera book was just one element of the cartonera exhibition; through dialogues, learning spaces, and the emphasis on process, cartonera’s relation to art has presaged the emergence of a very specific form of exhibition, one that constitutes a gesture of resistance and the reordering of social contexts and hierarchy, one that realizes art’s potential to constitute new collective worlds. Lastly, the conclusion centers on the final weeks of the cartonera re-

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

search project, with ethnography drawn from the London Cartonera Book Festival and the launch of a cartonera special collection at the Senate House Library, University of London. We discuss how unruly cartonera books issue a challenge to the librarians tasked with their cataloguing, and we consider the notion of precarity with regard to the particular labor relations in which we found ourselves embedded. Reflecting on the longevity of the project, we connect moments from London to São Paulo and Cuernavaca to make the case for a creative political ontology: a cartonera design for the pluriverse that is joyfully collective and yet irreverently autonomous.

CHAPTER 1

Histories: Tracing Trajectories of Resistance

A Thousand Drops: From the Louvre to the Streets One day, to the tourists’ dismay, the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre, stirring up a national scandal and a media sensation. . . . What disappeared was the painting, literally speaking: the thin layer of oil paint that constituted the celebrated master work. The canvas was still in place, as was the frame: a blank base as before da Vinci had set out to work on it. . . . The only signs of violence were some tiny, perfectly circular perforations, one millimeter in diameter, in the bulletproof glass of the box that had separated the portrait from the spectators. . . . The painting had reverted to the state of drops of living paint, and the droplets had gone to travel the world. . . . With the energy built up from five centuries as a masterpiece, a sheet of glass was not going to stop them, no matter how bulletproof. Not a wall nor mountains nor seas nor vast distances. They could go where they wanted, they had superpowers. If they had counted the little holes in the glass, they would have discovered how many there were: a thousand. . . . The drops spread across five continents, thirsty for adventure, action, experience. Césa r A ir a , Mil gotas

These are the opening lines of César Aira’s Mil gotas (A thousand drops), Lucy’s and Patrick’s first experience of a cartonera book, which they picked up, respectively, in a Buenos Aires bookshop in 2011 and a Montevideo bookshop in 2010. This cardboard-bound text, which lured Lucy into a decade-long journey of inquiry into cartoneras, tells the story of the magical escape of a thousand droplets of paint from the Louvre’s most iconic masterpiece and their subsequent voyages around the world. Infused with a strong dose of the fantastic and surreal that characterize Aira’s work, Mil gotas is open to multiple interpretations.

44 Taking Form, Making Worlds

Upon her first reading, Lucy saw it as a playful fiction based on the real story of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, a joyful celebration of the democratization of art hailed by Walter Benjamin in his famous 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and an undeniably ironic allegory for the “end of art” that the art critic Arthur Danto so controversially augured in his 1995 Mellon lectures. But by the time Lucy picked the book up again in 2020, nine years on from flicking through the same pages, her interpretation had taken on a very different hue, one inflected by the gritty yet technicolor worlds of cartonera, from the waste pickers’ cooperative in São Paulo to the mezcal-selling coffee shop and bookshop in Guadalajara. In these worlds, art is not a fetishized object of the gaze but an inescapably material process of production and exchange, a process in which even the least arty person can be lured into throwing some paint onto a cover just to have some fun and share a moment with old or new friends. Almost a decade after her joyful cartonera journey began, Lucy read Aira’s story very differently, not as a reflection on European theories of twentiethcentury art but as a prediction of the spread of cartonera practices in and beyond Latin America. After all, it is impossible to ignore the materiality of Aira’s story as a cartonera book with all the hallmarks of Eloísa’s artisanal methods: the rough cardboard cover, the brightly painted title, the glue that roughly binds the book together. Mil gotas, as one of the first books published by Eloísa Cartonera in its first year of existence, 2003, served multiple functions. It helped launch the publisher through the work of the already best-selling Argentine author César Aira. It contributed to creating a new readership that Eloísa members, gesturing to the cartonera’s roots in pop culture, call its “fan club.” And it set the tone for Eloísa’s future catalogue, rooted in the desire both to disseminate Latin American literature and to experiment with a novel art form based on unrelentingly playful, joyful, and collaborative work. Beyond these practical functions, though, Aira’s story lays the groundwork for Eloísa and the hundreds of cartoneras that would follow over the next two decades. Read from this perspective, Mil gotas points to some of the loosely defi ned yet nonetheless fundamental principles and concepts that would guide cartonera publishers and publics along the way: the democratization and defetishization of art; the dispersion of art from the museum to the streets; and, to cite Aira, the potential for “inexhaustible creative ingenuity” contained in every drop of paint. Mil gotas was published at a time when cartonera was Eloísa, a sin-

Histories 45

gle, offbeat initiative set up by then little-known artists and writers with a penchant for irreverence. Nonetheless, we read it as a portent of the spread of cartoneras that would spring from Eloísa’s unique initiative as a diverse set of autonomous art practices. Like Aira’s droplets, cartoneras have traveled the five continents. Like Aira’s rebellious splashes of paint, they have helped to decolonize art in a continent where, as Bruno Moreschi’s 2017 art research project “A história da _rte” demonstrates, the narrative of the creation of objects and experiences is mostly built upon works by white, Euro-American men.* And like Aira’s gotas, whose only sign of escape is a set of “tiny, perfectly circular perforations in the bulletproof glass box,” cartonera publishers, while piercing the cardboard boxes they repurpose, also perforate Latin America’s most tightly woven social fabrics. This is a deliberate overreading; cartoneras are too autonomous and too diverse to be theorized in a single prophetic text. Yet as Schwartz suggests in a section of Public Pages titled “Metacartón,” a strongly self-conscious element runs through cartonera literature, including fiction featuring characters and episodes involved in the cardboard bookmaking process (2018, 178). Without directly referencing cartonera, which existed at the time only in Eloísa’s burgeoning bookand-vegetable store, Mil gotas expresses a spirit of irreverence, rebellion, and resistance that led to the birth of cartonera and to its spread across the region. This first chapter is dedicated to the fascinating (hi)stories that provide the backdrop for the many worlds of cartonera, the magic of which scintillates from Aira’s tale. We begin with its birth in Buenos Aires and its journey across the continent before exploring the parallel histories of a key concept and practice that drives the cartonera community, that of resistance. Our purpose is neither to create a cartonera canon nor to delineate a definitive cartonera history. Instead, we offer a set of fluid chronologies that point to the many forms and formations that coexist, intersect, and overlap (to use Levine’s terms) in cartonera practices across Latin America—forms that offer windows onto the pluriverse. Giving weight to these diverse (hi)stories is critical to understanding cartonera: its plurality, its relationalities, its resistance. * Moreschi’s project focuses on the profiles of the artists featured in the principal textbooks used in undergraduate visual arts courses in Brazil. In eleven books, Moreschi identifies 2,443 artists, of whom 215 (8.8 percent) are women, 22 (0.9 percent) are black, and 645 (26.3 percent) are non-European. Of the 645 non-Europeans, only 246 are non-US. “A História da _rte” is posted at https:// brunomoreschi.com/Historyof_rt.

46 Taking Form, Making Worlds

Beginnings in Buenos Aires At first glance, the collectives La Cartonera and Dulcinéia Catadora appear to be worlds apart. While Dulcinéia’s artistic practice is deeply embedded in the social reality of the Glicério recycling cooperative and the work of its waste-picker members, La Cartonera is a “cartonera without cartoneros” (La Cartonera 2009, 178); there are few waste pickers in Cuernavaca, and La Cartonera has never sought to engage them in its community practice. Yet both these collectives identify as belonging to the same family, a transnational network of hundreds of cartoneras. To understand this network, seemingly united only by a common material (cartón), we must look back to the ways this idiosyncratic model of community publishing pollinated across Latin America. This particular form of artisanal bookmaking first emerged in Buenos Aires in 2003 in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis that followed a decade of neoliberal policies implemented by right-wing Peronist President Carlos Menem. These included a hard currency peg that paired the Argentine peso to the US dollar, leading to a boom in imports, a reduction in national industrial production, and rising unemployment throughout the 1990s. High levels of borrowing and government debt were offset by economic growth, which went into reverse in 1998. As national debt spiraled, the government of Fernando de la Rúa imposed austerity policies to maintain access to International Monetary Fund loans, leading to growing unrest and his eventual fl ight from the presidential residence, Casa Rosada, in a helicopter in late 2001. The government defaulted on the national debt, and new President Eduardo Duhalde eventually ended the dollar-peso peg, leading to a massive devaluation in the currency and a sharp rise in inflation. In 2002, national unemployment reached over 20 percent, with even higher levels in Buenos Aires. Traditionally, and unlike many other Latin American countries, Argentina had a strong history of formal employment and labor protections; now, however, unemployment pushed thousands to seek alternative means of supporting themselves and their families. Many took to the streets to become cartoneros (waste pickers), sorting through the city’s daily waste stream, picking out metal, glass, paper, and cardboard to sell to recycling companies. The devaluation of the currency that made imports more expensive also increased the price of recyclables, making this livelihood more feasible. Yet for many, the sight of thousands of waste pickers on the streets was a shock, an icon of Argen-

Histories 47

tina’s slump into economic depression. Though waste pickers had been around for decades, the Argentine writer and researcher Cecilia Palmeiro explained to us, “Due to their omnipresence and visibility, the cartoneros turned into the emerging social subjects of a great crisis.” Living and working in a city whose inhabitants—as well as bookshops, libraries, and publishers—were struggling to survive, the founding members of the first cartonera collective, writer Washington Cucurto and artists Javier Barilaro and Fernanda Laguna, were determined to find alternative ways of publishing books. Their criteria were simple: the crisis had made establishing a conventional publishing operation financially impossible, so any production method had to be extremely low-cost; and they were committed to selling as many books as possible at an affordable price, thus challenging the notion of books as an upper-middle-class commodity. This commitment was a political act but also, drawing on Barilaro and Laguna’s day-to-day practice, an artistic proposition that in itself recalled Barilaro’s admiration of the German artist Joseph Beuys and Laguna’s interest in literary traditions of popular printing, from cheap books to DIY-zines. With these guiding principles, the trio launched Ediciones Eloísa, as it was known before it became a cartonera publisher, and began production in Laguna’s studio. What was unclear at the time was how the countercultural, marginal, and experimental texts that Ediciones Eloísa was publishing could fi nd a broader connection to the social processes that were being practiced in the workspace. Laguna’s studio in Almagro, like much of Buenos Aires, was on the route of many cartoneros; some would stop to interact with the different publics who attended the readings and events that were constantly taking place in the studio. In 2003, Barilaro told us, the cartonero was the proletarian political subject most representative of postcrisis Buenos Aires. Always open to alternative ways of producing their texts, Cucurto suggested that in terms of readily available cheap materials, the cardboard collected by the cartoneros was the obvious choice. It was an inspired and inspiring move. Ediciones Eloísa began seeking to work with marginalized narratives and some of the city’s most marginalized inhabitants. At the time, a special rail transport service known as the tren blanco (white train) had been created to transport cartoneros from the peripheries to downtown Buenos Aires and back. The service operated outside regular hours, without seats and without interior lighting, underlining the physical, material, and social invisibility of those at the margins. Yet as Argentina’s economy began to recover, aided by the policies of

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

newly elected President Néstor Kirchner, the lexicon of recovery enthusiastically spread to include ideas of dignity, democracy, and public space (O’Hare 2020). The cartoneros who had been dismissed as a temporary symbol of crisis and marginality, alongside unemployed piqueteros, picketers (Svampa and Pereyra 2003), emerged as one of the country’s most important new social movements, consolidating themselves in cooperatives, associations, and federations (Sorroche 2017). A ragtag army of individuals was transformed into a collective force capable of negotiating public solid-waste contracts and of forging alliances with powerful politicians, in no small part due to the previous union-organizing experience of workers who had been made redundant. In partnering with cartoneros, Cucurto, Barilaro, and Laguna were not simply involved in social work but joined a range of actors who allied with waste pickers to explore new ways of reconfiguring social, political, and economic relations, ways to do things differently in postcrisis Argentina. Eloísa was set up as an alternative mode of sociality that connected people across otherwise segregated social strata. It was also a means of disseminating as many books as possible at an affordable price in a postcrisis context in which bookmaking materials like paper and ink had maintained their international value while the gross national income (GNI) fell by more than 50 percent from 2001 to 2004 (World Bank 2020). The collective began buying cardboard from the cartoneros and collaboratively producing hand-painted, cardboard-bound books. The focus of the project was always on the means rather than the ends; by bringing the social principles of collective work and cross- class collaboration into dialogue with their aesthetic intentions, Ediciones Eloísa irrevocably became Eloísa Cartonera. In this move away from more typical publishing models, a key artistic influence was the Belleza y Felicidad (Beauty and Happiness) collective, a printing press and gallery founded by Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón that since the late 1990s had been publishing texts in the form of stapled photocopies (Palmeiro 2011, 172). Palmeiro explains that Laguna and Pavón had imagined this alternative mode of producing and circulating texts during a trip to the city of Salvador da Bahía in Brazil, where they came across a much older form of popular printing known as cordel literature. Cordel is a practice that since the nineteenth century has involved selling serialized books, hung from a string, in kiosks and small shops alongside bric-a-brac. Despite obvious differences in their respective historical contexts and social milieus, what Laguna and Pavón took from Brazil besides a lesson in alternative popular

Histories 49

publishing practices was their particular understanding of the quilombo, a word that originally referred to a settlement established by people escaping enslavement, which they broadened to include a community coinhabited with people from different races and ethnicities marginalized by colonial Portuguese rulers: Jews, Muslims, and Indigenous people (Palmeiro 2011, 172). The intention behind Belleza y Felicidad was to set up a contemporary, urban quilombo that would bring together heterogeneous materials, subjects, and subjectivities. As Palmeiro explains, the low-cost formats of cordel inspired Belleza y Felicidad to produce a catalogue shaped by a “trash anti-aesthetics” characterized by materiality, corporeality, eroticism, feminism, and gender non-normativity. At the time, the collective was subject to much criticism by the previous male-dominated generation of Argentine writers and artists who had been involved in more overtly political conflict with the dictatorship and its aftermath. To them, the privileging of pleasure, sensuality, and happiness by Belleza y Felicidad was linked with a “soft politics” that failed to engage with the hard questions that still haunted postdictatorship Argentina (Palmeiro 2011). Yet the issues with which Belleza y Felicidad engaged, from LGBTQ and feminist subjectivities to social exclusion, prefigured many of the debates that, with the global rise of the far right, are now at the forefront of Latin American politics. For Palmeiro, there was no contradiction between the experimental creative endeavors of Belleza y Felicidad and a new radical politics; their production of literary forms constituted “subjective experiments in the light of a politics of difference that emerged during that period as a creative form of radical activism” (2011, 160). Ediciones Eloísa was also interested in a politics of difference and the search for a more intimate relation between alternative aesthetics and social margins, between art forms and plural worlds. Hence the significance of its subsequent transformation into Eloísa Cartonera; yes, the founders began to bind books with cardboard bought from cartoneros, but more importantly, they started working alongside the cartoneros themselves in this process, and what ultimately made this possible was the overtly social and sociable form of the workshop. On a material level, the cardboard covers and therefore the bound books were deeply embedded in the complex social fabric of the city, incorporating its uneven social strata, from informal street workers to wealthy consumers. And the workshops, by bringing writers and waste pickers to work together in shared spaces and processes, put forward a more egalitarian form of labor and exchange that offered a mode of resistance against

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

the alienated and disaffected labor relations that had emerged from Argentina’s neoliberal economic reforms. Craig Epplin notes in an essay that traces the connections between César Aira and Eloísa Cartonera, “The cardboard book, in this picture, becomes a vehicle through which a somewhat egalitarian distribution of labor and authority is theorized” (2009, 55). This view is shared by Felipe Cala Buendía, who despite his misgivings about the potential of Eloísa as a mode of resistance, concedes that the collective offers “a work environment without (many) constraints, directives, or hierarchies” and subscribes to “a conception of labor that recasts it as a privileged site for socialization” (2014, 120). The term “cartonera,” in the sense of an Eloísa-inspired socioartistic publishing model, is therefore rich in significance; it refers at once to “cartón,” the cardboard with which the books are made; to “cartoneros,” the waste pickers who are bound up in the process; and to the “cartonera” publisher, which connects literary and artistic production with the communities involved in making the books and the urban environment in which they are produced and consumed. Our decision not to translate this word is therefore a commitment to gain a deeper understanding of the multiple meanings, relations, and worlds that are prefigured through the pluriversal practices of these grassroots publishers. In relation to graffiti in Israel/Palestine, Rebecca Gould asserts, “Resistance to translation is in fact the surest indicator of a perspective that needs to be heard” (2014, 13). At the heart of our project and book lies that which would be silenced by translating “cartonera” as “cardboard,” the relation between the artistic and the social, a connection fostered by the material sociality of collective practice.

Open-Ended Practice, Plural (Hi)Stories Eloísa Cartonera dreamed up a model of publishing that from the very start was conceived as an open-ended practice, a Beuysian social sculpture that would consist of an easily adaptable socioartistic model of binding cardboard covers to photocopies and cheap prints through workshops. Javier recalls in Cartoneras (Brant 2019) that the use of cardboard was a response to the crisis but also a statement, a provocation, and a call to action: “We also chose cardboard in order to stand out. We wanted to do something. To make something happen!” The repeated word “something” is significant here, signaling a refusal to predetermine any definite outcomes, to define what cartonera should mean

Histories 51

or do, or to decide exactly what should happen. In an interview, Celis Carbajal has suggested, “Although Eloísa probably didn’t realize it at the time, this struggle we now have to define cartoneras is part of their value because it makes you think, what is a publisher? How do you define a publisher? Their redefi nition [of publishing] is this lack of defi nition.” Propelled by the power of this multifunctional material to intervene in diverse contexts, the cartonera model would go on to be adopted and adapted by hundreds of collectives across and beyond Latin America over the following years and decades. To this day, the undefi nition or uncommonality of cartonera is integral to the practices and principles of cartoneras across the world and relates to their resistance to the very notion of definition (Rosa 2017). Cartoneras’ refusal to fi x and constrain meaning and the heterogeneous possibilities that refusal offers for world-making (Escobar 2018) are echoed in the plural ways cartonera publishers and critics alike have situated these alternative publishing practices. In an essay published on Eloísa Cartonera’s website, Washington Cucurto (2005) invents a “little family tree” of Argentine writers whom he sees as predecessors of the cartonera press; it connects Roberto Arlt, Copi (aka Raúl Damonte Botana), César Aira, and Dalia Rossetti (aka Fernanda Laguna). What unites these authors, Cucurto argues, is that their work is driven by “the force and spontaneity of circumstance.” Drawing on Cucurto’s essay, Epplin deepens the fabric of the cartonera tapestry by exploring Eloísa’s rootedness in Latin American literary history, from a long pedagogical tradition that stretches from nineteenth-century “national romances” like Martín Fierro to the 1970s Theater of the Oppressed of Brazilian theater practitioner and political activist Augusto Boal (Epplin 2009, 56). He relates Eloísa’s experiments with “the construction of social life itself” to the theater projects Boal used in radical popular education movements that allowed for what he termed a “rehearsal for revolution” (56). Palmeiro (2011), on the other hand, connects Eloísa’s work to the 1970s Brazilian “poetas marginales” (marginal poets), whose texts, as a form of resistance against the dictatorship, were translated into Spanish for the first time by Cucurto for Eloísa Cartonera’s catalogue. Palmeiro also relates them to the GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero), an Argentine street-art collective that in the 1990s was set up to bring public attention to forced disappearances and in the 2000s intervened in public spaces through posters and traffic signs to create an autonomous cartography of the city. Although Argentine and Brazilian literary traditions provide a key

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

nexus for the creation of Eloísa and the wider network, possible candidates for cartonera precursors extend across Latin America. For John Beverley (2019), the practice recalls the handmade editions of the Nicaraguan poesía de taller (workshop poetry), books that were, like cordel, fastened together with string; they were produced by poetry co-ops in workplaces, marginalized neighborhoods, and villages during the Sandinista Revolution of the 1970s. Bilbija (2009) and Daniel Canosa (2017), in contrast, point to origins in the 1970s Ediciones El Mendrugo, a publisher in Mexico run by the Argentine writer Elena Jordana. El Mendrugo’s books, bound with corrugated cardboard and string, were distributed informally among friends and acquaintances. Jane Griffin (2009) relates the Santiago-based Animita Cartonera to the underground publishers that emerged during Chile’s military dictatorship. Douglas Diegues of the Yiyi Jambo collective speculates that it could have all begun in 1960s Asunción with the work of Carlos Martínez Gamba, who published simple books of poetry in Guarani, printed on stapled sulfite and bound by cardboard. Others see cartonera’s origins very differently. In Mexico, Aurelio Meza (2014), the co-founder of Kodama Cartonera in Tijuana, points us to a rather more recent history, connecting cartoneras to the zines that became a popular form of selfexpression in the United States and Mexico in the 1990s. And Israel Soberanes of Viento Cartonero, when we were working with him in Guadalajara, made a point of introducing us to the city library’s collection of books by the Cuban publisher Ediciones Vigía, founded in Matanzasin 1985. Soberanes regards Vigía as an important forerunner of Jaliscobased publishers like his; like cartonera books, Ediciones Vigía’s artists’ books are made in precarious circumstances with materials at hand.* Spanning the concrete and the apocryphal, this wide array of histo* On the Cuban publisher Ediciones Vigía, see Gordon-Burroughs 2017. Other significant precursors to cartonera include, in chronological order, the Club de Grabado de Montevideo, the Montevideo Engraving Club, a cultural institution that in 1953 set out to democratize art by using engraving techniques to reproduce images in series. Another is the Taller Leñateros in San Cristóbal de las Casas in the Mexican state of Chiapas, Mexico; the collective was founded in 1975 by the poet Ámbar Past and is run by Indigenous Maya artists, to document and disseminate Indigenous traditions, languages, and art forms and to rescue ancient techniques such as the extraction of dyes from wild plants. The Taller Tupac Amaru is a San Francisco–based screen-printing collective with radical political aims, set up in the early 2000s by the chican@ artists Favianna Rodriguez, Melanie Cervantes, and Jesus Barraza, best known for their social justice activism focused on the rights of immigrants.

Histories 53

rias (stories and histories) tallies with our own experiences of cartonera. The collectives we have been lucky enough to meet over the years love a good story and love sharing their historias generously with their interlocutors. What’s more, they all take pride in having their own cartonera, each with its own (hi)story invariably related to yet distinct from that of Eloísa Cartonera. These are histories in which economic crises and neoliberal reforms sometimes act as a key impetus and in which cartoneros are often absent in the flesh yet present in the spirit of working with material discards, resisting social exclusion, and embracing collective action. This insistent autonomy helps to explain how, within five years, Eloísa had already inspired the creation of seven cartoneras across Latin America, each collective being free to reinvent the model in its own context while creating its own genealogies.

Enter Sarita and Animita In the early 2000s, Lima-based publishers Tania Silva and Milagros Saldarriaga found some of Eloísa’s books in Chile. This was just a few months after the birth of Eloísa in Buenos Aires. In late 2003, they sent Javier an email asking if they could do the same thing in Peru. Javier’s answer? “Yessss! Of course!” It was at this moment that, Javier recalls, he realized that this model could be adapted “all over the place.” Javier reflected, “From that point, it sort of happened on its own.” Tania and Milagros set up Sarita Cartonera, whose name refers suggestively to a popular saint, the protector of taxi drivers, prostitutes, prisoners, immigrants, and “all of the marginalized.” Invoking Sarita reflects their project “to recover the used cardboard abundant in the city to convert this into books that are handmade by youth from poor neighborhoods and to sell these books at low prices” (Sarita Cartonera 2009, 75). Two years later, in Santiago, Chile, Ximena Ramos Wettling, Tanya Núñez Grandón, and Mauricio Mena Iturriaga would establish Animita Cartonera, whose name refers to “little souls,” miniature houses built on Chilean streets to mark the exact locations of violent, unjust deaths. For Ximena, animitas “are pure resistance.” She asserts, “As time passes they’re still there, insolent, immune to suspicions, and to death itself” (Ramos Wettling 2009, 93). Animita’s name thus echoes the gesture implicit in Eloísa founders’ decision to work with the cartoneros of Buenos Aires, to turn the production and consumption of books into acts of resistance and defiance against social injustice and structural violence.

54 Taking Form, Making Worlds

The notion of pure resistance is part of the growth of cartonera from its very first steps. Just as Eloísa sought to make visible the cartoneros riding the tren blanco from the periphery to the center, Animita’s members strove to “reach the marginalized communities and to include relegated sectors,” bringing culture “to the places that are beyond the reach of official initiatives” (Ramos Wettling 2009, 93). Their proposition was to democratize Latin American literature in previously unimaginable ways, lighting a fuse to canonical traditions of the “lettered city” (Rama 1984) and to official culture in a context in which both the state and the cultural industry constructed walls and fences around literary and knowledge production, determining what could be published and by whom, and what kind of stories had the right to be told. Animita Cartonera . . . has resistance tattooed all over it: it sticks out its tongue at the transnational publishing houses, and its cardboard books rub shoulders with conventional books on the same shelves. It makes a statement about high prices by imposing low book prices. (Ramos Wettling 2009, 93)

This spirit of irreverence is echoed in Sarita Cartonera’s manifesto: “We want pop music, music from the periphery, shrill and violent. We are against the establishment: we cross it, in order to be inside and outside all at once” (2009, 77). In the case of Eloísa, the principal mode of resistance has been the productive and transgressive relations between waste pickers, writers, and artists through inclusive and convivial workshops. As cartonera spread across Latin America, the underpinning values of antiestablishment resistance, conviviality, and community remained, but these relations began to shift depending on the different locations in which the collectives took root, bringing to light the surprising portability and plasticity of the literary-artistic model. What emerged across the continent was a broadened understanding of how a certain socioartistic model could be deployed to tackle context-specific issues of violence, inequality, and social justice.

Forms in Movement, Cartonera in the Making Like the Mona Lisa escapees imagined by Aira in Mil gotas, the journeys of cartonera are surprising, exciting, and plural. Free from any master template, cartonera made its way to Bolivia, with Mandrágora Cartonera

Histories 55

and Yerba Mala Cartonera after Javier Barilaro visited Cochabamba, to Brazil and Paraguay, with Dulcinéia in São Paulo and Yiyi Jambo in Asunción in 2007, and then to Mexico with La Cartonera in 2008 and La Rueda Cartonera in 2009. Like other forms of autonomous publishing in Latin America (Rabasa 2019), cartonera has spread through a range of different forms. In some cases, like that of Sarita, this grassroots publishing model would be transmitted through the books themselves. In many others, it spread through direct exchanges between publishers, writers, artists, and curators as a result of the movement of these young and older writers and publishers across diverse geographies and through the different forms that cartonera has adopted: copublished books, workshops, encounters, and exhibitions. These socioartistic forms were instrumental to the spread of cartonera from very early on. Just as the workshop was key to the formation of Eloísa in Argentina, the exhibition was central to the foundation of Dulcinéia in Brazil. In fact, had it not been for the 27th São Paulo Art Biennial “Como viver junto” (How to Live Together) in 2006, Dulcinéia Catadora may never have come into existence. The story goes like this: when Eloísa Cartonera was invited to take part, Javier asked the artist Lúcia Rosa to participate with catadores Peterson and Andreia after she contacted him via email to discuss her emerging artistic collaborations with waste pickers. Javier describes the resulting collaboration for the biennial thus: We painted the walls and filled up a section with a cardboard jungle. We invited anyone who wanted to make a plant or an animal—to cut it out of the cardboard and then to paint it. Everything turned into an extremely fun chaos. . . . With six pieces of cardboard I assembled an enormous book that was one and a half meters tall by one meter wide, and upon which Peterson, one of the Brazilians, skillfully painted a few monkeys. Every day that she was there, Lúcia added something new to the jungle and she made some brilliant palm trees. Cristian de Nápoli put himself in charge of fi nding Brazilian writers and people to translate several texts by Douglas Diegues, who later came to visit us and ultimately created Yiyi Jambo. (Barilaro 2009, 51)

This depiction of Eloísa’s playful, workshop-style intervention, which ran throughout the two months of the biennial, reveals that cartonera’s relation with art was realized, right from the start, through an artistic practice firmly embedded in social relations, with oodles of cooperation and piles of cardboard, explosions of laughter and splashes of paint. At

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

the heart of this experimental chaos was also the more literary desire of the collective: to work with Brazilian writers and to get local texts translated into Spanish through a collective effort that planted the seed for other cartonera publishers like Yiyi Jambo. A similarly collaborative process underpinned the naming of Dulcinéia Catadora, the other collective that would result from the biennial. Years later, when we came to work with Dulcinéia and Eloísa, those involved still recalled this moment in vivid detail with a mix of joy and nostalgia. The cardboard used for the biennial workshop was bought, week by week, from a waste picker named Dulcinéia Santos. When the nascent collective was casting around for a name, Lúcia suggested they adopt that of Dulcinéia. In Lúcia’s words, “the frequent contact we had with her produced an affective bond, and I greatly admired her for her courage and strength, for her determination to fight for her life.” Everyone agreed, and Javier said, “Ok then, let’s call it Dulcinéia Cartonera.” Andreia, though, not quite satisfied, retorted, “But I’m not a cartonera, I’m a catadora!” Lúcia, listening attentively to her new collaborator, concurred: “You’re right, Andreia. Dulcinéia Catadora it is!” This anecdote is a prime example of the way plural opinions, values, subjectivities, and identities, voiced, and more importantly listened to through collaborative activities, are embedded in every stage of Dulcinéia’s creative process. Later, within the Glicério recycling cooperative, or in Portuguese, Cooper Glicério, where Peterson and Andreia were based, a cover-painting workshop led by Lúcia drew other waste pickers to the project. Maria recalls this moment with fondness: “I’d met Lúcia once before at Cooper Glicério. One day, she came back and started painting. I went over to have a look, and Lúcia asked me if I wanted to paint. I told her I’d never painted before, but she said, ‘Why don’t you have a go?’ So I did.” More than a decade later, when we worked together, Maria was still a key member of Dulcinéia as well as the president of the Glicério recycling cooperative.* In other cases, it is a particular literary text or shared style that brings new cartoneras to life. La Cartonera was born following the launch of * Maria, like most of the waste pickers at the Glicéro recycling cooperative, is part of the Movimento Nacional de Catadores de Materiais Recicláveis (National Movement of Waste Pickers of Recyclable Materials). Founded in 2001, this is a social movement with more than a million members that articulates the political interests of waste pickers. The movement’s objectives include autonomy and self-management for recycling cooperatives and control of the recycling production chain.

Histories 57

a special issue in 2007 of the audio-video magazine Nomedites dedicated to infrarealism, a marginal but highly influential poetry movement founded by a group of friends in Mexico City in the 1970s, including Chilean writers Roberto Bolaño and Bruno Montané and Mexican authors Cuauhtémoc Méndez, Ramón Méndez, and Guadalupe Ochoa. Though some of its members, Bolaño in particular, later became internationally renowned, award-winning authors translated into several languages, the movement was firmly rooted in a stark rejection of the cultural establishment. Ochoa explains, “We shared an insubordinate, rebellious stance, against, above all, hegemonic culture” (in Molina Ramírez 2009). Their work flew in the face of “official culture,” which in this period of Latin American history was a radical political gesture; official culture, in the Chilean and Mexican contexts, meant dictatorial regimes and flawed democracies, repression, and impunity. Raúl Silva de la Mora, co-founder of La Cartonera, was very close to this literary movement through friendships and collaborations with several infras, including Rebeca López, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s widow, who put together some of her late husband’s unpublished poems for the special Nomedites issue. It was at the launch of Nomedites that Raúl met Sarita Cartonera’s publishers, Milagros and Tania, who invited him to their workshop in the National Library the following day. La Cartonera’s manifesto recounts that beginning: Naturally, like birth itself, nine months after that invitation, in February 2008, La Cartonera came into the world: without life insurance, without a fellowship or patrons, with no other impetus than concentrating on the mysterious experience of birth. (La Cartonera 2009, 178)

The romanticized story of La Cartonera’s birth underlines the way new cartonera publishers and networks are formed not despite but thanks to the lack of centralized structures, formal backing, or commercial impetus. And so it was that within their fi rst year of existence, La Cartonera, through Raúl’s connections with the infras, published a joint edition of Santiago Papasquiaro’s book Respiración del laberinto (2008) with seven other cartoneras: Eloísa, Yerba Mala, Animita, Yiyi Jambo, Sarita, Dulcinéia, and Mandrágora. From Argentina, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, and Mexico, this was, in Raúl’s words, “the fi rst time that these almost subterranean cultural actors came together [se hermanaron] with a common purpose.” Santiago Papasquiaro’s poems are the same in each edition, but each has its own prologue, whose au-

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

thors were selected for their proximity to Santiago Papasquiaro. Later, four further editions came out with cartonera publishers from Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, and Spain. Nayeli reflects that this way of working with plural prologues, modes of production, and re-editions “gave identity to each edition, each cartonera doing things in their own way and form but at the same time working with the same text.” This collaboration, built on autonomy, plurality, and pluriversality, would set the tone for the growing cartonera network. And the choice of an infra to bring together the diverse catalogues of seven cartoneras was entirely in keeping with the development of a certain dissident character that was coming to characterize cartonera practices. Cynthia García Mendoza argues that infrarrealismo was an important precursor to cartonera as a “grupo–no grupo” (not-group–group), a movement to which “anyone could belong” with “no rules, policies, or initiations” (2014, 6). Just as, artistically, Beuys’s thinking was influential for Eloísa and continues to shape cartoneras’ engagement with art today, in a literary sense, the antiestablishment, open-ended character of infrarealism exerts a similar influence, with some publishers, like Eloísa and Sarita, choosing to dedicate a substantial part of their catalogues to infrarrealista authors. In very practical ways, the coedition of Respiración del laberinto would pave the way for the growth of a transnational community of publishers. La Rueda Cartonera was formed after Guadalajara-based Sergio Fong got hold of a copy of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s book only to discover that it was bound in recycled cardboard and published through alternative cartonera circuits, a discovery that led him to transform his existing cultural collective into a cartonera publisher. In the case of La Ratona, which came into being after a split from La Cartonera, the Santiago Papasquiaro project was the first of many. In 2010 La Ratona coordinated a joint edition of Juan Villoro’s short story “Forward Kioto,” copublished with Eloísa Cartonera, Sarita Cartonera (Peru), La Propia Cartonera (Montevideo, Uruguay), Poesía con C (Sweden), Ultramarina Cartonera (Seville, Spain), Textos de Cartón (Córdoba, Argentina), and Cartonerita Solar (Neuquén, Argentina). It was not just these coeditions, though, that fueled the consolidation and growth of the cartonera movement. When Lucy asked Raúl and Nayeli about the spread of cartoneras across Latin America, they gave their own interpretations: Raúl: The “boom” of the proliferation of cartonera publishers was a natural event that was influenced by many other things: the novelty, the in-

Histories 59

tercontinental movement of young poets, the interest that these projects provoked in universities, like Wisconsin, and so on. Nayeli: The text by Santiago Papasquiaro led to networks being formed that would start to consolidate after we met in person in Wisconsin. This encuentro was also very important. And it also sparked other national and international encuentros that have permitted these networks to consolidate and grow further, each cartonera in its own way.

These two very different publishers coincide on one important point: the role of the first international gathering of cartoneras in Wisconsin in 2009. This flags another socioaesthetic form that belongs squarely in the cartonera repertoire, the encuentro. A hybrid form, the encuentro is not exactly a conference or a workshop or a book fair but rather all these things and something in between. And the first event that our cartonera interlocutors identify as an encuentro cartonero was that organized at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. At this point, we introduce another central figure whose work as an endlessly curious curator, rebellious librarian, and digital networker has been highly significant in the cartonera (hi)story since 2006: the librarian Paloma Ce-ce, as she is affectionately known in cartonera circles. After discovering cartoneras in 2006 during a trip to Buenos Aires’s International Book Fair, Paloma Celis Carbajal began an ambitious project to collect cartonera books for the University of Wisconsin– Madison’s Memorial Library, a collection that now numbers more than two thousand books, the largest archive of cartonera books in the world. In October 2009, Paloma, in collaboration with Latin American literature professor Ksenija Bilbija, organized a conference there that because of its very particular characteristics became known by cartoneras as the “first” encuentro. Held during the annual Wisconsin Book Festival, the Madison encuentro was designed to bring cartoneras from different parts of the world together and into dialogue with the academic community. Paloma emphasizes that it was very important for the academic participants— including Bilbija, Craig Epplin, Jaime Vargas Luna, and Livia Azevedo Lima—as a means of building a research community to consolidate the work on cartoneras that had previously been conducted by individuals working independently from one another. However, the encuentro was not envisaged as an academic event per se. Instead, cartoneras were the protagonists and took center stage. Another significant aspect of this encuentro was that it was used to launch Akademia Cartonera: Un ABC

60 Taking Form, Making Worlds

de las editoriales cartoneras en América Latina (Bilbija and Celis Carbajal 2009), a collection of texts by the invited participants consisting of eight manifestos by cartoneras and nine academic essays. This collection would go on to be a cornerstone reference for cartonera practitioners and scholars alike, and we bring its contributions into dialogue here. Encuentros, Paloma explains in an interview, are a key form through which cartonera publishers forge and grow their national and transnational networks. “It’s all about building networks of collaborators, building communities,” she told us. “Encuentros allow the cartoneras to meet others in person, including the ones they have been in contact with via Facebook and email.” And so, after Madison, encounters multiplied, beginning with the Encontro do Livro de Cartão in Maputo, Mozambique, in 2012, set up by the first African cartonera, Kutsemba Cartão, and supported by the Spanish embassy, the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, and the Camões Institute. In at least two cities, Guadalajara and Santiago, these encuentros have taken on an annual regularity. For many years now, the growing network of cartoneras in Jalisco headed by Sergio Fong has hosted francachelas cartoneras (loosely, cartonera blowouts) as an extension of the otra FIL (other FIL) at the same time as the world-renowned FIL (Feria Internacional del Libro), the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, promoted as the “most important publishing gathering in Ibero-America.” Sergio explains, “We formed the otra FIL in 2005, impelled by the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle,” a stirring manifesto released by the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, Zapatista Army of National Liberation) on June 28, 2005.* That was before La Rueda existed as a cartonera publisher, when it was a less defi ned collective called El Cantón de la Rueda. In many ways, the Cantón resembled Belleza y Felicidad as an autonomous cultural space in which Sergio and his friends presented books and magazines, did small exhibitions of painting, photography, and sculpture, and partied. Since then, Sergio has gone teetotal, the other FIL has expanded into a much larger event, and encuentros cartoneros have grown within this convivial cultural space. Eventually, the cartonera gatherings outgrew the otra FIL, and in the 2010s, members of La Rueda Cartonera decided to create their own parallel events dedicated to cartoneras, the noches cartoneras (cartonera nights). Those

* The 2005 declaration, EZLN’s “Sexta Declaración de la Selva de Lancandón,” is posted at Enlace Zapatista, http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx.

Figure 1.1. Poster advertising the Seventh International Encounter of Cartonera Publishers, Library of Santiago, Chile, 2019. Image courtesy of the event’s organizing committee.

62 Taking Form, Making Worlds

events were later renamed to francachelas cartoneras to set their joyfully festive, down-to-earth, anti-elitist tone. Another annual gathering is the higher-profile, more institutional, but still fairly informal Encuentro Internacional de Editoriales Cartonera hosted since 2013 by the Biblioteca de Santiago (Library of Santiago, Chile). This event is an example of how, in their diverse encuentros, cartonera publishers combine other cartonera forms such as workshops, exhibitions, and copublications that accompany or result from the events. For its seventh encuentro, in 2019, the organizing committee consisting of the library director Marcela Valdés Rodríguez, Sergio Rodríguez, Raúl Hernandez, Alexis Ruiz, and Olga Sotomayor of Olga Cartonera said they give “priority and focus to workshops” so that “adults and children can take part and join in with the cartonera phenomenon. Among the workshops are the making of Pop Up books, the making of Illustrated Spinning Traumatropes, cover-painting, performative readings and other activities for kids” (Mostrador Cultura 2019). The workshops were designed to encourage participants of all ages to join in activities that involved reading, storytelling, and making. The curatorial team’s emphasis on collective activities is highlighted in a poster that shows adults and children reading together and reading in movement (figure 1.1). Indeed, for cartonera publishers, books are inescapably tactile objects, and reading is a kinetic process, depicted in the poster by gestures of all sorts: a capped head buried in a book; a boy’s leg raised in a sprint; a smile, a laugh, and an expression of surprise; arms outstretched to show a book to someone else, to pass it on, or to exchange it for another, an activity that characterizes any encuentro. In thinking about these encuentros, it is noticeable that the academy has played a significant role in their organization and fi nancing. Through encuentros organized by Celis Carbajal and Biblija in Wisconsin in 2009, Susana María Ramírez Martín and María Araceli García Martín at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense in 2014, and Jania Kudaibergen at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2015, cartonera evidences a complex, dynamic, and contested entanglement with the university. While cartoneras often insist on their autonomy, this is often held in tension with the many connections that practitioners across this diverse network have with the academy. La Sofía Cartonera was founded by Cecilia Pacella, a faculty member at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, as a programa de extensión, an outreach program funded by the university. Malha Fina Cartonera was founded on a similar basis by Idalia Morejón Arnaiz, a professor at the Universidade de São Paulo. Both publish-

Histories 63

ers are staffed by graduate students. Beyond these direct connections, Vento Norte Cartonero was founded by Gaudêncio Gaudério, a professor at Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, and Mariposa Cartonera’s Wellington de Melo was studying for a doctorate at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco when we met him in 2018. Ever cautious of being co-opted, cartoneras nevertheless collaborate at specific moments with institutions and indeed, some of the cartoneras we explore in this book have been willing, with certain guarantees and caveats, to work in partnership with public institutions, from state prisons in Jalisco to the Museu de Arte do Rio. Such porous boundaries of practice lead us to suggest that attempts to historicize cartonera by dividing it into distinct phases with single unifying characteristics, such as orality or institutionalism (Mora 2018), are bound to face obstacles in cartonera’s inescapable diversity. Instead we follow the lead of Johana Kunin, Craig Epplin, and Doris Sommer in their contributions to Akademia Cartonera and the emphasis they place on modalities of cartonera practice that operate across time and publics. For Kunin, orality is central. She asserts, “The expansion of the Latin American cardboard publishing houses resembles the spread of oral traditional tales: it is transmitted by word of mouth, and it is spontaneous, creative, with freedom, with no hierarchies or strict rules . . . but preserves the ‘tale’s’ spirit” (2009, 45). For Epplin, analysis focuses on the cartonera workshop, a process that he so aptly refers to as “the fusion of the act of writing and the process of living” (2009, 57). We therefore understand institutional partnerships and entanglements with academics and librarians not as harbingers of an institutional phase but rather as a strategic but still contested extension of original cartonera practices of resistance and autonomy. Whether in institutional spaces or not, cartoneras bring together, in a single aesthetic gesture, the acts of taking form and making worlds.

Resistance in Theory and Practice The tensions that arise in such entanglements fi nd their roots in the diverse modes of resistance that have underpinned and continue to inform cartonera practices. Eloísa has articulated from its conception a stance against “savage capitalism”; Yiyi Jambo insists on a language that contests the colonial politics of the frontier between nations, languages, and cultures; Animita’s very name and trajectory was inspired by the

64 Taking Form, Making Worlds

“pure resistance” of insolent spirits. In fact, “resistance” is a word that kept coming up in our fieldwork with cartonera practitioners. Below, we turn to the ways in which cartonera publishers relate, through their everyday practices, to the idea of resistance within and beyond Latin America. However, to better contextualize these approaches, we fi rst take a short detour to examine how resistance has been theorized across the humanities and social sciences. Though resistance had been an important historical and philosophical concept in Europe since Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1929– 1935) and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1979), it was not until the burgeoning of cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s that researchers began to take seriously the existence of countercultures capable of contesting though not ultimately superseding hegemonic paradigms and structures of domination (Hebdige 1976; Jefferson 1976; Radway 1984; Willis 1977). At about the same time, the subaltern studies group, of which Ranajit Guha is perhaps best known, argued that Indian peasants put forward an overlooked subaltern “autonomy” (Guha 1983), a positionality and consciousness invisible to the elite and colonial gaze. The “invisibility” of subaltern groups highlighted the need for detailed ethnographic work that could situate such autonomy within particular contexts. The 1980s saw a boom in resistance studies in the social sciences (Moore 1998, 348), a paradigm change ushered in by two ethnographies by James Scott, Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990). Scott argues that, though outwardly compliant with systems of domination, peasants in Malaysia employed a wide range of strategies to contest oppressive situations, using low-risk, nonconfrontational, everyday forms of class struggle and resistance. In placing agency with the subaltern, he questioned the Marxist notion of false consciousness and furthered his analysis with the idea of “hidden transcripts,” the “offstage” contestations of power that made clear that the subaltern subject was entirely aware of inequality and imbalances of power but chose to articulate these concerns in a strategic manner. In this period of anthropological engagement with resistance, attention came to focus on the (non)intentionality of those who resisted, posing the question of the extent to which people were consciously resisting and, if they were not, whether their actions really could be theorized as resistance (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 31). This complemented similar thinking in cultural studies regarding the countercultures that sought to challenge ostensibly real structures of domination. While works such as Paul Wil-

Histories 65

lis’s Learning to Labour (1977) might have pointed to how people’s actions constituted resistance, those works were premised on the notion that the subjects were not aware of the significance of their actions and that any such meaning could only be articulated by the researcher. This impasse provoked the development of a different approach, social movement studies, which broadened resistance beyond transcripts, hidden or otherwise, and countercultures to hegemony and provided a path back to organized, visible, and conscious acts. Echoing Charles Tilly (1991), Sidney Tarrow defines social movements as “sustained challenges to powerholders in the name of a disadvantaged population living under the jurisdiction or influence of those powerholders” (1996, 874). Such a move resonated with cultural studies, whose emergence in the United States was attributed in part to the youth, multiracial, and gender movements that arose in the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Cruz 2012). And within the social sciences, the shift allowed the boom in resistance to continue, although now the focus was on new social movements, particularly in the Americas, from the landless workers movement in Brazil (1984 onward), the Zapatista movement in Mexico (1994 onward), the piqueteros in Argentina (1990s–2000s), and the alterglobalization movement (1999–2000s) (Sitrin 2012; Tapia 2002; Wright and Wolford 2003; Zibechi 2007). Yet, as John Gledhill has argued (2012), the connection between resistance and social movements must not occlude the interactions between the movements and the state, their alliances with wider civil society, and the hierarchies within these movements. In this manner, Gledhill observes, “the study of resistance should be embedded in more complex accounts of the practices of power” (2012, 3). This brings us back to the limitations of social-movement frameworks to understand more nuanced, long-term, and perhaps smallerscale practices of resistance. How do these theoretical approaches relate to cartoneras’ everyday practices, and how do cartonera practitioners see their work in relation to notions of resistance? Cartonera cannot be considered a social movement as such. It is not an organized body with a predetermined aim, making a sustained challenge to norms and legislation in the name of a specific disadvantaged population within institutionalized politics. Speaking with interlocutors such as Sol and Júlio, for whom cartonera was the social in movement, it was clear that cartonera was more nuanced than a social movement, whether those of Tarrow, Luis Tapia, or Zibechi. In fact, cartonera actively builds an alternative to the social-movement mode of end-oriented action, through processual, longitudinal, and open-ended artistic practice. And unlike Wil-

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

lis’s white working-class young men, cartonera practitioners are fully aware of their dissident practice and its generative, worlding potential. Practices such as the workshop, the exhibition, the collective text, and the encuentro articulate a tangible break from mainstream publishing, hegemonic literary canons, and a false universality. Moreover, Scott’s often-cited modes of hard-to-detect resistance cannot be applied to cartonera, where there is no “foot-dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage and so forth” (1985, 29). On the contrary, cartonera publishers seek to make themselves and their communities as visible as possible to diverse publics. Eloísa set the tone with its now well-known slogan branded at the top of its iconic poster: “¡la editorial más colorinche del mundo!” (figure 1.2). The motto translates as “the most colorinche publisher in the world,” with colorinche denoting a loud, colorful, rebellious aesthetic that screams out from the cover of every book the collective produces. This is hardly the stuff of “hidden transcripts.” For cartoneras, visibility is paramount, and it is achieved through technicolor books, catchy titles, punchy manifestos, subversive literature, cultural occupations, and hands-on exhibitions. And this visibility is compounded with a multisensorial experience, taking form in a most corporeal way. No one leaves a cartonera workshop untouched; the taste of the accompanying coffee and mezcal, the stains and blisters from bookmaking and coverpainting, are inevitably imprinted on participants. On every cartonera book, the textures and smells of the environments in which it was made are tattooed on its covers, just as the words of the writers echo from its pages. Cartonera publishers and texts circulate at ease through these material entanglements that, unlike resistance slogans and countercultural fashions, cannot be easily appropriated or commodified. Why? Because these relations are rooted only in the plurality of cartonera itself as a sociomaterial practice, based on a common, multipurpose material: cardboard. This decolonial plurality, or pluriversal decoloniality, underlies the work of Douglas Diegues of Yiyi Jambo Cartonera, who voices an important critique of the marginalization of the “triple frontier” region (Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina), the invisibilization of the area’s Indigenous people, and the environmental damage that has occurred there through disastrous projects like the Itaipú hydroelectric dam. How does he enact such a critique? Through the cartonera form, he deliberately calls attention to the texts he authors by inventing his own language, termed “portunhol selvagem,” wild Portuguese-Spanish, in

Figure 1.2. Eloísa Cartonera poster. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

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which “wild” means undomesticated and portuñol/portunhol, itself a neologism, denotes a combination of português and español/espanhol, along with some Guarani, English, German, and Italian: I repeat again, and I will repeat it as many times as we need: to impose grammatical rules on Wild Portuñol is like wanting to put it in a grammar cage. I learned from Guimarães Rosa, Manoel de Barros, and Sérgio Medeiros that grammar and its rules are a kind of enemy number one of the verb-creating language better known as poetry. (Diegues 2008)

Diegues’s texts rebel against the “pure” morphology and syntax of the colonizers’ languages, Portuguese and Spanish, incorporating Guarani and other linguistic and cultural influences. In creating a literary landscape that dispenses with canons and linguistic control, Diegues articulates what María Eugenia Bancescu describes as a “corrosion of language, identity and territory . . . imposing itself as a cultural resistance phenomenon regarding market incorporation absorption, as well as being a poetic, political, and linguistic strategy in the center of the intellectual debate” (2012, 143). The results are a conscious aesthetic gesture and, importantly, the formation of a plural linguistic terrain that places Indigenous vocabulary and concepts into horizontal conversation with the languages of the colonizer. The practice of Yiyi Jambo Cartonera, the foremost publisher of portunhol selvagem, simply does not fit within either Scott’s or Willis’s paradigms of resistance in the shadows or resistance as class reproduction. Rather than “muttered defiance behind the backs of the dominant” (Gledhill 2012, 6), Yiyi Jambo is all about play, humor, and the outrageous. This is emblematized in the nickname of the collective’s founder, El Domador de Yacarés, another neologism, meaning “The Alligator Tamer,” who reportedly came upon his unique artistic technique by swallowing a tin full of paint. He thus became a cartonera publisher through a corporeal accident rather than any ideological commitment. Cartonera publishers do not seek to fly under the radar of a dominant group, or any group, for that matter. Rather, they are constantly raising their heads above the parapet, throwing themselves into pots of colored paint, searching for new interlocutors, readers, and publics, and planting the seeds for new cartonera collectives. The mode of resistance we discuss here, therefore, does not enter into dialogue with the dominant frames of analysis that have characterized research from the late 1970s

Histories 69

onward. Indeed, the very notion of a single or singular subaltern subject is made impossible by the sheer range of actors within the cartonera world: waste pickers, artists, university professors, poets, street vendors, cooperative presidents, community organizers, teachers, nature-walk organizers, anarchist activists, librarians, café owners, biologists, punks, students, prisoners, and more. This is the kind of plurality that Sherry Ortner noted in the 1990s, when the concept of resistance was high on the anthropological agenda in relation to an overly homogenized notion of the “subaltern”: “There is never a single, unitary, subordinate, if only in the simple sense that subaltern groups are internally divided by age, gender, status, and other forms of difference and that occupants of differing subject positions will have different, even opposed, but still legitimate, perspectives” (1995, 175).

Existence as Resistance Despite the impossibility of reducing the plurality of subjectivities involved in cartonera production to a singular subaltern, and the disparity between the publishers’ diverse acts of resistance and the more unified anthropological theories of resistance, it seemed essential to engage with a term that kept cropping up throughout our fieldwork in a wide range of contexts. Gledhill comments in defense of “rethinking resistance,” It also seems important that “resisting” is often what our research subjects say they are doing when they struggle, to defend their lands, culture, or religion, or to achieve new rights and social dignity in situations of inequality and discrimination. (2012, 1–2)

In the case of cartoneras, resistance is what they say they’re doing in a wide range of actions: rescuing consumer discards from the streets, recovering Indigenous languages and knowledges, and even just existing. A prominent interpretation of resistance that practitioners put forward during the time we spent with them was existence as resistance. This was voiced particularly strongly by the Dulcinéia members and waste pickers Maria and Andreia, especially in the aftermath of Jair Bolsonaro’s election to presidency. In late 2018 Maria told us how Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign had made her life even more of a struggle. Following a campaign characterized by homophobia, racism, classism, misogyny,

70 Taking Form, Making Worlds

authoritarianism, and even political support for torture and the death penalty (Foley 2019), Maria commented, “If we exist at all, it is because we have resisted against the madness that is Brazil today.” This complex political situation, of course, predates Bolsonaro. Even before the far right took power over a Brazil in political disarray, racism was an everyday experience for the country’s large black and Indigenous populations, meaning that cartonera in São Paulo would inevitably be shaped in relation to this predicament. Andreia, in a punchy autobiographical narrative published in Cartoneras in Translation (Bell, Flynn, and O’Hare 2018), comments on the prejudices she has suffered as a female, black, poor waste picker in São Paulo. It is against the conditions of overwhelming erasure resulting from classism, racism, and sexism that she continues to work as a waste picker in the Glicério cooperative and as a publisher in Dulcinéia Catadora. In the same text, Andreia recounts how she developed an artistic technique while playing around with her daughter: “I trace pathways along the crumpled bits of the cardboard” (Emboava 2018a, 25). By tracing these folds in pencil, she documents the effect of an overwhelming weight on the material with which she works. This technique led to her first publication, Passagem (Emboava 2018b), with Dulcinéia (figure 1.3). In this way, cartonera publishing has become a tool for Andreia to make herself present and to mark her bodily presence on her environment and its materials, a counterweight that allows her to balance out the crushing burden of the stigma she faces every single day. Undertheorized in a body of scholarship to which some of our interlocutors refer as gringo or from gringolândia, the concept of existence as resistance appears to have its origins in the work of the nineteenthcentury Spanish philosopher Ramón Turró (Fuentes 2010). In our experience, though, Turró’s influence is long gone in Latin America, if it ever was there in the first place. The phrase “existence as resistance” has been used in contemporary discourses of activism, taking on particular meanings in the contexts of Black and Indigenous movements. For Tasha Spillet (2016), an educator and author who identifies through her Nehiyaw and Trinidadian roots, existence as resistance is the refusal to silently disappear, made manifest through a determination to hold onto her identity: herself and her self. The context for Spillet’s affirmation is an overwhelming institutional and systemic inequality, a lethal environment of hatred and violence against peoples of color. In this situation of systematic erasure, it is important to acknowledge the significance of continuing to articulate one’s subjectivity despite the collective phys-

Histories 71

Figure 1.3. Andreia (right) displaying her book Passagem inside its box in the

conservator’s office at the Senate House Library in London, with Lúcia standing by her side. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

ical and mental exhaustion doing so entails. For the Brazilian Indigenous activist Daiara Tukano, the most effective means for Indigenous peoples to resist an ongoing project of colonization is to “exist as we are” (2019). In this context, it is important to ask how cartonera exists at all, or at least how it continues to exist as a practice at the margins, subjected to overwhelming stigma pertaining to race, class, and gender as well as the more specific literary and intellectual snobbery that cartonera publishers face in the exclusive worlds of international book fairs and contemporary art galleries. Moreover, the question arises of how cartoneras have continued to grow, spread, and even prosper. A few months prior to beginning our project, Aldemir Pontes was killed in São Paulo by a young man firing a crossbow from his car. Pontes had been collecting materials for recycling using a hand-pulled cart (Gragnani 2016). The crossbow bolt was aimed to kill; it struck Aldemir’s neck. His murder caused a huge amount of trepidation in the community of recyclers. It was an act of violence in broad daylight in a middle-class neighborhood, barely three kilometers from the Glicério

72 Taking Form, Making Worlds

cooperative. In Mexico, most of our interlocutors and their fellow citizens have directly suffered the effects of a systematically violent state. In Guadalajara, Sergio’s semi-autobiographical fiction (Fong 2009, 2017) provides a window onto his lifelong run-ins with the police, and some of his collaborations (2018b) are in memory of Mexico’s desaparecidos (disappeared). In Morelos, the disappearance of the poet Javier Sicilia’s son shook inhabitants of Cuernavaca to the core and especially the community to which La Cartonera and La Ratona Cartonera belong. Such assaults on bodies in public space, which we describe in more detail elsewhere (O’Hare and Bell 2020), indicate the levels of violence that are perpetrated on ordinary people across Mexico and Brazil every day. The violence gives an idea of the constant struggle of everyday life, of just living, of staying alive, especially for the most vulnerable, stigmatized communities. Against this backdrop, Cucurto’s reflections on the despair of poverty with which citizens of Buenos Aires were confronted immediately after the 2001 economic crisis acquire a specific meaning: We started from nothing, with nothing, so to be here, fifteen years on, still making books is something that went beyond all my expectations. . . . You know, we’re survivors from that period. (In Brant 2019)

Cucurto’s words convey the sense that despite everything, they are still there. This is perhaps most tangible in the often makeshift workplaces of many cartoneras. Dulcinéia’s base of operation is the Glicério cooperative, under the pillars of the Radial Leste overpass, an occupation that has never been regularized by municipal authorities. Dulcinéia members are survivors. During the second year of our fieldwork, in addition to all the other difficulties they face to operate, they were subject to a judicial process to evict the waste pickers’ collective and move it to a location farther from the city center. Although the process was archived, it could be brought back at any time. In Guadalajara, La Rueda Cartonera by 2021 had occupied six different spaces in the city. In one instance, they were forced to move because of an altercation with the police; in most cases, it was simply because the rent had become unaffordable due to neighborhood gentrification or because they found a better arrangement through friends and other collectives who let them share their spaces at a discounted rate (Bell and O’Hare 2020). Across Latin America, cartonera collectives rarely have fi xed workshops, studios, or shops at all but rather move between places or set up in temporary arrange-

Histories 73

ments where and when they can. Even Eloísa, the longest-established cartonera, has moved several times, from the Abasto neighborhood to La Boca and more recently to a kiosk on Avenida Corrientes complemented with a workshop space in Almagro. Though the notion of existence as resistance fi nds few echoes in academic literature, there are some notable exceptions. One is the work of the Brazilian anthropologist Leonardo Schiocchet on Palestinian refugee camps. Seeking to understand the ritualization of daily life and a concomitant expression of “Palestinianness,” Schiocchet employs existence as resistance as a framework to explain the notion of s.umu¯d (loosely, steadfastness) and the temporal implication of being a body that remains present that is intrinsic to wider dimensions of the Palestinian cause. Schiocchet notes, The “existence = resistance” equation defi nes a type of passive resistance that characterizes the idea of s.umu¯d as opposed to muqa¯wama— which is a more active form of resistance, armed resistance for example. (2015, 213)

For Schiocchet, s.umu¯d is driven by fears of effacement: erasure of civil rights, a way of living, a knowledge system, and one’s very subjectivity and identity. In other readings, though, s.umu¯d is far from passive. It is the source of something much more dynamic, an embodied sense of being that over a longer period seeks to intervene, Diana Allan finds, by “producing new forms of subjectivity and belonging” (2014, 34), or in Rema Hammami’s analysis, “by resisting immobility, refusing to let the army’s lockdown of one’s community preclude one from reaching school or work” (2004, 27). Ultimately, cartonera is a mode of circulation under duress. As a practice, it takes what has been discarded and considered worthless and returns it to the world, creating communities, relations, and meanings through plural forms that are underpinned by an endlessly creative material practice and a decentralized, horizontal process of autogestión (selfmanagement). Importantly, however, the existence that cartonera proposes, against all odds, is capacious and open to spaces of dissent. The plurality of cartonera is indisputable. Just how plural, how far the cartonera net has been thrown, remains open to debate, however. A question that many interested interlocutors have asked us throughout our research is how many cartoneras there are. Or rather, given the ephemerality of their practices, how many cartoneras there have been.

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

Dozens, Hundreds, Thousands? Cartoneras don’t just continue to exist against all odds. Though they often fall away, reconfigure, and regroup, they also grow, multiply, and thrive. Through plural forms of making, working, being, and existing together and through different interpretations of what it means to resist in twenty-first-century Latin America, cartoneras have spread far and wide over the past two decades. Though they are often highly visible in their immediate communities, their grassroots, autonomous, and highly dispersed practices mean that it is practically impossible to count them at any given time. If anyone was likely to know how many cartoneras had appeared and in some cases vanished in the past two decades, it was Paloma Ce-ce. Her initial response to us in a 2020 interview was, “I have no idea!” After a thoughtful pause, though, she reflected, I would feel comfortable saying dozens, at any given time. Over the years, hundreds, of course. But some are no longer in existence. In Chile, right now, you can count them by the dozen. In Brazil too. And in Peru, they are growing exponentially, especially in partnership with public libraries, schools, and cultural centers.

We concur. Our experience, less continent-wide than Paloma’s, has nonetheless involved traveling around Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil with the explicit aim of searching out cartoneras after locating them through their digital footprints, most commonly blogs and Facebook pages but also Twitter feeds and Instagram posts, to talk with them, collaborate with them, and collect their books. In Mexico we have counted around forty active cartoneras across the country as well as about ten now inactive collectives. They have ranged from HtuRquesa Cartonera in the southeastern Yucatán Peninsula to Kodama Cartonera in Tijuana along the US border, with about a dozen new cartoneras being set up during our fieldwork of 2017–2019. Notably, in Jalisco, cartoneras multiplied through the intense activities of Israel and Sergio, who in the later phases of our project set out to create a Ruta Cartonera (Cartonera Trail), a close network of cartoneras working together but also autonomously throughout the state of Jalisco. And if we count cartoneras in institutions like libraries, schools, and prisons, dozens of projects were initiated in Mexico, Brazil, and Peru in 2020 alone, some through our collaborations, most completely independently of our project. Yet any attempt to count cartoneras is ultimately impeded by car-

Histories 75

tonera itself as an endlessly elusive grassroots practice. The number of cartoneras in existence depends on how one defi nes “cartonera.” Is a project set up in a school by a teacher after a cartonera publisher has run a workshop a cartonera? If so, there may be hundreds in Latin America at any given time and thousands in the making. Or does a cartonera have to be a group of people dedicated to publishing books through socioaesthetic interventions? Can a collective be a cartonera if, as is the case with some groups we encountered, its books don’t use recovered cardboard? These questions, which always generate much debate in cartonera encuentros, bring us back to the point that cartonera, for political reasons, is stubbornly resistant to defi nition. Cartonera practices have also spread far beyond Latin America, principally through the 2010s. Although mapping cartoneras across the world is outside the scope of this book, it is important to note their significant decolonial journey, which stands in stark contrast to the prevailing direction of travel in the history of books and publishing (Bell 2017b). This geopolitical reversal is partly the result of people traveling to Latin America and fi nding cartonera books or meeting cartonera publishers there, and partly through the Latinx diaspora, predominantly in Europe and North America. So in the Madison library, one can leaf through cardboard-bound books by La Marge, whose activist collective based in Anger, France, proudly runs “without a president”; by Cardboard House Press based in Phoenix, Arizona, a “nonprofit organization devoted to the creation of spaces and media for cultural, artistic, and literary development” that publishes writing, art, and contemporary thought from Latin America and Spain and hosts bilingual events, community projects, and workshops; by Mozambique-based publisher Kutsemba Cartão, the first cartonera publisher in Africa; and even by the Beijing-based collective Feng, which among other books has published Martín Fierro in Mandarin (Erlan 2016). Researching, writing, creating, curating, organizing, and participating in cartonera practice has helped us develop innovative, creative research methods. We have sought to work in a reflexive manner, constantly assessing our positionality. We did not always get this right. Critiques by Dulcinéia, Pensaré, and La Cartonera have made us stop and think about whether we were doing as much as we could in our attempts to work horizontally. In these moments, caught between different worlds, we sometimes felt we were trying to square the circle: How could we address these important questions and try to come up with a productive way forward? For us, the starting point was precisely the in-

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tersection of different methodologies, practices, and modes of knowledge. To think through these, as it quickly became clear, we needed to engage with cartonera on its own terms, recognizing that it is at once diverse and bound together, social and aesthetic, literary and visual, rooted in highly local contexts yet transnationally networked. In our methodology we hope that such ways of working might provide productive pathways for those seeking to resist and redraw the often overdetermined, deeply entrenched boundaries of academic disciplines.

CHAPTER 2

Methods: Trans-Formal Research for Transformational Practice

It’s April 15, 2019, and seven women are preparing for the launch of their book, Espejo y viento (Wind and Mirrors), in Puente Grande women’s prison, part of Mexico’s second-largest penitentiary complex in Jalisco state. For a book launch, this is an extraordinary setting, and this is no ordinary book. The colorful examples on display, bound with recovered cardboard, have been hand-painted by the same women who wrote the texts. In this scene, the women are no longer prisoners, shamed by and submitted to their condition of incarceration; they are authors and publishers, proud to present their work, themselves, and their selves. A mood of nervous excitement prevails as the participants wait for the event to begin, sitting on a row of bright-yellow plastic chairs in a crowd of fellow women prisoners, all dressed in beige clothing, alongside visiting family members and the workshop facilitators, Israel Soberanes and Irene Ruelas Ortiz. At the front, a table adorned with some of the books is set up with name placards for each speaker: two state prison directors, a representative from Jalisco’s Department of Culture, and two members of our project team, Sergio and Lucy (figure 2.1). These five speakers are given the public-facing seats by the organizers and take turns standing in front of the lectern and delivering short talks. Over the next hour, the audience listens, cheers, and claps as the women read extracts of their own writings aloud in front of the camera of C7 Jalisco TV, some with great ease and confidence, others struggling but determined to get their words across. In the three months leading up to this event, nine women took part in a series of bookmaking workshops facilitated by the cartonera publishers La Rueda Cartonera and Viento Cartonero, two of the ever-

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Taking Form, Making Worlds

Figure 2.1. Espejo y viento book launch at Puente Grande prison in Mexico,

April 15, 2019. Photograph courtesy of Puente Grande press team.

multiplying collectives in Jalisco that continue to survive and thrive in their indefatigable effort to create new readers, writers, and communities in a state where rising levels of violence are leading to the fragmentation of the social fabric (O’Hare and Bell 2020; Partida 2018). The texts published in Espejo y viento include poems, short narratives, and journal entries. Mainly autobiographical and testimonial in content, they illustrate what Joey Whitfield describes in Prison Writing of Latin America as the “conflicted political potential of prison writing, which moves between authors’ denunciations of the conditions in which they are held and their desire to distance themselves from their condition as prisoners” (2018, 2). Yet the women do more than this. Their literary interventions allow the women not only to represent themselves and denounce the failings and corruptions of the prison system, but also to effect change on both personal and institutional levels. Through the cartonera process, the women experienced certain transformations. Julia recounts, “When we were given this opportunity, I realized that it wasn’t just feelings of bitterness and frustration that can come out of this place, but also desires for love and freedom.” Her comment points to the affective, relational dimension of the writing and bookmaking process, which produced significant shifts in dynamics be-

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tween the women, their fellow inmates, and their families. These shifts, in turn, had a knock-on effect on wider material and institutional structures. It was highly unusual in Mexico to see prisoners, and even more so women prisoners, sharing a podium with a male director general of social reintegration and being featured on television, to celebrate their achievements as writers and artists. The Puente Grande intervention demonstrated the complex relations between cartonera as an aesthetic phenomenon on the one hand and a set of social relations, structures, and formations on the other. This particular research field was composed of texts, objects, and art; prisoners, guards, and authorities; prison cells, walls, and courtyards; state attorneys, juries, and judges; laws, pleas, and (often infringed upon) human rights. The deeply entrenched power relations of the Mexican state seemed more palpable than ever yet also strangely, although no doubt deceptively, fluid. In such a deeply contested affective space, so characteristic of our wider engagements with cartonera, it was inevitable that we would pose ourselves questions of methodology.

Questions of Method: Between Cultural Studies and Anthropology Back in 2015, when cowriting the funding application that was to enable the Cartonera Publishing research project to take place, we had a very clear idea about what we wanted to research but only a partially formed idea of how to go about it. Since the subject of this study was not just a collection of texts and art objects but also an assemblage of production methods, everyday interactions, organizational logistics, and social networks, we knew that it would require a combination of methods from the humanities and social sciences. To understand cartonera’s double fold of social and aesthetic form, we were going to have to link textbased approaches with fi ne-grained ethnographic research. Yet knowing this did not give us the answer to a fundamental pending question: Precisely how could these inquiries and methods be brought together? Clearly, we were not the first to ask this question. Since the birth of cultural studies in the 1950s and the “cultural turn” (Chaney 1994) in the human sciences in the 1970s, the fields of literary criticism and anthropology have borrowed from one another’s methodologies to carry out research that accounts for the contextuality of any cultural text and the textuality of ethnographic research. Since Paul Willis’s work on the “profane” culture of working-class lads (1977), Phil Cohen’s studies of

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subcultural confl ict (1977), and Dorothy Hobson’s analyses of housewives and the mass media (1980), cultural scholars have employed ethnographic methods to supplement their textual approaches, and the most prominent proponents of cultural studies have insisted on their importance. Despite holding a chair in a department of philosophy and religion in which textual methods dominated, Raymond Williams insisted on the need to “break away from the common procedure of isolating the object [the text] and then discovering its components” toward a more direct ethnographic approach allowing the researcher insight into “the nature of a practice and then its conditions” (Williams 2005, 47). Similarly, Roger Grimshaw, Dorothy Hobson, and Paul Willis advocate an ethnographic approach as a means of situating “forms in relation to their material contexts” and as a buffer “against theoretical reductionism” (1980, 62–63). In anthropology, meanwhile, such prominent figures as Victor Turner (1982) and Clifford Geertz (1973) explored the value of literary theory and practice to ethnography. In the first years of the discipline, three of Franz Boas’s students experimented with literary forms to widen anthropology’s nascent readership and contest the subject/object binary. Louise Lamphere (2004) details how Elsie Clews Parsons sought to present ethnographic information in a more accessible literary form. Lamphere also relates how Ella Cara Deloria, a Dakota Sioux, and Zora Neale Hurston, an African American contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, strategically moved between ethnographic and literary forms to challenge the dominant epistemological framework in which they were obliged to work (Lamphere 2004, 132–134). In the following years, however, despite the efforts of figures such as Ruth Benedict and collections such as Anthropology through Literature (Spradley and McDonough 1973), interest dwindled until the publication in 1986 of Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture. This seminal collection responded explicitly to a crisis in the discipline that saw the crumbling of the positivist notion of the anthropologist as objective, disinterested observer, a move that in many ways had been prefigured in the 1920s by Hurston. More recent work has continued to explore these productive interstices (Barton and Papen 2010; Wulff 2016, 2017), demonstrating how anthropological uses of literary processes vary from a self-reflexive tool for analyzing ethnographic writing to revealing how ethnography is itself constructed by way of literary techniques such as metaphor, figuration, narrative, and fictionality. Yet these multiperspectival approaches have often been limited or

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thwarted by very concrete obstacles, from disciplinary boundaries and institutional divisions to the time-consuming and costly nature of fieldwork. Even after receiving funding for our project, we still faced a unique challenge: cartonera texts are embedded within models of artistic practice and seek a direct connection to sociality, and we needed to think about a methodology that could work across many different kinds of social and aesthetic forms. It was clear that we would need to develop a reading practice that profoundly disrupted the “traditional objectcentered approach” of book history (Drucker 2014) as well as the textcentric approach that characterizes literary studies. A further question was one of positionality. In our project we sought to engage with practitioners who many times explicitly refuted the epistemological hierarchies they saw as endemic to academic research. To work with interlocutors who sometimes referred provocatively to the pointlessness of academia, it would be necessary to formalize our previous attempts at a horizontal research practice (Bell and O’Hare 2020; Flynn 2018) and question how we could make a meaningful contribution to our interlocutors’ collectives and networks. In the first place, developing an appropriate methodology to respond to these challenges involved working out what unites the different elements of the Puente Grande scene: the interactions between authorities and prisoner participants, the relations between outside publishers and inside writers, and the connection between La Rueda Cartonera’s Espejo y viento as art practice, literary collection, and political intervention. Reading the cartonera book in such complex contexts required attending simultaneously to the literary texts and art objects and the social, material, and political processes that they engender. Furthermore, this research process entailed understanding what unites the diverse practices of cartonera publishers across the expanding rhizomatic network within which they operate (Bell and O’Hare 2020). From their use of recovered cardboard as a material to the colorful colorinche aesthetics that Eloísa proclaims on their now-iconic poster, there were many elements of continuity between the Buenos Aires–based collective and the Puente Grande project. Just as the Eloísa founders foresaw the adaptability of the artistic model of cartonera publishing and promoted its dissemination and longevity beyond its own practices, the disruptions that occurred in Puente Grande in spring 2019 have outlived this initial intervention. Participants in the workshops have gone on to set up their own prisoner-led Bote Cartonero in collaboration with other incarcerated women. And the Puente Grande authorities, through

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ongoing collaborations with Joey Whitfield and Lucy, are now supporting cartonera projects led by Israel and Sergio in prisons across Jalisco. Beyond their sustainability and adaptability, what has also linked the projects is an explicit attempt to rearrange the forms of power that, as Levine explains in her Rancièrian take on the relation between art and politics, characterize social and political life through “activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping” (2015, 3). In 2003 Eloísa Cartonera set out to establish horizontal relations between waste pickers, writers, artists, and publics through participatory workshops and to call attention to conditions of alienated labor through a process rooted in fun, creativity, and freedom. In 2019 in Puente Grande, the cartonera program led by La Rueda Cartonera and Viento Cartonero disrupted the established forms—the hierarchies, rhythms, and networks on which Levine structures her 2015 book—that underpin prison life by offering incarcerated women the chance to tell their own stories and seize control of their narratives and the forms through which they are produced and disseminated. Starting from the stories of the women of Puente Grande and inspired by the work of our cartonera partners, which we understand as a highly self-reflexive process of inquiry, we address a number of key questions: What kind of methodology might be employed to work with cartonera publishers, encompassing both their artistic production (literary texts and art objects) and their social action? How might we work productively within such assemblages of social actions, political projects, literary texts, and art practices, which relate to a broader shift in contemporary art practice that finds expression in spaces beyond the white cube, from socially engaged art (Kester 2004) to postautonomous art practices (García Canclini 2014)? In order to begin building ethnographic work into such a methodology, how might our research practices recognize but also enact the codependence of social and aesthetic form that cartonera proposes? Finally, engaging with interlocutors who articulate cartonera as a mode of producing new meanings and knowledges and breaking down subject– object relations, how might we reconsider the kinds of outputs that an academic project should create? We begin by describing in more detail the Puente Grande project before presenting some of the main theoretical propositions with which we have engaged, in dialogue with our interlocutors, to reexamine cartonera art, literature, and aesthetics in a more dynamic relation to social and political processes. We propose what we term a “trans-formal” methodology composed of innovative ethnographic methods based on “reference

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to gesture” (Flynn and Quintana 2021) and reading practices that build on emerging postcritical approaches to literary and cultural studies.

The Double Fold I: The Impact of Sociopolitical Structures on Cartonera Practice Let’s return to Puente Grande prison. From a literary historical perspective, Espejo y viento might be read in relation to the Latin American testimonial tradition of the 1980s and 1990s that was celebrated and to a certain extent created and amplified through postcolonial subaltern studies scholarship. Such work sought to defend the truth value of the testimonio and widen the breach in the walls of the lettered city (Franco 2002; Rama 1984). Whitfield argues that many prisoner writers “claim to represent and advocate on behalf of excluded voices or sections of the populations” (2018, 19), and this collection is no exception. Though not all of the texts in Espejo y viento can be read as examples of resistance literature, and some of them may even be seen to collude in the state structures that perpetuate their authors’ imprisonment, many of the participants used this publication to denounce the grim realities of their arrest, detention, and imprisonment and by extension to call out the violence, corruption, and impunity of the Mexican state and judicial system, which, as the women describe, are inscribed on their bodies and subjectivities (Marsh 2020). Two texts in particular, despite their very different styles, share common themes of wrongful imprisonment and state-sanctioned violence against women. In her story “A Light in the Darkness,” Bogarín, then in her sixteenth year of incarceration for a crime she vehemently denies committing, describes being kidnapped with her husband from her workplace in 2003. Her writing is hard-hitting and graphic in its testimonial detail: Suddenly several armed men appeared. . . . One of them beat me, then he raped me while snorting coke; it was getting dark when they brought my husband back, bleeding, blindfolded, blood running down his ears, his forehead, and his testicles; then they blindfolded me. . . . After five days of interminable torture, screaming, abuse, and rape, they took me to some fi lthy back offices, showed me a picture of my son, and said, “Sign here, or your son will pay the consequences.” (Bogarín 2019, 57)

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In a no less heart-rending text, a brilliantly evocative poem entitled “Voices without Voice,” Enedina expresses her bitter criticism of Mexico’s highly corrupt and excessively male-dominated judiciary system: The life of the prisoner begins with slander by the one who seizes his sword, and the one who, behind bars, receives as an offer a plea bargain. After a year in prison, the beatings you bore fade away with your stolen innocence as it’s not the opportune moment for a trial, as human rights don’t matter to any judge or magistrate . . . —The Gods of Olympus— in the image and likeness of the Earthly Supreme Court . . . Suddenly, your thoughts take you by the hand and place you in front of the mirror of the officer who framed you with a lie, of the one who made up your crime because that was his job. (Enedina 2019, 41–42)

Both these texts denounce the “coloniality of power” (Quijano and Ennis 2000) embodied by the deeply entrenched hierarchical structures of the Latin American prison system (Whitfield 2018, 4).* Ricardo Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre contend in The Birth of the Penitentiary that Latin American prison systems are the result of “a process of modernisation that did not replace old structures, forms of interaction or racial and gender hierarchies, but instead reinforced them” (1996, xii). * Significantly, when a journalist from The Guardian newspaper took an interest in the stories of these women, their testimonials were dismissed by the prison authorities as “literary fictions” and therefore invalid as legitimate denunciations of state corruption. Yet they square with the fi ndings of the anthropologist Rosalva Aída Hernández (2013) in relation to women’s prisons in Atlacholoaya and Puebla that have demonstrated how women in Mexico, especially poor, Indigenous women, are often imprisoned not because of any significant role they have played in criminal activity but because of their socioeconomic vulnerability.

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These gender hierarchies are foregrounded by Bogarín and Enedina, whose texts highlight the masculinity of the violence infl icted on them as imprisoned women, whether overtly, through the women’s denunciations of beatings, torture, and rape, or metaphorically, through the phallic image of the slanderer’s sword or the Olympian, godlike judges and magistrates, 80 percent of whom, according to the state’s own National Institute of Statistics and Geography, are men (Mexico, INEGI 2018). Cartonera, as these two texts suggest, marks a significant step away from the testimonial tradition. Though on one level the political import of Bogarín’s and Enedina’s writings lies in their declamatory content, they move beyond representation through a sociomaterial insertion and intervention in their surroundings. In Puente Grande, this fi rst aspect of the double fold could be seen in the way the prison environment was interwoven through every stage of the production of the women’s books. That is, the social context made its mark on the aesthetic forms: the cells in which the texts were written, the courtyard in which the book was produced, and the prison system itself, from regimented routines to reward-based labor models, all were palpable in the cartonera workshops as well as in the collected texts and the cover designs. Israel reminded Lucy that the workshop process to a certain extent had to be integrated into the prison’s existing institutional structures and systems for it to be viable and importantly, permissible. For example, the cartonera facilitators were advised to encourage the women through incentives, replicating the prison’s own systems and culture. In Puente Grande, inmates receive minimal but significant payments for manual work and are allowed to sell their crafts, from cute cuddly toys to fashionable handwoven bags, to staff and visitors at market-style stalls in the prison’s courtyard. Sergio explains in an interview broadcast by C7 Jalisco (Peña 2019a), “Cartonera books are products that can be sold. One of the ideas is to support the women with an income, so that when they reintegrate into society, they can find a way to earn a living through this type of cultural work.” Beyond the workshops, the end products, books, were imbued with the physical spaces in which they were created. In very concrete terms, the palette of colors used by the participants to create their own handpainted books reflect the environment of the prison in which they were created (figure 2.2). The mishmash of bright colors echo the neoliberal capitalism of the Latin American prison (Whitfield 2018), most visible in the plastic furniture used for the workshops, the blue, red, and white Pepsi-branded tables and the bright-yellow chairs sponsored by

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Figure 2.2. Cartonera workshops at Puente Grande. Photographs courtesy of

Puente Grande press team.

the Squirt soft-drink company. The colors also reflect efforts to promote more grassroots arts initiatives in the prison such as a huge mural on a courtyard wall depicting an elephant (figure 2.1), a Buddhist and Hindu symbol of strength, patience, and wisdom. The mural was the idea of an inmate, supported by the prison administrators who provided paints and other materials. This composition of yellows, grays, and browns echoes through the participants’ cover art. In this way, it was clear that diverse political and social forms, from neoliberalism to grassroots rehabilitation practices, influenced the material practices and aesthetic choices of the imprisoned women. Another striking example from a number of the books created at Puente Grande is a style inspired by the covers by Maria of Dulcinéia Catadora in São Paulo, that of placing diagonal strips of masking tape

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on the cover and painting in the geometrical shapes the tape forms (figure 2.3a). This style was introduced to the participants at Puente Grande by Israel and Irene, who brought a Dulcinéia book as one example of cartonera artwork to provide inspiration. Such designs gain added significance in this carceral context, and as the imprisoned women appropriated Maria’s technique, the vertical lines would come to gesture toward the bars of the prison cells in which they are confined (figure 2.3b). Through each of their unique interventions—as Eloísa Cartonera’s poster shouts out—“¡NO HAY 2 TAPAS IGUALES!” (“No two cartonera books are the same!”), the women’s covers play around with the iconic prison-cell bars. The bars, through this vision of confi nement, which, critically, must not be equated with a confi ned vision, find themselves diagonalized and horizontalized, symbolizing both the women’s imprisoned status and the creative freedom that in this environment is inevitably a visual display of resistance. The permeability between prison environment and creative process was also tangible in a more overtly sensory manner. Some of the workshop facilitators, prison administrators, and family members who attended the book launch observed that the physical process of bookmaking and writing could also be felt, touched, and even smelled in the book-objects themselves. One cover, by Sonia, explicitly draws attention to the sense of smell: Every story has its smell. The smell of death. The smell of prison. The smell of solitude. The smell of triumph. The smell of treachery. The smell of danger. The smell of pain. The smell of happiness. The smell of triumph. (figure 2.4)

The cover of the book, which is now circulating outside the prison, still contains the material traces of her intervention: her triumphant brushstrokes that mark the cardboard with deep grooves; her palpable anxiety as she switched from one tint to another; the sweat of anguish as she poured her feelings onto the cardboard canvas; and the smell of the prison in which she was held. Irene picks up on this materiality in a preface that itself exudes a sensory lyricism: In the world shared by a group of women who spend months or years together in the Women’s Correctional Facility, experiences, the reasons for their incarceration, give off scents; a whiff that wafts toward the mirror that frames their identity to be transcended, toward that space that sentences time, their time, but not their spirits. The women

Figure 2.3. (a) Maria’s diagonal line technique from the Glicério cooperative in São Paulo, still from Maria’s Cartonera Book video by Carolina Caffé (2018); (b) Puente Grande books, photograph by Israel Soberanes.

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Figure 2.4. Sonia’s

Every Story Has Its Smell, front cover. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

reinvent themselves in a world dictated by others where one can vanish into oblivion.

In Sonia’s case, the possibility of oblivion was very literal. After losing her mother at the age of five and being left to her fate by an alcoholic father and seven older brothers, her life had been characterized by grief, loneliness, and abandonment. She used the writing exercise to unburden herself, to tell her story, to talk about her multiple suicide attempts and the guilt she felt about abandoning her three children and repeating the past.

The Double Fold II: The Impact of Cartonera Practice on Sociopolitical Forms The first aspect of the double fold in the context of the Puente Grande initiative is the one that has been the most recognized in the literature:

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the way the social shapes aesthetic and literary form. The second fold has been more overlooked: the way aesthetic practice can inform and reorder the social. What is particularly interesting about the Puente Grande project and cartonera more generally is how its specific double fold works across social and aesthetic forms, in both directions. The two collectives that facilitated the workshops have as their principal base of operations the community cultural café, La Rueda Libros y Café in Guadalajara. While Puente Grande prison could not be further away from the open, creative, and often festive environment of Sergio’s café, the workshops were able to bring about a transformation of the highly restricted prison environment to a colorinche space of informal encounters, animated exchanges, and provocative discussions. On the day of the book launch, this atmosphere was especially apparent. One imprisoned woman was busy making and selling tacos at a makeshift stand, another passed around jugs of prisoner-made horchata, and another still was installed at a table dishing out her mother’s homemade birria rib tacos. In this unusually relaxed environment, Lucy and her partner, Marco, were invited to Claudia’s table, where they were treated to tacos and conversation with Claudia, her mother, and her eight-yearold son, Pablo Emilio. As they chatted away, it was easy to forget they were in a prison and not in La Rueda café. This reshaping of forms of social exchange that are (or are not) permissible in a very specific space hints at the socially transformative power of cartonera practice. Cartonera workshop facilitators Sergio, Israel, and Irene were able to enter into this closed, oppressive, and statecontrolled environment with the consent of the authorities because of their seemingly apolitical, or at least uncontroversial, artistic project. What could be more innocent, after all, than making a book out of recycled cardboard, paint, and colored thread? Is this activity not one practiced by children across Latin America? Yet the sociopolitical effects of the project that came about through a playful and convivial process seemed to both mirror and prefigure significant systemic changes inside and outside the prison. Within Puente Grande, the cartonera project has been an important part of a broader process of reform led by its director of social reintegration, Juan Antonio Pérez Juárez; the process is known as Reinserción Segunda Oportunidad (Second Chance Reintegration). This term, Pérez Juárez explained to us in an interview in 2019, refers “to a second chance not only for the people deprived of their freedom but also for society as a whole.” In his words,

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It is crucial to understand the importance of promoting and respecting the human rights of all people, before and after they commit a crime, and if they do, to make their first and second and umpteenth chance meaningful, with education, health, sport, training, and work, which are the main vectors of social reintegration.

The cartonera project fed into these broader ethical and political principles, which marked a decisive shift away from the predominantly punitive policies of the Mexican judicial system, characterized as it is by fi xed hierarchies, structural gender inequalities, and normalized corruption (Ferreyra 2018). But the project was also an important part of a more gradual process of prison reform that is occurring in the state of Jalisco, in which culture and cultural production are increasingly being introduced into the repertoire of modes of social reintegration. Specifically, the project resulted in Bote Cartonera, the first in-house prison publisher in the state and, to the best of our knowledge, in Mexico; it is novel insofar as the texts and the books themselves are being produced in the prison. Pérez Juárez spoke of “leaving this activity in the hands of the imprisoned women,” a deeply subversive gesture in the context of a judicial system based on structural inequalities and strong hierarchies (Ferreyra 2018, 64). In relation to cartonera, the hands Pérez Juárez referred to are not merely metaphorical; the material practice of making their own books enables these women, even within the prison, to take control of their stories and reshape their lives in ways that would previously have been unimaginable. Even more important for the women involved in Bote Cartonero was the impact of the cartonera initiative on their benefi cios de preliberación (prerelease benefits). This system of benefits was put in place in 2008 across the Mexican prison system as part of a broader process of reform to encourage rehabilitation and ease pressure on chronically overcrowded prisons through a credit-based system for early release, conditional release, and humanitarian or significant public benefit parole requests for nonviolent offenders (Cruz, Vargas Morra, and Hecht Barbosa 2017, 7). The activities are classified under seven main categories: work, education, culture, health, sport, personal, and restorative justice (Cruz, Vargas Morra, and Hecht Barbosa 2017, 29). By engaging in activities across these different areas, prisoners can potentially reduce their sentence by up to 50 percent. Before they got started at Puente Grande, cartonera publishers Israel and Sergio were aware of this system of benefits and were in discus-

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sion with prison administrators and authorities as to whether cartonera workshops could be counted as credit for the incarcerated participants. Following their negotiations with prison authorities from Jalisco state, the creative activity of cartonera publishing was approved as one means of obtaining prerelease credits. A member of the Puente Grande communications team, Ramiro Lomelí, told us that Puente Grande inmates are now able to earn points for prerelease by taking part in various artistic activities, such as folkloric dance, modern dance, theater, painting, music, and, since the publication of Wind and Mirrors, cartonera workshops. This addition is significant because of the relative autonomy and horizontality of the cartonera process; unlike most workshops, the prison-based publisher Bote Cartonero is run by incarcerated women rather than by external facilitators or teachers. Beyond the reduction of their sentences, the act of working on this collective project was also a deeply relational process with external effects that could be seen in the interactions between imprisoned women, prison authorities, families, workshop facilitators, and our research team. Pérez Juárez explained to us that the collective process of producing cartonera books involves “an important element of teamwork and building relations with other people that is important for rehabilitation and reintegration into society.” At the book launch, he said, incarcerated women’s family members were able read the “stories they had not been able to hear from their daughters, mothers, wives, or sisters in prison.” This element of the project, the rebuilding of relations with often estranged family members, was highlighted by several participants in conversations after the workshops. For Griselda, it was a way of reconnecting with her mother and three children; for Claudia, what was most significant about contributing to the book was that her son, Pablo Emilio, the love of her life, to whom she dedicated her writings, was excited about her becoming a published author. As Pérez Juárez insisted, the opportunity to heal injured or broken relations with family members is particularly significant for women: I must emphasize the importance of having started this workshop in the Puente Grande women’s prison. We did it because we are very conscious of the gender perspective and because when women are deprived of their freedom they are more abandoned, some without a personal visit for years. Added to this is the issue of the family, which in the case of women who are mothers carries a tremendous emotional burden.

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What Pérez Juárez is hinting at here is the reality of “double deviance,” well documented by feminist criminologists such as Frances Heidensohn (1989) since the 1980s, whereby women are punished for the crimes they did or did not commit and for their deviance from gender norms around motherhood and femininity. In addition to resisting this cruel, dual punishment through the empowered narratives published in the collection, such as Enedina’s powerful denunciation of injustice in “Voices without Voice,” this particular cartonera intervention enabled the women to resist gender and class hierarchies. Through participatory workshops, the publishers from La Rueda and Viento developed more horizontal exchanges with the imprisoned women, simultaneously teaching them artisanal self-publishing methods and learning from their experiences and struggles; Sergio and Israel shared their stories of cartonera publishing and listened to the incarcerated participants’ life stories. Many of these transformations, fostered by the material sociality of cartonera practice, were visible, palpable, and audible. Others were far more intimate, internal, and silent, which is not say any less important or political. To return to Sonia, the process of writing was more than reflective; it was transformational. Following her participation in the cartonera workshops and her contribution to Espejo y viento, she revealed the high stakes of her involvement: Having tried to commit suicide and been in a coma for three months, I have discovered a new way of coping with life. Writing allows me to communicate and let go of my darkest thoughts. I have discovered that God accompanies me, and I am grateful for this project for bringing me inner peace and dignity.

Regardless of the particular and always unfortunate life circumstances that led them to imprisonment, the nine participants all described some kind of internal transformation through the process of writing and creating their own cartonera books. For Erika, doing so brought her “peace and happiness.” Griselda told us that it changed her attitude toward life. And Enedina, as reported by C7 Jalisco (Peña 2019b), explains, “The book Wind and Mirrors has been a journey, like winning a place on a cruise that allows me to travel far beyond the walls of this prison. I now know I can express myself and denounce injustices through literature.” As Enedina testifies, cartonera represents far more than a book, an object, a text; it offers a process of healing and self-transformation. This

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process is simultaneously internal and external, personal and political, corporeal and structural. Carol Hanisch highlights the dual nature of transformation in her influential essay “The Personal Is Political” (1970). The title, adopted from a slogan from the 1968 global student movement, including the violently repressed protests in Mexico, have echoed through the work of feminist writers and activists over the decades since. And in the world of cartonera, we have seen how the personal, psychological, and subjective transformations experienced by women, warriors and writers like those of Puente Grande, cannot be uncoupled from wider social, political, and legal transformations. Their diverse experiences of transformation as individuals and human beings are integral to a broader process of structural dehierarchization that in postcolonial Latin America and across the world—at a historical moment protagonized by the #NiUnaMenos, #NiUnaMás, and #MeToo movements— are closely connected to the long, ongoing struggle by grassroots activists and social movements for gender equality, equal rights, and equal education.

Methodological Starting Points The Puente Grande project is a powerful demonstration of the double fold. Cartonera books are imbued with the environmental, material, and social conditions of the communities by which they are produced; at the same time, literary and artistic practices reorder and reshape social values, relations, and communities, resisting deeply rooted patterns of stigma, injustice, and violence. This exchange between social and aesthetic forms operates in both directions, with transformational effects on each side. Throughout the project, we experienced more and more cartonera practices that revealed the double fold in a diverse range of settings, from Eloísa’s kiosk on Avenida Corrientes through Dulcinéia’s workshops in the Glicério recycling cooperative to La Rueda and Viento Cartonero’s interventions in public squares. As we took part in processes that moved across aesthetic and social forms, we became convinced that our project’s methodological framework should be developed accordingly. Our desire was not to root our methodology in any given discipline, whether literary studies or anthropology. Our subject matter, cartonera, constitutes a set of practices that disrupt colonial power relations, hier-

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archies, knowledges, and epistemologies. We therefore wanted to avoid working from disciplines that emerged within the very colonial structures and categories that cartoneras contest (Chatterjee 1995; Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008). Cultural studies was one possible starting point; interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and counterdisciplinarity are its hallmarks, as scholars over the past three decades have discussed through extensive inquiry into their own unstable and constantly shifting methods (Denzin and Lincoln 2018; Grossberg 2010; Rodman 2015). Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln have called our attention to the ambition of such interdisciplinarity; by working across different traditions, presenting our findings in new forms, and committing to issues of social justice, cultural researchers are “active agents for social change” (2018, 8). This political ambition relates back to the commitment of Grimshaw, Hobson, and Willis (1980) from the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham to work ethnographically as a buffer against theoretical reductions. Thus one of our methodological starting points was literary and cultural analysis contextualized through ethnographic data to help shed light on the diverse social, political, and economic conjunctures of cartonera publishers. And yet, because of our commitment to working with rather than on cartonera publishers, we needed to get away from the tendency of cultural studies scholarship to remain distant from its object of study through “overwhelming textualization” (Hall 1996, 274). In order to do so, we had to interrogate critique, a dominant paradigm in literary and cultural studies that has become commonplace, normalized, and to a certain extent universalized across the global academy and to which we as researchers have contributed. This mode of critical reading, Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski argue, is problematic insofar as it has tends to “render the thoughts and actions of ordinary social actors as insufficiently self-aware or critical” (2017, 14). Confronted with this problem, we engaged seriously with the postcritical turn that in recent years has begun to demand we interrogate our reading practices and orthodoxies. Anker and Felski point out that the possibility of separating “ordinary” social actors from privileged critics has been fueled by prevailing antagonistic and combative trends in the humanities particularly since poststructuralism, which despite its radically democratic underpinnings has in fact fostered a “spirit of marginality” and thus “kept serious thought sequestered in the ivory tower” (2017, 19). The resulting elitism of literary and cultural studies has paradoxically lessened the im-

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pact of the discipline on the public sphere, its connection to the nonacademic world, and therefore the very structures with which it seeks to engage and intervene. Anthropology also has its problems, and while its ethnographic method was central to our project, we needed to engage reflexively with the many critiques of the discipline. Beyond its well-documented difficulties with art and aesthetics (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015; Schneider 2015; Schneider and Wright 2006), anthropology has also had a complicated relation to narrative fiction, neatly encapsulated by Bronislaw Malinowski’s diary entry: “didn’t read novels or waste any time except for the moments I needed to rest” (1967, 279). And these tensions between anthropology, art, and literature were just part of a heavier conceptual baggage that most questionably comes back to deeply rooted issues of positionality. In anthropology and other social sciences, we still habitually label the people with whom we work as “respondents,” “collaborators,” “subjects,” or “informants.” The knowledge that anthropologists have derived from working with people in an “inferior” position, from what is now widely understood to be a highly problematic relation of cultural superiority, has thus often been attributed to anthropologists without full recognition of its true source. This issue of epistemological extractivism (Cusicanqui 2006; Grosfoguel 2016) has come to the fore in more recent decolonial discourse. Yet as the anthropologist Anders Burman notes (2018), asymmetric power relations continue to predominate, and anthropology is still Anglophone-centric. The discipline “gives nothing, or very little, back (not even a text in a language that might be intelligible to the people with and among whom we work),” and many anthropologists maintain a deep suspicion of scholar activism (Burman 2018, 60). While strongly worded, critiques such as Burman’s resonate with our work; similar criticisms have been voiced by some of our cartonera interlocutors. And yet, we agree with Anand Pandian that despite the charge sheet, there is still the possibility of nurturing a different kind of anthropological inquiry (2019, 8), one that might engage more meaningfully, processually, and horizontally with the people with whom we work. We wanted the cartonera project to be a dynamic process that the main parties involved could contribute to and benefit from. A key starting point was to recognize our interlocutors as theorizing agents and produce research that stems from a dialogue between our theoretical work and that of our cartonera partners. We see cartonera as a fundamentally plural form that creates communities, meanings, and relations,

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and this understanding was underpinned right from the start by the theoretical contributions of the cartonera publishers, writers, and artists themselves. With such an approach, it was important to avoid conflation and attribute with clarity and transparency the cartonera concepts that we describe. We feel honored that our interlocutors shared their worlds with us, and in these pages we attempt to document faithfully, for example, Javier Barilaro’s reimagination of Beuys’s theory of “social sculpture,” La Cartonera’s notion of “desacralizing literature,” Lúcia Rosa’s emphasis on the cartonera book as artistic process rather than art object, Enedina’s motif of “voices without voice,” Sol Barreto’s “caipora research” as decolonial method, Maria Dias da Costa’s concept of being a waste picker as a mode of “making culture,” Thais Graciotti’s art of “archipelagos,” Rigoberto Domínguez García’s poetic rendition of “Ce tlalli” (An earth), and Júlio Brabo’s concept of “the social in movement.” Cartonera publishing has grown and thrived because of the way it has been rethought and reimagined by individuals and groups across and beyond Latin America as they respond to different complex social contexts and needs. We hope that by detailing and acknowledging these theoretical standpoints, this book demonstrates the weight and value of our cartonera interlocutors as creative writers, artists, and proudly extrainstitutional, rebellious theorists. The other aspect of this methodological process is that it allowed us to make a tangible contribution to the cartonera world in a manner that practitioners themselves indicated might be welcome. We sought to achieve this by referring to the gesture behind the principal cartonera forms and working alongside our interlocutors in daily activities of making; in doing so, we were invited to become part of that material and social world. This had a political implication as well; when cartonera practitioners decided to take action against the impending election of Jair Bolsonaro, we were asked to contribute and to take a stance. Importantly, working in this manner offered a unique opportunity to consider seriously two connected ideas: how cartonera’s artistic and textual practice intervened in existing social forms to create spaces for transformation, and how these practices might be understood as modes of research in and for the twenty-first century, thus responding to wider questions of extractivism and positionality. We bring together the world of cartonera and the work of two thinkers, Jacques Rancière and Nestor García Canclini, who have helped us develop one of the guiding principles of this book, the double fold, and to make a case for the transformational power of open-ended artistic practice, a processual, relational

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kind of art to which cartoneras contribute in so many meaningful, productive ways.

Theorizing the Double Fold Rancière’s thinking came to the fore as we accompanied cartonera processes that seemed to produce disruption and dissonance, challenging consensual orders and posing alternative ways of being, working, and making meaning. Rancière (2004) argues that aesthetics and politics cannot be separated, that aesthetics is the means through which the political is constituted and operates. Instead of viewing politics as a party political system or a more traditional system of power and hierarchy, Rancière regards it (2012, 24) as “the configuration of a specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these objects and putting forward arguments about them.” In his reading of Rancière, Brian Larkin suggests that “politics takes place when those who occupy fi xed positions outside a certain order decide to intervene within that order. It is the apportioning that determines who can participate in a system” (2018, 187). In Rancière’s terms, this apportionment is the “distribution of the sensible,” in which those in power rearrange places and identities, deciding what remains visible and what becomes invisible, what counts as speech and what is merely noise (2004, 13). Artistic practices, for Rancière, are thus not privileged means of understanding reality but “‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility” (13). All art, in that sense, is political, and “there is . . . an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics” (13). This is because art and politics, through their different yet related modes of shaping the social, are capable of producing equality and inequality, inclusion and exclusion, through different forms of sensory perception, by giving people and things visibility and voice or depriving them of both. Rancière’s theory of art and politics resonates with the ways cartonera practitioners conceive of their own processes, and the consequent double fold of socioartistic practice that they model. More often than not, practitioners see their literary production, beyond the world of publishing, as a practice that is political in some way and that thus has a

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role in the shaping of society. In each of the collectives we explore here, artistic practices are explicitly used to forge productive relations and exchanges between artists, writers, and vulnerable, stigmatized, and/ or marginalized communities, thus producing a redistribution of roles and responsibilities that models a certain form of egalitarianism (Epplin 2009). As with Rancière, who in Nikos Papastergiadis’s words “believed that human equality proceeds from the common faculty of sensory perception—aesthesis” (2014, 8), cartoneras foreground the role of art as a means of horizontalizing social relations. For Dulcinéia Catadora, the social encounters and relations produced by the publishing process are more important than the publications themselves because they “dismantle prejudices” and “question aesthetic concepts connected to a world that’s still being built on inequalities and privileges” (Rosa 2018). And for Israel and Sergio, working in Jalisco, a state with ever higher rates of inequality, violence, and homicides (O’Hare and Bell 2020), cartonera publishing is a form of “cultural activism.” Sergio explains in a 2020 interview, For us, social transformation occurs when we are able to develop our projects through sociocultural interventions in a specific community. The process of publishing books is always an attempt to resolve a sociocultural problem. . . . The book, in this context, serves as an act of liberation and denunciation.

In this way, cartonera practice enters into closer dialogue with Rancière’s notion of the political than with more conservative interpretations of art. For some, cartonera books are individual artworks enumerated as a series in a manner that highlights their status as art objects. For others, that relation is less about the uniqueness of each item; each book is not an artwork in and of itself but rather part of a wider sculptural aggregation that acts upon society. In the latter view, individual works are perhaps “no more than a pretext for dialogue,” in a provocation that Achille Bonito Oliva offered to Joseph Beuys in 1971 (Sandler 1997, 92). To traverse the contours of cartonera’s propositions as a contemporary art practice, we engage with García Canclini’s concept of postautonomy (2014), a theory that owes much to Rancière’s thought. García Canclini places contemporary artistic practice within a particular arrangement of porous frontiers identifying a paradigm shift in art practices, whereby objects have increasingly been displaced by contexts. For García Canclini, what was once theorized as a hermetic system, or an

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“art world” with defi nable boundaries and conventions (Becker 1982), can no longer be contained within these terms. Art is no longer a singular field with a limited range of actors such as the idealized artist, gallery owner, or curator, nor is art practiced within a series of definable locations whether the “white cube” gallery, the museum, or the private space of the collector. Postautonomy, the condition that characterizes work that exists in interstitial spaces, is an evitable consequence of a contemporary history of art that García Canclini describes as “a paradoxical combination of behaviors devoted to securing independence for one’s own field and behaviors committed to doing away with the limits that separate that field” (2014, xvi). Processuality here is important; postautonomy fi nds expression in the long rhythms of making that are exemplified by the Puente Grande intervention, and engaging with process is fundamental to García Canclini’s reimagining of Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible.” One of the values of García Canclini’s theory, from the perspective of the cartonera project, is that it functions in part as an open-ended invitation to new research practices. García Canclini suggests, for example, that researchers should position themselves near artworks and be “nimble” in following their trajectories (2014, 178) and that more robust modes of investigation will be premised on working closely with artists themselves: “What we really need is the anthropological insistence on listening to actors, a great diversity of actors, spending time in qualitative matters” (184). This last point is important to us, as we have become convinced that while methods need to be developed in dialogue with theoretical advances and debates, they also need to be thought through collaboratively alongside the people with whom we work, bearing in mind their specific, situated, and reflexive practices.

Moving Forward through Form Caroline Levine’s pioneering formalist propositions, which also build on Rancière’s theory, helped us approach our research on cartonera publishers by listening to and acting with the great diversity of actors we encountered along the way. Levine argues, An attention to both aesthetic and social forms returns us to the very heterogeneity at the heart of form’s conceptual history. . . . All of the historical uses of the term, despite their richness and variety, do share

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a common defi nition: “form” always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping. Here, then, is where my own argument begins: with a defi nition of form that is much broader than its ordinary usage in literary studies. Form, for our purposes, will mean all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference. (2015, 3; Levine’s emphasis)

Levine’s reinvigoration of formalism, based on Rancière’s distribution of the sensible and a refusal to distinguish between literary/artistic and social/political form, allows us to understand cartonera in a way that acknowledges the double fold this practice enacts between different configurations of form. Her refreshing approach to literary and cultural studies furnishes a means of moving between textual analysis and ethnography, recognizing the potentiality of the broader etymology of the word “form” ( forma in Spanish and Portuguese), where it denotes shape, form, or figure but also way or mode. Within this approach to reading, forms of action (ways of doing things, changing things, and shaping experience) necessarily intersect with aesthetic forms (ways of shaping objects, words, and experiences). Levine’s rereading of literary texts as “theorization[s] of the social” (2015, 134) paves the way for a more relational approach to literature and art. In the context of the cartonera project, it helped us to develop ways of reading and researching not on but in processual dialogue with these literary and artistic collectives and thus to engage simultaneously with social practice, aesthetic form, and collective imaginaries. Eloísa Cartonera’s foundation narrative points to the value of a repurposed formalist methodology: It all began with the crisis of 2001. . . . Some say “we are a product of the crisis,” or that we “aestheticized misery.” Actually, it was nothing like that. We were a group of people who came together to work in a different way, to learn new things through work, to build up a cooperative, to learn how to subsist and manage ourselves, to work toward a common good. We were like many of the movements and collectives born from those insane times who organized into cooperatives or small assembly groups, into neighborhood and community groups, all sorts of social movements. There were people, workers, and neighbors. . . . It was summer, and Javier Barilaro and Washington Cucurto were busy producing some colorful poetry books. Eloísa was the name of a charming Bolivian Javier was in love with, and the name of the publisher be-

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came an ode to her. The story goes that they never did get together, but despite all that Javier and his friends went on producing beautiful and love-inspired books. Then one day came Fernanda . . . a golden late afternoon, a pink bike, and a green skirt, like spring itself. She proposed to open a workshop at Guardia Vieja. That was how Eloísa Cartonera was born, in the spring of 2003. (Eloísa Cartonera 2010)

Two principal narratives are used to frame Eloísa’s practices: the multiple social movements and community collectives that emerged in the wake of economic crisis, and the romantic and practical inspiration afforded by two women, Eloísa and Fernanda. Within these two narrative frames, there are many overlapping forms that belong at once to the realms of the social and the aesthetic, the functional, and the beautiful: colorful poetry collections and cartonera books; a pink bike and a green skirt; and the bookmaking, vegetable-selling workshop on Guardia Vieja. All of these material forms have diverse “affordances,” a term used by psychologist James Gibson (1979) to refer to the potential uses and actions latent in material things. The term is repurposed by Levine (2015, 6–8) to support her argument about the political potential of literary form. The pink bike and colorful clothes, for example, inspired the colorinche aesthetic that has come to define Eloísa, whose books are works of literature as well as provocative political acts that break through the invisible class barriers separating manual labor from intellectual activity, informal workers from renowned writers, the streets along which the cardboard is collected from the hypersanitized environs of uppermiddle-class Latin America. These multiple forms resist a new formalist interpretation of Eloísa’s aesthetics, like that of politically oriented literary critics such as Herbert F. Tucker (1997), that would situate the publisher in the context of the Argentina’s economic crisis of 2001. Though the Eloísa model undoubtedly has much to do with the postcrisis context in which it came into being (O’Hare and Bell 2020), the collective denies being the product of the crisis. Rather than an embrace of arte povera or an “aesthetics of poverty” (Schmidt 2017), Eloísa’s use of cardboard salvaged from the street is a socioaesthetic choice inspired by the affordances of what cartoneras often refer to as the “noble” material and the symbolic value of creating literature from the discards of consumerism. In this sense, their foundational narrative resists an epiphenomenal reading of cartonera forms as an outgrowth of the social situation(s) that it mimics or

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resists (Levine 2015, 12), encouraging us to find meaning instead in the multiple socioaesthetic forms within which the collective works, plays, and intervenes. Across the growing cartonera network inspired by Eloísa, cardboardbound, hand-painted, collectively-produced texts invite us to break with literary studies approaches that, Levine notes, “focus attention on the ways that a couple of formations intersect at any given moment: imperialism and the novel, for example, or the law and print culture” (2015, 132). The dense overlapping of forms within and across the world of cartonera is clear in the literary production of cardboard publishers. Cartonera is not a genre; rather it contains and plays with a multiplicity of genres, including poetry, prose, and (less often) drama, from oral tales in Indigenous languages to rap, from love songs to feminist manifestos, from children’s literature to literature by children. This sheer diversity is reflected across and within cartonera catalogues, which invariably resist categorization through hybrid literary and social forms. Sergio’s prose fiction is inspired by American Beat poetry but also borrows from the short-story genre and local Guadalajara street slang, the language of the barrio to which La Rueda’s founder is so attached. Dulcinéia’s Catador (2012) is similarly rich in form, a collage of texts including a rap song, interviews with waste pickers, and an academic essay, incorporating different social strata, sociolects, and lived experiences (Bell 2017b). In turn, these forms are means of shifting the relations between the barrio (in La Rueda’s case) or the Glicério Recycling Cooperative (in Dulcinéia’s), the world of publishing from which they are traditionally excluded (Bell 2017b), and the narratives of repressive government regimes that so often silence these voices (Bell and O’Hare 2020; Fong 2018b; Rosa 2018). Returning to the Puente Grande project, the cartonera activities intervened in at least three of the major structural forms covered by Levine: hierarchy, rhythm, and networks. The project disrupted the deeply entrenched colonial hierarchies that permeate the prison system in Mexico and across Latin America. The publishing program also disrupted the repetitive rhythms of prison life, described by Erika in Wind and Mirrors as a “daily routine that has taken over my senses” (2019, 29). For Erika, the cartonera program was a chance “to escape imaginatively from this oppressive system,” allowing her to break out of the sense of “infi nity” brought about by her long prison sentence and find her own pace of writing over extended periods (29). And the project opened new channels of communication through solidarity networks that connected writ-

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ers and publishers on the inside with readers, publishers, bookshops, and libraries on the outside. For these women prisoners, especially those who receive few or no visitors, it is highly significant that the books would come to circulate beyond Jalisco, through La Rueda bookshop and the central library of Guadalajara, and even globally, through our collaboration and broader networks of prison activists, in digital versions, online exchanges, and English translations.* Seeing cartonera interventions like these as theorizations of the social enables us to work not on but in collaboration with cartonera publishers as creative, reflexive, social actors who work through artistic practice to decolonize social relations and political ontologies and to disseminate pluriversal knowledges and epistemologies. To develop appropriate methods, however, it is necessary to move away from a common tendency, present in Levine’s work, to privilege the literary canon and the literary critic (Bell, Flynn, and O’Hare 2020). Through our longitudinal ethnographic work and our postcritical positionality we offer an alternative approach that anchors formalist methods in acts of reading that belong not to a privileged literary critic with specific training in formalism but rather to social actors and artistic practitioners themselves. The world of cartonera is not dependent on academics and even less so on Western reading practices to take form, inform, and transform. Instead, cartonera publishers themselves both theorize and reform the social through processual artistic and literary actions. Levine’s approach thus leaves room for questions that pave the way for further methodological experimentation: How can generalizing formalist methodologies be reconciled with ethnographic work located in concrete, unfolding experience? What happens when artistic practice, which has often served as a tool for theoretical development, is considered a research method in itself? To what extent can academics become involved in more creative, collaborative, participative, immersive activities such as cocurating exhibitions and media experiments (Lash 2007, 75) while retaining their credibility as rigorous researchers? We refer to our methodological framework as “trans-formal” because of the possibilities it affords to move between social, cultural, and aesthetic forms. * Inspired by the pioneering collection led by Celis Carbajal at the University of Wisconsin– Madison Library, we have worked in close partnership with the British Library, Senate House Library, and Cambridge University Library to build a large collection of cartonera books for readers, researchers, and activists in the United Kingdom.

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While it is based upon Levine’s Forms (2015), with this framework we also seek to move away from the impasses in her work by drawing from a range of more practice-oriented and action-based approaches to research from the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Toward a Trans-Formal Methodological Framework The trans-formal methodological framework we have developed in response to our experiences of cartonera publishing is premised on the close yet fluid relation between aesthetic and social forms, the kind of entanglement we see in the stitching of cartonera books themselves, a stitching that serves to produce both a book (through manual binding techniques) and a community (through collective workshop practices). The term “trans-formal” is used to defi ne a methodology able to operate across different aesthetic, literary, discursive, social, political, and material forms, across human and other-than-human forms, and across different kinds of form (shapes and actions, spatial configurations and temporal practices). On the one hand, this implies approaching the social forms at play in cartonera practice through methods derived from the aesthetic forms used by the publishers, a departure from Levine but following the logic of her radical formalist proposition. On the other hand, “trans-formal” means reading the texts as interventions in and creative reflections on these social forms; that is, it entails viewing their discursive practices in oral and print form as generators of their own critical thought and theory. From a social sciences perspective, our trans-formal approach builds on participatory action research (PAR) paradigms and activist anthropology. Though our premise differs considerably from the original PAR methodology set out by Orlando Fals Borda (1978), whose later work with Colombian peasants in the 1980s was deeply inspired by Marxism and the political atmosphere of Latin America of the time, we retain his commitment to the cocreation of knowledge with the aim of challenging North/South and academic/nonacademic epistemological hierarchies and to horizontalizing and decolonizing qualitative research practices. This political commitment manifests in an ethnography and textual analysis that is “both politically engaged and collaborative in nature,” as Jeff Juris has advocated (2007, 166), a practice that seeks to place in question the hierarchies of researcher and researched, object and subject, text and critic.

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In this way, we find inspiration in a multiplicity of more recent collaborative research propositions. Among these are Zoe Todd’s imagination of “a space that’s willing to break down walls, that’s willing to play” (in Pandian 2019, 3) and Macarena Gómez-Barris’s conviction that in response to extraction and a consequent totalized flattening of meaning, “there is already so much being done that what we require is a practice of listening to and then amplifying present-future analyses, responses and proposals” (2018, 136). And like Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, we anticipate the various angles of critique that our collaborative methods may bring about, from those who might see in our work an unfortunate ceding of theoretical ground to “the informant,” to those who may simply “turn around shaking their heads in irritation” (2018, 17). In our case, working with cartonera publishers in diverse Latin American contexts encouraged us to make a commitment to dialogue and cocreation with a multiplicity of actors engaging with the shared socioaesthetic practice of cartonera publishing but adapting it to their lived realities and struggles, whether those of Indigenous communities, homeless people, punks, or women prisoners. We focused on the idea of pôr as mãos na massa (getting your hands dirty), which our Brazilian cartonera collaborators often invoked, to bring about trans-formal methods that could emerge processually, relationally, and artistically through engagement with the messy, sticky, and at times chaotic practices of cartonera, “an extremely fun chaos” celebrated by Javier in the context of the São Paulo Art Biennial. So we went about our research by working across the different forms of cartonera production, circulation and consumption: stitching books, painting books, displaying books, collecting books, exchanging books, selling books, reading books, discussing books, presenting books, writing books, editing books, and translating books. The central pillar of our methodology that gradually came together as we immersed ourselves in these plural sociomaterial processes draws on what Alex and the artist Noara Quintana together have termed “reference to gesture” (Flynn and Quintana 2021). We understand gesture here not in an anthropological sense, through its relation to language (Kendon 1997), but more particularly with regard to its artistic significance. Let’s start with Vilém Flusser’s deceptively simple defi nition: If I raise my arm, and someone tells me that the movement is the result of physical, physiological, psychological, social, economic, cultural, and whatever other causes, I would accept his explanation. But I would not be satisfied with it. For I am sure that I raise my arm because I want

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to, and that despite all the indubitably real causes, I would not raise it if I didn’t want to. This is why raising my arm is a gesture. Here, then, is the defi nition I suggest: “a gesture is a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation.” (2014, 1–2)

For Flusser, a gesture comes about not through external impetus but rather through a manifestation of internal dialogue. Importantly, that dialogue is always translated into a propositional act, that is, Flusser raises his arm because he wants to, not because a particular force obliges him to do so. The gesture is one of the cornerstones of artistic practice. It is the act of creation; it is a movement that creates. First theorized by Cicero and Quintilian in the first century BCE (J. Hall 2004), we have come to associate the gesture with the painter’s brushstroke and the sculptor’s chisel. But if, following Flusser, we associate gesture with the expression of subjectivity, a gesture is defined as such because it articulates meaning; the gesture of the painter’s brushstroke, the movement of the sculptor’s chisel, is equivalent to her specific intention, her very state of mind, her agency as she moves through the world, making. In this sense, the artistic gesture acquires an expanded significance. It is no longer solely the movement of a paintbrush on canvas or a metal tool on sandstone, it is a body in the world through which each gesture creates meaning, in a propositional, nonobliged sense, or, to return to a concept widely used and practiced across the cartonera landscape, in an autonomous way. Why do we insist on this specific notion? Cartonera is an artistic practice that issues a proposition through form. These forms speak to both social and aesthetic dimensions that seek to intervene in the material sociality of the world. In our reference to the gestures that underpin cartonera’s forms that intervene in the world, we, the research team, sought to recognize and cite the power of cartonera’s proposition in our research. We wanted to avoid any appropriation by making clear that the gesture itself belongs to cartonera publishers in all their diversity, as a vast set of autonomous practices of world-making. In openly referring to the forms through which cartonera works in our research inquiry, we were paying homage to the practitioners who had shared that knowledge with us and taught us their actions. Working in Latin America, we were also inspired by the notion that reference to gesture finds its roots in artistic practice, such as in the possibilities of reencenação of Lygia Pape’s 1968 work Divisor. The practice

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of reencenação, which has no equivalent English term, can be thought of as an exercise in which one takes part in a particular choreography that was previously designed and carried out by someone else. The reencenação contemplates a flexibility of circumstance as directed by one’s subjectivity; circumstances of the original will change in keeping with the particularities of that reencenação’s context and location. It is not to be confused with a repeat performance; each reencenação is unique, but one can understand the structures, affective dimensions, and relationality of the steps of the choreography from the point of view of another, the person who first passed on this knowledge. If this were a simple repeat performance, its potential as a method would no doubt be limited; however, in referring to the gesture that cartonera proposes, as opposed to merely reproducing the result of that gesture, we inevitably, following Flusser, expressed our own subjectivities, and our gesture acquired its own distinctiveness. Our conviction to proceed in this manner was reinforced by the invitation from our interlocutors to write, make, display, and take part. During our fieldwork we saw how cartonera collectives had almost always come about through direct contact with other cartonera practitioners, and came to understand that this has been the main way through which cartonera has spread across Latin America and beyond. Back in 2003, when Cucurto and Barilaro imagined a cartonera book in every school and two publishers from Lima got in touch, they recognized the adaptability of the artistic model they were using and passed it on. Our conviction to work through reference to gesture was reinforced by noting how each collective interpreted the model slightly differently, producing unique forms of meaning. We began to understand that if we wanted to conduct ethnography that was not extractive, that would create outputs that were not limited by narrow conceptions of academic value, and that could produce knowledge that departed from a different epistemological standpoint, gesturing to the forms through which cartonera practitioners operate would be of central importance to our process of inquiry. In this manner, through our fieldwork, historical and literary analysis, and conversations with project partners, we identified four forms through which cartonera practitioners operate: texts, encounters, workshops, and exhibitions. Referring to the artistic gesture behind these four forms established three core principles that permeated everything we did. First, cartonera is a highly reflexive process and these were already existing forms of inquiry and research; second, our approach

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would directly contribute to the cartonera community throughout the project lifespan and beyond; and third, in referring consistently to these forms that traversed the social and the aesthetic, we would not only be researching but also producing knowledge that originated in a space closer to cartonera’s own positionality with regard to the distribution of the sensible.

Undisciplined Methods: From Participation to Reference to Gesture In practice, developing this trans-formal methodology and imagining a method to sit within it involved months of work on the texts and dialogue with our partners in Mexico and Brazil. Through lengthy discussions over coffee and teacups of mezcal, cutting cardboard and stitching books, supplemented by countless WhatsApp and Facebook group chats, we created a research design with our project partners that was structured by the artistic gestures that cartonera practitioners consistently expressed. Learning these steps and citing their models, we cocreated exhibitions, workshops, coeditions, and encounters of the type that we had enjoyed accompanying and observing during the early days of the project. In this way our research became synonymous with coproduction, emerging not only as an assemblage of plural modes of understanding and meaning-making but also as an open-ended set of processes that evolved through extensive dialogue with our collaborators in Guadalajara, Cuernavaca, São Paulo, and Barão de Guaicuhy. This open-endedness has been as essential to our research project as it is to cartonera publishers themselves. When cartoneras intervene in their local communities, they always collaborate with workshop participants to defi ne and decide on the nature of their activity and its outcomes; where the work in a given community starts, where it goes, and how it grows can be altogether different things. And so it was with our research project. Compared to the methods we had imagined at the outset of the project, a cultural studies approach to the “articulations” of cartonera through literary criticism and ethnography (S. Hall 1996) or a more straightforward anthropological research process of participant observation, the methodology we developed through collaborations was unexpected and serendipitous, allowing us to research alongside cartonera practitioners and codesign activities that were meaningful and transformational for us as researchers as much as for the publishers and their wider communities.

CHAPTER 3

Texts: Cartonera Literature in Action

With some notable exceptions, such as a fascinating chapter in Marcy Schwartz’s Public Pages (2018, chap. 4), very few studies of cartoneras attend to the content of their books, as Ben Bollig notes (2015). This may seem surprising considering that cartonera publishing is a form of producing, disseminating, and circulating texts. After years of grappling with cartonera literature, however, we have come to understand that this lack of critical attention is connected to cartonera literature’s resistance to interpretation. It is very difficult to read a body of work that is not, in fact, a unified body of work. Cartonera is more dispersed and diverse than the infrarrealista movement that first brought cartoneras together in 2008 in the copublication of Respiración del laberinto and had no central manifesto other than to “blow the brains out of the cultural establishment” (Moreno 2014). During the time we have worked with cartoneras, we have not come across a single motto or mission that unites this loose network of publishers, some of whom do not even like to be identified as publishers or even, in fewer cases, with the term “literature.” Yet as Paloma and Lucy came to realize in one of their many productive conversations over the years, the value of cartonera lies precisely in the absence of definition. Its beauty lies in its evasive plurality. In this sense, the only mottos that perhaps do ring true across the colorful landscape of cartonera are those of the Zapatistas, who have been highly influential for activists (including cartoneras) across Latin America. Zapatistas famously struggled for “a world in which many worlds fit,” and their alternative modus operandi, stated in no uncertain terms in their

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1998 Fifth Declaration,* involves “another form of struggle,” “another way of doing politics,” and another way of working with “others like us.” Here, we engage with the multiple others embodied in cartonera literature: other subjectivities and decolonial ontologies; other ways of doing, living, and being; other modes of action. Embracing the inescapable heterogeneity of cartonera literature, we see how its actors enact literary production as a fruitful mode of embodying, connecting, and horizontalizing plural voices from diverse sections of Latin America’s highly stratified societies. The wonderful richness of cartonera literature, which can be found in bookshops, literary festivals, libraries, public squares, and online, is revealed in its pluriversal voices, rhythms, and textures. Underlying decolonial explorations is a fundamental question that elicits much heated debate in cartonera circles and has fascinated and challenged us throughout our research. Given the staggering diversity of this publishing movement, what makes a book cartonera, beyond its cardboard cover? Our intention is not to defi ne cartonera literature, to search for a cartonera essence, or to exclude any publishers who selfidentify as cartoneras from the broader network. Nor is it to map, generalize, or categorize the thousands of texts produced across hundreds of collectives in their own geographies. Our inquiry, like cartonera itself, is much more open-ended, and here we ask: What is the relation between the cardboard cover and the text, between cartonera forms of production and their literary content? How do their collective actions of catar, of gathering, collecting, sorting, reclaiming, and repurposing discards materialize in their literary works? To what extent do their published texts dialogue with their day-to-day activities? Why does that matter? We approach these questions by bringing together some of the texts published by our four cartonera research partners throughout our project, from October 2017 to December 2019, to help deepen our understanding of the connections not only between their publications and their actions but also across their irreducibly plural yet connected approaches to community writing and publishing. Our readings of cartonera therefore stand in contrast to those of Cala Buendía, who argues * The Zapatistas’ “Quinta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona,” of 1998, is posted at Enlace Zapatista, http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx.

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that “all these spin-offs [of Eloísa] are highly localized and in no way function as a network” (2014, 134). While cartoneras are highly localized, this does not prevent them from functioning as a network. Nor does it stop their books from resonating with one another. In many ways, our approach to cartonera aligns with the thought of the activist and academic Cecilia Palmeiro. In relation to the work of the Argentine writers Cecilia Pavón, Washington Cucurto, Francisco Garamona, and Damián Ríos at the turn of the twentieth century, Palmeiro insists that “all these texts belong to a network, and beg to be read as part of this horizontal and contemporary dialogue” (2011, 160). By reading cartonera texts published across Mexico and Brazil side by side, we call attention to the contemporary, horizontal dialogues between diverse collectives not through explicit conversations between publishers, although these are common and important, but through cultural, social, and political connections. We examine Dulcinéia’s autobiographical collages and texts, Catapoesia’s collective prose and poetry, La Cartonera’s bilingual NahuatlSpanish poems, and La Rueda’s short stories and artistic collaborations because we saw them being planned, made, launched, and circulated. In many instances we participated in those activities, and in a few cases, following our method of reference to gesture, we took part in their design. Accompanying and participating in these production processes allowed us to grasp the ways in which cartonera texts, in conjunction with the covers that bind them, disrupt hegemonic discourse, dominant hierarchies, and prevailing meanings. The process of gathering and sorting used materials is at the heart of cartonera publishing, and it has different names across Latin America, including catar in Brazil, cartonear in Argentina, pepenar in Mexico, and clasifi car in Uruguay. To the workers who inspired Eloísa Cartonera and continue to drive the work of Dulcinéia Catadora, “gathering” means collecting discarded materials from the streets or from public or private organizations. This restorative process has taken on multiple material and political affordances in the work of cartonera publishers, from reviving local memories and revaluing Indigenous knowledges to reclaiming words and defi nitions and even recovering the memories of Mexico’s desaparecidos (disappeared), echoing the various meanings of recovery and recycling in Latin American contexts (O’Hare 2020). In many different ways, cartonera texts materialize artistic practices of recovery that in turn constitute political acts of resistance. The result is a set of books

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and catalogues that puncture holes in the prevailing conceptions of literature, publishing, and activism while threading them together to produce new socioartistic forms of action. Before launching into detailed readings of cartonera texts, though, let’s take a quick step back to address an important question: What is new about cartonera literature? Specifically, what are the original contributions of its writers and publishers in a region that has such a long history of political literature?

What Is New about Cartonera? From nation-building narratives like Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845) by the Argentine statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, through Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán (1971), to the rise of the testimonio in the 1980s and 1990s, Latin American writers have long held close ties to the world of politics. In particular, testimonio, a mode of life-writing famously exemplified by I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchú 2010), resonates with cartonera publishers’ desire to present, represent, and make present the words, voices, and views of those systematically marginalized from mainstream political discourse. In The Failure of Latin America (2019), Beverley makes an extended comparison between cartonera literature and the testimonio. On some levels we agree with this reading, insofar as cartonera is “a communal practice of appropriation, production, and distribution,” a “militant practice at the edge of literature” that “dislocates or resituates our sense of literature” (98, 99). Yet what distinguishes cartonera from testimonio is its contrasting historical and theoretical context. Testimonio debates, Georg Gugelberger explains, were connected to a broader political shift from “thirdworldism” to postcolonialism: The desire called testimonio was the desire called Third World literature. With the replacement of the Third World metaphor by the metaphor of postcoloniality, testimonio critics could not remain unaffected. When the margin moves to the center and loses its counter-hegemonic quality a different assessment is required. (1996, 2–3)

In relation to these paradigm shifts, our contention is that cartonera publishing is more closely related to what some of our Latin American partners have identified as decolonial practice, which in turn gives way

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to pluriversal forms of literature in action. Decoloniality, unlike postcolonialism, is a political project rooted in Latin America and led by Latin American thinkers and practitioners. Based on the understanding that the process of independence in Latin America was “a rearticulation of the coloniality of power over new institutional bases” (Quijano and Ennis 2000, 567), decoloniality seeks to untangle and “delink” knowledge production from a falsely universalizing European episteme. While there are undoubtedly connections between cartonera publishing and testimonial literature, many elements set cartonera apart from these literary and political predecessors. Whereas the testimonio debate hinged on questions of representation, mediation, and truth, encapsulated in the polemic unleashed by the anthropologist David Stoll (1999) around whether Rigoberta Menchú was telling the truth, the publishers discussed here seek to render marginalized communities visible less through linguistic representation than through material, affective encounters. Cartoneras operate through literary practices grounded in action: making, meeting, and being. In so doing, they ground themselves in what Scott Lash (2007) terms the “facticity of practice,” in collective action that renders cartoneras and their communities visible, important, and autonomous, in the mere fact of existing and surviving in the face of adversity. As we have heard so many times on our cartonera journeys, “existir es resistir,” existence is resistance. In seeking to explore cartonera decolonially, we dialogue with the works of Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, and Arturo Escobar to explore the ways in which, considered together, cartonera texts form a body—a breathing, living, moving, material, affective body—of literature(s) in action. Our point is not to read cartonera publishing as a unified decolonial project; the heterogeneous, decentralized world of cartonera precludes any such consensus. Yet decolonial modes of thinking enable us to gain a better understanding of the lived vitality of cartonera books implicit in their manifesto statements: The cartonera movement anchors its purpose and proposal in the affirmation of the human being as a living and corporally-bound subject. Practice and literature embrace one another in the search for this excluded and marginalized other. (Mandrágora Cartonera 2009, 117) We cartoneras have learned that publishing is in our hands and, above all, in the heart that allows us to feel books as living things. (La Cartonera 2009, 180)

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A deeply processual approach to literature allows cartoneras to foreground the book as a living thing, and the act of bringing these objects to life produces meaningful encounters with an excluded and marginalized other that recalls that of the Zapatistas’ Fifth Declaration. Through practices that vary subtly or overtly from collective to collective, these encounters enable diverse communities to challenge prevailing modes of knowledge, thought, and research; to unstitch the prevailing colonial relations that continue to divide Latin American society through hierarchies based on gender, race, and class; and to restitch the social through artistic practice and literary creation. We begin with Cartoneras in Translation (Bell, Flynn, and O’Hare 2018), a collection that features work by our four principal project partners, before reading selected publications by each of these collectives: Dulcinéia Catadora, Catapoesia, La Cartonera, and La Rueda. Whether autobiographical, poetic, or visual, whether by emerging artists, rebellious writers, or disenfranchised communities, the texts in question provoke us into reconceptualizing the relations between literature, publishing, art, activism, and resistance. Without a single characteristic that unifies them all, their writings are best read in connection with the relational processes from which they result: processes of recovering, reclaiming, and remaking; processes in which diverse writings take form and plural authors, individually and collectively, make worlds.

Cartoneras in Translation : Horizontalizing Literary Production Key to understanding the junctions and disjunctions between these four diverse collectives was the coproduction of an edited collection with our cartonera partners, Cartoneras in Translation (Bell, Flynn, and O’Hare 2018). As part of our commitment to working with and through gesture, this volume echoes the cartonera form of the copublication in which different collectives each publish the same text, albeit with their own designs, constructions, and sometimes prologues and paratexts. This copublication, like other references to gesture we have employed throughout the project, taught us much about cartonera texts and their publishers, whose words and actions in the collaborative process revealed more about what cartonera is, who cartoneras are, and what really matters to them. Prior to this copublication exercise, we viewed cartonera as a common socioaesthetic practice, the basic model of producing books and art objects out of recovered cardboard in workshops,

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which tied together their otherwise disparate social aims and literary catalogues. The copublication uncovered a much more complex picture. An ethnographic example demonstrates that the “basic” artistic model of cartonera bookbinding was an erroneous generalization of quite different and at times incompatible material practices that in turn are embedded in their highly heterogeneous texts. The example is a very concrete one and centers on a practical problem that recurs across the world of publishing: text length. Unlike commercial publishing, where text length often comes down to issues of editing and cost, for cartoneras it was a matter of manual production. La Cartonera has honed its flexible binding technique from a model developed by Nayeli’s father; La Rueda uses Israel’s electric drill; and Catapoesia use a Coptic stitching technique that can accommodate bigger books through multiple text blocks. Dulcinéia worked with a rather more restricted manual technique, employing a handheld bradawl, a very deliberate echo of the tool used for purposes of hygiene by the waste pickers to collect materials from the street. And so, while La Cartonera, La Rueda, and Catapoesia were able to work easily with a longer manuscript for Cartoneras in Translation, Dulcinéia was constrained by a very specific page limit. Seeking to resolve this technicality proved difficult, as attested by the following WhatsApp exchange: Alex: Do you think you can work with this form, a book of a hundred pages, composed of five booklets? Lúcia: No.

This difficulty seemed a purely technical question, how to perforate one hundred sheets of paper and a cardboard cover. But as time passed with no change in Dulcinéia’s position, we realized the implication of the double fold: the aesthetic form that this copublication would eventually take was entirely a product of the social situation and dimensions of relationality in which it was being imagined. The idea of five booklets did not work for Dulcinéia because they could not physically perforate one hundred pages with a bradawl. Lúcia’s counterproposal was to create a book with three booklets of thirty-three pages each, the whole held together with a different kind of binding. Laura Daviña, the designer, created both models, and we took them to Dulcinéia. At this meeting it became clear that the collective members had altered their stance. Dulcinéia’s fierce autonomy, expressed through socioaesthetic choices, was at stake in this collaboration, and the efforts we had made to engage

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Figure 3.1. Four car-

toneras, four binding techniques. From left to right, binding by Catapoesia, La Cartonera, La Rueda, and Dulcinéia. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

with its particular ways of making books had tipped the balance. A couple of days later, the collective replied that yes, they could make the five booklets work through the Coptic stitch method. This horizontality is materialized in the edited texts, which offer a window onto the diverse worlds of cartonera publishers. Though they were limited by the practical constraint of twenty pages per collective, each made selections that underlined the importance of bringing heterogeneous voices into one collection, stitched together through their different techniques (figure 3.1). Dulcinéia used the opportunity to create new texts, an essay by Lúcia and autobiographical prose and poetry by Andreia, Maria, and Eminéia. These powerful texts materialize the accessibility of cartonera publishers as “groups always eager to disseminate the most diverse of literary texts” (Rosa 2018, 34). Catapoesia’s selection highlights the collective’s focus on disseminating voices from some of Brazil’s most remote communities, especially those of ru-

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ral Minas Gerais. A poem by Isadora Georgia dos Reis hints at the colonial history of mining and cotton picking that marks the community of Gouveia, where Catapoesia is based. La Cartonera’s selection, like its catalogue, is international and multilingual and includes poetry, an essay, children’s literature, narrative fiction, and a song. It offers excerpts from La vaca bipolar (Gochez 2014), a light-hearted oral tale “told at a lovely cattle ranch in Cuernavaca,” and a poem from the 2015 volume of Kosamalotlahtol: Arcoiris de la palabra. La Rueda’s choice of texts is the collective’s manifesto as well as a short story by Sergio, “Azul” (Blue), characterized by his playful and creative language that horizontalizes lower- and middle-class discourses and highlights the extraordinariness of everyday life in Jalisco. As well as calling attention to the heterogeneous catalogues of these four cartonera collectives, this copublication points to certain features of cartonera literature: it captures the everyday lives of the urban and rural communities in which the cartoneras are based; it recovers local stories, oral histories, and often-forgotten legends; and it raises the status of previously unpublished, peripheral, and Indigenous voices in the world of publishing. In each of these four collectives, their active engagement with marginalized, stigmatized, and vulnerable communities is materialized in their catalogues, which reveal their processuality in different ways: through autobiographical interventions and affective maps rooted in everyday experiences of the metropolis of São Paulo (Dulcinéia Catadora); through the literary crafting of decolonial memories, knowledges, and epistemologies that they are able to recover (catar) along their trails (Catapoesia); through a pluriversality that reserves a special place for Indigenous cosmologies (La Cartonera); and through countercultural literature that, while highly playful, cannot be detached from Mexico’s flawed democracy, politics of repression, and forced disappearances (La Rueda Cartonera).

Dulcinéia Catadora: Relationality, Affect, and Art Brazil’s first cartonera, Dulcinéia Catadora, from 2007 to 2021 has published more than 140 books of poetry, prose, and art by authors and artists ranging from the emerging and little-known to the famous, including Horoldo de Campos, Samuel Beckett, and, more recently, Tim Ingold.* * For a full list of Dulcinéia’s publications, see the collective’s catalogue at its website, http://www.dulcineiacatadora.com.br. The catalogue is divided into

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Its publications, as highlighted in Cartoneras in Translation (Rosa 2018, 35), are the fruit of collective labor and, more specifically, a means of forging relations between people from diverse backgrounds, especially between the waste pickers of the Glicério recycling cooperative and the artists and writers who accompany them on their journeys. In its manifesto (2015), Dulcinéia Catadora insists, “Art’s value does not reside in the final product; the process has priority, because it is in the process that the exchange between people occurs, mistakes occur, confl icts, uncertainties and differences appear.” The books the collective produces are not just literary works or artists’ books; they are “instruments of resistance” (Rosa 2015). Since 2018 Dulcinéia has turned increasingly to artists’ books as a means of dismantling stubborn social hierarchies. Here, we focus on textual and visual works that offer a glimpse into the collective’s processual approach to publishing within the recycling cooperative. In Cartoneras in Translation, autobiographical narratives by Maria, Andreia, and Eminéia reflect and enact the subjectivities of each member of the Dulcinéia collective. Andreia’s begins with this introduction: OK! My name is Andreia. I was born in São Paulo, the state capital. I have been involved in recycling since I was a kid, my grandfather was a waste picker, my father is a waste picker, and so how could I not be a waste picker too? (Emboava 2018a, 24–25)

Andreia begins her story in a colloquial style that indexes the informal conversations with other members of the cooperative and the research team that led her to put pen to paper. At this stage in the narrative, an almost fatalistic logic seems to underpin her life story: becoming a waste picker is an inevitability given her upbringing. Yet the narrative registers a shift in thinking and being as a waste picker, and Andreia concludes her text thus: I still face some difficulties in life, because I’m “Black,” “Poor,” and a female “Waste Picker,” and for these and other reasons I suffer a lot of prejudice. But I live with dignity, love, peace, and wisdom! It is not easy, nor will it ever be, but I carry on, search for new horizons, always seeking better days for myself, my children, and my grandson. This is the story of my life, as a waste picker, a mother, a woman, a daughter, a wife, a grandmother, and, above all, a warrior. (2018, 27) two sections, literary texts and artists’ books, to highlight the work with artists that is so important to the collective.

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Andreia uses the copublication to denounce the stigma she has suffered due to her race, gender, and socioeconomic status as well as to reassert herself through positive qualities and values. Moreover, she seizes on the opportunity to affirm herself as a human being, not despite but through her profession and her gender. The fi nal sentence establishes her plural, intersectional identity (Crenshaw 1989), which could not be further from the seemingly deterministic trajectory painted in the fi rst paragraph. The process of reflecting on her life, for Andreia, appears to have opened up myriad self-identifications that fall under one dominant key, that of the warrior, a figure that in turn encapsulates a powerful attitude of resistance with which Andreia so often identified throughout our collaborations. Andreia thus (re)positions herself through a particular standpoint—feminism (Harding 2003)—in which her subject status as a warrior and a cartonera publisher is rooted in her experience of marginality as “black, poor, and a female waste picker.” Her short autobiographical text gestures toward a complex narrative that weaves together experiences of poverty, stigma, and strife with qualities of strength, determination, and wisdom as well as values like love, peace, and dignity. Maria’s perspective on her life as a waste picker is very different, but what the texts and the women have in common is their strength of character and determination. Maria’s strength materializes in her writing through a style that is consistently and resolutely self-assertive: My name is Maria Aparecida. I’m from Bernardino de Campos, a small town in the interior of São Paulo state. One day I decided to take a risk in life, so I came to the capital, São Paulo! To get by, I worked in some bars and restaurants, then I became unemployed. I was homeless for a while, living in the street and that’s how I came upon recycling, where I got back my dignity, pulling a cart around the city. I worked with scrap metal and then after the government closed the collection points, I came to the Glicério cooperative. In 2009 I met Lúcia Rosa, who introduced me to Dulcinéia Catadora, and today I’m a member of the collective. (Dias da Costa 2018, 32)

Maria places the focus not on her experiences of unemployment and homelessness that led her to waste picking as a means of survival but rather on how she transformed her own life and recovered her dignity through her work in recycling and subsequently as a member of the Dulcinéia publishing collective. She goes on to explain how she has represented Dulcinéia in a range of activities, from public workshops to

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talks and roundtable debates at literary festivals, and has been elected president of the Glicério Recycling Cooperative for two consecutive terms. Maria’s proactive attitude is reflected in her repeated use of active verbs in the first person, which highlights her valuable work as a waste picker—“I pulled a cart, I worked with scrap metal”—and as an artist and publisher: I made a photo book with the artist Maíra Dietrich based on a work by Paulo Bruscky that I became fascinated by. I took many photos in the coop, and Maíra then added her contribution to the work. In 2015 we traveled to many cities as part of a SESC program to which we contributed. (Dias da Costa 2018, 33; our italics)

By emphasizing her social actions and cultural contributions, she disrupts the sharp divisions and exclusions that characterize global capitalism, in particular the distinction between “useful” producers/consumers and the “wasted lives” of those outside of those categories, including migrants, refugees, and the unemployed (Bauman 2003; Bell 2017b). Against this flawed duality, Maria theorizes her social situation thus: “To be a Dulcinéia waste picker is to say that waste pickers also make culture” (Dias da Costa 2018, 33). The recycling cooperative is presented not as the end of the capitalist value chain that descends from production through consumption to disposal but rather as a central contributor to São Paulo’s social and cultural life. Waste picking, as conceptualized by Maria, is a means of making a living and a way of living well, with pride and dignity. Maria’s reflection resonates with Millar’s work with Rio’s waste pickers in which she critiques scarcity as a “persistent paradigm for understanding lives lived in precarious conditions,” instead offering the notion of “forms of living,” meaning ways of making a living and lifestyles (Millar 2018, 8), to point to the plurality of modes of being, living, and working as a catador(a). Maria, Andreia, and Eminéia call the reader to pay attention to “what else, beyond mere subsistence, is produced by their labor—what values, social relations, subjectivities, lifeworlds” (Millar 2018, 8). Their deceptively simple narratives open onto plural forms of living. For Maria, these are expressed through her productive relations with artists, her acts of risk and adventure (in the verb aventurar), her physical and subjective journey (viajar), and her reappropriation of culture for the peripheries. For Andreia, they are encapsulated in the core personal values and qualities that underpin her work and life. Arquipélago, published earlier in 2018, takes its reader further into

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these diverse, intimate lifeworlds. The six Arquipélago accordion-style books are the result of a collaboration between the artist Thais Graciotti and four members of Dulcinéia Catadora: Maria, Eminéia, Tatiana (who has since left the cooperative), and Lúcia. Through a series of four weekly encontros in 2018, the women retrieved printed images from the discarded materials that are brought back to the Glicério cooperative every day and worked with Thais to turn these into their own personal maps of São Paulo. We read the resulting collages in relation to these inspirational women and friends, their autobiographical texts, and our conversations inside and outside the co-op. The archipelagos offer fluid visualizations of their identities, subjectivities, and relationalities as waste pickers and warriors, literary publishers and artists, cooperative members and leaders. Maria’s two collages offer distinct visual perspectives. One is a futuristic vision of a city whose gray, tightly packed buildings and airborne zeppelin seem to leave no room for human or animal life, gesturing perhaps to a sense of being suffocated by an ever-growing megacity. Her other collage is dominated by a recurring image (revolved three times at different angles) of a man dressed in protective clothing and white gloves, superimposed on a huge concrete block that he appears to be cleaning (figure 3.2). In both, the cityscape is reinvented through Maria’s juxtapositions and superimpositions, which are at once geometrically configured and relationally fluid. The maps provide a response to Mara Viveros who, in an article on feminist movements in Colombia, insists that to understand identity in contemporary Latin America requires invoking the “fluidity and divisions that characterize identities” and accepting that “specific subject positions are produced socially and culturally” (2007, 183), through relations to others and in relation to multiple identitarian positions spanning gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and profession. Through their personal and interpersonal archipelagos, the women of Dulcinéia resist what Cherilyn Elston terms “simplistic generalizations about ‘Latin American feminism,’” and highlight the “complicated and often unequal social terrain on which they operate” (2016, 30). Graciotti (2018) gestures toward this situated, embodied multiplicity in her accompanying text placed discretely on the right of each collage: You are holding in your hands one of the six maps for a very precious archipelago. This is not just any map. This is a cartography produced with the remainders of a world—São Paulo—collected by women who navigate the streets of this great metropolis, and who’ve long been building

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Figure 3.2. Maria, in Dulcinéia Catadora’s workplace in the Glicério recycling cooperative, holding her two original collages, reproduced for the Arquipélago books. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

a place of existence where the power of encounters is transformed into colors, into books, into other, different worlds. These maps inscribe territories of resistance, which build their place-islands on the fragments of discarded materials through the invention of a dialogue with the city. Postcards of São Paulo and photos of strangers become collages from the point of view of these helmswomen, transforming this cartography into a multiplicity that opens up new territories. No, Dulcinéia is not an island. It’s an archipelago. Enjoy your journey.

This dense description needs unpacking, embedded as it is in Thais’s thought and its cultural and philosophical influences, particularly, as she told us while putting these books together, the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Suely Rolnik. How do these objects, created from the scraps of the city, inscribe territories of resistance? Territory is conceptualized in relation to dialogues and encounters. Regarding the many autonomous decolonial projects unfolding in contemporary Latin America, Escobar explains that “territory” is “shorthand for the system of relations whose continuous re-enactment re-creates the community

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in question” (2018, 173). Dulcinéia’s members work day to day to construct and reconstruct their own territory through artistic interventions and social encounters, producing strong social networks and relations that contrast the physical precarity of their base of employment in an occupied space from which they could be evicted at any time. The collages constitute material remainders of the transformative encounters between the members of cooperative, the artist Thais, a community of readers, and the scraps of the city, which coalesce through a process of creative mapping. Whereas the power (and the Achilles’ heel) of testimonial literature lies in the representation of the subaltern, the strength of the archipelagos lies in their ability to act as affective maps that shift—rather than seeking to contain—identities, relations, and perspectives. The maps are not mirror images; they are open-ended itineraries that lead to and connect with the other. We can see here how Thais’s work is imbued with Rolnik’s concept of resonance, which is premised on subjectivity’s exposure to alterity: “to discover and desire the singularity of the other, without feeling shame in discovering and desiring, without feeling shame about expressing that desire, without fear of contaminating oneself” (Rolnik 1998, 141). Unlike Jonathan Flatley’s conception of the affective map as a “mobile machine of self-estrangement” (2008, 7), the archipelago maps are neither machines nor alienating. Instead, through resonance, they invite, tempt, and seduce the reader, viewer, holder into discovering the singularity of the other. The reader is intimately involved in this process by virtue of being the privileged recipient of one of these maps, of which there are only sixty circulating in the world, whose uniqueness is inscribed through their numbering. The resonance of these objects is suggested in the dual meaning of Graciotti’s opening phrase (2018): “Here in your hands.” The phrase foregrounds touch rather than reading, inviting the holder, in Rolnik’s terms, to discover and desire the singularity of the Dulcinéia artists through affect and materiality, “without fear of contamination.” The expression also gestures toward a sense of “responsibility” and “care,” two words that echo across the world of cartonera, from the publishers who take great care in making books to librarians like Sergio Rodríguez, who explained to us that collecting cartonera books and holding an annual encuentro in the library of Santiago is an act that carries a heavy weight of responsibility. The meaning, effect, and affect of these maps are thus literally and materially in the holder’s hands. “Dulcinéia Catadora is not an island,” Graciotti asserts (2018), because its status as a territory of resistance derives from its capacity to encounter, extend to,

Figure 0.2. Mixtec family with Nayeli and Dany in the Parque Chapultepec workshop. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

Figure 0.3. Thiago Honório’s Dulcinéia, 2017. In collaboration with the Dulcinéia Catadora collective. Pierced cardboard, string. Fifty signed copies. Photograph by Edouard Fraipont. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 0.4. The Glicério recycling cooperative as viewed from Dulcinéia Catadora’s workspace. Photograph by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

Figure 0.5. Dany Hurpin and Nayeli Sánchez of La Cartonera, in Dulcinéia Catadora’s workshop. Photograph by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

Figure 1.2. Eloísa Cartonera poster. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

Figure 1.3. Andreia (right) displaying her book Passagem inside its box in the

conservator’s office at Senate House Library in London, with Lúcia standing by her side. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

Figure 2.1. Espejo y viento book launch at Puente Grande prison in Mexico,

April 15, 2019. Photograph courtesy of Puente Grande press team.

Figure 2.2. Cartonera workshops at Puente Grande. Photographs courtesy of

Puente Grande press team.

Figure 3.2. Maria, in Dulcinéia Catadora’s workplace in the Glicério recycling cooperative, holding her two original collages, reproduced for the Arquipélago books. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

Figure 4.3. Temok Saucedo of A My Me Vale Verga looking on during the encuentro cartonero. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

Figure 4.4. Econtro cartonero in São Paulo, November 2018. Photograph by

Lucy Bell.

Figure 5.1. Sergio and Israel at their cartonera bookstall at the Ixtlahuacán del Río

book festival, 2017. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

Figure 5.4. Cochineal workshop in Guadalajara’s Templo Expiatorio square, 2017. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

Figure 5.5. Sergio oversees children experimenting with cardboard and cochineal, 2017. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

Figure 6.3. Solange Barreto in conversation with Brasinha in his community

museum. Photograph by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

Figure 6.4. Júlio with Seu Manoel (left), wearing the robe that denotes his

membership in the Cordisburgian Academy of Letters. Photograph by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

Figure 6.5. Poster outside the Casa do Povo in São Paulo for the exhibition

“Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas.” Photograph by Lucy Bell.

Figure 6.6. Staircase module at the exhibition “Cartoneras: Releituras latinoamericanas.” Photograph by Filipe Berndt.

Figure 6.7. Workstation at the exhibition Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas.

Photograph by Filipe Berndt.

Figure 6.8. View of the exhibition Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas.

Photograph by Filipe Berndt.

Figure 6.9. The first workshop session, led by Andreia and Maria of Dulcinéia Catadora, for members of Warmís, MILBI, and the Colectivo Feminista de Argentinxs en São Paulo. Photograph by Laura Viana.

Figure 6.10. Somos mulheres imigrantes (clockwise from top left): the front cover; the open book; the full text; the “No Woman Is Illegal” fold-out protest placard. Photographs by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

Figure 6.11. “No Woman Is Illegal” placard held during the Women’s Day demonstration, São Paulo, March 8, 2019. Photograph courtesy of Brasil de Fato.

Figure 7.1. The London Cartonera Book Festival (clockwise from top left):

participants making books at Catapoesia’s workshop in the British Library’s Story Garden; the project’s cartonera partners in front of the Senate House Library; Sergio overseeing bookmaking during La Rueda/Viento Cartonero workshop at the University of London. Photographs by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn and Solange Barreto.

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and forge rhizomatic alliances with other individuals and groups. We are far, here, from the reality effect of the testimonio, which “produces if not the real then certainly a sensation of experiencing the real” (Beverley 1989, 22; his emphasis). Though these material remainders may well constitute what René Jara and Hernán Vidal term “a trace of the real” (1986, 2), they do so not through representation but through resonance and relationality. The female members of the waste-picking cooperative transform their sense of self and relationships with others, restitching the social fabric of the city through active engagement with its material and cultural residues.

Catapoesia: Epistemic Disobedience, Decolonial Practices We continue our journey through cartonera literature with the texts of Catapoesia, which emerge from the trails of the sertão of northern Minas Gerais. Sertão, like so many words and worlds that feature in our project, does not have a single translation but is often approximated in English to “backlands” or “hinterlands.” The sertão of Minas Gerais is the same setting that occupies center stage in the work of João Guimarães Rosa and especially his magnum opus, Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1956). Over the two years we worked with Catapoesia, 2018–2019, the collective, deeply inspired by Guimarães Rosa’s legacy, worked with several community groups and produced an impressive twenty-two new texts to add to their growing catalogue of more than sixty titles. One of these is a volume coedited by Catapoesia, Letras de cartón (Cuerva and Barreto 2019), featuring work from twenty collectives, from Peru, Paraguay, Mexico, France, Spain, Chile, and Brazil. This international collaboration stands out in a catalogue that results principally from a highly relational practice with people much closer to their home.* Based in the remote backlands of Minas Gerais, the collective has as its principal aim to publish the voices of some of the region’s most isolated, marginalized communities. Sol explained to us, Our writings are intrinsically related to our work in communities. Catapoesia, from the beginning, decided to write collective texts because * Catapoesia’s full catalogue is at https://catapoesia.wordpress.com/livros. Some of its books may be purchased at the website, and Sol carefully packages them up and sends them to readers and collectors across the world.

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they benefit from the words of all the participants, even those who don’t like to write. Our role is to include all the members.

The texts bear the marks of this communal process and Catapoesia’s ethical stance of inclusivity. Cipó (Barreto and Brabo 2018b), for example, is part of the Leitura Viva (Live Reading) program; it comprises a set of short texts collected on the Caminho dos Escravos (Path of the Slaves) on the Serra do Cipó, where Sol and Júlio left a cartonera book for walkers to contribute comments. When they returned to the book a few weeks later, they found several comments, including the following: “I can’t write,” signed Luiz Antônio. This simple yet powerful statement is printed in Cipó; though Luiz Antônio could not write a longer text, he is still made present through this minimal but lasting material inscription. This inclusive process of bookmaking connects Catapoesia’s work closely with that of Dulcinéia. Yet Catapoesia’s texts and objects reimagine catar in a context that could not be further from the megacity of São Paulo where Sol first encountered the publishing model. The authors are not waste pickers but leaf pickers and “mestres da raiz,” community elders with a deep knowledge of the sertão’s flora and fauna; they are not members of an urban occupation but sertanejos, members of communities that for generations have lived in and with the sertão. As suggested by the name of the collective, Catapoesia, their work of catar involves recovering cultural memories and local folk tales connected to the “natural” environment of the sertão through the lived experiences of the communities that, though they have lived and worked there for generations, have been cast aside in the national state-building process and were not granted status as one of Brazil’s many “traditional communities” until 2007. In the context of Catapoesia’s work in the sertão, the word “natural” is placed in quote marks above for two reasons. Sol and Júlio insisted repeatedly throughout our fieldwork that the region bears the scars of extractivism and enslavement, as we are reminded by the name of the state, Minas Gerais (General Mines). Beginning in the seventeenth century, Indigenous and African peoples were exploited to mine gold, gems, and later diamonds (hence the name of the city of Diamantina), and the landscape lays bare the wounds of these extractive activities. Furthermore, Catapoesia’s texts explicitly problematize the very concept of “nature” and its opposition to “culture” through engagement with a traditional cosmovision mediated through their interlocutors, especially the

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sertanejos. Bringing Catapoesia’s 2018 Muros (Walls) collection in dialogue with the thought of Walter Mignolo and Phillipe Descola, we argue that it is by recovering material memories of a people—the sertanejos—silenced by colonial and neocolonial narratives that Catapoesia’s interlocutors reinscribe and revalue themselves and their ways of living and being in the world. Muros is an unfinished project by the Cordisburgo-based collective Loucos por Memória (Crazy about Memory), which Catapoesia helped to set up, whose five members collect histórias (stories and histories) across the town of Cordisburgo and the surrounding sertão. Their books are the result of collective action, be it hiking, interviews, or publishing workshops in which participants paint the covers and bind the books. The aim of the collection, whose title, Muros (Walls), refers to the mountains that make up the Espinhaço mountain range, was to record the stories and memories of the traditional communities of the area. As a literary collection, the Muros-inspired texts are hybrid forms that combine historical narrative, geographical descriptions, walking guides, oral tales, and poetry. The first book of the collection, Cordis, né? (Cordis, right?) is a collaboration between Sol, Júlio, the Loucos collective, and the mestre de raiz (root master) Seu Toco Pequi (figure 3.3). As suggested by the title, the shortened local name for Cordisburgo followed by the colloquial contraction né? (isn’t it?), it is a provocative intervention, an act of renaming and resignifying the cerrado, the savanna biome that surrounds Cordisburgo and covers much of the region. This is hinted at in the poem that lies at the heart of the book, the central pages that because of the large staples that bind it together first opened up to Lucy as she picked up the book to read: It’s not common to fi nd books in the Cerrado. Rubbish, yes, incomprehensible, rejected, it flies over the scattered ground. A connotative reading can be seen in the natural furrows. Word, paragraph, verse. A single verse: “The Cerrado is not a library.” Human literature must be rewritten. (Barreto and Brabo 2018a, 14)

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Figure 3.3. Seu Toco Pequi in his front room in Cordisburgo. Photograph by Alex

Ungprateeb Flynn.

The poem proposes a set of dualities—books/cerrado, library/cerrado, literature/cerrado—that serve as provocations in a literary collection deeply rooted in the cerrado. A similar provocation comes in the tension in the “natural furrows” resulting from the act and art of plowing that “reveal a connotative reading,” a literary practice. Sol and Júlio’s poem thus prompts a set of questions about the relations between books, reading, literature, and the cerrado. The cerrado provides much more than the setting of the Muros collection; it is its impetus and its drive, its life and its body. The urgency of rewriting “human literature,” in this context, suggests a call for decolonial literary practices that refuse to take for granted the categories of human, nature, and culture. Indeed, as argued powerfully by Mignolo, the very concept of the “human” was a construction of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, built on the act of differentiation: [I]n order for [the colonizers] to self-identify with the human, they needed to draw on differences with entities that were lesser than or nonhuman. . . . When Christians encountered lands and people they

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did not know and baptized the people Indians and the land Indies, and when later on in the sixteenth century the trade of enslaved Africans began, it was necessary to situate the human and humanity in relation to people whom the Bible did not account for. (2018a, 158)

The result of this colonial impulse was the labeling of Indians and Blacks and their classification as “lesser beings” in relation to the prototype of the (White) human. Underlying the human/less-than-human construction, another fundamental dualism underpins what Mignolo terms the “colonial matrix of power” (2018a, 157): nature/culture, an opposition that Philippe Descola argues (2013) makes no sense beyond Western civilization. The criteria for any such opposition simply do not exist, for example, in the Amazonian Achuar community’s cosmology, “in which most plants and animals share all or some of the faculties, behavior, and moral codes ordinarily attributed to human beings” ( Descola 2013, 8). There is therefore no equivalent for the words “culture” and “nature” in the ancient languages of Mesoamerica and the Andes. Against this backdrop cartonera publishers like Catapoesia play their part in a broader critique of dualisms that, Escobar argues, “is arising from many different intellectual and activist domains, not just academic critiques” (2018, 3–4). Catapoesia’s project goes beyond critique, featuring among the many autonomous grassroots projects that contribute to a broader project of decoloniality, which seeks to take hold of the deeper structures and systems of knowledge upon which coloniality is based through a process of “epistemic reconstitution” (Mignolo 2018a, 166). This becomes clear in Toco Pequi’s “Coração magoado” (Sorrowful heart): The act of naming living or nonliving beings is a task for popular knowledge. This often happens with trees, mainly in the cerrado biome, where the voice of the people [o povo] is the most powerful. (Pequi 2018)

Two important points emerge from these lines. Toco Pequi classifies beings not as human or nonhuman but as “living or nonliving beings.” The distinction he makes points to a hierarchy of animate and inanimate objects that in certain Indigenous communities, as Descola explains, is “not based upon the degrees of perfection of the beings in question or upon the differences in their appearance” but rather upon variation in their modes of communication and socialization (2013, 6).

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And for Seu Toco, renaming constitutes a political act of reclaiming local species from official colonial language through the “powerful” voice of the cerrado community. The titular coração magoado is a tree known more widely as the inga; its popular local name is reclaimed here. Toco Pequi explains that the name derives from the “sad shade of red” taken on by its leaves, which as they mature “recall a sorrowful, grief-stricken heart” (Pequi 2018). The povo, the people, thus take power not over nature but through nature, through what Mignolo refers to as “relational modes of knowing” (2018b, xi), rooted in lived experiences of the cerrado, an environment resignified by the sertanejos through an embodiment that is at once physical (as it provides their sustenance as well as their medicine) and emotional (as their feelings are mediated through the cerrado’s flora and fauna). In this manner, the literary collection can be read as a series of acts of resignification or epistemic reconstitution that serve to recover material memories and embodied knowledge. Later on in Cordis, né? the story “Pau santo” (Holy wood) claims back the meaning of the eponymous tree through Toco Pequi’s ancestral memory. In the Christian narrative the Holy Tree takes its name from Jesus resting under its branches; Toco Pequi’s tale is much more localized. The name, he recounts, came from the use of the cerrado tree’s leaves for ox carts; because the carts were made of wood, the friction would set the wood on fire; the solution was to insert the leaves of this tree between the wheels and the axis to prevent them from burning. “It’s because of that action that the people took to calling it the Holy Tree,” Toco Pequi explains (in Barreto and Brabo 2018a, 17). This story can thus be read as a decolonial act of epistemic disobedience in uncoupling the plant species from the Christian narratives upon which the colonial matrix of power is founded. Integral to this process of reclaiming silenced meanings and knowledges is the act of walking the paths of the cerrado with Seu Toco, as shown in this poem by Sol and Júlio: Thus we were prepared to get to know all the flora mediated by Seu Toco all in his/her/its time and pace the research was understood as a caipora effort (Barreto and Brabo 2018a, 8)

The collective’s knowledge of the flora of the cerrado, here as elsewhere, is mediated by Seu Toco. The line “tudo a seu tempo e a hora” (all in

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its time and pace) is ambiguous, referring simultaneously to Seu Toco and to the flora of the cerrado, pointing to a cosmology in which the living organism of the human body operates in a continuum with its surroundings. Sol and Júlio characterize the resulting research process as an “empenho caipora,” another phrase that is difficult to translate: empenho refers to an attempt, endeavor, or physical exertion, suggesting that their research is rooted in both embodied action and emotional drive; caipora, in Tupi-Guarani mythology, is an inhabitant and custodian of the forests. In the attempt to understand this passage, Lucy had a long conversation with Sol, who explained, “We believe we are caiporas .  .  . and our caipora research is a lifelong endeavor insofar as it is inscribed within us, within our souls.” Sol’s theorization of caipora research challenges a notion of research rooted in European imperialism and colonialism. Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains that “‘research’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary” because of its association with “the worst excesses of colonialism,” extractivism of natural resources but also of “our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce” (1999, 1). From this perspective, caipora research constitutes an act of resistance against the epistemic extractivism that perpetuates colonial relations of power over some of the world’s most endangered yet valuable communities, ecosystems, and biomes (Bell 2020). Sol and Júlio, the walker-writer-researchers of Cordis- né?, work under the spell of the forest as its flora is mediated by the root master Seu Toco, at his rhythm, which is also the rhythm of the cerrado. Their research is based on postextractivist practices rooted in a close relationship—a resonance, to return to Rolnik—between (wo)man, animal, plant, and earth. This human-animal-plant relationality recurs throughout the Muros collection and the community-based actions by which it was generated. In another short text, Sol tells of her search for a walking stick: It was close to the Serra dos Coités that we saw on the ground the stick that would become part of my path. Seu Toco recovered it with wisdom. He really enjoys working with unusual materials from the cerrado, transforming them, extending their lifespan, and giving them a new mode of being. (Barreto 2018, 10)

“More than a valued object,” the titular stick (cajado) they pick up marks what Barreto calls “the energetic starting point for sharing memories and collective listening to tales and stories told as we walk” (11). Seu Toco’s actions and Sol’s words resonate with Jane Bennett’s theory

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Figure 3.4.

The cajado in the cerrado of Minas Gerais, 2018. Photograph by Sol Barreto, courtesy of Catapoesia.

(2010) that even the most seemingly inanimate material object, a piece of dead wood in this case, has “thing-power.” In the context of the cerrado, though, thing-power must be understood in relation to Indigenous cosmology and astronomy rather than (Western) new materialist philosophy. The cajado gains its power when Seu Toco blesses it under the stars and crescent moon (Barreto 2018, 11), the celestial bodies that hold such sway in Indigenous cosmologies across Latin America, particularly among Guarani communities (de Mello 2015). The title of Sol’s piece, “Memories of the Stick,” thus takes on multiple meanings. It refers to Sol’s memories of collecting the stick and to the shared spiritual experiences it embodies, including traditional and Indigenous memories, that are in turn recorded on the object by colored ribbons (figure 3.4). Catapoesia’s texts and labor are thus marked by the process of catar, collecting elements of the cerrado and bringing them together to construct a literary landscape on the foundations of a radical, caipora

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research practice. This political-literary endeavor is situated within a burgeoning and global postextractivist movement, paving the way for “thousands of diverse alternative practices—many of which are not capitalist—across the planet . . . oriented towards utopic horizons that propose a life among human beings and between human beings and nature” (Acosta 2017). Through highly localized literary interventions, this cartonera publisher helps disseminate ways of being, knowing, and relating to the earth as well as model those alternative practices through literature in action. Making literature, for Catapoesia, is decidedly connected to a radical social process: remaking the world.

La Cartonera: Toward a Pluriversal Catalogue La Cartonera in Cuernavaca, Mexico, has a distinctly cosmopolitan catalogue that opens onto alternative ways of being human through heterogeneous literary practices of world-making.* We begin with a poem by Rigoberto Domínguez García, a poet and mechatronics engineer from San Pedro Cholula, a colonial city in Puebla state built on an Indigenous settlement. The city’s notable history of colonization is recalled by the huge, mostly buried archeological complex Tlachihualtepetl, the largest pyramid in the world, on top of which colonial settlers built a Catholic church, an emblem of the systematic decimation of Indigenous cultures by the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century. Rigoberto’s “Ce tlalli”/“Una tierra” (An earth) in Nahuatl and Spanish opens volume 6 of Kosamalotlahtol: Arcoiris de la palabra (Sánchez and Hurpin 2019). Ce tlalli mo tlahuia toixpan Zatepan oczequi tlaltin pehuan tlanextian Icuac ahzi nochi yohualtzintli Ipan chipahuac ilhuicatzin Caten miyacquen citlaltin Nochtin petlanin ipan tlaihualtzintli

An earth appears before us Then other earths start to light up When the blessed night comes In the limpid venerable sky There are many stars All shine brightly in the blessed darkness

* La Cartonera’s full catalogue is posted at http://edicioneslacartonera.blog spot.com /p/catalogo-de-la-cartonera.html. The blog gives addresses where the collective’s multilingual books can be purchased, in Cuernavaca, Oaxaca, Puebla, and even two bookshops in Paris.

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Ti cualtizquen ti tlachian In oltin, in ohhuihuan Nochtin mo tlacemahyan Yehhuantzin Qui tlahuian cemanahuac Qui tlahuian tlacatl

We can observe Their movements, their paths They are all alike The queens of the night That illuminate the universe That illuminate man

Huan nic ilnamiqui tlen citlaltin Tlamantli ocachi chicahuacquen Ipan cemanahuac mo patlan, mo tlacehuian, mo tlaxinian Huan ni mo tlahtlania itech tehhuan, tlacatin tlacatin amo nemin cenca nochti ipan cemanahuac miqui citlaltzitzin ohuihqui

And I remember that the stars The strongest things in the universe They transform, fade, and die And I ask myself about us men Men do not live forever Everything in the universe dies So do the stars

huan icuac tiquin tlachian citlaltzitzin tehhuan tiquín tlachian oczequi tlaltipactzitzin tehhuan ti tlazalohuan tlen cemanahuac qui pia nemiliztli tlen cenca caten ipan ollin tlen achto oczequi tlaltzitzin o tlacatquen, huan zanima to tlaltzintli, huan to tlaltipactzintli

And when we observe the stars We observe other worlds

icanon to huehuecoltzitzin O qui chihuacquen tlahtolli “Citlalli” Citlalli ican nahuatlahtolli qui ihtoznequi . . . “ce tlalli” (Domínguez García 2019, 13–14)

We learn that the universe has a life That they are always in movement That before, other vulnerable stars were born And after, our blessed earth and our world That is why our venerable ancestors Created the word Citlalli Citlalli in Nahuatl means . . . “an earth”

This is the first poem of a collection published in 2019, marking the International Year of Indigenous Languages at a historical moment when, of the 5,000 Indigenous communities worldwide with their

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own languages, 2,680 languages are critically endangered (N. Sánchez 2019, 6). Nayeli Sánchez’s introduction highlights, though, that more is at stake than language loss; each of these languages supports a unique identity, reality, ontology, and autonomy (7). Preceded by Nayeli’s poignant introduction, “Ce tlalli” can be read both literally and figuratively. On one level, the stars Rigoberto describes are the celestial bodies that lead the author to reflect on his own mortality and the ephemerality of his universe. On another level, they are metaphors for the thousands of languages that give light and life to different communities, cultures, and ways of being human. On both these levels, the poem contributes an often-overlooked perspective embedded in the Nahuatl language: ce tlalli (“an earth” rather than “the earth” or “Planet Earth”) acknowledges that our earth is but one of millions. The thinking that underpins “Ce tlalli” corresponds with the concept of pluriversality, a notion that gained prominence through the Zapatista uprising of the 1990s. In the early 2000s, pluriversality was advanced by decolonial scholars as a project that in Mignolo’s view involved “renouncing the conviction that the world must be conceived as a unified totality (Christian, Liberal, or Marxist) . . . viewing the world as an interconnected diversity” (2018b, x). Such a decolonial shift in perspective, for Mignolo, leads to a potentially profound horizontalization of power: “stripped of its pretended universality, Western cosmology would be one of many cosmologies, no longer the one that subsumes and regulates all the others” (x). Viewed within the broader context of cartonera production, the multiple earths of Rigoberto’s poem gesture toward such pluriversal horizontality and heterogeneity. La Cartonera’s actions as a publisher open up a plural, pluriversal political ontology. While we worked with La Cartonera in 2018 and 2019, the collective published, besides the annual Kosamalotlahtol collections, nine new poetry collections, including bilingual and trilingual editions in Spanish, French, and German; three historical, essay, and testimonial works, including a collection of texts and photographs commemorating the 1968 student movement on its fiftieth anniversary; and one shortstory collection. This range of genres and languages is reflected in the diversity of the authors, who come from all walks of life and professions, including engineers such as Rigoberto and, to quote Nayeli, “otra gente cercana” (other friends). Three examples of prominent figures in La Cartonera’s life and catalogue are Kristos, the singer-songwriter whose lyrics were chosen as La Cartonera’s very first publication; computer scientist Edgar Artaud Jarry, to whose infrarealist poetry they have dedicated three titles; and sociologist Victor Hugo Sánchez, whose exten-

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sive research on local and Indigenous oral histories has appeared in La Cartonera’s catalogue since 2009, such as the Trova suriana (2011), a collection of traditional songs from Morelos. The collective’s commitment to the plural is marked by the publishers’ systematic naming in all their books of each participant from the cover-painting workshops, often more than twenty contributors of different nationalities, cultures, and ethnicities. What unites the catalogue, as the founders suggest in their manifesto, is this very diversity: Ours is a cartonera without cartoneros, but with an impulse to run through streets and computer in-boxes, parks and cafés, cybernetic conversations and the alcoves of any place on the planet, to collect the stories of our time, until we come up with some way to contact other galaxies. (La Cartonera 2009, 178)

This statement sets the tone for La Cartonera’s catalogue. Playful and pluralistic, it invites readers to connect with different modes of being human, different ways of knowing, relating, living, and being. As the publishers point out in Misael Cedillo’s 2019 documentary, Sueños de cartón, their workshops represent different ways of living together and bring together diverse actors. Dany says, “There’s a really cool [padrísima] mix,” including “artists from all walks of life, members of the general public who are not artists, friends who are academics, and so on.” Through a diverse collective, a unified material sociality of practice, and prices that vary only according to the length of the book and the consequent cost of production, La Cartonera horizontalizes different knowledges, philosophies, and literary movements. Aztec cosmologies are present through the work of the urban Nahuatl poet José Carlos Monroy, as is quantum theory with the posthumanist poetry of Edgar Artaud. Modernism is represented in several publications dedicated to the muchcelebrated Malcolm Lowry, who wrote Under the Volcano (1947) during his time in Cuernavaca, and infrarealism through texts by Santiago Papasquiaro, Edgar Artaud,* and José Rosas Ribeyro. The catalogue features well-known authors such as the Peruvian-Mexican novelist Mario Bellatín and Mexican poet and peace activist Javier Sicilia alongside little* Patrick met Edgar Artaud at a book launch when the poet was dressed in the space suit featured in his 2018 collection La vida no es más que un electrón en busca de un lugar para descansar (Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest). The title is an homage to the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent- Györgyi.

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known poets from Morelos, including Maria Jiménez Baltazar, whose mother tongue, she insists, is Nahuatl/Muosieûale. In this way, La Cartonera responds to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s call for an “ecology of knowledges” (2007) and to the need for “horizontal dialogues among different traditions of thought” (Boidin, Cohen, and Grosfoguel 2012, 2). Within La Cartonera’s impressive catalogue of more than sixty titles and one hundred editions, the Kosamalotlahtol collections play an important role, with seven volumes published by 2020. Each collection is rooted in the cartonera workshop held as part of the Mother Language Book Fair (Amoxilhuitl In Tonanyoltlahtol) in Xoxocotla, as indicated in the publishers’ foreword to volume 6: “La Cartonera is grateful . . . to all the children, women and men, young people and adults who participate in our cartonera workshops, because this participation is also part of the process of rebuilding the community” (Sánchez and Hurpin 2019, 4). This “rebuilding” refers both to the social fabric of Xoxocotla, as one of Mexico’s many Indigenous communities whose survival has been a struggle in the face of oppression and erasure, and to the material structures of the village, which was hit particularly hard by the earthquake that shook Morelos state in 2017. The reference to rebuilding also helps make sense of the book’s literary content such as Monroy’s poems, which constitute a fierce critique of the capitalist socioeconomic powers that over the past five hundred years have caused the fragmentation, destruction, and extinction of Indigenous communities across Mexico and Latin America. In “Gossypium hirsutum,” Monroy denounces the cotton trade as an instance of colonial exploitation, extractivism, and slavery: Miek ipatioj iken tlakamej kikouaiaiaj kaman pixkatekej motolinkej uan tlalaxkauaj kiueietiaj itomin, imelio, ipialis. Imixkatsitsiuan tlaltipak tsetselouaj ixkichka xichkatsin iluikak kueponij . . . Imixkatsitsiuan tlaltipak tsetselouaj ixkichka xichkatsin iluikak kueponi

The white cotton, the bitter salt of the sobs of the pickers. A high price for the clothes that people were buying as the pickers were dying of hunger and the landowners accumulated their money, their resources, their possessions. The earthly little clouds shake while the celestial cotton blooms. . . .

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Mexko okimakak ichkatl kikemitia tlaltipak, kema melak. . . . Tel ajke kikemis Mexko? (Monroy 2019, 30–31)

Mexico gave the cotton that clothes the world, it’s true. . . . But who clothes Mexico?

The seemingly innocent white cotton is one of the principal materials of the global textiles industry, worth a staggering $425 billion in 2015 ( Riello 2015, xxiv). It serves as a powerful image of the deception of imperialism, a veil over the “darker side of Western modernity” (Mignolo 2011), colonial exploitation in the name of economic progress. Specifically, Monroy’s poem refers to the boom of the cotton industry on the US-Mexico border in the early 1810s that brought wealth to powerful landowners on the Gulf Coast while forcing the mainly Indigenous Mexican population of Texas to abandon Native lands and enslaved people from Africa, smuggled across the US-Mexican border, to endure hardship and suffering (Torget 2015). The cruel working conditions on the plantations in then-Mexican Texas is suggested in the image of the “bitter salt” from the tears of the cotton pickers and the blooming of the “celestial cotton,” a metaphor referring to the enslaved people who died while enriching the landowners. A more ambiguous image is that of the “shaking earthly cotton,” which may suggest the fear experienced by enslaved workers or the uprising of revolutionaries in the Mexican War of Independence that took place in the same decade. This hint at rebellion is reproduced linguistically in Monroy’s poetry. While his poems critique the coloniality of power in Mexico, they also offer modes of resistance, creating a literary pluriverse through the use of the Nahuatl language and Mesoamerican cosmologies. This is most striking in the paratextual details he includes so insistently at the end of each of his poems, such as the place and date here: Teopan, Mexihko-Tenochtitlan. Chikasen tochtle xiuitl, toxcatl metstle, matlaksen koskakuaujtle tonajle (11/06/18) (Monroy 2019, 31) Teopan (now la Merced Neighborhood), Historic center of Mexico City, year six rabbit, twentieth of tóxcatl, day eleven king vulture (11/06/18)

Resisting the one-world universalism of the Gregorian calendar, Monroy dates the poem through the Mesoamerican system. Against the cultural colonialism embedded in Mexico’s Spanish place names, he situ-

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ates the poem in Teopan, reclaiming the pre-Columbian name for the neighborhood now known in its Spanish form as La Merced. Moreover, by grounding each poem in its own place and time, he underlines the contingency of his poetic production. In this way, he actively resists any pretension of universalism, in line with Bernd Reiter’s assertion that “all knowledge is bound by the place, time, and positionality of the knowledge producer” (2018, 5). Monroy’s desire to decenter knowledge production and therefore power became clear in a conversation with Lucy in the latter parts of the project when he specified, In relation to Gossipium, I have to tell you that cotton was already exploited by the Mexica people in ancient times. Everyone talks about colonialism as a European invention, but other societies also practiced it.

Referring to recent research by the archaeologist Raúl Barrera and colleagues on the peoples of Ixcateopán, Monroy pointed out that cotton was used to dress the Mexica warriors ruled by Izcóatl, who subjugated the peoples of Oztuma, Ixcateopán, Taxco, Tlaxmalac, and Cuetzala in the fifteenth century. Research indicates that Ixcateopán (meaning “temple of cotton”), under the rule of Izcóatl, delivered large quantities of manufactured cotton to the Mexica-governed centers of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tlacopán (Mexico, INAH 2010). Monroy insists on this point: since processes of colonization have taken place in plural sites by plural peoples, not only by Europeans, even the history of colonialism needs to be rewritten, rethought, and decentered, something that he seeks to achieve through his poetry. Such decentering also occurs in Monroy’s “Pantitlán,” the name of a historic site of child sacrifices (Wood 2020). The title refers both to modern Mexico City’s metro station and to the ancient lake of Tepetzinco near Tenochtitlán at the Indigenous heart of the capital. Ijkon omijto kokonej omiktilojkej numpuna Poiaujtla, numpuna Pantitlan, ateskapa kitetsalkualtikej epkoamej uan kiuikajkej mokuepkej tlalokej. Ipan atlakaualo metstle, sejse xiuitl.

As it was said that the children were killed there in Poyautla, there in Pantitlán, on the lake they turned into epcoates and they were led to turning into tlaloques

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Miec xiujtin tepan, atl okauak tlajle uan ikalakuaian Tlalokan omokuep ostomej. Aiokmo ejkoj epkoamej akaltipan ika iminepanoiujkaiouan: naman ualaj ipan sen kali kikisa, mimiloa uan tlaneloua ixkichka kiuikaskej; naman ualaj ika iken netolinilis, ixaiak maianalis, ijioj cualanilis, nochi ikak, iken tlakamej.

Many years later, the water left the earth and the access to Tlalocán turned into caves. They no longer arrived on boats clad in their dignity as epcoates: now they come in a structure that whistles, rolls, and moves as it carries them. Now they come dressed in poverty, their shoes, their clothes, faces of hunger, breaths of anger.

Ijkon omijto kokonej omiktilojkej numpuna Poiaujtla, numpuna Pantitlan, ostotijtik kitetsakualtiskej iankuik epkoamej uan kiuikajkej mokuepaskej tekitkej ipan sejse tonal, sejse metstle, sejse xiuitl.

As it was said that the children were killed there in Poyautla, there in Pantitlán, in the caves they turned into the new epcoates and they carried them to become workers every day, every month, every year.

Pantitlan ojtle makuilte. Chikasen tochtle xiuitl, toxkatl metstle, makuil itskuintle tonajle (09/06/18) (Monroy 2019, 26–27)

Pantitlán line five. Year six rabbit, twenty tóxcatl, day five dog (09/06/18)

“Pantitlán” weaves together two worlds through the motif of child sacrifices, those practiced in homage to the rain deities by the Aztecs and those resulting from the inequities of modern capitalism. “In the past,” José Carlos put it bluntly in a conversation about this poem, “sacrifices were made for rain; now they are made for money.” Today, these sacrifices are the children sent daily on trains and tubes from the peripheries to the center of Mexico City, a grim contemporary reality captured in an estimate that the Mexican workforce includes more than 3.6 million children, half of Latin America’s working children (Canales 2017).

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Their labor is an acute symptom of the exploitation of some of the most vulnerable people in an ostensibly civilized capitalist world order, recalling the “white train” in Buenos Aires that compelled Eloísa’s founders to take action in the early 2000s. Again, though, Monroy’s poem goes beyond critique; it is an invitation into the pluriverse, achieved through specific literary and linguistic techniques. The first is defamiliarization through the image of “a structure that whistles, rolls, and moves.” An emblem of Western industrial development, the underground train becomes a strange object that we are invited to look at from an otherworldly perspective. Monroy’s other strategy is his refusal to translate the culturally specific words epcoates and tlaloques in the Spanish version of the poem, meaning that the Nahuatl language cuts through the translation. Monroy explained to us that these words have very particular yet evasive meanings: The tlaloques are Tláloc’s assistants; there are four of them, and they correspond to the four cardinal points and the seasons of the agricultural cycle. As for the epcoates, we don’t know much about them; their very etymology is confusing.

The Franciscan missionary friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) wrote that epcoatl (“mother-of-pearl snake children”) referred to the children sacrificed in the lake of Pantitlán during the Atlcahualo ceremonies, in honor of the god Tláloc (Broda 2016). But Monroy opts not to translate the terms, saying, “If I did, they would lose meaning.” This brings us back to Gould’s reflection on the importance of “attend[ing] to the untranslated, the untranslatable, and to everything that resists translation” (2014, 13). By resisting translation, Monroy points to the irreducibility of specific Indigenous ways of understanding the world that have been sidelined by centuries of colonial rule but can be rescued through literary practices of recovery. Resistance to translation recurs throughout the Kosamalotlahtol collection, from Monroy’s epcoates to Tirso Clemente Jiménez’s “Joven Muosieûale” (young Nahuatl), in a poem that invokes the eponymous Muosieûale community: “Ye tieh nauatétekate ma to héhiuako” (“prepare yourself for the defense of your culture, of your identity”) (2019, 37). This insistence on Indigenous words and names is an important political act in contemporary Mexico, as illustrated by Tirso Clemente’s community, which only recently managed to reclaim its original Indigenous name, Tetelzinku, from the Spanish version, Tetelcingo. As reported by Francesco Taboada Tabón, a representative of the group Political Re-

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form in the Indigenous Communities of Morelos, “Today Tetelcingo is rebelling and has decided to recover the real names of the spaces of its community, to recover its language and recover its autonomy” (in M. Sánchez 2017). La Cartonera, through meticulous editorial work and a commitment to plurilingualism, acknowledges the importance of these reclaimed identities and complex positionalities, highlighting the tensions between the two place names, Tetelcingo and Tetelzinku. Beyond the Kosamalotlahtol collections, La Cartonera’s catalogue encompasses many other languages, cultural contexts, and genres, and it is the collective’s radically open text selections, combined with a careful editing process, that offer multiple literary “designs for the pluriverse” (Escobar 2018). Through titles that take the reader from Kristos’s deep humanism to Artaud’s cyborgs, La Cartonera’s work profoundly destabilizes the category of the human, recovering some of the hidden stories that pertain to plural ways of being human, other-than-human, and beyond-the-human (Lien and Pálsson 2021).

La Rueda: Resisting State Repression An altogether different collective, Guadalajara-based La Rueda Cartonera, resists the one-world ontology of modern capitalism through a literary practice rooted in Mexican counterculture. La Rueda is the latest configuration of a cultural collective run by cofounder Sergio Fong since the 1970s, when he and his cuates (a word with a Nahuatl root that means friends) began to make fanzines and flyers to celebrate marginal, underground culture through what Sergio refers to as “an urban, street, barrio aesthetics.” In 2009 they joined the cartonera wave and began to make books out of cardboard recovered from the streets. Stated in no uncertain terms in Cartoneras in Translation, La Rueda’s overarching aim is “to oppose government cultural policy and resist the homogenizing ideology and (dis)information propagated by public institutions and the mass media: mechanisms by which the state seeks to maintain its control” (2018, 66). From this perspective, we read La Rueda’s post-2017 catalogue as a series of literary and creative interventions against state power and violence in the context of Mexico’s flawed democracy.* Quijano and Mi* La Rueda Cartonera, unlike most other well-established cartonera publishers, does not have a record of its catalogue. When Lucy was attempting to start

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chael Ennis explain that the process of decolonization and democratization of power that occurred in postrevolutionary Mexico was “slowly limited from the 1960s, until fi nally entering a period of crisis at the end of the 1970s” (2000, 568). In the 1960s and 1970s, a so-called dirty war was waged between the PRI-ruled Mexican government (under presidents Gustavo Ordaz, Luis Echeverría, and José López Portillo) and left-wing student and guerrilla groups; the conflict resulted in thousands of cases of forced disappearance and systematic torture. Since newly elected President Felipe Calderón’s declaration of an allout “war on drugs” in 2006, the resulting violence has led to more than sixty thousand people being “disappeared” by drug cartels and state security forces (Phillips 2020). State-sponsored violence looms large in La Rueda’s stubbornly countercultural catalogue. To examine the relation between “counterculture” as understood and practiced by this particular cartonera collective and the broader processes of resistance in which its members and collaborators engage, let’s begin with La Rueda’s publication of 50 años de contracultura en México (50 years of counterculture in Mexico) (Marroquín 2019). It is a new edition of Enrique Marroquín’s La contracultura como protesta (Counterculture as protest), originally published in 1976. From his position as an ordained priest, Marroquín, a liberal Catholic scholar from Mexico City, became one of the foremost figures of Mexico’s counterculture movement known as La Onda (The Wave). In this retrospective edition, Marroquín addresses the question of counterculture through the figure of the xipiteca, an “enculturation” of the North American hippie. The 1960s are presented nostalgically as a “grandiose decade” encapsulated in the work of dependency theorists Aníbal Pinto, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Enzo Faletto, who unmasked the ideology of desarrollismo (developmentalism) that had dominated Mexico’s economic policy since Lázaro Cárdenas’s presidency in the 1930s (Romero Sotelo 2012). Marroquín thus situates the xipiteca movement explicitly within the political context of decoloniality: “In our countries it would be impossible to come out of underdevelopment because we were living under a colonized economy” (Marroquín 2019, 26). It is against this colonial backdrop that Marroquín locates the 1960s student movements and the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre that claimed the lives of dozens if not the archival element of the research, she asked Sergio if he had a list of his publications or at least a folder with the PDFs. His response, half joking, half serious, was “If I did, it wouldn’t be cartonera.”

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hundreds of protesters (2019, 30–31). The xipiteca movement, in Marroquín’s analysis, presented an alternative to these student protests, which were met with overwhelming state violence. Through alternative hairstyles and clothing, a marginal “sublanguage,” naturism, free love, and recreational drugs, xipitecas embodied an internationally recognizable form of cultural resistance to state repression. In his response to Marroquín’s essay, Sergio’s son, Pavel Neikame, argues that xipiteca cultural practices are still relevant to contemporary autonomous cultural actors in Mexico who “act according to judgments that do not conform to the ideological nucleus of the State” (2019, 69). On a practical level, Pavel foregrounds autogestión (self-management) as a mode of practicing nonconformity: [Countercultural collectives] must avoid establishing relations that subordinate their own activities to the economic-political agenda of an external actor, and if they do, it would only be in solidarity with other groups that recognize themselves as their equals but never as their superiors. Internally, these groups can’t take decisions vertically, and the efforts made together must be attributed to the collective rather than the leadership of an individual. (Neikame 2019, 73–74)

Self-management in and across collectives like La Rueda Cartonera, Viento Cartonero, and Neikame’s own publisher Varrio Xino Cartonero is linked to the broader struggle for autonomy in Latin America that, Escobar insists, “involves not only a critique of formal democracy but an attempt to construct an altogether different form of rule anchored in people’s lives” (2018, 172). Guadalajara’s cartonera initiatives align with a broader emerging autonomous book culture across Latin America described by Rabasa as an “interplay of horizontality and dialogical knowledge practices” (2019, 29). Through a politics inspired by 1960s counterculture, publishers like La Rueda and Varrio Xino enact creative forms of direct democracy and horizontality that have come to characterize new social movements across Latin America (Sitrin 2012; Zibechi 2000). La Rueda’s practices of direct democracy, though, could not be further from the large-scale, institutionalized, and end-oriented modus operandi of new social movements. Their books, instead, take form through a much more open-ended process, rooted in exchange, collaboration, and friendship. This is enacted in 50 años de contracultura en México, which, as highlighted in Sergio’s prologue (Fong 2019), is the product of a series of encounters and discussions in La Rueda’s coffee

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and bookshop in Guadalajara between Marroquín, Sergio, José Becerra, Yonbin, and Jaime Torres Guillén. These are Sergio’s compas, a word Sergio uses, he explains, to mean compañeros (companions) and amigos (friends) but also “compadres,” a historically loaded word that harks back to the solidarity politics of the Mexican Revolution. From the very first page, then, the book lays bare its status as the remainder of a process of convivial exchanges between diverse participants. And this relational process, for La Rueda as for many cartonera publishers, is at least as important as the book itself. The embeddedness of La Rueda’s literary texts in Mexico’s underground culture is clearest in Sergio’s cuentos, which combine elements of the modern short story with strong doses of the oral tradition, including a penchant toward gossip and digression.* Drawn from lived experiences in the barrios of Guadalajara, his stories fictionalize the city’s clandestine underworlds in which the writer appears as El Gato (The Cat), Sergio’s fictional alter ego who has recurred throughout his literary fiction since 2009, when he appeared as the eponymous character in his first short-story collection, Tripas de Gato (Cat’s entrails). Sergio told us, El Gato is my alter ego. I chose it because one day, my friend El Flaco and I were jumping over the fence of someone’s house, and I got scared as I started to fall and ended up on my knees. El Flaco, already on the other side, was shouting to me, “You look like a fat cat!”

Many of Sergio’s friends feature in his writing, including El Flaco, as do his favorite places, among them Guadalajara’s street markets and old bookstores, the Varrio Xino (Xinese Kwarter, Sergio’s name for his neighborhood and a tongue-in-cheek homage to his Chinese heritage), and even the Café La Rueda. Let’s examine in more detail “Albatros,” a story from Sergio Fong’s 2017 collection, Cuentos de varro, whose title, a play on barrio and barro (mud), gestures to the marginal urban settings of his stories and to the dirty wars and corrupt governments that have mired life for ordinary Mexicans over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “Albatros,” Sergio explained, is based loosely on his early childhood memories of neighborhood gossip about some of the older members of * For a detailed discussion of the hybridity of the Latin American cuento, see Bell 2014.

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his barrio. The tale opens with a single-sentence paragraph: “In the peripheries where Don Celso was born, surviving means breathing in the squalor” (2017, 47). Don Celso, in true Fong style, never reappears in the story, an example of digression, the stuff of day-to-day storytelling. But in many ways the main character is already present in this opening line; it is the barrio, one of Guadalajara’s many peripheral neighborhoods. And the story’s coprotagonist, Aunt Yuya, lives and breathes this, downtrodden barrio. As the story goes, Aunt Yuya has been quite literally refusing to let go of her dead mother. Less a psychological exploration of grief, though, this is a rather more practical tale, both humorous and deadly serious. To go on claiming her mother’s pension, Aunt Yuya has kept the corpse in her house, wheeling the rigid body outside every day to keep up the pretense and leaving it “toasted by the burning sun” (Fong 2017, 47). As described by the child narrator and his friend (Yuya’s nephew), who witness the scene while playing marbles on the street, two government officials from Jalisco’s Institute of Forensic Sciences, the eponymous Albatrosses, dressed in black and white, come to collect the corpse in a body bag. “What the hell? And what are they going to do with your grandmother?” asks the narrator. His friend responds, “Soap, I think” (48), a reference to myths surrounding the manufacturing of soap from the bodies of concentration-camp inmates in Nazi Germany (Neander 2006). The tale ends with Aunt Yuya crying and screaming at the children not to eat the sweets the Albatrosses gave them: “Spit them out! They’re made from dead bodies!” (Fong 2017, 49) The children look up and then carry on playing marbles, a chilling indication of the banalization of everyday violence, confl ict, and terror in contemporary Mexico. Sergio’s tale is a fictionalized depiction of some of the shocking day-to-day realities endured by our interlocutors and their children. It is within these realities that, against all odds, new cartonera publishers take form, in the attempt to give meaning to lived experiences but also to imagine and enact other possible worlds. Since Cuentos de varro was published in late 2017, the dramatic increase in levels of violence in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and throughout Mexico resulting from the escalating drug war has led our cartonera partners in Guadalajara to engage more explicitly in resistance against state repression (O’Hare and Bell 2020). For Sergio, this has involved forging closer links with other publishers, activists, and collectives and working with Israel of Viento Cartonero to create what they are calling Jalisco’s “Ruta Cartonera” (Cartonera  Trail), an active and activist network of literary and artistic production.

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One book that gives form to these collaborations is Trazos de resistencia (Traces of resistance, Fong 2018b), a coedition by La Rueda and Huellas de la Memoria (Footprints of Memory). Huellas de la Memoria is a collective whose public art commemorates Mexico’s disappeared in what has become an international, participatory, socioartistic intervention. Since 2013 its founder, Alfredo López Casanova, has been creating evocative installations from shoes sent to him by relatives and friends of the disappeared who have worn them to walk the country in search of their loved ones. Adding to the material traces that embody these journeys, from wear and tear to mud and dust, he engraves their soles with names of the disappeared, dates, and messages of suffering, strength, and resistance written by family members. It is this form that is adapted for the book cover (figure 3.5), which features the words, emphatically engraved in capital letters, FOOTPRINTS OF MEMORY: WE WILL CARRY ON UNTIL WE FIND THEM

This emphatically Jalisco-based collaboration is accorded primacy of place in La Rueda’s catalogue as the collective’s ninth-anniversary edition, dedicated to Sergio’s friend Tambo: “For us, even though Tambo, like so many others, is no longer among us physically, his spirit accompanies our day-to-day actions. The memory of all of them carries on, and will carry on, uniting us” (Fong 2018b, 7–8). Sergio recalled in a solemn discussion with Lucy, El Tambo disappeared from the barrio from one day to the next, and even though many of us were close compas of his, nobody ever found out what happened to him. So you know, faced with these facts, we always have to make up our suppositions and even myths. His family looked for him, but we never found out what happened to him. An old barrio legend says, “He vanished into smoke.”

As Sergio’s compa and his most direct link to Mexico’s disappeared, Tambo drives La Rueda’s day-to-day activities. But what unites La Rueda and Huellas de la Memoria is not just this common goal to recover the disappeared and fight against the political corruption and impunity that is perpetuating the disappearances; it is also a common aesthetic process imprinted in the physical bodies of their works. In the introduction, the Huellas de la Memoria collective depicts the intention behind the use of the shoes:

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Figure 3.5. Trazos de resistencia copublication, 2018. Photograph by Lucy Bell, courtesy of the collectives La Rueda Cartonera and Huellas de la Memoria.

You could say that the shoes turn into a memory device in which the body engraves the walking of searching family members as well as their voice of struggle, resistance, and courage and their broken, intimate, loving voice, which the social body must protect. . . . Hence our call to society: make our bodies into a collective body so that the necessity for truth and justice become social necessities, so that when the families are

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not there, we, as a society, can search for them and demand that they be returned to us. (Huellas de la Memoria 2018, 14)

What the Huellas collective calls for is solidarity enacted through a collective body grounded in material practices and physical substances. The “power of the shoe,” they explain, “emerges from the imperfection caused by its use: tears, dust, mud, dirt, wear” (14). These are some of the basic substances whose significance is highlighted by Ingold (2007), and they are crucial here because they make present the disappeared through material traces. In this respect, both the Huellas and cartonera collectives share a common aesthetics and ethics: the recovery of materials from everyday life, whether shoes or cardboard boxes, that retain traces of their previous itineraries while taking on an afterlife in the form of a multilayered, affective artwork; it is artwork that matters. This shared focus on collective action as a simultaneously social and material practice is enacted by the process of turning these highly personal texts and images into a collective book. When asked about the cardboard used to bind the book, which is different from the recovered materials most often used by La Rueda, Sergio explained, The Huellas de la Memoria collective decided to use that cardboard because of the silk-screen printing. Even the paper used inside the book is different from our usual paper because of the requirements for silkscreen printing. The prints of the images were made in Mexico City and sent to us. We printed the texts in Guanatos, and the Laguja workshop [where Sergio’s friend Erica makes artisanal notebooks] lent us their equipment to bind it all together.

Foregrounded here is the way La Rueda’s collaborative bookmaking practices enable ever-evolving, transient communities to form a unified social body through the gestures of printing, stitching, and binding. “To bind it all together,” here, means many things: it is simultaneously a physical act (of putting the book together); an ethical commitment (to the disappeared and their families); and a social act (in which actors from three different collectives come together to produce a common object, with, this time at least, a single objective). This act of resistance does not come about through a loud or silent protest; it is different from the caravans and marches led by the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity sparked by the poet and activist Javier Sicilia in Cuernavaca. Resistance, here, takes form through a

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collective art practice that unites the initiatives of Las Huellas de la Memoria with those of La Rueda and other cartoneras, from Dulcinéia’s Arquipélago to Catapoesia’s Muros. What each of these groups does to claim justice is to come together, in all their embodied presence, to recover some of life’s most basic materials, visible yet invisibilized because of their ubiquity: rubber soles, cardboard, sticks, fi ngerprints, dust, mud. In this way, the materials take form through a multilayered, affective artwork with an unpredictable, autonomous, and sometimes unexpected afterlife. This process is an important aspect of the material sociality of practice that both unites and distinguishes cartonera publishers, driving their everyday actions, and as Júlio Brabo of Catapoesia says, keeping “the social in movement.”

Diverse Needs, Plural Stories The readings we have proposed offer a glimpse into the ever-evasive heterogeneity of cartonera texts, which within the texts and in each of their unique versions as artists’ books bear heavily imprinted material traces of the identities, subjectivities, and desires of writers, artists, publishers, and communities. These vary from cartonera to cartonera yet demonstrate our project partners’ most significant political gestures: to resist state repression (La Rueda), to put forward a pluriversal reality (La Cartonera), to recover and revalue local memories and Indigenous knowledges (Catapoesia), and to confront racial and classist stigmas and unequal power relations (Dulcinéia). Though a testimonial impulse is present in some of their work, their literary and artistic propositions are not merely representative. To make their texts matter, cartoneras use the processes of collecting and assembling materials, objects, and knowledges, from cardboard and thread to local and Indigenous vocabularies, tales, definitions, and meanings. These processes, in each case, perform prefigurative functions, creating in the present an underlying and deeply relational matrix that points toward multiple archipelagos, islands across Latin America linked by diverse literary and artistic practices and connected through plural struggles for equality, peace, justice, and dignity. These four cartonera collectives thus create diverse forms of literature in action. Though each is rooted in its own social, political, and environmental context, they also relate to Eloísa’s original proposition. Cecilia Palmeiro comments in the documentary fi lm Cartoneras (Brant 2019),

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It didn’t make sense to have a project that didn’t have a link to the streets. It didn’t make sense to make literature for libraries that were disappearing. Bookshops were in crisis, publishers were in crisis. So literature had to fi nd other modes of existing.

Faced with this reality, Eloísa proposed a new model of doing or making literature besides simply writing it, of enjoying literary work together, and of learning through collective, creative, and playful practices. This model, in turn, has inspired hundreds of collectives and thousands of texts, united by a shared material practice of making books from recovered cardboard as well as by a desire to learn and explore “how to live together,” as the 27th São Paulo Biennial that brought Dulcinéia to life was entitled. This understanding of writing, making, and living together, highlighted by Escobar, is integral to the act of worldopening beyond state and corporate control: There is an embodied character to writing that is often disregarded, a tactility almost and a phenomenology of writing that partakes more of a makers’ culture than of the isolated “mind at work” celebrated in popular accounts of scientists and innovators. (2018, xv)

Cartonera publishers allow some of Latin America’s most marginalized communities to participate in this makers’ culture by foregrounding writing not as an isolated endeavor, but as a communal practice.

CHAPTER 4

Encounters: Existence as Resistance and Sites of Plurality

The notion of an “encounter” in Spanish (encuentro) and Portuguese (encontro) speaks to various concepts, activities, and actions. Defi nitions range from standard dictionary entries such as meeting or appointment to more conceptual notions such as confluence, conjunction, or concurrence, to nouns that point toward wider dimensions of sociality such as gathering, conference, assembly, and even rally. Cartonera is a diverse, hands-on, and gregarious affair, and all of these definitions made themselves apparent at one point or another during our fieldwork. Although naturally there is a degree of overlap with any kind of categorization, we observed the repetition of certain events that we came to understand as encounters: book launches, book fairs, performances, occupations of urban public space, saraus (a Brazilian Portuguese word for nighttime cultural events of music, art, or poetry), and the international events that cartonera practitioners attend. Cartonera forges relations, meanings, and communities and provokes the intervention of bodies in this world. Diverse encounters bring cardboard books, authors, and artists into dialogue with local communities in public spaces, offering an opportunity to understand how the political is contested from particular contexts by a specific form. Encounters manifest in different forms. We pay specific attention to two modalities: the encounter’s tendency toward open-endedness and how this characteristic acquires a specific potential when it takes place in public spaces, and the encounter as site of inscription in which collective writing practice works to challenge dominant epistemological hierarchies, destabilizing established categories and truths. We then turn to ethnography, focusing on two international encounters of cartonera practitioners that occurred during our project, the fi rst in Cuer-

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navaca, the second in São Paulo. Here, we highlight the differences between the Mexican and Brazilian contexts and the underlying concerns that emerged through lively conversations, before moving to the capaciousness of the encounter, the sheer multiplicity of relations that can emerge, from the playful and convivial to the more dissident and hardhitting. The São Paulo encontro’s program was altered on short notice upon the electoral victory, just two weeks before the event, of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right presidential candidate who has historically advocated for a return to military dictatorship. In these difficult moments, we found the capaciousness of the encounter to be a practical example of de la Cadena and Blaser’s theory of uncommonality (2018). In the creation of a coauthored text entitled BR, we find that the cartonera encounter offers room for dissent and a temporary harbor from despair; it manifests an enveloping, affective coalescence of forms but also a plurality of actions, a pairing of resonance and dissonance where these are not mutually exclusive. The encontro/encuentro is simultaneously artistic and political, literary and lived, in its forging of complex networks of resistance.

Open-Endedness, Public Space, and Inscription Dulcinéia Catadora’s manifesto highlights cartonera’s responsibility to break down the barriers between “art spaces” such as galleries and museums and “non– art spaces” such as the streets, city squares, magazine kiosks, and book fairs. Throughout the project we worked in many of the latter category with our four project partners. La Cartonera regularly takes part in book fairs in Cuernavaca and Mexico City as well as in France. La Rueda members travel across Mexico from their base in Guadalajara to participate in a variety of fairs, as well as organizing their own events closer to home, such as the francachelas cartoneras. Catapoesia exhibits at fairs in the collective’s home state of Minas Gerais, including events in Diamantina and Belo Horizonte. And Dulcinéia is a regular presence at some of Brazil’s largest book fairs, including Miolo(s), Tijuana, and Feira Plana. Book fairs tend to cater to a more middle-class audience, but even in these settings, unexpected conversations can occur that are often an explicit objective of the organizers. At one book fair, Lúcia and Andreia were approached at their stand by a woman who began to leaf through some of their books. Perhaps surprised to come across cardboard repurposed from the street and a

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waste picker working at one of the booths, the woman asked, “Do people actually buy these?” Reflecting afterward on this moment, Lúcia commented on the stigma attached to cartoneros and cartoneras, catadores and catadoras, waste pickers and cardboard publishers. For her, it was precisely for this reason that Dulcinéia had to be present in the book fair. Such prejudice needed challenging, and one of Dulcinéia’s roles was to intervene in, to occupy, exclusive middle-class spaces. Lúcia added that such comments were rare; it was far more common for people to become unexpectedly mesmerized by the feel of the books and end up buying multiple copies. Sol Barreto of Catapoesia describes her experiences at book fairs: People come first out of curiosity, then they start chatting and talking, they start to interact. Then someone from a university will turn up and start chatting with the one who is already talking to us. So, these encontros, they end up providing these moments without us even thinking about them, you know? They just happen.

Being open to the unforeseeable underpins cartonera’s potential to create encounters in public spaces and on the street. In April 2019, Lucy participated in a community action organized by Viento Cartonero, La Rueda Cartonera, and Colectivo Cultural Polanco, a local neighborhood organization, to bring together children and young adults in Lomas de Polanco, a neighborhood of Guadalajara whose residents were experiencing a vertiginous rise of drug-related crime and violence. The choice of location was a disused módulo, a small police station in Parque Montenegro, a public square transited by hundreds of community members, especially on a Sunday because there was also a food market there and a church. Choosing an abandoned police station as the site of community encounter meant that that it was seen in no uncertain terms as an occupation, a statement of resistance. The former police station was renamed Casa Polanco de la Paz y Cultura, as indicated by a colorful sign above the entrance, and the project’s objective to give the community a space to articulate their voice posed an explicit challenge not only to a culture of state-infused violence and impunity but also to the city’s repressive police culture, which only served to fuel the violence. In a city marked by police brutality (O’Hare and Bell 2020), the space invited children and their parents to come and write their own stories, paint their own lives, and make their own books. They called members of the community to come together (encontrarse, to meet up) and engage in peaceful, creative action.

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Dulcinéia has also organized many performative actions in public spaces including an intervention in which Alex participated in May 2018 during São Paulo’s Virada Cultural, the world’s largest twentyfour-hour festival, which occurs in diverse locations across the city. Wearing carnivalesque outfits made of cardboard, Dulcinéia’s members recited poetry and sang songs as they moved through the city, accompanied by an acoustic guitar and accordion. This type of interaction, seeking to move beyond the often closed circuits of art-book publishing, is characteristic of Dulcinéia’s conceptualization of the encontro. The very first book that Dulcinéia published, in 2007, is a collection of poems and short stories by authors from the periferias (outskirts subject to stigma) of São Paulo; the launch took place in the Glicério recycling co-op, hence the title Sarau da Cooperifa. The book launch, which was attended by poets, authors, waste pickers, publishers, and a bookbuying public, had multiple affordances, serving as literary event and political statement, a poetic sarau and a social gathering. It set the tone for further work in this vein, including Dulcinéia’s participation in the 2012 Festival Baixo Centro (Downtown Festival), where the collective occupied São Paulo’s Marechal Deodoro Square for a week, organizing a whole host of artistic activities: a bookmaking workshop, a literary sarau, an exhibition, a cartonera book fair, and a series of musical performances (Braga 2014). For Catapoesia the encontro is fundamental to its cartonera practice. Founder Sol Barreto’s first book was Tia Tança, a collection of oral histories as told by children from quilombos, communities of formerly enslaved people. This experience shaped all of Catapoesia’s future catalogue, as Sol explains: When I fi nished the project in the quilombo I had a feeling that I had lived my life as part of a community for two years. It was amazing, enriching. I thought, I need to structure my work along these lines, that it has to be collective. You know, it’s too easy to get in touch with an author and say, “Hey, give me your text” or “Donate your text” or “Sell me your text.” It’s too remote. There’s no sense of building content. I wanted Catapoesia to be something more constructive, more collaborative.

Almost all of Catapoesia’s texts are written collaboratively by the many groups with whom the collective has worked. To name a few examples, in Cordisburgo, Minas Gerais state, Catapoesia worked with a group of young adults who chose the name Loucos por Memória; in

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Serra Negra, São Paulo state, the collective worked with several groups including De-Fusão on the book Quartas and CRAS on the Robôs text from their base in the Trilhas da Palavra community library. In Riacho dos Ventos, the collective worked with another quilombola community on the book Buriti-Dão. Sol and her partner, Júlio, have described the beginning of their very particular editorial process as an encontro, an open-ended meeting to discuss questions of mutual interest that nevertheless has the possibility for other pathways to emerge. The Loucos por Memória group started through a connection to the Brazilian author João Guimarães Rosa. Sol and Júlio were frequent visitors to the Guimarães Rosa Museum in the author’s childhood home in Cordisburgo. The museum employs young adults to narrate sections of Guimarães’s texts to visitors, and the different generations of these performers have come to be known as miguilins, after the protagonist of Guimarães’s short story “Campo Geral” from the Manuelzão e Miguilim collection. Cordisburgo is set within the incredible biodiversity of the sertão, the hinterlands that are so important to Guimarães’s work, and Sol and Júlio wanted to connect the world of the museum to the local mestres de raiz (root masters), community elders such as Seu Toco Pequi, with their intimate knowledge of the surrounding flora and fauna. Júlio explained that working with local memories through the generational knowledge of community elders was something in which both Catapoesia and the miguilins had a shared interest. Perhaps more specific to Catapoesia’s project, however, was a certain conviction that cartonera practice in this sense constitutes resistance, both to the process of forgetting and to the way the world is ordered. As Júlio explained, “In one way or another, society puts one type of knowledge above another, right? And as a result, certain kinds of knowledge get excluded.” In this, Catapoesia takes its lead directly from Guimarães’s most important text, Grande Sertão: Veredas, an epic, sprawling novel that occupies a similar place in the Brazilian literary world as James Joyce’s Ulysses does in the English-language canon. The book has long been of interest to scholars seeking an analysis of philosophical questions of plural knowledges and meanings from within a literary context (Flusser 2002; Valente 2011). Bernard McGuirk, from a postructuralist perspective, has highlighted the deeply unsettling effect that Guimarães’s language has on established categories and truths, destabilizing binaries such as nature and culture, modernity and tradition (1997, 234). Equally, David Mittelman (2014) analyzes Guimarães’s implicit challenge to hierarchies that point to an epistemic conflict between realism and rela-

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tivism. For Riobaldo, the principal narrator of Grande Sertão, realism represents fi xed truths that seemingly stand apart from his experience of the world, whereas relativism touches on the notion that truths originate from a given matrix of sociality, a web of social and cultural conventions (Mittelman 2014, 56). Working so closely with Guimarães, and embedded in the psychogeography of his oeuvre, Sol and Júlio’s emphasis on local oral histories is not a type of “salvage anthropology,” the early twentieth-century practice of archiving “endangered cultures” for the benefit of future generations, but rather a practice that hinges on a realization of Guimarães’s aesthetic forms through social intervention. In each of their encontros and in the books that result from them, Catapoesia works to challenge dominant epistemological hierarchies; they facilitate encounters through which, in Sol’s words, “the erudite can coexist together with the everyday.” The potential for the encontro to bring about this kind of resignification crystallizes most noticeably in Catapoesia’s project with an Indigenous Xakriabá community in São João das Missões, Minas Gerais state. Through three books developed with the Raízes de Xakri collective, Homenagem ao Sr. Elifa (2011), Frutinhas do cerrado (2012a), and Lixo na aldeia Sumaré (2012b), Catapoesia invited young Xakriabá adults to consider themes important to their particular context. The three books are, respectively, a collection of poems in honor of Elifa Ferreira dos Santos, a community elder who had recently passed away; a series of poems about the fruits found in the Xakriabá Indigenous Territory; and a collection of short texts researching the question of waste in the village. Sol described to us how resentment was building in this community because of their growing dependence on researchers from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG, Federal University of Minas Gerais), many times anthropologists, in the process of producing and publishing, their plural, decolonial knowledges. Joel Gonçalves de Oliveira, the coordinator of the community’s cultural work, questioned the right of UFMG scholars to come to the community and conduct research that drew on Indigenous knowledges only to then publish this work for exclusively academic circles. In this context, Sol recounted how Joel reacted to the emergence of the first cartonera book from Catapoesia’s encontro with the community: So, we were putting together Sr. Elifa. They created the content, and I just helped with the layout and the covers. And when the fi rst book was ready and everything, Joel picks it up and says, “Look! We can make

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our own books now. We’ll never need UFMG to do it for us ever again!” I was taken by surprise; he was so happy. We don’t need anyone else to do it for us, and that’s that.

For Júlio as well, this kind of resignification means becoming the protagonist, taking control not just of one’s own narrative but also the means of production through which this narrative can take form. He explained that in that same moment, he realized how powerful cartonera practices are; they allow participants to free themselves from the prevailing idea that publishing a book is the preserve of important or well-known authors and academics. Cartonera, in this sense, again in Júlio’s words, “emancipated an idea.” Through a simple artistic method of bookbinding from recovered materials, communities like the Xakriabá in São João das Missões could produce the kind of knowledge to which Guimarães Rosa gestures in his 1962 short story “A terceira margem do rio” (The third bank of the river), a knowledge in which dualisms dissolve and the linearity of modernity collapses. However, Júlio was quick to point to the limits of the cardboard book in this respect. He reflected on his and Sol’s positionality as cartonera publishers in relation to the people and communities with whom they had worked. This reflexive consideration came about one evening in their house in the tiny community of Barão de Guaicuhy when Alex asked Sol and Júlio whether the cardboard book was a gesture of resistance or was resistance in and of itself. Júlio commented that, for him, it was more of a gesture: Because what we do is a small thing. The people who we work with, they have had to struggle so much more than us. For example, these community elders . . . for us to participate in this process of producing knowledge through a book, we start from a position of privilege that they don’t have. Their process of knowing has been much more difficult than ours.

Sol agreed with Júlio and acknowledged that in their publications, they could not and would not seek to capture the plenitude of, for example, a community elder’s knowledge. Even so, however, she insisted that the book was more than just a gesture and in doing so revealed the plural ways in which cartonera practitioners conceptualize the relation between the cardboard book and the notion of resistance. Her conviction,

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Figure 4.1. Mirian “La Osa Poderosa” Soledad Merlo in the Eloísa Cartonera

workspace in Buenos Aires. Photograph by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

she explained, rested on the book’s capacity to transit between various spheres and its ability to resist the passage of time. Sol spoke of how she might pass away, how Catapoesia might cease to exist, but their stories would continue, and people would still be able to make cheap photocopies or print her books from digital files. This possibility of recurrence was also expressed by Mirian Soledad Merlo (figure 4.1), a member of Eloísa Cartonera better known in cartonera circles as La Osa Poderosa (The Mighty Bear). In the fi lm Cartoneras (Brant 2019), La Osa comments in her inimitable style, “I paint them here, quietly, in my workshop, and then the book has its own world, it goes on its own journey.” La Osa thus gestures to the often unpredict-

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able journeys and unbridled adventures of the mil gotas, the thousand drops of cartonera books. The open-ended, unprescriptive quality of the cartonera encounter, which relates to the broader histories (and futures) of cartonera in our Aira-inspired readings, is an important thread that connects the diverse examples we describe. Their contexts spark relations within a broad ambit, and some speak to more overtly politicized situations than others. The contested politics of occupying urban spaces in Guadalajara and São Paulo that have witnessed countless instances of police brutality to control marginalized subjects is entirely different from the more mildmannered yet implicit occupations of relatively segregated spaces like art galleries, book fairs, and cultural centers that are also distant from the peripheral, rural environments in which Sol and Júlio intervene in the global politics of knowledge production. And yet, the encontro encompasses all of these contexts, premised on an open-endedness of practice that is crucial to the flexibility of this specific form of sociality. The members of the Dulcinéia collective had no idea of the kinds of relations that would come to be formed in Marechal Deodoro Square; Sergio was unaware of the way his alternative to Guadalajara’s huge corporate book fair would evolve; Israel had hopes but no guarantees that his collaborative project in Polanco would lead to the birth of an entirely new kind of children’s cartonera; and while Catapoesia’s method of collaborative authorship starts from a very broadly defined outline of shared interests, the texts, performances, and exhibitions that emerge from the initial encontros have come to constitute a realization of resistance that is entirely modeled for that particular public, context, and time. Beyond the different forms cartonera encounters adopt, our analysis now shifts to the encounter as an international meeting of cartonera practitioners. In this modality, the encounter can be thought of as a type of meet-up, the first example of which took place at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. Many such encounters occurred during our project, and here we focus on two of them: a one-day encuentro we helped to organize with La Cartonera in Cuernavaca that accompanied the exhibition to commemorate its tenth anniversary, and a two-day encontro in São Paulo to accompany the Cartoneras exhibition organized by the project team in collaboration with Dulcinéia Catadora. Both of these adhered to the method of reference to gesture that, in this case as in others, enabled us to gain a deeper, more relational understanding of the encounter-as-form. This embedded understanding revealed the plural types of relations cartonera encounters can create, some more

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openly articulating questions of social justice and others less so, and the way this form allows cartonera publishers to respond spontaneously to unfolding events, experiences, and realities, from earthquakes in Chile to earth-shattering elections in Brazil.

Taco versus Pastel Walking up a tight, winding staircase in the center of Cuernavaca in late March 2018, the tumult of chatter, laughter, and celebration growing ever louder, Alex was unsure what to expect. Having lived and worked continuously in São Paulo since 2014 and been immersed in the daily workings of the Glicério recycling co-op for the previous several months, this pleasant middle-class Mexican town with its colonial squares and gentle day-tripper vibe seemed to be an entirely different setting for cartonera practice. The first-floor French restaurant, the venue for a pre-encuentro gathering, was entirely empty apart from a long table adjacent to a parasol-shaded balcony. Around the table were seated the invitees for the two-day encuentro and exhibition opening organized by La Cartonera with assistance from the project team. Accompanied by Patrick, Alex was late, and empty plates had been shifted aside to make room for bottles of chilled beer, while the invitees chatted, toasted, took photos, and discussed the cause for celebration: La Cartonera’s tenth anniversary. Scholars, activists, punks, university professors, but no waste pickers. Conversations with this strange representative from São Paulo touched on cartonera in Brazil, the encuentro in Wisconsin, and mole sauce, a range of subjects that grasped toward connection without really hitting the mark, inevitable when the distance between Cuernavaca and São Paulo is almost exactly the same as between New York and Moscow. In the following days, the sheer diversity of cartonera was again present. It seemed that the approach, feel, aesthetic, in fact, pretty much every thing apart from the cardboard, was different from the São Paulo context, which Alex, scribbling furiously in a notebook noted as “amazing to see but also terrifying,” in recognition of how all of this might coexist within a coherent framework. For Patrick, meanwhile, this was the cartonera world as he knew it, having worked with Mexican cartoneras for six months, the previous few with La Cartonera in Cuernavaca. He knew of the founder members of La Rueda, who now joined us with new partners, projects, and publications. He knew of the expat community

162

Taking Form, Making Worlds

in Cuernavaca that made it normal to host our opening event in a restaurant owned by one of Dany’s compatriots, where mezcal-inspired art created by La Cartonera’s collaborators was visible on the walls, but pastis, the French aniseed-flavored spirit, could be procured behind the bar. The encuentro was held in the gallery space in the lush Parque Chapultepec, where La Cartonera was celebrating its tenth anniversary with a two-month-long exhibition of books. The events brought together cartoneras from different parts of Mexico, including HtuRquesa from the Yucatán Peninsula, La Rueda and Viento from Guadalajara, La Biznaga from the Sonoran Desert, and several collectives from Mexico City (figures 4.2 and 4.3). During the first roundtable, when it came to speaking of practice as opposed to merely comparing Mexican tacos to Brazilian pastel, points of connection began to emerge: a shared social proposition, a profound engagement with the material, the desire to work with artists, the practice of stitching and perforating books, the collective ethos of the workshops as shared spaces of creation, and the enjoyment of being part of a network of people with shared preoccupations. At the same time, the kind of differences and uncommonality between Brazilian cartoneras that we were later to witness in our São Paulo encontro were also present in discussions between Mexican cartoneras visà-vis the questions of what defined a cartonera, whether literature or art took precedence, and how quality was perceived and evaluated. The publishers’ backgrounds were also radically different; Nayeli was a biology professor; Miguel Ángel from Pachuca could only come for the day, as he was expected early at market the following morning to sell micheladas, a Mexican cocktail of beer, tomato juice, lime, spices, and tamarind. Nevertheless, as the day unfolded, we began to understand that despite the many superficial differences, the ties between the different worlds were strong. We have highlighted the cartonera encounter as a site of inscription, a space where established truths and epistemological hierarchies are challenged. This perspective surfaced in the discussions in one of the four themed panels that structured the fi rst day of the Cuernavaca encuentro, when Isra brought attention to the fact that his cartonera’s first publication, a copy of which now hung in an art gallery in Cuernavaca, had been written by a twelve-year-old girl. Martín from Sonora’s La Biznaga Cartonera, whose induction into cartonera practices had come from Israel, spoke about how his cartonera had run a competition asking people to submit their worst poems or stories, as long as they had never

Figure 4.2. First roundtable of the encuentro cartonero in the Chapultepec Park art gallery, 2018. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

Figure 4.3. Temok Saucedo of A My Me Vale Verga looking on during the encuentro cartonero. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

164 Taking Form, Making Worlds

been published before. Publishing a twelve-year-old’s work or someone’s worst poem clearly runs counter to the dominant idea that one has to plug away for years, perfecting one’s style, discarding draft after draft, before finally putting words into the public domain. Martín’s point was that if writers hesitated, then perhaps they would never publish at all and that if the worst was already out there, then things could only get better. The Cuernavaca event also revealed a creative tension between the open-endedness we have noted and the structure that La Cartonera and our research team felt would be necessary in order to provide the focus that justified people having traveled from all over the country. Our idea, for instance, that each cartonera might showcase its method to the others soon had to be jettisoned; expecting Óscar to travel 700 kilometers from Zacatecas with a saw or Israel to be lugging around his moto-tool was simply unrealistic. The cartonera workshop is portable, but only up to a point. It was much easier for La Cartonera members to transport a cartonera workshop the short distance from their homes and the Casona Spencer, where the collective held weekly workshops, to Parque Chapultepec, as they would do at points throughout the duration of the exhibition. Even this short move was not without hazard; Nayeli, her hands laden down with cardboard, pens, water, tools, and coffee, tumbled onto the pavement the second morning of the encuentro. She picked herself up and, with Dany, delivered a public-facing workshop La Cartonera-style; the other publishers transformed into a public that failed to materialize save for a large Mixtec family. The encuentro was open to dissent, both inside and outside the structure we had established, as Sergio and Fernando moved around the room cracking jokes during talks, making sure that no one took themselves too seriously. But to some extent the encuentro was not open and openended enough. During the events, La Cartonera’s community, those who painted the covers of the books in the Saturday sessions in Casona Spencer, were largely absent, even if their works were present on the walls. Their absence was accounted for by Dany in several ways; the park was a bit farther from the city center than Casona Spencer and accessible only by a long bus ride or an expensive taxi, since few collaborators had cars. The park, though beautiful, was also a space with some security measures; bags were checked when entering, and strictly no consumption of alcohol, mezcal included, was permitted. More importantly perhaps, the first day of the encuentro, although a Saturday, had not allocated any time to the making of books. The event did, however, spur unexpected future collaborations. It was here that La Cartonera’s Dany and Mexico

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City–based Temok Saucedo met. They were superficially very different, the former a genteel French expat who prided himself on careful craftsmanship of books, the latter a tattooed and pierced punk, the name of whose cartonera, A My Me Vale Verga (Ah Don’t Give a Shit), pointed to his iconoclasm. Yet the pair united over an appreciation of Malcolm Lowry; Dany took Temok off on a literary tour of the city, and soon they were plotting an event celebrating Edgar Artaud in Mexico City’s legendary countercultural space, the Foro Alicia.

Spaces of Dissent When as a research team we started to think about creating an exhibition of cartonera books in São Paulo, we knew we wanted to organize an encontro in parallel. In planning the encontro as part of the exhibition Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas, we were inspired by cartonera encounters like those that took place in Madison in 2009, Santiago in 2013, and Cuernavaca in 2018. The exhibition took place at the Casa do Povo art space in the Bom Retiro neighborhood of São Paulo from November 1, 2018, to February 8, 2019. The São Paulo encontro at the Casa do Povo was contextualized by the presence of hundreds of cartonera books on November 7–8, a week after the exhibition’s opening. The two-day event brought together twenty-five cartonera practitioners, writers, poets, artists, and academics from Mexico, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, England, and the United States. The format was designed in consultation with Dulcinéia Catadora, La Rueda, La Cartonera, and Catapoesia, the research project’s four principal partners, and comprised a welcome by the research team, Lucy, Alex, and Patrick; a guided tour of the exhibition by the curators, Beatriz Lemos and Alex; five roundtable discussions; and a closing session led by Dulcinéia Catadora. The emphasis of the encontro was on collaboration, and the event’s organization was marked by a long phase of consultation. Before invitations were made in July for an event in November, Alex consulted extensively with Dulcinéia Catadora, Vento Norte Cartonero, and Paloma Celis Carbajal as to possible participants; with La Rueda, El Viento, and La Cartonera as regards the dates and schedule; and with Lúcia Rosa and Beatriz on the nature and direction of the roundtables. Interstate travel in Latin America can be extremely expensive, and our motivation in hosting an event in São Paulo was in part to contribute to the carto-

166 Taking Form, Making Worlds

nera world that had welcomed us by providing funding for practitioners to travel internationally, in some cases for the fi rst time, to meet face to face. Despite differences between the practitioners gathered, many topics of mutual interest came to the fore as people asserted their position and voice amid a situation of seemingly overwhelming political despair. The five roundtables at the encontro at the Casa do Povo addressed questions of scholarly interest, and perhaps to someone coming in from the street, as people did, the encontro might have seemed like a twoday academic symposium. In this manner, even though the event was thought through with cartonera project partners, the first session was overly formal. There was a table behind which sat the five speakers: Maria from Dulcinéia Catadora, Sergio from La Rueda, Sol from Catapoesia, Patrick from the research team, and Laura Fernández from La Regia, a cartonera publisher from Monterrey, Mexico. The speakers were amplified and directly faced an audience organized in rows that went to the back of the room. In the lunch break between the first and second sessions, various participants, including Graziela Kunsch, the coordinator of the exhibition’s public program, and Lúcia Rosa of Dulcinéia, questioned this spatial organization, suggesting that it introduced unwanted hierarchies. For the second session, therefore, the arrangement of the room was changed; the table behind which the speakers were fi rst seated was moved to one side, and the speakers and public became one group, sitting in a large circle (figure 4.4). The atmosphere immediately changed as a result. What were previously longer, unbroken speeches from the front of the room became a sequence of conversations. As had happened also in Cuernavaca, people got up to browse the exhibition or grab a coffee as they wished. As part of the exhibition, a worktable had been established with everything necessary to produce cartonera books. From the second session onward, many participants moved between the discussion circle and this practical space to make books while the event continued. In this setting, we discussed collaborations between cartonera collectives and other actors, differences and similarities between collectives, the underground character of cartonera publishing, the book as a work of art, and future possibilities for collaboration. For the most part, the atmosphere was congenial and relaxed: in a mixture of Portuguese, Spanish, portunhol, and even portunhol selvagem (owing to the presence of Douglas Diegues), practitioners shared their differing views. As in the vast majority of encuentros cartoneros across and beyond Latin America, the event was public, and many people came from the street to take a look at the exhibition, take part in the encontro, or both.

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Figure 4.4. Encontro cartonero in São Paulo, November 2018. Photograph by

Lucy Bell.

A recurring theme became diversity and plurality. Javier Barilaro commented at one point in the second roundtable, There are many times I’ve thought there are things that other collectives do with which I don’t agree in a conceptual sense. But who am I to criticize? Each and every person does what they want. There are many possibilities.

Referring to this kind of plurality of practice, he recalled the first moments of Eloísa Cartonera and the advantages as well as disadvantages of working with strong-willed Cucurto to get things off the ground. Barilaro explained how in their initial partnership, he wanted to experiment with different techniques and put more effort into each book they published. This approach created a certain tension, as Cucurto’s main priority was to produce books in volume and as quickly as possible. A hybrid thus emerged from Javier’s wish to experiment with the conceptual potential of the book and Cucurto’s desire to focus on volume at the cheapest possible price to address questions of accessibility. Reflecting on their curious partnership and its symbolic dimensions, Barilaro sug-

168 Taking Form, Making Worlds

gested that this tension, present right at the origin of cartonera practice, was really “one of the most beautiful elements of cartonera.” We suggest that it has continued to characterize cartonera ever since. Creating a beautifully worked artist’s book as a one-off stands in stark contrast to producing roughly painted and simply bound cardboard editions, and the question of how much a cartonera book should cost has long been a point of contention for publishers. Within a previously harmonious event, raised voices and divergent views began to be more strongly articulated. In the third roundtable, Lúcia Rosa pointed out how the artist Paulo Bruscky’s collaboration with Dulcinéia, Um livro para desvendar mistérios, cost fifteen reais (US$2.78 at the time), in line with Dulcinéia’s general policy. At an auction in 2011, Bruscky’s Envelopoema, a single 24 by 34 centimeter envelope, sold for US$9,000. But for Dulcinéia, Um livro para desvendar mistérios is merely part of a catalogue that numbers over 130 books; it sits within the democratic proposal of making such works, including those by collectible artists such as Bruscky, available to a wider public. Lúcia commented on the “cruelty” of the market, saying she had received requests from collectors for twenty such books, and when she refused, collectors would hire people to get in touch with her one by one to make individual purchases. Shaking her head, she noted that Dulcinéia’s works had even ended up at auction. At this point, Douglas Diegues stepped in with a very different stance: I make books of all costs, but there are some that I wouldn’t sell for less than US$10,000. If the collector wants to buy at that price, they pay. If they want to sell it on, at an auction, so be it. We have to eat, and neither I nor the [Yiyi Jambo cofounder] Domador de Yacarés have any other source of income. If we sell at a low price, the Domador won’t be eating, and neither will I. . . . I am for a free market of prices with regard to cartonera. I see no ethical problem with this. No one should be able to regulate the prices that we sell at. We set the price.

Other practitioners agreed with Douglas. Wellington, of Mariposa Cartonera, probably the most commercially successful of all the cartonera publishers in terms of sales, commented that the market is cruel but that is the situation in which practitioners find themselves. For Wellington, it is important to sell; if publishers don’t place a price on their work, they do not valorize the unique creativity of their labor and consequently undermine the wider work of the cartonera network. These discussions echoed those that had taken place in the previous

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encuentro in Cuernavaca. There, for instance, Tegus, a cartonera from Puebla, told everyone that the collective didn’t charge anything for its books because they were sponsored by the Alliance Française. La Cartonera and La Rueda initially worked with artists who went on to become commercially successful, Cisco Jiménez in Cuernavaca and Chava Rodríguez in Guadalajara. The two cartoneras had ceased to work with these artists. For Sergio, selling Chava Rodríguez’s book covers at a standard rate devalued his work, while it was Cisco, whose paintings can be found selling for thousands of dollars at Christies, who had stopped attending La Cartonera’s workshop, even as they remained friends. Dany was nonplussed about the commercialization of the books considered works of art, saying that this question should be left to the art critics and historians. Back in São Paulo, Cecilia Palmeiro intervened, calling attention to the complexities of any activist project that has a commercial dimension: It’s really complicated to mix social intervention, activism, literature, and art. These are four forms that really have nothing to do one with another. There are some cartonera projects that are more activist, there are some that exist to provide a livelihood, and then there’s the logic that comes with the art market. . . . All these sectors are in tension, and you can’t really reconcile them. I’m part of Ni Una Menos, but we don’t take any money. I don’t make any money from my books because I make my living as a university lecturer. You can’t fool the market; it will make a fool of you. We’ve already lost that war.

Referring to Ni Una Menos (Not one [woman] less), the grassroots feminist movement that has spread across Latin America since the first mass protests against gender violence and femicides in Buenos Aires in 2015, Cecilia was staking out her own position as an academic activist more than an activist academic who has written on and worked with Eloísa Cartonera and the broader Argentine and Brazilian networks of activists, writers, and artists to which they belong. For her, it was imperative that activism and commerce remain separate because of the allengulfing tendency of the neoliberal market, which she suggested was capable of swallowing anything up to spit it out as merchandise, from Ni Una Menos T-shirts, posters, and mugs to photographs and films of protesters circulating in the mass media. This discussion focusing on price, value, and the engagement of cartonera with the market had been partially brought about by Lúcia’s text

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(Rosa 2018) in Cartoneras in Translation, published shortly before the encontro. In this short reflection, Lúcia questions whether cartonera was losing its identity, moving away from its original commitment to work closely with waste pickers and toward any other generic form of producing an artisanal book. She writes of the way the original cartonera collectives, hers included, had embodied an anti-establishment posture in their work, making strident critiques of consumerism. Indeed, their very names made clear this attitude of resistance and their commitment to intervening in the social. Recalling one of the original collectives, she notes, “As the saying goes, Bolivia’s Yerba Mala [bad weed] is hard to kill” (Rosa 2018, 37). Lúcia’s text was contentious because hardly any collectives apart from Dulcinéia and Eloísa work directly with waste pickers. Other collectives have adapted the cartonera model to work with marginalized populations that are particular to their own contexts. But for Lúcia, the issue was clear and is addressed directly in her text: The resistant, underground, and questioning nature of the cartoneras seems to have given way to the production of carefully hand-crafted books, books like precious gems. I wonder to what extent this trend can be interpreted as an indication that the initial proposals by Eloísa, in its first years, and by Dulcinéia, still today, are being watered down. (Rosa 2018, 39)

It was important to us as researchers to unpack this statement with other cartoneras, so Lucy opened up the third roundtable asking Lúcia to elaborate on the important views she had voiced in that text. Lúcia began her response by stating, with her usual strength and sensitivity, that she respected the work of everyone present. She then posed a series of questions: Why do we use cardboard? What is it that makes us cartoneras? What is the meaning of the word “resistance” for us? Is it resistance in the sense that we publish authors who aren’t present in the market? Is it resistance in the sense that we do something different than the regular book market? Is it just that? I don’t like to identify myself as a publisher because working with waste pickers, in a processual sense, that’s the work for me. The process is what’s important; the book is just a result.

Among the responses that followed, Nayeli explained that waste pickers simply didn’t exist in Cuernavaca, and Sol commented that in a rural

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area of Minas Gerais, there was no option to work in this manner. Then Wellington took the microphone: Have you seen the film The Life of Brian? When everyone is looking for a truth that is in fact a mirror of what they want to see? What is the essence of cartonera? There’s a genesis, Eloísa Cartonera. And from there we can prioritize alternative means of publishing, the integration of process, collaborative work, sustainability and environmental questions, a solidarity economy, or even fi nancial sustainability of the projects themselves. Each of these is valid. If we defi ne a pure DNA, we end up excluding people rather than including them. I mean, this is like the Council of Trent here. What I think is cool is that every minute, we can see a cartonera come into being.

These moments of dissent also found expression in the final session, albeit on a different subject, that of cartonera’s relation to academia. In 2016 the Pensaré Cartoneras collective published a reflexive, coauthored article on its blog, spurred on by a number of academic events such as the symposium in which they had participated in Bochum, Germany, on “Las editoriales cartoneras como plataforma para las voces marginadas” (“Cartonera Publishers as Platform for Marginalized Voices”), organized by Jania Kudaibergen, as well as a number of scholarly articles on the subject. This article, entitled “Pensaré habla (y siente) como práctica II” (“Pensaré speaks [and feels] as practice II”), discussed the collective’s relation with academia and academic publications and raised many questions, including that of the subject– object research relationship. A member of Pensaré then posted a link to this article in the Facebook group Libros Cartoneros: Reciclando el Paisaje Editorial en América Latina, a public group administered by Paloma Celis Carbajal that by then had more than a thousand members, mainly cartonera practitioners.* The link was accompanied by an introductory paragraph by this member of Pensaré suggesting that other cartoneras could reflect on and learn from Pensaré’s disagreeable experience, and this person tagged a member of our research team, thus publicly identifying the academic with whom Pensaré had taken issue to the wider cartonera network. The writer justified the post on the basis of our upcoming re* We deliberately do not name the member of Pensaré who tagged a member of our research team, as we do not agree with the practice of identifying individuals in a public sphere.

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search project, asserting, “We want to have our say so that we can have distinct ways of doing things” (“queremos también poner nuestra palabra para que tengamos formas distintas de hacer las cosas”). Aside from the Facebook post, the Pensaré article in question states, This text was the result of a collective reflection based on an academic text published in a journal in English about our cartonera practice. Published without having consulted us previously. This text places us, the Pensaré collective, as an object of study. On the one hand, we are grateful for the publication of the text because it has allowed us to think, to critique ourselves, and to continue doing things in our particular way. On the other hand, from our experience, we consider it important to talk about the dominant position of knowledge that is exercised (and has been exercised) and not to lose the opportunity to clarify statements made in this article. (Pensaré Cartoneras 2016)

The Facebook post, but more particularly the tag, caused a gamut of reactions within our research team. We profoundly disagreed with the tagging of an individual and also the way that the circumstances of publication had been misconstrued. Yet we also recognized in hindsight that things might have been done differently; attempting to work in a horizontal manner meant engaging meaningfully with critique. We sought to move beyond the circumstances of the tagging, therefore, and read Pensaré’s article as an important affirmation of autonomy and an invitation to work more horizontally. This reading prompted us as a research team to reflect deeply on our practice and renew our commitment to confront the hierarchies that undoubtedly exist when academics from universities of the global North carry out research in contexts of the global South. One phrase in particular from the article resonated with us: If one thing exemplifies the practice of cartoneras it is their will toward nonhomogeneity. If one thing exemplifies the practice of The Academy, it is precisely the opposite: a tendency to reduce diversity to categories (a first step to continue exercising structures of dominance and to strip it of all that is alive).

The notion of exercising power through position resonated throughout our project, as other cartonera practitioners were to voice similar concerns. Dulcinéia members were uncomfortable with the term “precarious,” which we had used in our original funding proposal. Equally,

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Dany Hurpin of La Cartonera on more than one occasion queried the project’s use of language. For example, at an encuentro in Mexico in March 2019 he told us in no uncertain terms what he thought of our follow-on-funding project’s name (the snappily titled “Activating the Arts”). And Dany and Nayeli joined Wellington of Mariposa Cartonera in commenting on the Pensaré member’s Facebook post, noting that we, the research team, had been in contact with them and although our project seemed of interest, it would be good to have more context to discuss why a member of Pensaré had taken such action. There were many more such invitations for the research team to reflect during the course of two years of intensive collaboration. Working processually with our project partners made clear the importance of developing a research practice that could make a contribution to the worlds in which we were working, and this is one of the main reasons we developed the method of reference to gesture; our hope was to exit from what Pensaré terms an “endogamous space of exchange and professional career” that resulted in work that “could be harmless or completely useless” (2016). In many senses, it was necessary to depart from what Pensaré identifies as mainstream academic practice and make a clear recognition of cartonera interlocutors as theorizing agents. Cartonera practitioners were reflexively researching their own practices and using their practices as modes of research long before we started our project, whether autonomously (like Sol and Júlio of Catapoesia, with their caipora research) or through more institutional means (like Martín of La Biznaga, who embarked on a master’s thesis on cartoneras as we were fi nishing our work on this book). We invited Pensaré to the encontro because we felt it was important to address these critiques but also as an opportunity for cartonera more widely to discuss its relation with academia and create knowledge across this perceived academic/cartonera border divide (Delgado Shorter 2020). In the fifth roundtable, Marc Delcan Albors of Pensaré started his talk by thanking those present for having spoken and listened as well as for having generated a space for reflection. He then commented on how it had been a difficult decision to come to the encontro: So for us to be here was a complicated decision because in some cases we don’t consider, due to previous experiences, these kind of invitations as safe spaces for our work, in the sense that we have been harmed in spaces similar to this one, and so sometimes we tend to prefer, as was said previously, micro networks, more affective spaces that build something similar.

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Questioning to what extent the relations between cartonera and the state or institutions more widely could be considered extractivist, he put forward a series of questions: Is this, or will this ever be, a place of construction, a developing together among equals in any way? Why do we continue to put effort into coming to these spaces, or why is it that some, like us, can come here but others can’t? And why don’t we create other spaces that are different from this?

Affirming that Pensaré had opted to participate because they were seeking to build relations, Marc highlighted that critique was important and that always stating that everything was fi ne was not a productive way to start on such a project. One particular point he raised, focusing on the fundamental inequality of cartoneras and university projects, was regarding fi nance: So we did some math, and we saw the state of our accounts and we compared them, for example, with the grant that was given to this project, and we saw that in a year and a half we had earned what this project gets in a month. Then we asked ourselves, how is the relationship, let’s say, that we can establish between a project about the cartoneras and a project made by the cartoneras? What is the difference? What economy are we playing?

In response, Israel of Viento Cartonero mentioned how academics had an important role to play in researching and disseminating information that was accurate, and how it was important for him as a cartonera practitioner to have access to this in spaces like the encontro, where people could meet face to face for the first time and exchange ideas. Júlio, of Catapoesia, highlighted that their work with academic collaborators, principally from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, had broadened the circulation of Catapoesia’s work, and how new audiences would have the opportunity to read their texts, particularly through translation into English. Júlio also touched on the value of exchanging ideas and being confronted with types of cartonera books he had never imagined could exist. After Wellington had regaled everyone the day before with his Life of Brian allegory, people were eager to hear his response. Taking the microphone, he stressed the importance of how the encontro allowed

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people to build relations face to face. Asking permission from Gaudêncio of Vento Norte, Wellington revealed that before the event, he and Gaudêncio had had a misunderstanding over something, and as a result their online relationship had soured. Approaching Gaudêncio on the first day, Wellington signaled that he would like to chat, and having resolved their differences, they went shopping in a mall for men’s underwear together. “Was this not a sign of trust?” Wellington asked, to general laughter. This was the affective potential of the encontro, he suggested. What had happened between him and Gaudêncio, a type of cartonera feud built up over years, was resolved through a “microencontro, where we can construct relations, construct friendships, and build bridges,” Wellington said. He then spoke more specifically about the role of academics: All these debates, these provocations, these shifts in thought are happening and are made possible by this event. If this event didn’t exist, these provocations wouldn’t be being made. So there is a role [for academics] in the cartonera ecosystem, yes. It’s an important role. But is it more important than anything we all do day to day? Not so much, because the daily work we all do is equally important. I see that I’m being kind of polemical, but I think it’s because it’s important to say that within the cartonera ecosystem we can have this kind of feedback. Everyone has a role to play.

The last word went to Pombo, a researcher and activist who had worked with Alex and Beatriz on the exhibition’s organization and who had followed cartonera publishing for more than ten years as a zine publisher. Acknowledging the various critiques that had been put forward, Pombo spoke of the Brazilian theorist Suely Rolnik’s concept of resonance. For Pombo, the tension between academia and cartonera could be understood in two senses: thinking with Rolnik, the desire to discover the other was dependent on “a certain state of the body, in which its nerve fibers vibrate to the music of the universes connected by desire [and] a certain tuning with affective modulations provoked by this vibration” (Rolnik 1998, 10–11), and this state was not always present; second, any such discovery must necessarily presuppose an acknowledgement of positionality. Pombo continued, When we understand our positionality, when we reflect on it, our practice can achieve resonance and not start from exploitation. Without a

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doubt, cartonera practice doesn’t need this encontro, it doesn’t need the money from English universities to have meaning because it already has that power and will continue to do so. But I do believe there is potential for a positive resonance between these different worlds, which can meet and have an effect on one another.

Rolnik suggests that an outcome of encounters between resonant bodies is that within an open-ended collective, objectives and destinations may be unclear, but the knowledge that something special is shared impels a forward movement of resistance. In our work with cartonera, we were unafraid of doing things differently, and our project partners openly sought the singularity of working step by step with a dedicated team of researchers. And yet, despite a certain shared vibration through material, there were also moments of dissonance as opposed to resonance between us as a project team and cartonera practitioners but also, as the provocations of the encontro make clear, among cartonera practitioners.

Uncommonality and What It Can Do Bearing in mind the fierce debates that erupted in São Paulo, what might we surmise is the special character of the encontro that allows it to hold, at one time, such different and conflicting views? How can we think about this capaciousness, this plural syntax, that variously allows practitioners to hold so many issues in tension? Decolonial scholars like de la Cadena, Blaser, and Escobar have written compellingly on the totalizing paradigm of what John Law and Annemarie Mol (1995) term a “one-world world.” Cartonera, like Andreia tracing the lines and folds of cardboard when it has been crushed by an intolerable weight, gives rise to a means of articulation that survives this obliteration. What we can perceive here is an affirmation, through the mobilization of aesthetic and social forms, to tell alternate stories from within a world that is bent on silencing and cancelling such possibilities because they lie beyond its limits. The internal debates that characterize the plural cartonera network, voiced through encontros such as the one in São Paulo, are pertinently connected to broader intellectual debates on decoloniality. In their introduction to A World of Many Worlds (2018), de la Cadena and Blaser outline what they term the “uncommons.” Set in contrast to colonial notions of “the common good” or enclosures, de la Cadena and Blaser define the uncommons as “the negotiated coming together of heteroge-

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neous worlds (and their practices) as they strive for what makes each of them be what they are, which is also not without others” (2018, 4). This position draws on the philosopher Isabelle Stengers’s work in two ways. One is Stengers’s definition of a practice as “any form of life that is bound to be destroyed by the imperative of comparison and the imposition of a standard ensuring equivalency” (2011, 59); the other is Stengers’s theorization of the alliances between actors who embody such practices and who, in de la Cadena and Blaser’s assessment (2018, 4), occupy greatly varying positionalities as “interests in common which are not the same interests.” In her article “Uncommons,” de la Cadena argues, Uncommons does not work through sameness or its twin, difference; it does not emerge from constitutive commonality. Rather, participant entities may become into commonality without becoming the same. The conceptual condition underpinning uncommons is what Isabelle Stengers calls divergence: rather than a relation (of similarity or difference) between entities, divergence constitutes practices in their heterogeneity as they become together, even through each other, while remaining distinct. Like orchid and wasp, through an interest in common that is not the same interest, practices self-make with others as they diverge in their own positivity. (2018)

A cartonera encuentro or encontro, whether in an international event in São Paulo, a public square in Guadalajara, or a quilombo community in rural Minas Gerais, provides a pertinent practical example of what such an uncommons looks like and what it can do. A diverse group of actors is brought together by their interests in knowledge, stories, waste, and language, each recognizing that their particular interest goes beyond the conventional defi nitions that have come to colonize such words and that their transgressive definitions provide an interesting intersection with the person sitting beside them. De la Cadena and Blaser find that the importance of such plurality, articulated in a deeply relational space, is that “such alliances may also be capable of refracting the course of the one-world world and proposing, as in the Zapatista declaration, the practice of a world of many worlds, or what we call a pluriverse” (2018, 4). Cartonera practitioners seek reworldings on multiple levels. And the capaciousness of such visions that is particular to the encounters in Guadalajara and São Paulo is fundamentally interlinked with the processual nature of negotiating heterogeneity; as Wellington joked, an encontro is not like the Council of Trent. The pluriversatility that is inherent to the cartonera toolkit is fun-

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damentally due to cartonera’s origins as a simultaneously literary and artistic practice, a practice embedded within and committed to openendedness, present since the birth of Eloísa Cartonera. “¡Que pase algo!” (Let something happen!), exclaims Javier Barilaro in the opening moments of the film Cartoneras (Brant 2019), reflecting on the deep desire to create a project that would go who knows where in the darkest moments of the post-2001 Argentine economic crisis. And just as open-endedness refuses to negate, invisibilize, and homogenize, it is also quick to react, always searching for a means to manifest a dynamic and emergent potential in response to what is happening in its particular context. In the second moment of the encontro in São Paulo, an unexpected change of plans gave rise to a complex publication in a hostile political climate, a means through which practitioners could practice existence as resistance by making their body and subjectivity present in the world. Right after the final roundtable and with a note of what in Brazil is termed divergência still hanging heavy in the air, Lúcia, Maria, and Andreia announced a change to the program. In the materials that had gone out to the encontro’s participants, the closing session was to focus on creating a book deriving from people’s reflections on the event. The idea was that participants would take photos during the two days and these would be used to create a book and therefore a kind of memento. Since the event information was sent out, however, things had changed, and the Dulcinéia collective began setting up tables and paints and directing us to a text they had prepared that had nothing to do with photos. Not having checked their emails since traveling, many of the event’s participants did not know about the change. What had happened in the interim? The encontro took place on November 7–8, 2018. Ten days earlier, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. Bolsonaro’s record of advocating criminalization of minorities, making openly homophobic and racist posturing, and declaring in favor of a return to military dictatorship had created a somber mood among many in São Paulo and especially in the Casa do Povo, a space created as a living memorial to the Holocaust by the local Jewish community. On November 3, Lúcia informed Alex that Dulcinéia Catadora wanted to change the nature of the fi nal session. Visibly upset by the results of the election, Lúcia said that the previous proposal just didn’t feel right, not in this moment, faced with an incoming president who had publicly celebrated the torture of dissident writers, activists, and artists, among many other actors, during Brazil’s dictatorship. Having consulted with Andreia, Maria,

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and Eminéia, Lúcia expressed a wish to create a coauthored publication composed of various texts that spoke to the tense political situation. The text would “se posicionar” (position itself and, by extension, those who wrote it), making clear cartonera’s position regarding the election’s result, and be distributed for free. At a time of great trepidation, with many in São Paulo wondering whether their names were on lists of targets for persecution, it was a bold step to openly contemplate defiance by offering such a public gesture of resistance. Indeed, only six of the twenty-two cartoneras responded affirmatively when emailed about the potential publication. Back in the encontro and gathering again after the last roundtable, we began to read the text that Dulcinéia Catadora had put together in the previous few days. There were contributions from Universo Cartoneiro, Mariposa Cartonera, Catapoesia, La Cartonera, and Pensaré Cartoneras. There were also complementary contributions: an open letter and manifesto in defense of democracy, signed by arts workers who had recently gained much publicity in Brazil; a text by the group Judeus pela Democracia (Jews for Democracy) entitled “Manifesto Herzog Vive!” celebrating the journalist Vladimir Herzog, a victim of the military dictatorship; a contribution by Marta Dillon, an activist of the Argentine feminist movement Ni Una Menos; and a series of texts, many of them addressing Bolsonaro’s election directly, written by activists and artists who had previously collaborated with Dulcinéia Catadora, including a text by the research team. Entitled BR (Rosa 2019a), it became clear that Dulcinéia was asking people to commit to a very deliberate political act. During a coffee break, one of the encontro invitees approached Alex to warn him about taking part in something so overtly politicized. Brazil was dangerous for foreigners in this regard, and there was no way of knowing what was to come. The gist of this advice came from a place of care; the participant recommended prudence and an awareness of how rapidly things could change. Such prudence, it was suggested, lay behind the decision of many people not to reply to the email. We understood that there was a feeling among some practitioners that it was not the moment to publicly sign something like BR. However, another dynamic was also present in the room. In some ways, it was impossible to extricate the cartonera discussions and displays, proposals, and projects from the reaction to the oppressive atmosphere that characterized Brazil at that time. The relations in which cartonera is located as a practice more generally contextualized BR’s publication; Beatriz Lemos, the cocurator of the exhibition, had inaugurated another exhibition she was

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working on, entitled Textão, at the Museu da Diversidade Sexual (Museum of Sexual Diversity) in the days before the encontro. Equally, the transversal and intersectional nature of cartonera’s forms of aesthetic resistance was evidenced in the choice of many of the practitioners to attend the posthumous book launch on November 7 of Marielle Franco’s UPP—Redução da favela a três letras: Uma análise da política de segurança pública do estado do Rio de Janeiro (UPP—Reduction of the favela to three letters: An analysis of public safety policy in Rio de Janeiro state). Franco was a Black, lesbian, left-wing city councilor and a noted critic of paramilitary activity in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas who was assassinated in Rio in March 2018. Then and now, Marielle is a hugely important symbol of tireless and eloquent resistance and of the danger faced by those who articulate dissident voices in Brazil. The launch was held in the cultural center and “urban quilombo” Aparelha Luzia coordinated by the Black trans activist Erica Malunguinho, who, inspired by Marielle, became a member of the state legislature in 2018 just a month before the encontro. After a day at the cartonera event, a diverse group of cartoneras and academics made our way to the book launch, which in turn became a space of (re)encounter between the realities of Mexican cartonera publishers such as Israel and those of Brazil, between old friends and collaborators Cecilia Palmeiro and Suely Rolnik, and between the celebration of life and frayed nerves, as security from Brazil’s Black movement stewarded this all-too-visible cluster of opposition to Bolsonaro’s new Brazil. As people considered how they might contribute, or not, to the BR publication, the energy of the previous days seemed to temporarily fragment. Just as many different opinions had been voiced in the final session and indeed over the course of the entire event, Dulcinéia’s action to change the program, a surprise to many, created a multiplicity of divergent positions. And yet, gradually, as the soundtrack of making a cartonera book played out—the sound of the brushstroke on cardboard, the needle stitching pages into place, the clink of glasses brimming with mezcal that Dany and Nayeli began to serve, the easy conviviality of two people discussing their designs, the constant flow of Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish from Mexico, Colombia, and portunhol selvagem—a togetherness emerged in the act of fazer junto, of making together, that went beyond the disagreements of the roundtables and the worries about BR without erasing them. Lúcia’s opening lines of the collection seem all-encompassing:

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The very session that closes the encontro constitutes an act of resistance, a collective gesture that grasps the cartonera book as an instrument in its fullest potential of circulation and sharing of ideas. (2019b, 1)

Not everyone contributed a text. Those who wished to remain, in an authorial sense, outside of the publication did so, and they were welcomed to bind copies together with everyone else, thus entering the ambit of the publication as a maker. This capaciousness is expressed within the collection itself, which features a photographic reproduction of an artwork by Adrianna Eu entitled Pure Heart. Eu’s sculpture alludes to a heart constructed of entangled strings that go up, down, and across from a center. Even in its black-and-white photographic reproduction one can trace the metaphor of heart strings, the materialization of the affective basis that connects all human lives and underpins the artist’s conceptualization of interrelationality and interdependence. For Lúcia, this work, with its veins reaching out to other imagined hearts, gestured toward “the heart of all Brazilians” and its inclusion and affective connotation are significant to the collection. In Marta Dillon’s contribution, an article from the Argentine newspaper Página 12 of October 29, 2018, Dillon proposes a model of feminist resistance based on what she terms “transversal relations”: Against domestic incarceration where violence seeks to discipline us, we open our doors . . . we turn . . . diverse desires into sites of exploration of other alliances. . . . This last week, in Brazil, the opposition to the future government woke up, militants took to the streets to dispute votes body to body. (Dillon 2019, 29)

The form of this text reinforces the affective alliances that it depicts; though it is a newspaper article, it takes the form of a poem or a protest song, with an opening and closing verse about Brazil as a “warning for all genders,” who “today stand together in a tight embrace” to “resist against oppression of any form” (Dillon 2019, 29). An affective politics (Sitrin 2012) in this sense involves a multitude of actors possessing diverse subjectivities and desires who mobilize horizontal relationality, embodied physically in their presence on the street, as both a tool and an objective of political intervention. BR offered this opportunity for the cartonera practitioners who were there that day, the chance to place their bodies in the world through material and affec-

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tive relations. Cartonera’s commitment to plural syntax ensured that it didn’t matter that some collectives had contributed a text and others had not, just as the encontro had been characterized by sometimes confl ictive discussions over what cartonera was and should be. Somehow, despite the disagreements of the previous days and the unease around each practitioner’s relation to politics, the encontro’s affective potential was made manifest: a sensitive, bodily reality that offered the potential for divergence without rupture, a heterogeneity expressed through togetherness, a distinctness anchored in uncommonality.

CHAPTER 5

Workshops: Cardboard and the Material Sociality of Practice

The morning after getting off the plane from England, still trying to get his head around cartonera publishing, a jet-lagged Patrick met Sergio and his fellow cardboard publisher Israel at Sergio’s bookshop café, La Rueda, and they traveled together to a small village called Ixtlahuacán del Río on the outskirts of Guadalajara. Though just fifty kilometers from Mexico’s second city, it took two hours and two buses to get there to deliver a cartonera workshop to a group of primary-school children. Rosalba, a local schoolteacher who owned and ran the village’s only bookshop, had invited the cartonera publishers to Ixtlahuacán to take part in a small municipal book festival that she was seeking to establish as a yearly event. It was, to all intents and purposes, a different world from the bustling city that we had left behind. Guadalajara is the industrial capital of western Mexico, while in this rural, mountainous region, most families make a living by growing corn and other staples in the surrounding fields. On arrival in the village, we made our way to the main square, where banners, marquees, and book displays alerted us to the literary festival. After setting up a small display of cartonera books (figure 5.1), we met with the schoolteachers who would take us on the short drive to the elementary school. The workshop proceeded in stages. First, we laid out the materials we had brought with us, counting out sheets of paper, cardboard, pieces of string, cloth, scissors, paints, and adhesive paper (figure 5.2). Then, Sergio and Israel gave a short talk to the children, explaining the history of cartonera and mentioning the founding role of Eloísa in Buenos Aires and of La Cartonera in Cuernavaca. Cartonera histories soon gave way to the workshop itself, as they explained the assembly of the books, the punching of holes, the stitching of pages, and

Figure 5.1. Sergio and Israel at their cartonera bookstall at the Ixtlahuacán del Río

book festival, 2017. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

Figure 5.2. Materials for the cartonera bookmaking workshop at the Ixtlahuacán del Río book festival. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

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then the application of adhesive paper along the spine of the books. The second, longer, and more creative stage consisted of illustrating the cardboard covers, using an assortment of paints, pens, pencils, and collage. Here then, we have the principal materials and tools needed to create cardboard books in mobile workshops. Yet, as Rosalba explained, the workshop was only possible due to the book festival, and the infrastructural contribution of the local municipality was the marquee under which we sat and conversed, comfortably shaded from the glaring Mexican sun. This support was under threat for the following year because in the fractious and divided local political scene, Rosalba had been deemed too close to a cultural figure who belonged to an opposition party. As a consequence, she had started to raise funds to start a nonprofit civil association that would be responsible for organizing the next year’s festival autonomously, reducing dependence on the municipal government. In the conversatorio that followed our workshop, Rosalba explained these issues and asked for the donation of cartonera books that she could raffle. Sergio and Israel gladly obliged. Patrick’s headfirst plunge into the world of cartonera brought several themes to the fore. One is the importance of the workshop form itself, something we confirmed as we worked with other publishers in Mexico and Brazil over the following months. Second, that Patrick was immediately asked to help and assist, cutting cardboard, carrying equipment, telling schoolchildren about our country, was indicative of the way that cartonera apprenticeship worked, a nod to the open invitation to collaborate and innovate that was materialized in the cardboard book. A third theme is the fundamental role played by materials, tools, and their affordances in cartonera workshops; it simply would not have been possible to deliver workshops without the cardboard, needles, thread, and paper that Sergio and Israel supplied, nor could it have been done without some form of shelter, in the form of either a marquee or a school classroom. Such materials are inherently political, entangled in local party allegiances and priorities, fi nances and funds. Sergio pointed out as we left the village that he was being asked to contribute to a local book festival through the donation of books, while the municipal government appeared to be ripping up perfectly functional paving stones for replacement but balked at the annual provision of a marquee for an event that promoted local literacy, literature, and culture. It is with this third point that we are principally concerned here, asking a series of questions rooted in the workshop form itself: What are the materials that help to constitute cartonera as a movement, that have

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enabled its spread, and that make it accessible? How do these materials and their affordances combine with human skill and tools to produce continental catalogues linked by cardboard but also by their shared diversity? We explore these questions through a deep dive into the cartonera workshop, which is both a physical space made up of cardboard and cutters, pens and paints, bradawls and boards, and an activity through which cartonera methods multiply as they are taken up by a wider public. The role of materials in cartonera practice brings us into dialogue with recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, where attention to the constitutive role that the nonhuman plays in social life has been gaining traction in recent decades. One manifestation of this has been the emergence of “new materialism,” an area of research clustered around theorists such as Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Susan Hekman, Spinoza- and Deleuze-inspired scholars interested in resurrecting the material after what they consider an overwhelming focus on discourse, ideology, and meaning (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 4; Barad 2003). The kind of materiality these scholars seek to recognize, however, is not of a Marxian deterministic kind but rather a framework that emphasizes openness, unpredictability, and becoming as constitutive of social life. Within anthropology, Marianne Elisabeth Lien and Gisli Pálsson note (2021), there have been moves to stretch the contours of the social and therefore of anthropological inquiry beyond the human in a series of cognate approaches that have variously been described as “more-than-human” (Tsing 2013), “other-thanhuman” (Lien and Pálsson 2021) and “posthuman” (Smart and Smart 2017). Where inanimate things are the matter at hand, this has often been framed as an attention paid to “materiality” (Miller 2005) or the properties and affordances of materials (Ingold 2007). Cartoneras might at first glance be described as an all-too-human “community of practice,” a group of publishers linked by common practice and connected by way of virtual and physical fora. Yet the concept as developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) does not adequately incorporate the extrahuman elements that constitute cartonera. In its place, we propose the idea of a material sociality of practice to highlight the way cartonera functions as a practice-based social activity in which social relations and communities are underpinned and shaped—stitched, glued, and bound together—by a multitude of materials. In opting to focus on materials and material sociality, we are influenced by Tim Ingold’s (2007) critique of materiality as a vague concept that can too easily be used to divide the world into the material and

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the immaterial, reenacting prior binaries such as mind and matter. Ingold inveighs not only against materiality but also against a world that, suffocated by the dead hand of materiality . . . can only be brought back to life in the dreams of theorists by conjuring a magical mind-­dust that, sprinkled among its constituents, is supposed to set them physically in motion. It has come to be known in the literature as agency. (2007, 11)

Yet this idea of agency as a thing that can be possessed is relatively rare in the new materialist literature, which instead stresses the ways agency emerges out of assemblages, actor-­networks, phenomena, or events. In Barad’s influential concept of intra-­acting, for instance, agency is “not something that someone or something has .  .  . [but rather] the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices through the dynamics of intra-­activity” (2003, 826–­827). In dispensing with the concept of materiality but not that of agency, then, we sidestep an unrepresentative account of the latter as “magical mind-­dust” while embracing a definition that stresses the way agency emerges through iterative and processual change in cartonera practice. The fundamental principle underlying our discussion of workshops is a very practical one: quite simply, cartonera practice would be nothing without cardboard. Therefore, any definition of cartonera must go beyond a focus on communities of practice made up of only human subjects. We follow anthropologists such as Sara Schroer in foregrounding “more-­t han-­human communities of practice as a unit for anthropological enquiry” (2019, 146). Drawing on the work of the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll, Schroer describes “more-­than-­human world making as a mobile, permeable, and necessarily partial process, . . . [a] relational achievement, constituted by the activities of living beings as well as the influence of manifold other aspects such as technologies, infrastructures, landscapes, and affects” (145). The material, the cartón of cartonera, is both constitutive and generative; cartonera tools, though inert, exert an influence, produce effects, and thus enact specific kinds of agency. To cite Barad, “matter comes to matter through the iterative intra-­ activity of the world in its becoming” (2003, 823; Barad’s emphasis).

The Cartonera Workshop in Context When we first started working with Sergio, he operated out of a physical space that he referred to as “el taller” (the workshop), a tiny store-

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room rented with a studio where he coordinated and broadcast an online community radio station called Radio Cartón. There, he kept a stock of cardboard, paper, books, and the materials and tools required for bookmaking workshops. Sergio’s collaborators, Pavel, Jacobo, and Israel, would meet there to assemble the catalogue of cartonera books that had started back in 2009 with a collection of Sergio’s own short stories. For Sergio, this was “the barracks where copies are assembled and the next editorial task is imagined,” as well as a “space of teaching and learning.” It was one kind of workshop, contrasted by Sergio with “the other workshop,” like the one in Ixtlahuacán, “where we act, where we deliver a workshop because we are invited to do so.” As researchers, we inevitably influenced our field of study in a generative process of moving through the world of cartonera and making it in collaboration with the dynamic community of cartonera practitioners and participants (Ingold 2011a). As Barad puts it, “‘We’ are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity” (2003, 828). What we were and were not permitted to do in the cartonera spaces where we conducted research helped to indicate the contours of workshops as cartonera forms and the power structures, techniques, and horizons of possibility that existed within them. For example, with the bearded and esoteric Jacobo chain-smoking his way through a pack of cigarettes a day in the radio-taller, we suggested, for everyone’s health, moving the workshop outside, setting up two folding tables on the pavement in front of Sergio’s bookshop, effectively turning the production of books into a public spectacle. Outside, we were closer to the relatively fresh air, to the aroma of strong coffee from Sergio’s café, and to the unfolding conversations of his clients and passersby. It is such mobility that leads Magalí Rabasa (2019, 89) to describe “organic book workshops,” following Bruno Latour, as “mutable mobiles.” The portability of cartonera workshops is even more pronounced given that more traditional publishing equipment such as the Risograph is forsaken for an assembly kit that can, as Sergio demonstrated so adeptly, fit inside a repurposed trombone case. The exception here is print technologies. Cartonera publishers are not generally printers, availing themselves instead of fotocopiadoras (copy shops) to reproduce their texts quickly, reliably, and cheaply. At La Rueda, Jacobo would copyedit and design the layout of the books in a simple way using Microsoft Word, dispensing with more sophisticated editing software like the industry standard package InDesign or the open-source

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Scribus. He would then put the files onto a flash drive and take it to a local fotocopiadora. When he returned, the assembly of the books was back in the hands of the publisher, as we carefully separated out the thin content of each book from a bulky paper stack. Like other countercultural and alternative economic endeavors, then (Homs and Narotsky 2019), cartonera workshops are not entirely autonomous units; the possibility of reproduction relies on a political economy relatively common across Latin America, where books are often expensive but photocopying is cheap. The workshops also rely on both a (re)turn to craft and the availability of digital publishing software that has played a role in democratizing the means of production of literature (Rabasa 2019). Arguably, there is no single cartonera tradition. Yet the rough-hewn, rapid manner of creating and decorating books of the fi rst cartonera, Eloísa, has been influential. “A small, informal workshop that makes use of waste materials (among them cardboard) and espouses an ethos of anti-perfectionism: this is an adequate description of the cartonera workshop,” writes Craig Epplin (2009, 67). This pronounced antiperfectionism places cartonera as a socioaesthetic practice in an interesting tension with the history of the arts and crafts workshop, where if not perfectionism, then at least fi ne workmanship has historically been more greatly valued than speedy completion. In Richard Sennett’s expanded defi nition, craftsmanship represents an “enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake” (2008, 9). For some cartonera publishers, however, one cannot be seen to do a job too well, to make a book look too bonito (pretty), without risking falling afoul of the unwritten guideline that cartonera books should be somewhat rough and ready. “I don’t think that he has understood,” Sergio commented to us about another cardboard publisher who prized his artistic covers, “that there is a cartonera aesthetic.” Yet the aesthetic range and use of materials and tools within cartonera as a continental and even transcontinental phenomenon is impressively wide. Such diversity occurs not only between cartoneras but also within them. Although Sergio was el maestro (the master, or teacher) of La Rueda, he encouraged both pragmatism and freedom of expression. Thus, when Jacobo was involved in the design of book covers, he worked digitally, then printed them out as large stickers that were placed on the covers of the books. With the re-edition of one of local poet Raul Bañuelos’s poetry volumes, Israel decided to print the face of the poet on each cover, with Sergio suggesting that this be combined with a playful splash of paint. Sergio encouraged freedom to an even greater degree

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than La Cartonera, for while the latter gave the participants in their workshops freedom to decorate the covers as they pleased, they were generally limited to the medium of paint because paint and the multicolored cloth used to cover the spines of their books were characteristic marks of the Cuernavaca-based publisher’s workshop. Cartonera has spread like wildfire across Latin America. That Sergio urged Patrick to start his own cartonera—tentatively named El Cocodrilo in homage to the ice cream shop-owning crocodile that protagonized the stories Patrick told his daughter—after participating in a single workshop is indicative of the break that cartonera workshops represent with art and craft workshops as these have generally been understood and theorized. Unlike the medieval European guilds (Sennett 2008), in cartonera the road from apprentice to master did not, in La Rueda, consist of a structured, hierarchical path toward a destination that could only be reached with the utmost patience and discipline. Rather, Sergio horizontalized his practice, encouraging his apprentices to start their own cardboard publishers almost immediately after having learned the most rudimentary techniques. In this, cartonera sits within broader autonomous Latin American publishing collectives studied by Rabasa where a workshop participant tells her that they now feel prepared to make their own books (2019, 75). While assisting with La Rueda, Jacobo and Pavel started Ediciones del Varrio Xino and Israel started Viento Cartonero. The two titles that Patrick helped to assemble during his own ethnographic apprenticeship, Los solos and Rancheros versus gángsteres, are examples of such collaborations. This, then, strikes us as a key characteristic of the cartonera workshop; rather than well-kept and well-honed secrets of the master craftsman or indeed the irreplaceable genius of the artist, the taller cartonero consists of a portable assemblage of tools, techniques, and materials generously and openly disseminated by practitioners. Such generosity may well be related to the wider workshop form itself. Writing about African art workshops, Kasfir Littlefield and Till Forster (2013) identify two features that, they suggest, distinguish the workshop from other modes of production: the workshop provides the means of production, mainly materials, tools, instruments, and utensils; and workshops lead to a distinct type of cooperation and interaction, linked to the sharing of the means of production and the modes of interaction that this brings about. Such a characterization helps us understand cartonera workshops as a particular social form that enables a flourishing of diversity through cooperative work. Yet in seeking to un-

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derstand cartonera workshops, it is also important to place them in a specifically Latin American context. Before moving on to discuss cartonera materials and their affordances in greater detail, let us situate cartonera alongside different types of workshop in the Latin American social and political scene in order to draw out their distinctiveness and the ways cartonera workshops index changes in artistic and political practice on the continent. An epoch-making moment for intersections of art and politics has already been referenced: the “world revolution” of 1968, in which the filmmaker and La Cartonera collaborator Óscar Menéndez played an active role as a student at the San Carlos art school in Mexico City and to which the Cuernavaca-based publishers dedicated a collection of photographs and texts in 2018 (O’Hare and Bell 2020). Edward McGaughan explains, “Students at the nation’s two leading art academies, San Carlos and La Esmeralda, produced hundreds of posters, flyers, and banners for the movement, using bold graphics to express the demands for civil liberties and democracy” (2012, 7). After the massacre of students at Tlatelolco, activist art of the Mexican 1968 generation morphed into the grupos movement, which in the late 1970s numbered more than ten collectives in Mexico City alone (McGaughan 2012, 137). Members of such groups referred to themselves as cultural proletarians, workers for the revolution like any others (138). The establishment of independent publishers such as Beau Geste Press, founded by Felipe Ehrenberg, was integral to their movement, making them direct ancestors of the Mexican cartoneras. Ehrenberg wrote to a friend, [T]he answer to the uniformity of taste, to the monopolic control of culture by the artmongers (publishers, gallery owners, museum curators, critics, the whole proverbial slew of mystifiers . . .) the answer, I repeat, is to set up as many possible sources, each existing within the organic limits of their own capacities and yes, even of their immediate communities’ capacities. (In Medina 2006, 158)

Ehrenberg was in dialogue with the Chicano artistic movement in the United States in the early 1970s, and the expansionary spirit of “many possible sources” was one of the many points of contact he found with a movement that was influenced by Beuys and the aesthetic of the everyday. This commitment to deconstructing the canon and decentralizing the means of artistic production survives in the generous dissemination of cartonera.

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Activist workshops also share some traits with cartonera. In recent years the subjective turn in activist studies might seem at odds with the focus on materials and materiality that we take in this book. Yet a focus on the material technologies involved in the production of subjectivities, or processes of subjectivation, is implied by anthropologists such as Maple Razsa, who argues that activists’ appropriation of technologies and practices of subjectivation is . . . seen . . . clearly in a concrete example, such as their use of digital video, in particular their engagement with the footage of physical confrontations with the police they sometimes called “riot porn.” (2015, 12)

For Razsa, visual documentation of the strong, active body engaging in pitched battles with police as opposed to being passively on the receiving end of violence is a crucial means by which anticapitalist activists “cultivate radical political hopes in the infertile soil of postsocialist and postwar Yugoslavia” (11). Cartonera publishers do not generally operate on “infertile soil.” Indeed, as we have seen, Eloísa Cartonera grew out of the incredibly fecund ground of postcrisis Argentina, which witnessed the rebirth of a radical politics, from neighborhood assemblies and unemployed piqueteros to politically committed artistic propositions (Dinerstein 2010). Yet it is equally true that the hopes of the 2000s soon gave way to disillusionment in many activist spaces, long before the dramatic turn to the right when the so-called “pink tide” of progressive center-left governments receded. Although revolutionary in many regards, governments such as those of the Kirchners in Argentina, Lula in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela sought an accommodation with capitalism rather than its overthrow, while economic strategies relied on what have been called “neo-extractivist” or “neo-developmentalist” policies (Svampa 2019). Indeed, as Gómez-Barris (2018) argues in Beyond the Pink Tide, the strongest resistance to such models of governance has often been found not in organized political movements but in artistic undercurrents, whether trans performances, student movement anthems, or Indigenous remapping exercises. Across Latin America, artist collectives have responded in various ways to changes in the political climate, as surveyed in Bill Kelley Jr. and Grant Kester’s edited volume (2017a). What binds the diverse groups are three traits that also speak directly to the cartoneras we discuss. In all groups, Kelley and Kester assert, a “situational commitment is joined

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by a strong connection to national and international networks of practitioners and activists struggling”; there is an emphasis on the “generative potential of collaboration itself”; and one encounters both a “shared recognition that existing models of . . . artistic practice and political resistance are changing, and a .  .  . willingness to challenge the conventional boundaries between art and activism or aesthetics and politics” (2017b, 12). Links to cartonera practices can be found in many of the groups discussed in their edited volume but perhaps none more so than in the contribution made by the Bolivian group Colectivx Ch’ixi, a collective whose members include the renowned anarchist sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui; the group dedicates its chapter to the physical construction of an activist space through the joys of manual work (Ch’ixi / LXS Colectiverxs 2017). This, an integral part of the Bolivian national psyche and identity, can be detected in the lyrical quote from national poet Jaime Sáenz: You must be coming to the realization that we only learn with our hands, and because of this we know all kinds of trades. We are hunters, construction workers, and travelers, potters and stonemasons, and also warriors, and we are witches and miners, and we have discovered the veins of Totoral formed by the earth. And we also know how to plant, to sew, to spin cotton, to turn on a lathe, and to weave, and we raised up our houses and sewed our clothes because we are Bolivians and we know how to work. (In Ch’ixi / LXS Colectiverxs 2017, 345)

Rather than indulge in shallow nationalism, however, the Colectivx Ch’ixi gestures subtly to the continental networks in which they are enmeshed, with their community green space, recovered from a former dumping ground, baptized the “intergalactic garden” by “some Mexicans who passed through there” (Ch’ixi / LXS Colectiverxs 2017, 358). Marco Arnez Cuéllar highlights the importance of the collective as a place for the (re)discovery of manual work in the context of an ever more consumerist society and the consequent devaluation of craft and craftsmanship. For him, “the enjoyment of everything that we have within our reach invokes less and less frequently the hand of the artisan who made it possible and causes the devaluation of the magic that this silent ‘act’ converts into sculpted or shaped material” (in Ch’ixi / LXS Colectiverxs 2017, 345). Rather than invisibility, Cuéllar puts this down to “selective blindness, aggravated by a stagnant memory.” He continues, “Seduced by the comfort of the abusive consumption of that which

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is ephemeral and disposable, things appear to us as if by magic” (345). To cure himself of such “blindness and forgetfulness,” Cuéllar undertakes to enjoy every minute of manual labor, echoing the claim in Eloísa Cartonera that, through the formation of a cooperative, they “converted work into part of [their] lives, never an obligation or something disagreeable” (Eloísa Cartonera 2010). There are clear differences between the workshops of movementallied artists and those organized by social movements themselves. The latter workshops tend to consist less of physical spaces and more of time-limited didactic events; they are temporal rather than spatial phenomena. Social-movement workshops are more likely to have a clearly defined political purpose, such as instruction in political theory, or popular education-inspired conscientização (awareness-raising). The Brazilian Sem Terra (landless workers) movement’s use of mística, a form of ritualized theatrical performance, is a good example of how such techniques are designed to raise participants’ awareness of structural injustice and their positions within it (Flynn 2013). María Mercedes Palumbo enumerates artistic-cultural activities as one kind of social movement workshop among many, including those focused more on organizational issues, protests, decision making, and neighborhood-based approaches (2016, 233). In terms of what such workshops achieve, Palumbo mentions one aim that has overriding importance: the creation of a new political culture and the formation of revolutionary political subjects (233). This serves as a reminder that although a subjective turn in social movement studies is relatively recent, an emphasis placed on the creation of ideal subjects in revolutionary and radical movements is hardly new, with Che Guevara’s “new man” and the Soviet Stakhanovite worker constituting paradigmatic examples. A comparison with the cartonera subject that emerges in the public or private bookmaking workshop is instructive for understanding the ways cartonera tends to differ from such explicitly political schools of self-formation displayed in the archetypal social-movement workshop though cartoneras do often participate in social movements. To draw a metaphor from the material practices at stake in bookmaking, it is form rather than content that is replicated in cartonera workshops. In no cartonera workshops did we witness the publishers instructing participants as to what use they should give the blank notebooks fabricated, to which genre they should dedicate their prospective cardboard publishing houses, or which political cause their publishing work should be in the service of, if any. This is a clear difference not only with the social-movement workshop understood in its

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broadest sense but also with the publishing workshops delivered by explicitly autonomist publishers (Rabasa 2019). What is encouraged instead is a flourishing diversity. This does not mean that cartonera is devoid of political content. Rather, the workshop form itself is political, where an emphasis on affordable replicability represents a democratic and horizontal gesture.

Cardboard Communities Patrick worked with Sergio on a daily basis for several months in 2017, becoming—the term is fitting for a discussion of workshops—an “anthropologist-apprentice.” Within this framework, participant observation allows the ethnographer to “access other people’s ways of perceiving by joining with them in the same currents of practical activity, and by learning to attend to things—as would any novice practitioner— in terms of what they afford in the contexts of what has to be done” (Ingold 2011b, 314). The rapid and generous integration of the newcomer into cartonera communities links back to Lave and Wenger’s concept (1991) of a “community of practice” and their notion that such groups involve the production or use of objects but also the learning of norms and values. In cartonera praxis, these values include freedom of expression, horizontal structures, and the democratization of technique. For the publishers Dany and Nayeli, the workshop is a “space of sharing know-how with others, of disseminating our knowledge.” Importantly, Lave and Wenger argue that the “legitimate peripherality” of newcomers in a community of practice provides them with more than an observational lookout post: it crucially involves participation as a way of learning—of both absorbing and being absorbed in—the “culture of practice.” An extended period of legitimate peripherality provides learners with opportunities to make the culture of practice theirs. (1991, 95)

This mode of participation is akin to what we ourselves underwent in our cartonera apprenticeships with La Cartonera, La Rueda, Dulcinéia, and Catapoesia: following the steps that we were taught, respectfully recognizing our teachers’ instruction, and creatively referring to their gestures without appropriating. Still, the “community of practice” concept cannot adequately incorporate the full extent of the cartonera world and

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the cardboard, staples, paper, thread, and tools of which it is made; instead, cartoneras operate through a material sociality of practice, an experiential form of praxis located within an iterative and convivial mode of making. Like the scientific practices described by Barad, cartonera is “perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings” and involved in the “enfolding of locally stabilized phenomena . . . into subsequent iterations of particular practices” (2003, 817). The term “material sociality of practice” also does some useful conceptual work. It dispenses with the singular “community” that is present in Lave and Wenger’s framework because even though some cartoneras communicate regularly and might be said to form a loose collective body, they are also embedded in their own local communities and are generators of diverse new groups; in cartonera, the multiple takes precedence over the singular, the pluriverse over the universe. The phrasing also avoids counterposing the material and the social. Law and Mol (1995) explore sociality and materiality as separate, if deeply entangled aspects of life; we highlight cartonera’s pluriversatility, the manner in which, as a toolkit, it can enfold a multitude of materials in constituting its diverse worlds while also recognizing that humans are themselves material, constituted by flows of chemicals, solid flesh, brain cells, and nonhuman bodily hangers-on. We fi nd it useful not to speak of the engagement of the social and the material world as separate entities but of, in Ingold’s words, the “skilled practitioner participating in a world of materials” (2007, 14). Ingold encourages anthropologists to “learn more about the material composition of the inhabited world by engaging quite directly with the stuff we want to understand” (2007, 3). Yet perhaps Daniel Miller (2007) has a point when, in riposte, he suggests that the kinds of materials and activities to which Ingold refers, knapping stones and sawing logs, are not particularly representative of the modern world. In our approach, we take from Ingold a focus on production over consumption and openended materials over finished objects, while with Miller we share a recognition that most people nowadays only rarely fi nd themselves with “virgin material” in their hands but come into contact with and dispose of thousands of cardboard boxes yearly without a second thought. Indeed, materials do not come much more mass-produced or industrialized than cardboard. We have explored the ways that cartoneras create relations, communities, and meaning. Largely, this has taken cartonera to mean cartonera publishing and publishers, yet the word “cartonera” itself contains the principal material that links these diverse

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Figure 5.3. Sergio sourcing cardboard and handing in old books to be pulped.

Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

groups: cardboard (cartón). This material, as grasped, worked, held, perforated, stitched, painted, even worn, by cartonera practitioners, itself plays a key role in constituting “cardboard communities” (figure 5.3). As Dany mused during the encuentro in Cuernavaca, “noble” cardboard is integral to the modern world; almost all the objects in the room, whether chairs, tables, bottles of water, bags, or pens, would have made their way there in cardboard boxes. Yet Dany’s point also alerts us to a peculiarity of cardboard that is not shared by other mass-produced industrial materials. Cardboard is singularly associated with one particular shape and commodity: the box. Insert the word into Google Images, and you will be met with a sea of boxes or cardboard sheets that can be assembled into more boxes. Cardboard comes in all sizes, it seems, but not necessarily all shapes. It has effectively one job to do, carrying things, and it does that rather well, with an astounding one hundred billion corrugated boxes used annually in the United States alone (Cardboard Balers 2020). Cardboard is thus in a curious position vis-à-vis Ingold’s critique of material culture studies as focusing overwhelmingly on “a world of ob-

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jects” where “materials appear to vanish, swallowed up by the very objects to which they have given birth” (2007, 9). On the one hand, most people would have no problem identifying cardboard as a material, to be placed in the recycling container or given to a waste picker alongside other categories of material such as glass, plastic, and paper. On the other hand, cardboard is intimately associated with a particular object, the box. In its rigidity of form, cardboard might be usefully contrasted with plastic, which, Roland Barthes writes, “more than a substance . . . is the very idea of its infinite transformation” (1991, 97). The ubiquity of cardboard and its primary use as a container of important and valuable things lead not to an appreciation of its utmost importance and utility but to its dismissal and invisibility as a material of marginal importance. Its formal rigidity may also limit the imagination. Certainly, the cardboard box has long been a favorite plaything of Western children, as in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes in which the box becomes a “transmogrifier,” a “duplicator,” or a “time machine.” A nondescript cardboard box was even added to the US National Toy Hall of Fame in 2005. Yet even here, the box becomes something else rather than cardboard ceasing to be a box. Necessity, as the mother of invention, sometimes spurs more imaginative uses, such as the cardboard violins that we saw and heard in Zacatecas, confected by music teachers as they awaited the arrival of the real instruments (Casillas Jácquez 2018). This was a singular, colorful example in which rather than playing second fiddle to the objects that it protects and encloses, cardboard literally became first fiddle. One common repurposing of cardboard is as a protest placard, as in Dulcinéia’s work and also taken up by La Cartonera during its involvement with the peace movement of 2011. Following the disappearance of the son of one of its contributing writers, the poet Javier Sicilia, La Cartonera assisted in the construction of a large cardboard placard onto which artists and protesters painted and drew messages of solidarity and denunciation. The cardboard canvas was soon destroyed by state security services; more lasting was cartonera’s attempts to prevent cardboard being boxed in by a rigidity of form. The liberation of cardboard from its formal, serial, replicable straitjacket is one of cartonera’s key material achievements, made possible through a focus on the specific properties of cardboard. The properties of cardboard that make it particularly suitable for transporting commodities include its light weight. This attribute is also clearly of value in its role as the cover of cartonera books, making them

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easy to be moved around and not overly cumbersome. Cardboard is durable due to the strong and resistant wood fibers of which it is composed. Again, this is useful for cartonera publishers, whose books can be carried around book festivals and transported in suitcases on long flights or in more boxes through courier services to eventually endure on domestic or library bookshelves. Cardboard has shape stability, meaning that it will keep its shape as a cardboard box or a cartonera cover. Finally, cardboard can absorb some liquid, which means that it provides relative protection for whatever it encloses, whether paper pages or multifold commodities. This might be seen as useful in cartonera, but it is problematic where the cover itself is in many cases considered a work of art or at the very least an integral part of the cartonera book’s value. Until now, we have been discussing cardboard in general, yet cartoneras only ever deal with cardboard in the particular. Further, they rarely buy new cardboard, instead sourcing it secondhand, whether from the streets, from friends and businesses, or in Dulcinéia Catadora’s case, directly from the waste-picker cooperative in which they are based. The cartón of cartoneras is, therefore, always relational. These modes of acquisition are consequential with regard to the nature of the cardboard that they receive; it often bears advertising, inbuilt features such as handles, or signs of usage such as stains, creases, and rips. The French philosopher François Dagognet notes, “Even the smallest utensil, like the most used cloth, carries with it a sort of tattoo indicating time and contact” (1997, 13). Cartoneras have differing attitudes as to the condition of the cardboard with which they work. Some seek out the cleanest, bestquality cardboard, as does the Yucatán-based publisher HtuRquesa, whose editor, Ruth Pérez Aguirre, went so far as to seek out cardboard that had contained cleaning products to reassure potential consumers with the idea of hygienic practice. Others prize that which acts, in Dagognet’s words, as an “incomparable witness” to past lives (1997, 13). Yet while the environmental commitment of cartoneras varies widely, very few cardboard publishers buy new cardboard for the purpose of covering their books. Most opt to save existing cardboard from the pulping mill or the landfill rather than contributing grist to the mill for the production of new commodities. Many of the affordances of cardboard could only be grasped by working with the material. One of the first characteristics we noticed when creating cartonera books, also obvious to anyone who has ever paid close attention to cardboard, was that it is composed of two or sometimes three paper surfaces filled with corrugated paper rolls known

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as “flutes.” These can be of various specifications, including, in the Spanish-language environments in which we worked, micro-corrugado or doble-corrugado. The roll can be so thin that it is barely noticeable or a thick and undulating feature; it can run horizontally or vertically along cartonera books depending on how the cardboard is cut. But if it is cardboard, corrugation is present. What is the significance of this structure? In La Cartonera’s method of bookmaking, the corrugated interior and one of the containing surfaces is cut vertically about a centimeter from the inner end of the book, effectively creating a relatively immovable spine, which is stitched and covered with cloth, and a flexible cover that can be opened to allow the reader to leaf through the pages. Another feature of the corrugado is that its lines provide a natural fold for the cardboard; cartoneras that use a single piece of cardboard to cover their books often use the natural fold to create the spine. The corrugated surface is not always a friend of the cartonera, however; a vertical fold might occur unintentionally in the middle of a cover page, for instance, while the thin paper covering is susceptible to ripping on one side. Creases and cuts in fact played an important role in the accidental invention of the precut cardboard box in the late nineteenth century in New York, where in the office of Scottish-born printer Robert Gair, a careless pressman cut rather than pressed twenty thousand seed bags. Diana Twede and colleagues report, “Rather than igniting Gair’s thrifty Scottish wrath, it fired his imagination,” leading him to alter his press to be able to cut and crease in a single operation (2005, 41). For those intervening on cardboard covers, cuts, tears, leftover advertising, or informational symbols can themselves be grasped as affordances suggestive of or easily incorporated into designs. In Patrick’s copy of La Cartonera’s Arcoiris de la palabra, painted at the group’s Casona Spencer workshop, the painter conserved and painted around a picture of a crown and the words “Corona Soap,” while barcodes, numbers, and other words were painted over, though not enough to cover them completely. Another message, “Handle with care,” originally intended to preserve not the cardboard but the product inside, now served as a protection for the book in its entirety. Cartonera publishers or workshop participants sometimes modify the text in ways that are obviously political and subversive; for a publication on Zapata, Dany changed the name of the clothing chain “Zara” to “Zapata.” Other times, the intervention is more playful; for a copy of Adiosadios by El Ene, published by the Guadalajara cartonera El Viaje/El Viejo, the author chose a sec-

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tion of a pizza box, following the curvature of its print to inscribe his name and title, and leaving a text that boasts of a pizza that is “as always handmade with the best ingredients.” Anyone who got hungry during El Ene’s reading could even call the phone number still printed on the front. In other books, symbols refer to the material properties of the cardboard itself. A copy of La Cartonera’s Fuera de foco by Edgar Artaud Jarry has three symbols on the back of the white cardboard cover: an umbrella under rain, indicating that the box should not get wet; a crossed-out sun, meaning that that it should not be exposed to sunlight; and a glass, signifying fragility. This information constitutes a trace of a past life yet also serves as a guide for the new object that the cardboard has come to constitute. Cardboard books, we have learned in our cartonera travels, are also relatively fragile items that might be damaged by exposure to sun or rain. Such cardboard thus does not come as a blank slate; it constitutes an “informed material” (Barry 2005), a palimpsest whose layers of signification may be glimpsed by the reader or grasped by the handler. Yet a blank canvas is often exactly what cardboard publishers seek for the covers of their books so they can intervene with an original work in paint, stencil, or serigraphy. One way around printed words and images on cardboard in cartonera practice is to relegate what was the outside of the box to the inside of the book. A copy of La Ratona Cartonera’s Cuentos de nuestra América by Luisa Valenzuela features the title and a hat, scarf, and jacket drawn onto the nondescript cardboard cover. On the inside, however, we are informed that the cardboard formerly housed “multipurpose white paper” with “93 percent brightness”; through symbols and text, we are told that the cardboard should not be exposed to sunlight or water, is flammable, and should also be “handled with care.” This example alerts us to a curious situation whereby cardboard and its role both has and has not been transformed. It was used previously to protect paper, and now as a book cover, it still does. Its properties have in a sense remained the same; it should no more be exposed to rain and water now than before. What, then, has changed? It no longer frames blank virgin pages but recycled paper that has been inscribed with, in this instance, Latin American fiction. Just as importantly, cardboard’s paradigmatic form, the box, has been dismantled or, we might say, transformed by another form, that of the workshop, with its relations and affects, its collectivities and communities, its materials and its mobilities.

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In Brazil, Dulcinéia Catadora has also carried out conceptual experimentation with cardboard through a collaboration with the artist Thiago Honório. Thiago was invited by Dulcinéia to create a book in collaboration with the members of the collective. The resulting work, Dulcinéia, is an interesting example of how collectives have experimented with Eloísa’s original proposition and deliberately foregrounded the material with which the collectives work. Dulcinéia has no sulfite A5 pages, only ten sheets of cardboard bound by Coptic stitch. Each page features a letter that, reading the entire book, spells the name of the work. The letters are constituted by perforations of varying degrees of force with a sharp instrument to puncture holes into a pattern to indicate characters. As a result of this technique, the book can be read in both directions; the exit points are visible on the reverse side of each page and manifest an inversion of the original gesture. Composed of nonconventional pages and bound by coarse stitch, the book takes on a self-consciously three-dimensional form. Its sparseness focuses the reader’s attention on the cardboard itself and the way each perforation is subtly different in the degree of force applied. This use of cardboard, and nothing but, is a defining central theme, and in its coherence with the collective’s practice it offers a strong affirmation of a material sociality of practice; to hold the book, to play with it, is to understand that its realization could only have occurred through a handson collaboration between the artist and the Dulcinéia waste pickers. Thinking back to Felipe Ehrenberg’s coruscating denunciation of “artmongers” who control culture (in Medina 2006, 158), the lack of mystery in the cartonera book locates its artistic intentionality in the deceptively simple act of making things together. The Dulcinéia collaboration began with a gift. Visiting the Glicério recycling co-op, Thiago was presented with a bradawl, its polished wooden handle bearing the patina of years of effort and manual work in the palms of the Dulcinéia collective’s hands. Thiago commented that this object presaged the collaboration: Andreia wanted to work with something more raw, it was already defi ned that we wanted to work this way before the fi rst session, the material, the binding, and the cardboard. All the sessions took place in her house, and I felt that my contribution should really be a whisper, me, as a white, privileged man, next to their work, their presence.

Andreia and Maria spoke fondly of their collaboration with Thiago. He was respectful and wanted to learn, and the easy conviviality of their

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shared labor made possible the complex authorship of the work. The activity—the discussion, the cutting, and the gestures of perforation, alternately light-touch and intense, delicate and fierce—created a lasting impression, as Thiago recounts: It was about an exchange, what I create and the way I work and what the women of Dulcinéia create and the way they work. The work we started on was invested with so much desire, effort, dedication, and lightheartedness. It was beautiful. After those sessions, I would leave totally overcome, deeply moved. I was shot through.

Significantly, Thiago collected and cut cardboard, took photos, and took part in discussions but did not create any of the perforated lettered pages himself. The gesture of piercing the cardboard with the bradawl, he explained, echoed the spiking movement with which some waste pickers collect materials. Dulcinéia is one of the few cartoneras that continues to work with the waste pickers who fi rst gave the publishing movement its name. The cardboard they use is recovered from the streets by the workers of the Glicério recycling cooperative where Dulcinéia is based, the very same waste-picker publishers like Maria who then transform it into books and works of art. Thiago argued that it would not be coherent for him to inscribe the work, given that the trace left by the waste pickers, “its uniqueness, its spirit, its libido, its force,” arose from the singular relation each woman had with the material. In this way, Dulcinéia calls attention to the importance of practice within well-established notions of material sociality. The contours and affordances of the material make themselves present in the social relations generated by such stuff, but it is through an iterative and respectful engagement that only a genuinely relational practice can engender that cartonera creates community and worlds through acts of forming, deforming, and transforming. If material sociality refers to “ways in which bodies are necessarily materially implicated in one another’s corporeal existence” (Chandler and Neimanis 2013), then a material sociality of practice seeks to defeat the “flattening impulse within a great deal of recent critical theory which . . . runs the danger of reducing human sociality to nothing more than the relationality between various beings or actants” (Long and Moore 2013, 41). The focus on cartonera practice allows us to pay overdue attention to how the properties of materials impinge upon and drive the complex relational matrix of which they form part. Unlike Mignolo’s “colonial matrix of power” (2018a), this is based not on hierarchies of class, gender, and race but rather on horizontali-

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ties enacted, by Dulcinéia, through the day-to-day practices of and exchanges across a working cooperative. The Dulcinéia work produced in collaboration with Thiago is a good example of the way that cartoneras re-form and re-inform cardboard, for in this case not only is cardboard disassociated from its paradigmatic form, the box, but it is also divested of its function as a container, whether of products or pages. This is, following Ingold (2007), a stripping back of the object to the bare bones of the material, but one in which the material is not unblemished but rather rhythmically perforated by the hands of the catador/cartonero using the tools of the workshop.

Workshop Spaces and Material Flows La Casona Spencer is a grand mansion that overlooks Cuernavaca’s celebrated cathedral. The mansion once briefly housed the regional government of Morelos, then became the home of English sculptor John Spencer. It might seem a strange location for a cartonera workshop, in jarring contrast with Dulcinéia’s makeshift home in a waste-picker cooperative in São Paulo. Yet the apparent opulence of the Casona Spencer is belied by its crumbling stone walls that require constant labors of preservation. It is also the perfect setting for the enactment of cartonera’s particular horizontalist ethos, which is underpinned in the cartonera world by a material sociality of practice. Cardboard is not the only material that fuels the cartonera workshop. On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, La Cartonera took stock of the materials it had used over the previous decade: 3,000 cardboard boxes, 7 kilometers of thread, and 250,000 sheets of paper to create around 10,000 books in 400 workshop sessions. During these workshops, 90 kilos of coffee had been consumed, an interesting fact in the context of bookmaking and “new materialist” theory. Within Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality, “in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” and “ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (2008, 238), eating and drinking are proffered as concrete acts, seemingly straightforwardly social or even biological, through which “plants or animals become the substance of the social” (253). Eating has also been discussed by the philosopher Annemarie Mol, for whom “neither tightly closed off, nor completely open, an eater has semi-permeable boundaries” (2008, 30). In this vein, Mielle Chandler and Astrid Neimanis suggest that processes of porosity, fluidity, and absorption evidence water as the “medium of material sociality par excellence” (2013, 71).

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Eating and drinking highlight the porousness of the body, the way that at any given point it is reconstituted by things that a moment ago were outside of it. Edgar Artaud Jarry, a friend of La Cartonera, highlights the body’s porosity in his third cartonera poetry collection, a posthumanist exploration of his own human body-cum-cyborg as “a machine exchanging / bacteria with the environment” (2018, 54). In all the Saturday-afternoon workshops that Dany and Nayeli hosted in the Casona Spencer, coffee and cake were provided alongside paints and cups of water. The refreshments were essential elements of the convivial atmosphere of the workshops; if the coffee and cake were missing, there were complaints. For La Cartonera’s tenth-anniversary celebrations, books themselves were transubstantiated into the shape of a cake, created by Patrick’s partner, Mary, as a collective achievement and celebration to be consumed collectively, a way of recognizing the many hands that had gone into creating La Cartonera’s collection. Dany noted that the visual richness of the books’ covers was nothing more than “a translation of the workshop, the convivencia [living together], the diversity of the people who participate, their enthusiasm.” Enthusiasm, an intangible affect, is channeled, transformed, and given cardboard form in the covers of La Cartonera. Following Law and Mol (1995, 279), the cardboard book can thus be thought of not as a thing in itself but as a set of affective, material relations between humans and nonhumans. In Sergio’s La Rueda café, participants in his various endeavors were also fueled by the strongest coffee that we have ever had the pleasure of consuming. It stained our tongues, charged our conversations, blocked adenosine, made us more alert. In both workshops another substance flowed surreptitiously, sparking creativity, arguments, books, and borracheras (drunken episodes): mezcal. Should the amount of this powerful distilled maguey spirit, cousin of tequila, that was consumed in the Casona Spencer workshops have been inventoried in the ten-year exhibition? Dany had considered but decided against it. Sergio, a recovering alcoholic, found drinkers rather tiresome. On Friday nights, however, when Sergio’s old friends descended on La Rueda for the philosophical radio discussion show The Human Observatory, a large carafe of mezcal was brought out from under the counter and served deceptively, and rather dangerously, in small ceramic tea cups. Cartonera workshops are fluid, not fi xed; they are open to flows, improvisation, and the inclusion of new and unexpected materials. Such was the case of one workshop held as part of the program of events that Sergio coordinated in parallel with what is the second-largest book festival in the world after Frankfurt’s, Guadalajara’s Feria Internacional

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del Libro (FIL). Originally, the FIL was a relatively inclusive event at which Sergio and other countercultural writers and figures would participate; Sergio had even given a talk at the FIL about the various alternative fanzines and journals with which he had been involved. But the book fair became increasingly corporate and steadily incorporated into the fiefdom of Raúl Padilla López, the powerful rector of the Universidad de Guadalajara. Sergio said local writers and artists were barely ever invited anymore, shunned for star attractions like Irvine Welsh and Elena Poniatowska. Sergio called the FIL a “derroche” (splurge or extravagance) where fi nancial and corporate sponsors spent in excess and Padilla made lots of money, as did the multinational publishers that took part every year and the businesses surrounding the conference center where it is held. Sergio had long since given up on the FIL and instead put his energies into simultaneous alternative events to give voice to less wellknown authors in cafés, cultural centers, and public squares in the city center. These started with “the counter-FIL,” “the anti-FIL,” and “the other FIL” but by 2017 had morphed into the francachela cartonera, with francachela defined by the Real Academia Española as a “meeting between several people to have fun, drink, and eat, usually excessively and without limits.”* Francachela participants indulge in a more inclusive, carnivalesque kind of excess grounded in local community and corporeality. This intended inclusivity has practical limitations, though; with the cost of traveling Mexico’s vast distances relatively high and not much chance of recovering the bus fare through book sales, only a few cartoneras made it from outside of Guadalajara in 2017, to be joined in the program by Guadalajaran cartoneras, writers, and musicians. To support the 2017 francachela, Patrick recruited a Scottish artist friend, Greer, who was living in Mexico City, to offer a free workshop alongside the bookmaking session that Sergio and Israel would deliver in the public square in front of Guadalajara’s neo- Gothic Templo Expiatorio church. This event included the use of cardboard cut into different shapes to make sculptural nopals, known in English as prickly pear cacti. Greer would bring along cochineal, a small insect that lives on prickly pear and has for centuries been pressed to extract carmine dye. Our event was announced over a public-address system in the square as a “completely free cartonera book workshop and a painting workshop * “Francachela,” Diccionario de la lingua española, Real Academia Española, https://dle.rae.es/francachela.

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FIgure 5.4. Cochineal workshop in Guadalajara’s Templo Expiatorio square, 2017.

Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

with cochineal, that marvelous pre-Hispanic substance” (figures 5.4 and 5.5). What we attempted was a performative reenactment of a lively symbiotic relation between the parasitic cochineal and the nopal pads from which they suck moisture and nutrients. The cochineal would be crushed and mixed with vinegar, bicarbonate of soda, and lime, turning their remains different shades of red, to be applied in brushstrokes to the cardboard that would be cut either in rectangular pieces for book covers or in the shape of leafy pads to be slotted into frames that recreated the shape of the ubiquitous nopal. This was a meeting of worlds and temporalities, that of mass-produced cardboard, created and modified in the United States through a series of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century inventions and patents, and that of cochineal, used as a dye by Mexico’s Indigenous peoples since precolonial times. Carlos Marichal Salinas writes, “The technology for the development of the red dye was the result of centuries of experimentation by peasant communities” (2018, 259). Cochineal was used by Aztec women to paint their lips, by Indigenous artists, and for coloring the Aztec nobility’s garments and ceremonial feathers. With Spanish colonization, cochineal became a key material of early modern globalization; at one point it was the most expensive dye in the world due to the

208 Taking Form, Making Worlds

FIgure 5.5. Sergio oversees children experimenting with cardboard and cochineal,

2017. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

demand for luxury textiles by European aristocrats and Catholic clergy. Cochineal dye was a pre-Hispanic substance but one whose cultivation and trade had been under the control of European elites for centuries. Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll writes about another process of pigmentation produced by different living organisms, black fungi and cyanobacteria that maintain the life of Aboriginal rock paintings. Focusing on the Gwion Gwion rock paintings found in northwestern Australia, she explains, “The cyanobacteria have a red skin and, together with the fungi, black and red eat into the rock to produce the painting” (2015, 168). Unlike the bacteria and fungi studied by Von Zinnenburg Carroll, however, the cochineal used in the workshop and more widely were no longer alive, having been harvested and then dried as close to the end of their natural lives as possible because that is when they are biggest and juiciest. In cochineal, we thus find an example of congealed life, in Barad’s terms, a “congealing of agency” where matter is “substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing, but a doing” (2003, 822). Natural biological processes are involved in the creation of carminic acid by the female bugs and their nymphs in a process that farmers oversee before releasing the material into complex markets and pathways through which it eventually ended up becoming entangled with cartonera in the square.

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We have referred to Ingold’s suggestion that we “take a step back from the materiality of objects to the properties of materials” (2007, 9), and this was the approach taken by the participants in our cochineal workshop. Mostly children, they became obsessed with exploring the properties of this congealed life form and the effects of its combination with other substances. In various senses, both the cochineal and the cartonera workshop came to life. The cochineal, its relatively short life extinguished, was enrolled into new, unexpected projects, tiny volcanic eruptions, just as in the past it had dyed military uniforms and cassocks, leaving its mark on European empires. The cartonera workshop too was brought to life, confi ned neither to Sergio’s radio studio nor to the FIL’s sanitized spaces; vibrant, chaotic, and messy, it became part of a life already being lived in the square, as people married in the church, danced salsa in the corner, shared beers and tacos, and took in a poetry recital. Von Zinnenburg Carroll’s story of living paint is one that depicts black fungi as an ally of the Aboriginal and a foe of the colonist; it protects Indigenous cave paintings but eats away at white marble statues of Greek antiquity (2015, 169). Cochineal helps us to tell a different story with cartonera, one in which the global North and South intersect. Here we see that it is not simply a case of our research team bringing cartonera to the global North in the form of workshops, encounters, or cartonera books catalogued in British libraries or contained in this present book. Our cocreative practice was also encouraged as we carried out research in São Paulo, Guadalajara, and elsewhere, our cartonera partners at once defending their own techniques, querying and engaging with our approaches, and being open to adaptation and addition. The workshop in the Templo Expiatorio square was quintessentially Mexican; we were decorating books and cacti using pre-Hispanic natural pigments, and the cardboard we used consisted of off-cuts from a friend of Sergio’s, who boxed artisanal tequila. At the same time, both cardboard and the workshop forms were themselves fruit of historical and contemporary flows between the global North and South and across Latin America. Cartonera had traveled north from Buenos Aires and cardboard south from New York; we had traveled west from England, while cochineal had traveled east to the heart of empire and back. Dependent neither on cardboard nor on the cartoneras alone, this single public workshop emerged from a multiplicity of actors and factors that were clustered around accessibility, adaptability, and porosity. It relied on life and was open to its unpredictable flows. All of this took place in contrast to the rational, ordered, and policed space of accumulation that Sergio found that the FIL had become.

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The otra FIL (other FIL) that Sergio cofounded took its name from the Other Campaign that the Zapatistas launched in 2005, distancing the movement from electoral politics. The francachela in the Templo Expiatorio square was also an act of resistance against the kind of exclusionary mega-events that the biggest international book fairs and festivals have become, at least from the perspective of local publishers and authors. This resistance rehearses the kind of cartonera-multinational publisher conflict that Lucy has discussed elsewhere in relation to another cartonera, whose aim “is not to intervene or compete with multinational communication conglomerates, but rather to create alternative spaces in which different ways of being and working together can be proposed and tested out” (Bell 2017a, 67). There is not, then, a strictly oppositional model between the FIL and the francachela; some cartoneras are present at the FIL alongside other independent publishers, and over the years, many writers and publishers have presented at both the FIL and its alternative. This brings us back to cartonera’s relation with resistance expressed by our interlocutors in a way that can perhaps best be conceptualized as “existence as resistance.” We can see this in the francachela; when disputes prevented the organization of a wider FIL alternative, Sergio nevertheless thought it important to maintain a smaller cartonera event. Otherwise, the center of Guadalajara and its plazas would have been empty of literary events during the book fair; the only indication that the FIL was occurring would have been the large advertising banners hanging from lampposts. The gathering of a cartonera public in Guadalajara’s central square, attracted by the opportunity to work with “that marvelous pre-Hispanic substance” is an example of an important point made by Johansson, Lilja, and Martinsson: that materialities, or in our argument, materials themselves, play an important role in making “counter-communities of belonging possible, recognizable and visible” (2018, 7).

New Dimensions for Action, New Stories We agree with Otto Von Busch that “a material perspective can open new dimensions of how humans and objects (or nonhumans) act in concert to open specific possibilities of resistance which point to the material culture of capitalism and everyday consumerism” (2017, 68). Existence as resistance is enabled and mirrored by the materials that cartonera practitioners appropriate and reappropriate, deform and transform. Both co-

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chineal and cardboard are resistant in that they have outlived patents and trade wars, the decline and growth of superpowers, the fall and rise of artisanal techniques. A little bug that survives by extracting moisture from cacti in one of the driest landscapes on earth is unlikely to be disappearing any time soon, and while the farming of cochineal may have declined, it is nevertheless resilient, “a tradition that resists extinction” (México Desconocido 2001). As we have narrated it, the story of cardboard is very different, yet the covers of the books stitched in workshops, by way of their own properties and resilience, have also shown an ability to escape the pulp, surviving to tell many new tales. As Law and Mol suggest, “Relational materialism doesn’t just reside in objects. It’s also a way of telling stories” (1995, 291). We have recounted some of the many colorful tales that could be told of cartonera workshops and the materials that constitute them. Whether situated in a smoke-filled garret dedicated only to bookmaking or in a city plaza, a village square, or a museum, cartonera practice joins the many currents of life, the lived and living stories that do not merely surround it but are rather imprinted upon it. Produced in this way, cartonera books belie the very concept of “environment,” a word derived from the French word “environ,” meaning “surrounding”; raindrops do not slip off cartonera books, they shape and deform them; spilled coffee stains the books; air ages them; light fades them. Cartonera books, as works of literature and art, tell this story through their pages but also through their covers, which bear the marks of production with pride or dignity, care or chaos, joy or grief. This diversity of affect is supported by the cartonera workshop as a fundamentally democratic, generative, and generous endeavor whose characteristics are a result as much of the other-than-human materials that constitute it as of human intention. All the goodwill in the world would struggle to transform Formula 1 racing into an accessible sport of the masses; the costs involved are simply prohibitive. The cartonera workshop, in contrast, is made up of paper and paints, bradawls and Bics, needles and thread. Common materials, then, but often put to uncommon uses; as we have long known, there is more than one way to stitch, more than one type of thread, more than one kind of cardboard. We have paid close attention to cardboard itself, a mass-produced, democratic material that regularly passes through our fingers and is easy to get hold of, but also we have given attention to the many other materials and substances that underpin cartonera workshops. Distinct from a social movement, cartonera constitutes a material sociality of practice, a concept whose three terms, in the world of car-

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tonera, carry equal weight. If we have sought to give cardboard and its companion materials, both everyday and exotic, the attention they deserve, this has not been at the expense of how such materials are socialized, circulating through and sustaining cartonera networks. Cartonera practice, meanwhile, is that which has been drummed into our fi ngers as together we became skilled and inventive practitioners in the workshop, stitching, painting, drinking, aching, conversing, worlding. Although fundamental, the materiality of the book object is just one element of the cartonera exhibition. Dialogues, learning spaces, and an emphasis on process open up the possibility of reordering social forms and formations, invoking art’s potential to make plural our collective world.

CHAPTER 6

Exhibitions: An Artistic Proposition to Reorder the Social

Meeting Washington Cucurto in Pizzeria Kentucky, a chain restaurant on Avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires, was a rushed affair. Sipping espressos with orange juice while filming an interview, Alex, Beatriz Lemos, and the filmmaker Isadora Brant juggled AV equipment, medialunas (Argentine croissants), and cartonera books while curious onlookers wondered who the burly guy with dark hair in a Pumas rugby shirt might be to merit a film crew in the early evening. It was Cucurto, and in June 2018, we traveled to Buenos Aires to meet him and other Eloísa members to gather material for the fi lm Cartoneras, directed by Isadora. The film was an integral part of the upcoming exhibition we were organizing; Alex and Beatriz, while attentive to facilitating this side of the project, were also interested in trying to get an idea of Eloísa Cartonera’s practice and speaking to some of the less well-known actors such as Pablo Rosales and Mariela Scafati, who had been active on the scene when Eloísa was formed. Despite having been interviewed many times before about the origins of Eloísa, Cucurto was patient and polite, showing no signs of irritation, even as he had to repeat answers due to the sounds of passing colectivos (buses) or the interjections of an enthusiastic maestro pizzero. “Around that time,” Cucurto said of the cartonera’s beginnings, “we had the idea of making books using cardboard available in the streets. There was loads of it. We decided to cut this cardboard, fold it in half, and make book covers, then put photocopies in the middle.” Speaking about the creation of Eloísa, Cucurto was matter-of-fact, prosaic even. He reached for a nearby book and held it up. “It’s a simple book. Cardboard from the streets. Inside are pages folded in half.” The title of the book, by María José López: No me gustan las princesas // I don’t like princesses.

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The next day, we went to see Javier Barilaro, who along with Curcurto and Fernanda Laguna, founded Eloísa in 2003. As Javier welcomed us into a narrow hallway, he explained that he was in the process of trying to redo his house. Climbing from one level to the next, we eventually came to the multilevel rooftop space where he was working. Dressed against the winter chill and wearing workman’s gloves, Javier busied himself here sorting and reorganizing old coats, pieces of A4 paper, discarded towels, logs, newspapers, and pieces of cardboard, among other materials. While he attempted to create a level surface, he gestured toward the debris, explaining that he had collected it from the street. He was stuffing the materials into the cavities of the walls and roof, he added, because he couldn’t afford insulation. Sitting down to take a break as the twilight descended, he said quite plainly that although he was no longer part of Eloísa Cartonera, he would always seek to reuse and repurpose, discovering new ways to encounter meaning in the discarded objects he stumbled upon throughout the city, whether it was here on this rooftop, in an exhibition like the one they put on at the São Paulo biennial, making cardboard books, or lecturing about cartonera at Harvard. His was a unified artistic practice employed in different contexts. Sitting on his rooftop, Javier rolled a cigarette as Isa readied the camera. His lighter was not working, so Alex threw him one. Reflecting on the formation of Eloísa in 2003, Javier commented: Para mí, siempre fue un proyecto de arte // For me, it was always an art project.

Meeting Javier and Cucurto and hearing their different takes on their shared project pointed to the false contradictions Lucy and Alex had initially argued over. Cucurto, the pragmatist, focused on the scale of literary production, circulation, and accessibility, with no time for artistic pretension; Javier, the idealist, dreamed of artistic experimentation, the conceptual, the esoteric. This tension has been highlighted and perhaps exaggerated. And yet, the synthesis of these two approaches points to the artistic orientation of cartoneras across the world, as a conceptual art project designed for everyone to be able to access and an experiment that achieved unprecedented circulation. The productive tension between Cucurto and Javier only lasted for so long within Eloísa Cartonera, but its consequences have been long-lasting. On that Southern Hemisphere winter evening, Javier told us more about how he understood Joseph Beuys’s conception of social sculpture, the reshaping or

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resculpting of society that can be achieved only by working inclusively with the creative capabilities of all individuals, not just those of a select artistic group. These two encounters, with Cucurto and Barilaro, create interesting points of departure for discussing exhibitions. Among these points are cartonera’s relation to art and how Eloísa’s initial stance has accompanied and contextualized cartonera practice as it expanded exponentially from a small Buenos Aires art studio. Also, Javier’s reference to Beuys indicates that Eloísa’s nascent framework articulated a type of artistic practice that sought a profound engagement with the social. The exhibition, the act of engaging a wider public through artistic practice, emerges here as a crucial form for cartoneras; our project partners showed us how their conceptions of art and exhibition effect potential modalities of reach, display, and relations. And from an artistic project bound up with the post-2001 economic crisis and premised on the medium of publishing, we can discern the transformative potential of the artistic gesture. Back in 2003, Cucurto wanted to publish Latin American writing, and finding himself surrounded by cardboard, that’s what he chose to use. Years later, in 2018, Javier wanted to build his own house, but since he could not afford expensive foam-based insulation, he laid his hands on whatever he could find on the nearby streets. Cucurto and Javier took discards and integrated them into vertiginous constructions that, we have learned, are not as precarious as they may look. The construction of Eloísa has provided solid foundations on which writers, artists, and publishers across the continent have built their own homes and communities. Cartonera practitioners exhibit their work in many contexts, but what underpins their approach to the exhibition form is a political intentionality, a commitment to accessibility and a determination to subvert existing categories of meaning. How does this occur? How does a literature that traverses borders of many kinds enter into dialogue with aesthetics, exhibition design, and importantly for our work, politicized public space? To answer these questions we start with Eloísa Cartonera’s original understanding of cartonera as an instance of social sculpture and how this understanding has influenced the work of other collectives. Different practitioners have interpreted Eloísa’s stance with regard to their particular circumstances and localities while maintaining dialogue with a basic shared proposition. Surveying this plural scene, we fi nd that rather than a simple taxonomy, these different yet related understandings of cartonera’s relation to art can be conceived of as what Johanna

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Drucker has termed a “zone of activity” (1995, 2); practitioners move across and between different aspects of practice at different moments depending on the necessity of the situation. The rough-and-ready aesthetic of cartonera practitioners and their preoccupation with relations and encounters are key to understanding the ways they engage with the exhibition form; when exhibiting work, cartoneras initiate a shift away from the fetishized and auratic and toward the convivial and processbased. In our ethnographic work, we as a project team were inspired by such practice; based on the method of referring to gesture, we organized a cartonera exhibition. In the unexpected encounters that occurred and socioaesthetic interventions that resulted we came to understand how the book object is just one element of the cartonera exhibition; through dialogues, learning spaces, and the emphasis on process, cartonera’s relation to art has presaged the emergence of a very specific form of exhibition, one that constitutes a gesture of resistance and the reordering of social forms and formations, one that realizes art’s potential to constitute new collective worlds.

Art, Aesthetics, and Social Sculpture We have discussed our engagement with theorists of socially engaged art and outlined the positions of art theorists and historians on the one hand and social scientists, principally anthropologists, on the other. What is pertinent in relation to the double fold of cartonera is that while Pierre Bourdieu (1979) makes clear how aesthetic judgment and taste are conditioned by the social, Rancière (2009) points us to a necessary corollary: if such a relationship, which he terms the “aesthetics of politics,” is a terrain well laid out and understood, conversely the politics of aesthetics, how aesthetics may determine the social, is less ethnographically documented and very much lacking from social science research. Sociological work on “social aesthetics” (a term coined in 1999 by the art theorist Lars Bang Larsen) conducted by Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw (2017) and Cristiana Olcese and Mike Savage (2015) offers one avenue forward. Olcese and Savage acknowledge how Bourdieu’s perspective has dominated the social sciences; they suggest that thinking about aesthetics in instrumental terms must be put aside to consider aesthetics as “immanently located within the social” (2015, 733). Born, Lewis, and Straw urge us to focus on how aesthetics can “empractice novel realms of social experience, new modes of sociality” (2017, 9).

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However, we are hesitant to follow Born in her paradigmatic prioritization of music, specifically musical improvisation, as engendering myriad social forms that are mediated on four planes: microsocialities, imagined communities, social relations, and institutional arrangements (2017, 44). These four planes, in fact, intersect with many of the features that we have identified in relation to cartonera publishers and their broader artistic communities. Our suggestion, then, is that these planes are rather too generic to describe music in particular as a somehow superior or more complex art form; other modes of art making and indeed living seem to fit these categories in different but equal ways, be they cartonera bookmaking, painting, or sculpting. For Born, Tia DeNora’s tendency (2010) “to reduce the socio-musical universe to the microsocial space of relations and practices” inevitably obstructs her analysis (Born 2017, 42). For us, however, DeNora’s focus on “meaning-making” (2010, 44) points to what is left unspecified in Born’s analysis: the contextual political frameworks, including those that exist between the global North and South, as well as the disputed epistemological terrain of coloniality and meaning that are operating when the social informs the aesthetic and the aesthetic concomitantly reorders the social. García Canclini argues, “Art processes are epistemological places where art and society, aesthetics and sociology, rethink their ways of making and knowing” (2014, 162). What we foreground here in relation to but also beyond cartonera is precisely this potential to rethink the ways in which the world has been thought, imagined, and made and thus, in Escobar’s terms (2018), to redesign our (one-world) world and recognize a pluriverse. The connection between cartonera practice and the exhibition form is most commonly dated to Eloísa Cartonera’s participation in the 27th São Paulo Art Biennial, but before that Eloísa had already created its own exhibition space in a greengrocer near its workspace and participated in the exhibition Farsites: Urban Crisis and Domestic Symptoms in Recent Contemporary Art, held concurrently at the San Diego Museum of Art and the Centro Cultural Tijuana in 2005. Through an installation that demonstrated how the collective was seeking to engage with the city through direct action, Eloísa signaled a political ambition in working with the exhibition form, one that other cartonera collectives have subsequently adopted and adapted in response to their own circumstances. Dulcinéia, for example, has been deeply influenced by Eloísa’s emphasis on process as opposed to object and has created many complex interventions in this vein. Workshops, complex community negotiations, coauthorship, and hundreds of cartonera books have characterized its work to date, most prominently in O abrigo e o terreno (Shel-

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ter and land) at the Museu de Arte do Rio in 2013 and A arte de contar histórias (The art of storytelling) in 2016 at the Museu de Arte Contemporâneo de Niterói in Rio de Janeiro state. For many cartonera practitioners, the question of cartonera books becoming art objects, seemingly an inevitability if they are inserted into an exhibition, is a complex one; there is a recognition that such a change of status brings a problematic affordance. This generates unease, as Sol Barreto of Catapoesia noted: “To my mind, objects in an exhibition acquire an aura, like it’s a diamond ring that has such value to the museum because it belonged to the queen.” Catapoesia has created many exhibitions with the cartonera book as starting point, so we asked how the collective sought to mitigate the traditional exhibition form. Sol replied, For us the book’s value comes from the whole context around it that had to be built, right? It’s not built overnight, like it’s ready just like that, no, it comes from all that processual work. . . . The way we think about it, we designed an exhibition for the street, and anyone who was there could handle a book and even buy it. Our proposal was that while waiting for the bus, people might pick a book up, look at it, ask questions, that the book would instigate something in them. So in our case, it has an aura, but at the same time it’s not that aura: no, you can’t pick it up, you can’t mess with it, you can’t damage it. That’s not our work, the static object.

Aura was clearly important for Sol and Júlio, so what is this other aura that instigates curiosity as opposed to reverence? What is the value of a process constructed incrementally within a context, as opposed to a static object? Eloísa’s influence is tangible here: the move away from the static toward something in perpetual construction that invites others to get involved is to practice social sculpture, an interdisciplinary type of art that invites its audience to participate in the shaping of the social, in an active and therefore political sense. This understanding of art as process is a motif that goes right back to the origins of cartonera and Javier’s original conception of Eloísa Cartonera, “for it to serve society like a sculpture that anyone can model.” Javier’s engagement with the thought of Beuys throws light on the type of artistic project cartonera would come to be. Not to be confused with “sculpture” as commonly understood (the original German term is Sozial Plastik), Joseph Beuys argued that so-

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cial sculpture was a practice that went beyond typical art spaces such as galleries and museums and included thought and conversation as propositional elements of an open project to which anyone could contribute. Social sculpture questioned what an artwork could be, asserting that if art was reconceived in this extended form, everyone could be considered a potential artist, capable of contributing to a more egalitarian world. For Javier, therefore, the book was merely one manifestation of a process that sat within a wider artistic proposal. If we go back to Beuys, we see how Eloísa’s work bears his mark. In his 1973 text “I Am Searching for Field Character” Beuys asserts, Only on condition of a radical widening of defi nition will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system to build a SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART. (2006, 125)

Beuys makes plain that social sculpture must be envisioned from a starting point that goes beyond traditional spaces of art practice such as the museum, the gallery, and the collection. By arguing that the aesthetic realm must be expanded, Beuys makes an implicit connection between society as a work of art—in which everyone, famously is an artist—and a desire for radical social transformation: EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who—from his state of freedom—the position of freedom that he experiences at fi rst hand— learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER. (2006, 125)

For Javier, inspired by Beuys, cartonera practice is an open invitation to a wider artistic intervention: the democratic proposition to make both the production and consumption of literature more accessible; the destabilization of canons; the political intentionality of traversing stigmas through cardboard books; and the circulation that these books might instigate, taking unexpected pathways toward reconfiguring relations and restitching the social. In this understanding, each book is not a work of art in and of itself but rather a point of composition within a wider aggregation that seeks to make a societal intervention that occurs through different forms, including workshops, coeditions, encounters, and exhibitions.

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Eloísa, through Beuys, thus found a productive synthesis in the tension between Barilaro’s artistic experimentation and Cucurto’s insistence on the reproducibility of the book. What was important for both, in their different visions of Eloísa, was that the process of making a cartonera book should be as accessible as possible. By insisting on everyday materials and recognizing that the book’s value lies in its being largely a reproducible art form that can be made quickly and efficiently, Eloísa stripped away the “aura” of the singular art object while articulating a much more complex artistic gesture. Drucker comments in her panoramic Century of Artists’ Books that such work hinges on the “multiple, non-unique and non-auratic” potential of the book (1995, 363). In Barreto’s comments we can perceive how Catapoesia’s emphasis on inviting people to get involved, physically touch the books, and get conversations going works to dispel the notion of a singular, fetishized object, a position that is entirely coherent with Eloísa Cartonera’s original proposal. In a sense, the English translation of Sozial Plastik as “sculpture” is misleading. Cartonera is expressly not a sculptural work composed of books such as John Latham’s mid-1960s series of “SKOOB sculptures,” one instance of which featured a tower of books being set on fi re in close proximity to the British Museum. For Latham, the book was a component of his work that served its purpose through a radical transformation such as being cut, slashed, or burned. Through these actions, he was exploring, displaying, and challenging the book’s explicit potential as cultural icon. Latham’s work and similar interventions are not to be confused with cartonera books. As part of a practice inspired by social sculpture, cartonera books do not lose their intrinsic identity as functioning books; their texts, materiality, and unique modes of construction are dimensions of the book form that are key to those who produce them. Rather, in their everyday nature allied to a wider transformative project, they can be more productively compared to the work of Mexican American artists seeking to establish unique artistic identities in the United States, resisting and challenging dominant social norms and stereotypes. In her introduction to Chicano and Chicana Art (2019), Jennifer González discusses how an initial challenge in approaching Chicano/a art was to be able to recognize its unique contours and parameters, its perspective on mestizaje or difrasismo, its gesture toward a political consciousness located at the border and its gender ambiguity with regard

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to queer communities. Equally significant, however, has been its use of a rough-and-ready aesthetic, a rasquachismo that manifests itself through unexpected materials: Objects and artifacts of everyday life, domestic spaces, home altars and yard shrines, and the fences and porches of the barrio were employed as the medium of a larger “social sculpture” in which community participants were also active components of the fi nal artwork, directed toward social change. (González 2019, 4)

González makes plain that any analysis of Chicano/a art requires an understanding of a mode of expression employed by artistic practitioners to create dialogue between everyday materials, marginalized communities, and intervention in the fabric of the social. Cartonera is similar in this respect; just as art historians and critics did not at fi rst understand how to categorize Chicano/a art because its objects and practices resisted integration into existing paradigms of the recognizable, cartonera articulates a relation with art that subverts and destabilizes the canonical, seeking inspiration in rasquachismo or, in Brazilian Portuguese, gambiarra. This kind of rough-and-ready practice can be seen in cartonera practitioners’ understanding of their relation to art. While their commitment to the social is strong, it is also diverse and open-ended, taking various forms depending on their interests and the needs they identify in their local and wider communities. Producing art for most cartoneras means inviting groups of people to participate in the collective process of bookmaking. Book covers are decorated by hand, and whether the cardboard is painted, a collage, or perhaps embroidered, cartonera’s relation to art in this sense is pictorial and many times representational. Social sculpture might seem more distant in this regard, but art in these contexts is the invitation to join in; painting, decorating, and otherwise adorning bare cardboard in a workshop context is an activity in which people can get involved. This more practical sense of the conceptual orientation as expressed by Javier Barilaro is still a direct expression of the framework that Eloísa created. Whether it is workshops or conceptual book sculptures like Dulcinéia’s collaboration with Thiago Honório, these linked modalities cannot be thought of as a taxonomy; practitioners move between different emphases at different times, depending on location and circumstance.

222 Taking Form, Making Worlds

Such understandings are not mutually exclusive, and as Drucker comments, the connection between publishing and art resists simplistic categorization: If all the elements or activities which contribute to artists’ books as a field are described, what emerges is a space made by their intersection, one which is a zone of activity, rather than a category into which to place works by evaluating whether they meet or fail to meet certain rigid criteria. (1995, 2)

While the book as literary product is of course important in cartonera practice, there is equal emphasis on the book’s ability to spark collective processes, those capable of generating new meanings, relations, and communities through what we term “literature in action.” Similarly, and within this zone of activity, art might mean inviting children to make books as in an occupied police station, or it might mean conceptual experimentation as exemplified by Dulcinéia Catadora’s work with artists such as Maíra Dietrich (Dietrich and Dias da Costa, Por sobre, 2013), Thais Graciotti (Arquipélago, 2018), Paulo Bruscky (Um livro para desvendar mistérios, 2011), and Kátia Fiera (Só o que se pode levar, 2015). The central thread of all these publications is a commitment to creating and maintaining relations, and as interpretations of social sculpture, all enter into dialogue with the notion of circulation in the city and the subversive reinterpretation of stigma, placing the waste picker as the narrative protagonist through a direct collaboration with the artist. Inspired by Eloísa’s original proposal but ever mutable, cartonera practitioners move across different modalities. Art as invitation to collective practice and specific collaborations with different artists can be understood as expressions of cartonera’s original intention to model the social, a commitment to a process that opens up different political pathways.

Exhibitions: La Cartonera and Dulcinéia Catadora The exhibition is a common form with which cartonera practitioners regularly engage. During our research fieldwork, La Cartonera organized an exhibition in early 2018 to commemorate its tenth anniversary, while in 2019 La Rueda and Viento Cartonero organized a collaborative traveling display of their cartonera books brought to life by bookmaking workshops across the libraries of Guadalajara to celebrate those col-

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lectives’ ten years of work. The exhibition is also part of Vento Norte’s practice. Beginning in early 2018, the Vento Norte collective organized the largest traveling cartonera exhibition we have come across; by 2021 it had taken place in eight editions across different cities in Spain and Portugal. Despite the familiarity of the exhibition form, we fi nd uncommonality in the spaces for experimentation and flexibility between different modalities of practice. La Cartonera, for example, aims for the coexistence of art as conceptual investigation on the one hand and collective endeavor and affective mechanism on the other; these emphases found simultaneous expression at La Cartonera’s tenth-anniversary exhibition in Cuernavaca’s Parque Chapultepec in March 2018. In cocurating the exhibition with municipal authorities and selecting which books to display, La Cartonera sought to recognize the more experimental end of its practice while also making sure that regular contributors to its weekly workshops were represented and could see something of themselves on display when they visited. On entering the exhibition, visitors were greeted by an enormous cardboard book painted principally by Víctor Gochez and Mafer, a workshop regular and artist. The front cover depicted a young man painting a cartonera cover, and the back cover featured a representation of the Casona Spencer. On the front and back, small La Cartonera covers had been painted by diverse participants in La Cartonera’s Casona Spencer workshops in the weeks running up to the inauguration of the exhibition. The work, under the direction of Gochez but involving the brushstrokes of many others, was presented as an exercise in “Col-Art/Arte Col,” a movement founded by the German artist Marc Kuhn and in which Joseph Beuys himself once participated. The concept of Col-Art is premised on canvases in which different people paint specific sections that together make up the collective work, sometimes based around a particular theme. It was representative of the spirit of the exhibition itself, where the work of accomplished artists like Gochez and Cisco Jiménez was featured alongside that of hobbyists, writers, and friends, all equally valued. In a wider sense, the exhibited covers, even those painted by one person, were not necessarily individual; they had been painted in the Saturday workshops, where people often intervened in each other’s bookmaking with suggestions if not with paint strokes. “Do you think that this is fi nished?” painters would often ask, holding up their covers and either continuing or stopping based on the collective response. La Cartonera exhibition’s visual timeline set out the origins of car-

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tonera and its uptake around Latin America, and display cabinets contained newspaper articles and book-fair posters referring to cartonera activities in Mexico and abroad. In contrast to these materials, all of the exhibition’s books were set on simple shelves and displayed outside of the vitrine. La Cartonera’s own publications were ordered chronologically, one book from every edition, with second and third editions placed vertically above the originals. Books from other cartoneras, national and international, borrowed from Dany and Nayeli’s personal collection, occupied one wall to themselves. Although most of the books could not be taken down or opened because La Cartonera wanted to protect the publishers’ archive, visitors were given a few sample cartonera books that they could fl ick through as they wandered about the exhibition. Another installation presented seventy-five different book covers, all of the same book, to demonstrate the variety of subjective interpretations that different people had experienced when engaging with the text. Two films made about La Cartonera rolled on screens in the background, and quotes from cartonera publications had been chosen by Dany and Nayeli and painted onto the walls by some of the same participants who attended their workshops; among them was Patrick, who was accompanying and assisting Dany and Nayeli with the exhibition. La Cartonera’s conception of its exhibition thus moved between different modalities of art to demonstrate how the artwork and the text could intersect in diverse manners to create something the reader could apprehend as a whole. The exhibition was complemented by activities whose ambit included a wide social engagement. La Cartonera organized an encuentro and regular public workshops in the park space outside of the exhibition. An indication of the importance of the exhibition form for La Cartonera is that before starting to put together books in any workshop, Dany insisted that participants take a tour of the gallery space, even joking that he would quiz them on the content before they began. The obligation to circulate in the space left open the amount of time spent inside, something that we noticed varied widely, as did the gallery viewers’ impressions. The latter could be glimpsed by the comments scribbled in the visitor book, which, naturally, was handmade and bound with cardboard. The entries were split between La Cartonera’s existing community of participants and friends and those who had encountered cartonera for the first time in the gallery. The former were appreciative of the exhibition but also of the workshops in which they had participated, what Víctor Gochez in his entry called his “living laboratory.” The lat-

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ter commenters variously praised La Cartonera for inspiring a new generation of artists, promoting literacy, and engaging in environmental activism through their reuse of cardboard. Our point that the cartonera artistic proposition lies neither in the single painted cover nor in the aggregated display of such covers in exhibitions can be brought to the surface in the case of La Cartonera by returning to the Indigenous Mixtec family who participated in a workshop. This family made a living by selling ice cream slushies near the Casona Spencer where Dany and Nayeli worked every weekend, but the apparently closed space of the Casona and the family’s work meant that their paths had not crossed. Despite the exhibition taking place within an architecturally traditional gallery space, the transfer of the workshops to Parque Chapultepec made cartonera more visible and accessible for families enjoying a leisurely break from working downtown. While many exhibitions in large galleries often have workshops or children’s activities, the difference with cartonera is that any one of the books painted in accompanying workshops might itself end up in a future exhibition. Each workshop participant formed part of the inclusive exhibition form, one that in this instance brought an Indigenous family into the fold, or rather double fold, of cartonera. In this way, each of the children and young adults of this family went home with a book made by their own hands and, importantly, with the skills to make many more. Cartonera exhibitions manifest the same commitment to artistic practice with social connotations that we fi nd in cartonera publishers’ conceptual investigations of the book’s form. Being with Dulcinéia in its intervention during the 2019 São Paulo Virada Cultural was a joyous affair. As part of a moveable audience transiting the city, we were witnesses to the supersizing and embodiment of the cartonera book; members of the collective, wearing carnivalesque outfits made of cardboard, surprised and delighted passersby as they recited poetry and sang songs, accompanied by two enthusiastic musicians (figure 6.1). This practice has been developed in the many years since the collective’s founding and perhaps achieved most visibility in 2013 with the invitation to participate in the exhibition O abrigo e o terreno. One of four inaugural exhibitions for the Museu de Arte do Rio, the centerpiece of a gigantic project of urban regeneration in the old port zone of Rio, the work Dulcinéia presented was constituted through a yearlong series of workshops in the nearby Morro da Providência favela. The workshops produced four texts, collectively written with residents, on the threat of gentrification and the risk of violence they faced in their homes. We analyze

226 Taking Form, Making Worlds

Figure 6.1. Andreia of Dulcinéia Catadora recites to an audience at the 2019 São Paulo Virada Cultural. Photograph by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

this in detail elsewhere (Flynn and Bell 2019), but what is interesting to note here is how the exhibition became a type of battleground in which Dulcinéia’s aesthetic intentionality managed to subvert sedimented social forms of exclusion. The presence of various billionaires and VIPs at the glitzy opening-night ceremony prompted museum security guards to refuse Andreia access to the museum exhibition until it was made plain that she was one of the artists involved. Then, in the exhibition itself, the opening-night public was confronted with an unexpected and, for some, unwelcome reminder of the Morro da Providência’s proximity and the accompanying poetic and artistic agency of the people who lived within it. The starting point for the exhibition was the set of four books that Dulcinéia created with the Morro da Providência community, but the books were not conceived of as the focus of the show. Instead of displaying the books behind a glass vitrine to showcase their importance as individual art objects, the exhibition featured an architectural installation composed of hundreds of these books, complemented by piled-up cardboard boxes and a floor space of flat-pack cardboard arranged so as to create an obstacle in the circulation of the space (figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2. Detail from the exhibition O abrigo e o terreno, Dulcinéia Catadora’s

installation at the Museu de Arte do Rio. Photograph by Tânia Rêgo.

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This expographic arrangement is one way Eloísa’s original conceptualization of cartonera as a form of social sculpture fi nds expression in Dulcinéia’s work. We asked Lúcia Rosa how she understood the construction of space in the exhibition. She replied, Clarissa [Diniz, the exhibition’s cocurator] asked us to create a project and also within that, asked how we imagined it to take shape in the museum space, how we would present it. I don’t consider each little book a work of art, no. I understand that what people saw there, the whole thing, that’s the artwork for me.

The intentionality of cartonera practitioners’ engagement with the exhibition form is located in the desire to create social possibilities, as opposed to presenting a product in which all eventualities have already been subsumed. As Dulcinéia’s manifesto intimates, art’s potential partially lies in its modality as a relational process; merely displaying a fi nal outcome occludes the exchanges that have occurred, the mistakes that have been made, and the necessary confl icts, uncertainties, and differences that were part of any given process. This process is resolutely political, in the amplified sense of the term used by many cartoneras, and a mode of existence, resistance, and existence as resistance. Through its participation in O abrigo e o terreno, Dulcinéia created a processual frame for what others might assume to be the canvas of their work. The frame performed two interconnected functions, as an extension of the intentions of the text, with its emphasis on how the residents of these informal settlements wished to circulate through the city, and the realization of a social and spatial intervention that granted these wishes in a tangible and material sense. Lúcia commented to us, This was our principal interest, to physically bring something to the exhibition and to work symbolically with this notion. . . . The exhibition was a type of occupation, from the floor to the ceiling. It was like a wall, and it said, “We are here.” That’s the message.

O abrigo e o terreno is just one of many cartonera exhibitions. These range from big shows and biennials to more local installations and pop-ups, but in almost all of these examples there is an emphasis on the artwork as a complex assembly of processes, interventions, public activities, and social space rather than a focus on an art object. Catapoesia’s practice does not reach international audiences. But in creating exhibitions in spaces such as libraries, community museums, and even local botecos, the ubiq-

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uitous Brazilian neighborhood bar, they demonstrate cartonera’s unique plasticity.

Botecos, Books, and the Community Museum Based in Barão de Guaicuhy, a tiny community in rural Minas Gerais, Catapoesia’s place of work stands in stark contrast to the built-up urban settings of megacities such as São Paulo and Guadalajara or even smaller cities like Cuernavaca. While Dulcinéia has been invited to participate in major exhibitions garnering international attention and press coverage, Catapoesia has organized its own exhibitions on a much smaller scale with a do-it-yourself mentality in the local communities where it works. Despite these differences in circumstance between Dulcinéia and Catapoesia, their relation to art as a social practice is markedly similar. The notion of “intervention,” which is common to both collectives, is crucial to understanding how each approaches its work and how the exhibition becomes a device for reconfiguring relations and challenging stigma. Sol and Júlio told us this commitment stems from Catapoesia’s objective as a cartonera publisher. Sol: Just to make this clear, I see cartonera as artistic practice. Júlio: Me, too. From the Catapoesia point of view, it’s socioartistic work.

Catapoesia has conducted seven exhibitions from its formation in 2007 to 2021. Initially based in Serra Negra, a small city dominated by coffee plantations in the interior of São Paulo state, the collective organized four exhibitions there on themes connected to the projects on which they were working at the time. Subsequently the collective shifted the focus of its activities to the state of Minas Gerais and primarily to the town of Cordisburgo, the birthplace of Guimarães Rosa. Accompanying this move was a gradual shift from the collective’s work in São Paulo state, with its general focus on pedagogy and literacy, to more specific concerns. Among these were the visibilization of local oral histories and folk narratives that are characteristic of the rural hinterlands of Minas Gerais state; addressing questions of environmental degradation and the exploitation of local people by the large mining conglomerates present in the region, questions thrown into sharp relief by the mining disasters in Mariana in 2016 and Brumadinho in 2019; and questioning

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why elite forms of knowledge should be privileged over those generated by local communities. Because of its association with Guimarães Rosa, Cordisburgo is the location of the Academia Cordisburguense de Letras Guimarães Rosa, a Guimarães Rosa museum, and the Semana Rosiana literary festival. Catapoesia’s practice seeks to articulate an alternative politics of knowledge premised on the reconfiguration of the forms and formats of research through alternative literary and poetic practices. Drawing on its work with the Xakriabá community, Catapoesia brought together these three central preoccupations into one exhibition through a distinctively Cordisburgian cartonera intervention. Cordisburgo is a pleasant, sleepy town in the interior of Minas Gerais state that for ten days each year is transformed into an international destination for all those interested in one of Brazil’s most celebrated authors, João Guimarães Rosa. The Semana Rosiana literary festival occurs in various spaces throughout the city, but its principal setting is the Guimarães Rosa museum based in the impressive house in which the author spent his early years before moving to Rio de Janeiro and then traveling the world in the Brazilian diplomatic service. When Sol moved from Serra Negra to Minas Gerais, Cordisburgo became a point of reference for the work of Catapoesia, in large part due to Sol’s affinity with Guimarães Rosa’s texts. In Brazil, Guimarães is loved and celebrated for his elaborate folkloric depictions of nineteenth-century Minas Gerais and particularly for his integration of local actors and their complex language and neologisms into the narratives of his novels, portraying a Brazil that was already disappearing when he was writing. When we visited the Guimarães Rosa museum, Sol told us that Guimarães’s writings had deeply influenced her practice. She commented, “Guimarães is my bible. It’s a reference for my life.” She said the Catapoesia book that sold best was Veredinhas do sertão, a text with many allusions to Guimarães Rosa’s classic novel Grande Sertão. When we asked her how many of Catapoesia’s books had been influenced by Guimarães Rosa, she replied, “All of them,” before specifying three that she said had a direct connection. With such deep affi nity, Cordisburgo and the Guimarães Rosa museum made a natural starting point for Catapoesia’s practice in Minas Gerais. From 2012 onward Sol, later in partnership with Júlio Brabo, began to work intensively in the city. Catapoesia’s early Cordisburgo works of 2012 such as In-verso, Tocos do cerrado, and Bordando letras were coauthored by the Loucos por Memória collective formed in collaboration with Catapoesia. Catapoesia’s first works were therefore strongly

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connected to the Guimarães Rosa museum, and Sol built relationships with the museum’s staff and its director, Ronaldo Oliveira. Sol told us, however, that she felt that the museum articulated a certain type of institutionalized discourse on Guimarães, one that she felt was not particularly true to the kind of work the author himself put forward: I love this museum, but it’s traditional, it’s very didactic, there’s an education section, the monitors take you around, take you up to the garden where they recite some poetry that ends the visit. It’s a place of traditional types of research, professors from USP [Universidade de São Paulo] come here, etc.

What seemed fundamental to Sol was to echo Guimarães Rosa’s preoccupation with bringing the erudite into dialogue with more everyday life, not just through the pages of a book but through the very fabric of the community, through words, certainly, but also through action. She stressed Guimarães Rosa’s concern for “uniting two spheres” and said this preoccupation was at the center of Catapoesia’s work, noting that “academia can be so exclusionary.” The opportunity to realize a project based around this idea came about in 2014, when in partnership with a local community member named Brasinha (figure 6.3), Catapoesia was successful in a bid for external funding from the federal program Pontos de Memoria (Points of Memory). Their project, Recordanças (Memories), which ran from 2014 to 2016, centered on a community museum created by Brasinha, coincidentally located about 50 meters from the Guimarães Rosa museum. Brasinha had been collecting objects for decades, and as word spread, local people began donating objects with which they felt a strong affective connection and telling the stories of how these objects came to hold such meaning for them or their families. Engaging with this eclectic mix of intensely meaningful objects, the Recordanças project focused on creating an inventory of five types of items—radios, candy dispensers, cinema seats, cameras, and tobacco pouches made of bull horns—and documenting people’s affective memories of these objects through a series of Catapoesia publications. As the project continued, and building on previous experience, Catapoesia decided to organize an exhibition in parallel with the Semana Rosiana with the title No sirgo fio das recordações, roughly translatable as “The untrustworthy threads of memory,” a play on words deriving from a neologism in Grande Sertão. The exhibition’s opening was timed to co-

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Figure 6.3. Solange Barreto in conversation with Brasinha in his community

museum. Photograph by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

incide with the opening night of the 2015 Semana Rosiana, the intention being to create a point of contact between Catapoesia’s communitybased texts and Brasinha’s community museum on the one hand and the erudite, institutionalized space of the Casa Guimarães Rosa on the other. The location of the exhibition was crucial in this respect; next to Brasinha’s community museum, itself only a few doors down from the Casa Guimarães Rosa, Catapoesia identified a boteco (bar) as the exhibition’s location. Sol and Júlio jokingly told us that the bar was frequented by the “most legitimate drunks of Cordisburgo,” and they pointed out that it was situated right next to the city’s bus station, another important factor. Júlio described how, as people waited for local and regional buses, queues would form outside the boteco, creating the perfect opportunity for an intervention into the wider social fabric of the city; it was a location with high foot traffic, eminently popular, and yet entirely embedded in a trajectory that would take a visitor from a down-at-heel watering hole to a community museum and then on to the house of the world-famous writer Guimarães Rosa. The exhibition’s content and expography also focused on these con-

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cerns of circulation, transit, and the sparking of conversation between diverse publics. Inside and outside the bar, Catapoesia created an installation of roughly one hundred cartonera books that had been produced by Loucos por Memória, including De repentes, Viver e etcetera, Veredinhas do sertão, and Tocos do cerrado, whose authors included Seu Manoel and Seu Toco, two root masters with an intimate knowledge of the area, its people, its fauna, and its flora. De repentes focuses on Seu Manoel’s use of the repente form, a traditional literary practice particular to Minas Gerais that can be approximated to a type of spontaneous poetry performance. In making this selection, Catapoesia aimed to foreground Seu Manoel’s literary talent to an audience by whom he had largely been overlooked. More broadly, in placing the books that had been developed with Seu Manoel and Seu Toco in an exhibition in a bar, Catapoesia hoped to spur a wider conversation about the type of culture that could and should be celebrated by the city of Cordisburgo and the tensions between the erudite and the popular that necessarily occurred during the Semana Rosiana. Sol explained, We wanted people to see a contrast, the counterproposal we had created between Catapoesia in the Casa Guimarães museum and Catapoesia in the bar. There, we were working with the oral history of the people. The mediation between object and viewer was being done by the people themselves, the people of the region.

At the entrance of the bar, two large peneiras, the sifting pans used in the nearby rivers to separate gold and diamonds from silt, were hung from the door frame, both painted in a spiral format with the names used by Guimarães Rosa to refer to the devil in Grande Sertão. In the bar itself, Catapoesia created an installation of painted sewing machines and hundreds of industrial-size spindles with loose threads of cotton, a visual metaphor of the networks and threads they hoped to sew through their diverse community but also a material remainder of a nearby deactivated cotton factory, a reminder of Minas Gerais’s place in the country’s colonial history, as the first site of colonial cotton plantations in Brazil. At the back of the bar was a panel on which visitors could write their impressions of the show in chalk and various paints. During the ten days of the exhibition, almost two thousand people visited, but it was the unexpected events of the opening night that best fulfi lled the exhibition’s objective in keeping with Catapoesia’s wider practice, to reveal and subvert local contours of stigma.

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Sol recounted how the opening night of the Semana Rosiana is always a formal affair, the highlight of the annual cultural calendar in Cordisburgo. July 2015 was no different. In the crowded space of the Casa Guimarães Rosa, the secretary of culture for Minas Gerais, Angelo Oswaldo, gave a dignified opening-night speech. Oswaldo was also the creator of the Pontos de Memória program in his previous role as director of the Instituto Brasileiro de Museus (Brazilian Institute of Museums), but he was unaware of the proximity of one of his projects, Recordanças, until an unusual intervention that Sol narrates: So almost at the end, Ronaldo, the director of the museum, spoke a little bit about the project, the exhibition we were doing nearby, and asked me to say a few words to explain it. Then Oswaldo understood that our project was part of his program and unexpectedly said, “Great! Before we continue with the formal opening here inside the Casa Guimarães Rosa, let’s go to this bar to see the exhibition!” So, 100, 120 people all followed the secretary! They had to, no? Otherwise it would be the biggest gaff in the parish! All of them went into this bar in their formal clothes, everyone, including the president of the Cordisburgian Academy of Letters.

An extraordinary scene resulted: the most privileged members of the Minas Gerais cultural elite mixing with the patrons of this very ordinary bar, listening to Seu Manoel’s performance of repentes on the street, and drinking Seu Toco’s artisanal teas at the bar’s doorway next to the Cordisburgo bus station, all the while surrounded by the cartonera books of community figures such as Brasinha, Seu Toco, and Seu Manoel. Oswaldo did not stop there. During the visit, in the bar itself, the secretary of culture of Minas Gerais gave a spontaneous speech, a kind of formal version of Seu Manoel’s poetic repentes, in praise of the exhibition as a perfect example of how to create a connection between community spaces and more traditional museums and how the latter should be more open to collaborations with the former. Sol reflected, “The drunks with the intelligentsia with the museum people, everyone was there! It was really crazy. It was honestly one of the weirdest experiences of my life.” After a short pause, she added, thoughtfully, But that’s it, isn’t it? The exhibition is a moment in which we can show people that there is a process. The book is not something that you just

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Figure 6.4. Júlio with Seu Manoel (left), wearing the robe that denotes

his membership in the Cordisburgian Academy of Letters. Photograph by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

sit down, type on your laptop, and there you are. It’s a process that takes time, a year, a year and a half. It’s a collective construction of a text, a collective construction of a work.

And so the exhibition makes plain what Catapoesia’s books carry within them: the marks of a distinctly collective literary process. We asked Sol and Júlio whether they felt that the exhibition had achieved its aim of “opening doors,” as they phrased it. Júlio replied, Of course! Seu Toco and Seu Manoel both received the Guimarães Rosa medal, the highest mark of recognition of the Semana Rosiana for those who have made a contribution to culture. Seu Manoel, who they had always ignored, was invited into the Cordisburgian Academy of Letters because of his mastery of the form of the repente [figure 6.4]. This was always the idea, to subvert, to do everything in a different way.

By carefully thinking through the timing and positioning of its exhibition, Catapoesia succeeded in creating a space in which unexpected

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relations could occur and clearly defined social hierarchies could be subverted. The exhibition did not just display culture; it helped to create it, to restitch the very cultural fabric of the local community, to “make something happen,” as Javier had so desired all those years back in Buenos Aires. In repeated conversations around the form of exhibition, it became clear that the very function of the exhibition in the bar next to Brasinha’s community museum was precisely to spark unforeseen encounters, as Sol told us: It’s not always that these relations occur. But they are a goal, they are one of the objectives we propose to ourselves. Just like that, one person will enter and empathize with what we’re doing, and from that point, we can establish a connection with that person.

Catapoesia’s emphasis on art’s potential, beyond individual objects, to shape the social, resonates strongly with the other examples we have described here, all of them influenced by Eloísa’s proposal of cartonera as social sculpture. The starting point is always the book as an openended proposition. As the exhibition in Cordisburgo demonstrates, by placing cartonera books into a certain framework but without predetermining their meaning or suggesting any particular reading or interpretation, the books invite the community to transit between different places; during this transit, an unplanned encounter, or even intervention, can always take place. One evening, in the gathering darkness, all of us were tired after working on yet another artistic intervention, Poste Poesia (Post Poetry), which involved posting fragments of poetry onto the telephone poles in Barão. We asked what was more important, an exhibition’s artistic or social impact. Sol’s answer came without pause for breath: “Social. For us, the social always comes first.” One question remained unanswered, and Alex asked it: “So why do an exhibition?” Júlio answered immediately, equally clear in his conviction: “To show that the social exists! To show how to resist!” For Sol and Júlio, then, placing folk narratives and community practices center stage, traversing contours of difference, creating unexpected connections, and breaking down boundaries demarcated by stigma are the articulation of a paradigm of resistance. Inspired by cartoneras’ mobilization of the exhibition as a form of resistance in itself, we organized an exhibition in São Paulo to gain a deeper understanding of the social and aesthetic forms that underpin cartonera practice.

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Rereading Prefigurative Politics Cartonera practice enables the creation of new relations and more inclusive communities in the now through embodied experience, empathetic connections, and horizontal networks. Through their texts, workshops, encounters, and exhibitions, cartoneras open windows onto the pluriverse not through representation of otherness but through lived, embodied experience of the otherwise (Povinelli 2012). In considering the gesture of cartoneras’ engagement with the form of the exhibition, we have sought to understand the structures, affective dimensions, and relationality of the steps of this very particular choreography from the point of view of the actors who shared this knowledge with us. We also find the exhibition an act of resistance rooted in bodily presence. In terms of theoretical notions of “prefiguration,” cartonera artistic practice contemplates a particular kind of open-endedness, a recognition of the unexpected, and a desire to place the body into movement within the social. In Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas, the exhibition our research project organized in São Paulo in collaboration with project partners and the curator Beatriz Lemos, we deliberately sought to refer to the gesture that underpins cartonera practitioners’ understandings of the exhibition as artistic intervention. Our exploration leads us to engage in very practical terms with more theoretical notions of prefigurative politics and to ask how cartonera practitioners situate themselves with respect to such concepts. As part of the process of inquiry that led to the São Paulo exhibition, and inspired by Vocabulário vivido (Rosa 2017), we asked the members of Dulcinéia Catadora for their own defi nitions of art. The suggested meanings were contrasting, yet complementary: Lúcia: Cultural manifestation or form of human expression that seeks to generate knowledge and social critique. Art certainly contains the potential for social transformation. It is symbolic resistance. It is the product of an artistic activity. Maria: For me, art is doing the unexpected. Constantly. We are always doing something new, and we enjoy what we do. So, for me, art is continually making possible the unexpected.

Nicolas Bourriaud’s and Néstor García Canclini’s theorizations of contemporary art place a marked emphasis on the prefigurative as a

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means of understanding art’s transformative potential. With an analysis indebted to Félix Guattari’s conceptualization of micropolitical actions, Bourriaud rejects the utopianism of 1960s notions of societal change: Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world: today it is modelling possible universes. . . . Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist. (2002, 13)

García Canclini also muses on how a contemporary art practice that has shifted from objects to contexts might generate wider societal change without falling back on teleological, overdetermined notions of transformation. His conclusion is to suggest that art possesses an intangible quality that he terms “imminence,” allowing us to glimpse possibilities that “situate themselves in a prior moment, when the real is possible, when it has not yet broken down” (2014, xiv). García Canclini is more cautious than Bourriaud, however; imminence is merely a “way of saying things without pronouncing them fully” (26), as opposed to a way of living in the here and now that prefigures the future. Citing Josefi na Ludmer (2007), García Canclini (2014) also identifies a type of literature that is “in exodus” at once outside and inside existing paradigms of categorization, always fleeing definition. The potential of imminence, for him, is to be located precisely in this state of exodus; and it is a state shared by cartonera, which deliberately leaves unresolved the tensions between its status as book, artwork, exhibition object, and tool for activism. Questions arose through our exhibition of where we can locate cartonera’s prefigurative potential and whether it does more than merely leave a phrase unfi nished, a transcendental lacuna into which meaning can be inscribed. Curated by Alex and Beatriz, our exhibition, Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas, took place in São Paulo from November 1, 2018, to February 9, 2019. Located in the Casa do Povo cultural space (figure  6.5), it featured more than 350 books from thirty-five cartonera collectives. Among works from Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Germany, and France, our four project partners’ books were specifically foregrounded along with works from the publishers Yiyi Jambo and Eloísa Cartonera. The exhibition also included four short films documenting methods of producing cartonera books and the documentary film Cartoneras by Isadora Brant (2019). In-

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Figure 6.5. Poster outside the Casa do Povo in São Paulo for the exhibition

Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

spired by Eloísa’s work at the São Paulo Art Biennial, one of the central principles of the exhibition design was that all the books on display should be accessible to the public’s touch. As a project team, we wanted visitors to be able to engage physically with the books, to feel the textures of materials from across Latin America and trace with their hands the aesthetic interventions on the books’ covers. The exhibition was based around four display modules: a staircase with an integrated seating area and storage space installed in the entry hall of the building (figure 6.6); a set of two parallel lines of shelving that echoed the staircase module; three iron-framed units on which to hang the curatorial texts and display three video units; and a small set of parallel shelving for themed rotating collections. Just as in the Museu de Arte do Rio and the boteco in Cordisburgo, there was an emphasis on discovery as opposed to display, an expanded curatorial strategy (Caso and Barco 2020) that characterizes the exhibition of socially engaged art practices; we thought of the books as points of potential interaction that made possible a space of relations and exchanges, a space in

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Figure 6.6. Staircase module at the exhibition Cartoneras: Releituras latinoamericanas. Photograph by Filipe Berndt.

which other events could take place. While the design included a certain didactic content such as the tutorial videos and the documentary film that explained how cartonera books are made and where cartonera originated, it was our intention that the space should function to welcome visitors to come in and sit down, pick up a book, and come to their own understandings of the cartonera phenomenon. We also thought of the books as enacting a type of protocartonera library. Lúcia commented to us that just as a university library could be a starting point for many research processes, a cartonera library could function in the same way, albeit with rules of access, copyright, and interaction that are much more flexible. The accessibility of the space and possibility of hosting events within the exhibition was designed with a public program in mind. Inspired by La Cartonera’s tenth-anniversary commemoration, which included discussions of cartonera and bookmaking workshops in the Parque Chapultepec gallery, the public program of our exhibition, coordinated by Graziela Kunsch, offered a variety of events. In the exhibition, Graziela’s team maintained an active work station (figure 6.7), which echoed Eloísa Cartonera’s installation at the São Paulo Art Biennial. This workstation was equipped with cardboard from the

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Figure 6.7. Workstation at the exhibition Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas.

Photograph by Filipe Berndt.

Glicério recycling cooperative, paints, paintbrushes, box cutters—in short, the items of a typical cartonera workspace, so that visitors who wanted to take home a copy of the exhibition catalogue could bind the text with cardboard and decorate it, creating their own cartonera book and engaging with it materially. We also provided a free printing facility so visitors could bind in cartonera form whichever PDF text they had chosen. Over the duration of the exhibition, more than three hundred catalogues were created in this manner; and about thirty scholarly and activist texts as well as many schoolchildren’s notebooks were bound. Their creation allowed us to work alongside people integrating cartonera, literally and affectively, into their daily lives or research processes, making plain the transition of a literary work into the processual and visual sphere. In addition, the team coordinated targeted workshops and events, including a two-day encontro of Indigenous people of Aymara, Quechua, Guarani, Pankararu, and Baniwa ethnicities to discuss language and its role in coloniality. Beyond the space of the cultural center, members of the educational team also undertook visits to local schools to present cartonera and draw wider, younger audiences into the publishing movement. Our cartonera collaborators were constant and valued partners in the

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Figure 6.8. View of the exhibition Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas.

Photograph by Filipe Berndt.

design of the exhibition, and as happened also in the cochineal workshop, their trust emboldened us to rephrase and reinterpret aspects of the exhibition form. Our method drew on the notion of taking part in a particular choreography that was previously designed and carried out by someone else, and as a research team we naturally brought our own ideas and perspectives. Over long periods working together, we realized that our partners in Latin America encouraged such moves. At a meeting with Dulcinéia Catadora to discuss the coedition Cartoneras in Translation, Alex commented that as we moved forward with the project, there would probably be elements with which Lúcia would disagree. As Andreia tried to hide her smile, Lúcia, even-handed as ever, said that was right, that it was all part of the research process (figure 6.8). Alex addresses the exhibition in more detail elsewhere (Flynn 2020), but for our purposes here, we would like to highlight one particular sequence of events. From the earliest discussions with Dulcinéia and Beatriz, the exhibition was conceived as processual and generative. The original plan was for Dulcinéia to offer a series of workshops in the Casa do Povo, but as weeks went by, the theme of these sessions remained undefined even after the exhibition had opened. Dulcinéia was always

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in conversation with Graziela, the coordinator of the public program, however, and what resulted was not a series of one-off public workshops but rather an in-depth artistic collaboration in the exhibition space between Dulcinéia Catadora and three collectives in the Frente de Mulheres Imigrantes (FMI, Immigrant Women’s Front). The point of connection here was Maria Paula Botero, a collaborator of Graziela’s on the public program and a member of the collective Mulheres Imigrantes Lésbicas e Bissexuais (MILBI, Lesbian and Bisexual Immigrant Women). Having discussed the possibility of some form of collaboration on this theme, in early January 2019 Maria Paula presented the idea to the FMI of working with Dulcinéia in the ongoing exhibition, and the response was enthusiastic. Maria Paula explains: There were three groups: Warmís [a women’s group focused on intercultural communication], an Argentine feminist collective [Colectivo Feminista de Argentinxs en São Paulo], and MILBI. We thought about the possibility of creating something with the cartoneras, and it was an incredible coming together because we thought, “Let’s take advantage of this moment, let’s take the opportunity to talk with the cartoneras, let’s take the opportunity to share a reality that is not common for the women who are part of the FMI.” It was a moment of renewal for us, this union of collectives of immigrant women.

With the three collectives keen to participate, the first of three sessions was set for January 22, with Alex facilitating and accompanying the collaboration (figure 6.9). Occurring in the first days of Bolsonaro’s presidency, the stormy weather of early January seemed in keeping with the prevailing mood. Members of the exhibition team discussed plans to remove left-wing books from their homes for fear of persecution; the directors of the Casa do Povo grappled with a nonsensical order for community organizations to resubmit accounts that had been audited eight years previously; female friends of the project team reported being spat at and harassed in the nearby streets for nothing more than the way they dressed and wore their hair. In such a hostile environment, the exhibition space in the Casa do Povo became a safe space for Dulcinéia and the three collectives and a productive place for discussion and exchange. In the first session, women of differing immigrant backgrounds gathered around the exhibition’s workstation and had long conversations in a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish about what they wanted to

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Figure 6.9. The first workshop session, led by Andreia and Maria of Dulcinéia Catadora, for members of Warmís, MILBI, and the Colectivo Feminista de Argentinxs en São Paulo. Photograph by Laura Viana.

create together. Addressing the question of what it meant to be an immigrant woman in São Paulo at that particular time, the atmosphere quickly became convivial and animated. Maria Paula recalled, This moment of learning how to construct a book with the women from Dulcinéia was very interesting because we started talking. They had no idea of what it meant to be an immigrant, and we, at least Warmís, had no idea about cartonera. So there was an exchange in this moment, an exchange of knowledge about lived experience. It was really, really important because both groups, Dulcinéia and the FMI, exchanged ideas but without knowing that it was an exchange, you know. . . . We chatted, it was kind of informal, it was relaxed, we ate together, we drank coffee, we ended up sharing these moments.

This conviviality quickly created a bond between the women that manifested in a commitment to create something together although the collectives engaged with different aspects of the feminist struggle and were composed of women of different nationalities and ages. One of the

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participants commented that the act of working together to create was inherently democratic and caring; it was democratic in the sense that despite their differences, there was an attempt from all parties to fi nd common ground and express that through visual means, and it was caring in the sense that to achieve any such synchronicity, there was a lot of online work occurring behind the scenes, such as setting up Google Drive access to multiple documents that could be read and edited by all members of the project. Ironically, and despite this agreement to work together and the commitment to read each other’s work, one point of contention that came to the fore was a general resistance to the idea of producing a book. Taking place in late January, the women were aware of the upcoming demonstration on March 8 to celebrate International Women’s Day, and they began to think of how the object they were creating with Dulcinéia could somehow figure into the march. One of the participants unfamiliar with cartonera commented at the time, “No one will read a book. It won’t stand out.” In the session, Maria Paula, influenced by her work on the public program, suggested a way forward: People are really interested and curious about cartonera because it escapes the norms of aesthetics, it escapes from the forms that things should take. Circumventing the aesthetic, circumventing the norm, to be able to publish what you want, the notion of making literature more accessible, I think cartonera breaks these questions down and breaks down the book as sacred. It turns everything on its head.

What Maria Paula referred to with the verb fugir (to flee, to escape) is a concept akin to Ludmer’s notion of exodus (2007), and in this femalecentered space it meant something quite particular. Dulcinéia was mindful of this desire to flee from a historically male-dominated world of books and literature that cartoneras have long challenged by creating alternative sites of encounter, production, and exchange. So, in the second session, Lúcia brought along a different type of cartonera book to show to the group. Previously, the discussions on the kind of object they were going to create had focused on binding techniques, but this model was different. Lúcia demonstrated a book composed of two A3 sheets glued together to form an A2 poster that through a series of folds could be collapsed to A6 size. The book was completed by two A6 pieces of cardboard that when the poster was folded in a certain way became the front and back covers. The women from the three immigrant-centered

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collectives liked the book and decided to use it as a model, seeing a potential to create a complex text on one side and a simple message on the other. Maria Paula recounted, It was a way to engage people, it was a way to invite people to read. It wasn’t something normal that you could fi nd anywhere; it was something that had been made in a specific way that you could put up on the wall if you wanted, something that you could do anything with, and not simply a book that you would put in a library. So in that moment, there was a double message: there’s this important movement, the movement that says that no woman is illegal, but behind that there are questions of health, education, being LBT—what are the experiences of immigrant women who are lesbian, bi, trans, who undergo abortion, who are excluded from education—a load of things behind that simple message.

At stake for the women was the need for this object to portray and to participate in a complex, multifaceted struggle that was being articulated by different collectives while also gaining visibility for a relatively underrepresented group—immigrant women—by putting forward a simple message. The object they were creating was to constitute much more than a typical placard, and at the same time it was more complex in its construction and form than a typical book. And on a material level, it had to be big enough to be seen in a protest but small enough to fit into someone’s pocket. Equally, communicating a simple message was necessary for the march, but they could not allow the plurality of their struggle to be defi ned by one message. Working together through these complicated priorities, the group decided on their slogan, “Nenhuma mulher é ilegal” (“No woman is illegal”). With that fi xed, the collectives began to research the content that would be printed on the flip side of the placard and arranged to create the text of the book through the complex series of folds. The women began referring to this process as a “labyrinth,” finding a way to paste together the different texts so that, when folded, everything appeared in the correct order. And we see the notion of a labyrinth as a direct allegory to the process of finding points of encounter between the uncommonalities of the three groups, collectives with overlapping and yet distinct agendas seeking to create an artwork through cartonera. The Warmís collective’s priority was immigrant women’s health and the violence inflicted upon them by men; the Colectivo Feminista de Argentinxs en São Paulo wanted to focus more on the right to abortion and

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education; MILBI was much more centered on the question of being lesbian, bisexual, or trans within the immigrant community. The particularities and points of connection among the collectives manifested through the making of the object; its material make-up as a series of panels would allow these particularities to come through the making rather than being lost in it. The notion of a typical book had been rejected, as had the notion of a unidirectional slogan. What held the collectives together in their simultaneous uncommonality revealed itself here as crucial to the composition of the book’s form. The social connotations of the sessions were informing the aesthetic composition of the object; the different perspectives of the collectives regarding what was most important in their struggle were represented in the work, while a statement with which they all agreed demonstrated their cohesion and unity. This oneness, held in the plural, took on a unique cartonera form and is also represented in the form of the text: a collage of writings, some taking up one A6 panel, others taking a panel of A5 size (figure 6.10). One text in particular embodies this ethos: feminismoS diversoS geografiaS diferenteS históriaS distintaS

diverse feminismS different geographieS distinct (hi)storieS

a mesma luta

the same struggle

Once the key decisions were made, the women began the process of constructing more than a hundred books, now entitled Somos mulheres imigrantes (We are immigrant women, Dulcinéia Catadora et al. 2019). They set up various workstations, with two people cutting, two people folding, two people gluing, and others painting the title on the covers using a stencil that was specially created at the Centro Cultural de São Paulo’s workshop. The process was joyful and fun, and even a huge rainstorm that Andreia laughingly described as “apocalyptic” did not stop the women from coming back to the Casa do Povo to make more books. Weeks later, with more than a hundred copies made, the women readied themselves to take part in the March 8 demonstration. On the day of the march they met at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo on Avenida

Figure 6.10. Somos mulheres imigrantes (clockwise from top left): the front cover; the open book; the full text; the “No Woman Is Illegal” fold-out protest placard. Photographs by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.

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Paulista before taking Rua Augusta to fi nish at the Praça Roosevelt. With an estimated thirty thousand protesters, the atmosphere was exuberant. The Frente de Mulheres Imigrantes umbrella organization had arranged a theme, Bloco MIRA: Mulheres imigrantes, refugiadas e apátriadas (MIRA bloc: Immigrant, refugee, and stateless women), and in the publicity materials the slogan had become “Nenhuma mulher é ilegal,” the very same statement the women participants had agreed upon in their workshops at the Cartonera exhibition space. In the first phase of the march, at the concentração (the initial meeting that occurs before a demonstration or carnaval parade), the women greeted each other, took photos, organized themselves, and handed out copies of Somos mulheres imigrantes. This distribution happened at various points during the day. People were intrigued by the objects and wanted to know what they were, as Maria Paula recounted: People were curious, they asked questions, and we answered, starting various conversations, and not just in that moment of the concentração but in all the moments of that day when the book was there. “Ah, how did you make this?” they asked, and not just about the content but also about the process, like, “How was the book made?” It sparked curiosity in many ways. And we chatted with so many people that day, it was a process of exchanges, of knowledges, and that curiosity, the book generated that effect that we wanted, to spark curiosity, “Ah, but what, it’s a placard that becomes a book? I want one!”

The women had distributed the books to friends and to friends of friends, but there was also an intention in handing out copies to reach people who weren’t necessarily familiar with issues of immigration and how they intersected with women’s rights. Each collective had autonomy to hand out books to whomever they chose, and accordingly, people given a book interacted with it in different ways. Some immediately unfolded it and held it aloft once the march began to move from the museum toward downtown São Paulo. Others retired to the tree-lined sidewalks of Avenida Paulista and, with fewer people around, engaged with the object as a text, sitting down to read the contributions of the three collectives. Unfolded as a placard, the book helped to identify the diverse women taking part in the FMI’s bloco, complementing the plurality of the struggle that was strikingly present through the many other banners that the women were carrying (figure 6.11). There were Ni Una Menos necker-

250 Taking Form, Making Worlds

Figure 6.11. “No Woman Is Illegal” placard held during the Women’s Day demonstration, São Paulo, March 8, 2019. Photograph courtesy of Brasil de Fato.

chiefs, black T-shirts of the MILBI collective, the green flag of the Argentine campaign for the legalization of abortion, as well as wider references to the march itself. Some promoted the campaign to free Lula, the ex-president of Brazil who was at that time imprisoned on corruption charges; others held banners of “Mulheres contra Bolsonaro” (Women against Bolsonaro) and “Por Marielle, por direitos, por democracia” (For Marielle, for rights, for democracy) in homage to the black, lesbian politician assassinated in Rio the year before. The visual uncommonality presented by the various components of the MIRA bloc was so evident that it caught the eye of another researcher present at the march, Karen Carvalho Rosaboni, writing on gender and migrant women in São Paulo: “The [MIRA bloc] highlighted, for those observing, the intersection of the various struggles experienced by migrant women, . . . numerous groups and collectives, different political parties, women of various ages and different agendas” (2019, 88). Rosaboni argues for an intersectional perspective of the kind that emerges through and from the Arquipélago books made by female waste pickers and artists in the Glicério cooperative. The MIRA bloc, Rosaboni suggests, demonstrates the impossibility of separating the conditions of a migrant from those of a woman more widely; it is necessary that questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class are associated with di-

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verse experiences of being an immigrant. This also brings us back to de la Cadena and Blaser’s defi nition of the uncommons: “the negotiated coming together of heterogeneous worlds (and their practices) as they strive for what makes each of them be what they are, which is also not without others” (2018, 4). What made this complexity possible, the coming together of heterogeneous worlds and a multilayered intersectional stance, was the unique form of that particular cartonera book that had been worked upon collaboratively by four very different collectives. The aesthetic form of Espejo y viento, a book written and produced collectively by imprisoned women at Puente Grande prison in Jalisco, was informed by its social context before its aesthetic form reordered the social context of the prison through a double-fold process. Similarly, the multipanel textuality of Somos mulheres imigrantes was informed by four collectives working together on its construction; the fl ight it proposed took them from a typical book or protest object to a completely different, hybrid object, which itself reordered the FMI’s struggle, its march, and its constitution through diverse positionalities. In its playful unfolding, Somos mulheres imigrantes took the exhibition into the middle of a powerful protest march that was one of the first public events in which Bolsonaro’s nascent presidency was roundly condemned. The exhibition created a space in which the collaboration could occur, but its influence was more precisely felt in the willingness of the women to break with traditional forms, both social and aesthetic. Maria Paula commented, These folds, it was a revelatory moment. There are other ways of making a cartonera book. It’s not just binding through sewing techniques, and the fact that we didn’t do that doesn’t make what we did any less of a cartonera book.

Surrounded by books of all types, evidence of hundreds of cartonera practitioners’ refusal to remain within prescribed notions of content and form, this willingness to experiment allowed the women to construct a text capacious enough for their diverse viewpoints and at the same time succinct enough to become the slogan for the entire bloc of a protest march. Maria Paula said, Each collective had a specialist field. But the format, the way to think about it, it was open. Everyone had an idea, and we weren’t restrictive

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about it, especially when cartonera as a form is so against the idea of restriction, so against that type of canonical, literary tradition.

Somos mulheres imigrantes projected the intentions of the exhibition, to counter traditional aesthetic forms and literatures through sociality, into a broader public space. Just like Releituras, it invited people to read, touch, and engage with the utterly unexpected through a journey away from both the form of the book and the protest placard. It sparked curiosity; it was reported on by Brasil de Fato (2019), a Brazilian online newspaper and radio agency; images of the book in the march were tweeted and retweeted; it appeared in scholarly writing and made tangible the processual commitment the women had shown over the weeks leading up to the march. In the exhibition space of Releituras, visitors found interacting with cartonera, beyond but including reading the cartonera books, to be an emotional experience. Maria Paula recounted, The book became a vehicle for exchange. Every activity that happened in that space had something to do with the exhibition. So there were many forms, many existences, many different ways to think about the book. For us [the three immigrant women’s collectives], our willingness was very important. The motivation was very important in that moment, affect, this sisterhood, what we did together, the dedication that we constructed in that process, as immigrant women.

In a subtle but powerful manner, the books presented in the exhibition encouraged these tactile, affective connections. Each cartonera book is the product of an embodied, relational process that is inscribed on the covers and whose artistic interventions reveal themselves in their material marks and materialized messages. Some of the books were picked up and read by the women involved in this particular intervention who as immigrants from other parts of Latin America had the ability to read fluently in Spanish and Portuguese. One book that we observed being picked up and handled with particular regularity was Dulcinéia, which does not require knowledge of either Spanish or Portuguese but rather invites the reader, viewer, holder in on a much more embodied level. Held in the midst of these tactile, affect-laden, collectively produced objects, these women’s activities revealed another face of literature in action, books as vehicles for exchange and encounters; an encounter in this case brought together activists from all walks of life to join forces and protest together.

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A Gesture of Resistance Somos mulheres imigrantes was an unexpected outcome of the exhibition. The open-endedness of a cartonera exhibition meant that the workshops we had planned for months ended up taking an entirely different form and yet one that was consistent with the method of reference to gesture. Welcoming communities that were directly threatened by the election of Jair Bolsonaro—Indigenous communities, feminist and LBT collectives, journalists concerned with human rights, and collectives articulating the struggle for democracy—this cartonera exhibition facilitated the creation of affective communities. The gesture to which this particular exhibition referred, which emerged through the interventions of the public programs team, was a gesture of resistance. Maria Paula makes the value of that resistance clear: Our everyday life is resistance. Our struggles as women, immigrants, bi, lesbians, it’s resistance. When we manage to bring all these things together, the resistance is greater, and that is important particularly in this moment in Brazil. . . . So we are resisting all the time, resisting against things that attack us, the system itself when it says that a woman is illegal, when no woman is illegal. Our existence is resistance. I think that what we managed to do was materialize that resistance in specific moments. And that moment was one of them, the process of making the book, taking it into the street, chanting together in the march, coming together to embrace.

We opened ourselves to the challenge of understanding how cartonera publishers perceive the form of the exhibition. Working closely with La Cartonera, La Rueda, Dulcinéia Catadora, and Catapoesia showed us the continuing influence of Eloísa’s original understanding of cartonera practice as an instance of social sculpture and demonstrated how the postautonomous literature of Ludmer’s conception, a literature that traverses borders between outside and inside, and enters into dialogue with aesthetics, exhibition design, and politicized public space. Referring to the gesture of the cartonera exhibition allowed us to gain a privileged insight into the importance of the processual as opposed to the construction of a space designed to create an aura around specific books as works of art. Whether it is an intervention by those who live in the favela reconfiguring space within the Museu de Arte do Rio, the secretary of culture of Minas Gerais leading an opening-night audience from the Casa

254 Taking Form, Making Worlds

Guimarães Rosa to a local bar, or immigrant women fi nding a material form for the complex uncommoning that holds them together even as they assert their difference, the exhibition as artistic process, not art object, is a cornerstone for cartonera practitioners to bring people together to form unexpected and unpredictable alliances. The results encompass all senses of the word “alliance”: material connections, affective bonds, and political associations that in turn facilitate new forms of resistance. While the “Nenhuma mulher é ilegal” collaboration is the most obvious example of political resistance, all of the cartonera exhibitions in which we participated were subversive of what Beuys has called “a senile social system” but also of the predetermined definitions of particular forms and their affordances, whether those of the book, the protest placard, or the exhibition. La Cartonera’s exhibition in Parque Chapultepec, Catapoesia’s work in the boteco, and the Releituras exhibition in the Casa do Povo all invited people to join in and participate, to get hands on objects that surprise and delight, to touch and be touched by the experience. Rather than a social movement with specific aims putting art to instrumental use, we have seen how cartonera constitutes an artistic proposition that sets people, objects, and ideas in movement and allows them to take flight through the sociality of material practice, sparking unexpected and open-ended collaborations. In this manner, cartonera exhibitions enact and enable a plural politics; they rethink ways of making and knowing, modeling and instantiating many possible worlds that are at once militantly present and carefully future-oriented. In answer to the question of where cartonera’s prefigurative potential can be located, we thus respond: on the street and in dialogue with art, in the boteco and in the cantina, in books and in bodies.

Conclusion

It has been an amazing journey. We’re all together again in a small Senate House Library office as part of the project’s last formal event, the autumnal 2019 London Cartonera Book Festival (figure 7.1). This week of events has been on the agenda since the beginning of the project, and it has always been important for our cartonera partners. At one moment, when funds were tight, Lúcia summoned Alex to the Glicério recycling cooperative and looked him straight in the eyes to stress that it was very important that Andreia and Maria come to London, a point reinforced later that afternoon when Andreia revealed that Lúcia had “given her heart and soul to the project” and we must not let her down. If cartonera has taught us anything, it’s that there is always a way to make things work, and here we are: organized with Senate House Library and the British Library, the festival centers on a series of public workshops delivered by our cartonera partners. Other things are also happening; we are working on a podcast for the British Library featuring our project partners, visiting the libraries where they can now find their books catalogued and available to the public, and enjoying some time off to explore the city’s galleries, bookshops, and bars. The festival also coincides with the launch of the cartonera special collections. Inspired by Paloma Celis Carbajal’s work at the University of Wisconsin– Madison and the cartonera book collection she has built there, we have worked with three institutions, the British Library, Cambridge University Library, and the Senate House Library, to create cartonera collections in England. The enthusiasm of our project partners—María Castrillo, Philip Abraham, Iris Bachmann, Sonia Morcillo- García, and Clara Panozzo-Zénere—has been astonishing; they too have fallen in love with cartonera, and close to a thousand books are being prepared for people to engage with, learn from, and be inspired by.

256 Taking Form, Making Worlds

The past few days have been celebratory, and we are all happy because the workshops have gone well; the events have been listed in Time Out magazine, and participants have come from far and wide. From the very first night of the festival it has been cartonera as we know it; connections are created and networks activated as people paint, talk, and exchange ideas. We see the practices we have been part of in Mexico and Brazil take root in London, from Dulcinéia Catadora welcoming the proposal to work with the Save Latin Village Campaign to protect a Latin American market in London, to Sergio’s and Israel’s engagement with the Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organization (IRMO) and Sol initiating a long-term collaboration with a Brazilian schoolteacher seeking to promote the Portuguese language among London’s Brazilian diaspora. These exchanges are premised on material and affective engagement as campaigns are discussed and tactics shared, and participants’ enthusiasm grows as they see the opportunity to grasp their own narratives and tell their own stories. As with most cartonera encuentros, there is a stand of the publishers’ books for sale, but London’s status as one of the world centers of the publishing industry seems less important than making new friends and connections. Indeed, on one of the days, a quick dash for materials takes us around the corner and past one of London’s signature bookstores, Waterstones on Gower Street, Europe’s largest bookshop. It is striking that none of the cartonera practitioners inquire or seek to place their books for sale there. We cast our minds back to an interview that Celis Carbajal gave for Isadora Brant’s 2019 film Cartoneras, in which she suggests that cartonera “will not revolutionize the book industry.” Accompanying cartonera publishers across Latin America makes clear that this stance is a conscious decision. Why would cartoneras want to revolutionize an industry in which they don’t believe? Lúcia Rosa tells us later, “I don’t think a large bookstore would be the right place to sell our books. Our proposition is emphatically unconventional, and our books fit better in more alternative spaces.” As Lucy has written elsewhere on cartonera as a socioeconomic phenomenon, cartonera publishers “do not engage in a direct struggle against large multinational corporations, but rather create spaces in which alternative approaches, methods, voices and narratives can travel—not from the ‘centre,’ but rather from the peripheries” (Bell 2017a, 18). This festival is no exception; the cartoneras from Mexico and Brazil put all their energy into sharing their unique approaches and stories with the diverse London-based participants, who listen attentively and take in the knowledge and skills brought from their hermanos and hermanas from the other side of the pond.

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As the workshops continue, the spaces where the workshops are held, linked to higher education institutions and libraries, prompt further discussions, questions, and challenges. The very form of cartonera books issues a gentle challenge to the libraries in the impossibility of restricting books made of cardboard, each entirely unique, to a catalogue. Just as library collections have taken root in Guadalajara, in Cuernavaca, and nascently in São Paulo, our project partners’ books have traveled from Latin America to Europe to constitute these special collections in the United Kingdom. The process of cataloguing resistant objects has prompted much reflection, leading library curators to put forward decolonial strategies and redirect departmental budgets. It seems the cartonera practitioners, in deciding to contribute toward collections outside of Latin America, have trusted in the invisible affordances of their work, the latent potential that is located between social and aesthetic forms to make new worlds. Lúcia terms integrating the collections “an occupation” like those of buildings and spaces in Brazil and makes a direct comparison between contributing books to these libraries and Dulcinéia’s work in the Hotel Cambridge occupation in São Paulo. The cartoneras’ gesture is indeed the very opposite of an invitation to appropriation; they have sold their books, at a price they determined, with the knowledge that they will shape and shake up these elite British cultural institutions from the inside. They know that their books are not a scarce resource to jealously guard; cartonera’s artistic proposition is located elsewhere, precisely in the books’ reproducibility and accessibility. The British Library owning cartonera books does not extract books from Brazil and Mexico. On the contrary, more will be made, and the libraries will work for them, thriving to decolonize these British institutions by creating new publics, new frames, new possibilities of circulation through hands-on workshops and digital media. The London Cartonera Book Festival was important to us and our project partners for several reasons. During the course of our research, the line between cartonera researchers and practitioners had been blurred, as we found ourselves making books, delivering workshops, and helping to sell our partners’ books to bookshops and libraries. Our cartonera partners had of course been publishing, circulating, and disseminating cartonera books long before we had. Yet the flow of cartonera researcher-practitioners had until then been relatively unidirectional, as we traveled from the global North to the South, returning with friendship certainly but also, unavoidably, with scholarly outputs and books. Naturally, this South-North polarity and flow is overly simplistic; we also facilitated the São Paulo encontro to which Mexican and Argentine

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Figure 7.1. The London Cartonera Book Festival (clockwise from top left):

participants making books at Catapoesia’s workshop in the British Library’s Story Garden; the project’s cartonera partners in front of the Senate House Library; Sergio overseeing bookmaking during La Rueda/Viento Cartonero workshop at the University of London. Photographs by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn and Solange Barreto.

cartoneras had been invited and traveled, thus helping to foster and support the kind of pan–Latin American exchanges that characterize cartonera. Nevertheless, the flow of bodies and books could easily give rise to accusations of epistemological extractivism. Even though we hope to have addressed these fears through the methodology and practice outlined in this book, the London event was nevertheless something of a

Conclusion 259

crucible. If it enabled a reversal of flows, it also facilitated a moment of truth. How would cartoneras feel about seeing their books in the special collections of institutions such as the British Library and the University of London’s Senate House Library? It is almost time to leave. The office we are in is the room where librarians prepare the special collections. Having learned from the cartonera publishers, over the days, how to make her own books from materials collected from the street, María Castrillo is now reciprocating the gesture by giving our project partners a special tour of the Senate House Library, showing them what she and her colleagues do and how they catalogue materials. As we are all crammed into the space, the conservator points to piles and piles of light-blue cardboard boxes stacked against the wall. One of the cartoneras, perhaps a bit worn out by what has become a lengthy tour in English, grabs a box marked “Cartoneras [C.P.C] 001– 016” and takes off the lid, and out spill dozens and dozens of brightly colored cartonera books, so many that they begin to slide off the table, as another and yet another box is opened, each collective hunting for its own contribution (figure 7.2). The office, so neatly or-

Figure 7.2. Sol and Júlio with a box of Catapoesia books in the conservator’s office

at Senate House Library, London. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

260 Taking Form, Making Worlds

dered with its workbench, shelves, and storage system, descends into a light-hearted chaos. There are books everywhere, hundreds of them, expanding, multiplying, an explosion of plurality as the tears flow, people wipe their eyes, exchange hugs, compose themselves for a photo, and then break down in tears again.

Precarity Redux Before this moment and just a few weeks before the London events were set to take place, a wrench was thrown into the works that highlighted the complex flows between Latin America and the United Kingdom and between the neoliberal university and the low-paid, largely immigrant labor that sustains it. Together with the invited cartoneras, we were contacted by a representative of a small, radical trade union that represents many members of London’s low-paid immigrant workforce, from janitors to delivery drivers. The union representative told us that the space where our cartonera workshops were to be held was on a boycott list of locations associated with the University of London. The university was caught in a long-running dispute with its mostly Latin American custodians who were struggling for more secure contracts and better wages. This circumstance brought us back full circle to a term that had originally been associated with our project and that some of our cartonera partners had rejected, “precarity.” Despite their situatedness within a waste-picker cooperative that many would describe as precarious, Lúcia had nevertheless told us that she found the term “precarious publishing” troubling, even insulting. It was an in-vogue concept in the social sciences, meant to grasp changing class dynamics and go beyond problematic dualisms such as the formal and informal. Yet, as we have seen, cartonera is exercised in a range of circumstances, and even if it maintains a link to vulnerable and marginalized communities, there is nothing precarious about its coherent proposition, developed over decades of practice and articulated through schemes of complementarity and autonomy across multiple continents. Washington Cucurto explained that although Eloísa Cartonera was born out of the 2001 Argentine economic crisis, the collective is not determined by the precarity of the contexts in which it works. On the contrary, we have seen how cartonera aesthetics work, through the double fold, to care for and shape the social worlds out of which they emerge.

Conclusion 261

Yet here we were, faced with a situation in which Latin American workers and their union representatives employed the language of precarity to describe their working conditions and called for solidarity by way of the relocation of our event. Our proposal of bringing cartonera and cartoneras to London, seemingly a simple gesture, was complicated by the struggles of janitors from across Latin America who were already there, being exploited by institutions that not only seemed to take an interest in theories of precarity but also played a key role in implementing them, outsourcing cleaning and janitorial services to private companies and withholding job security. Yet if Latin American custodians and cartoneras seemed worlds apart, we had already played a part in bringing them together through a series of cartonera workshops run in collaboration with the Brixton-based Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organization and the Migration Museum. The parents of the Dominican, Peruvian, and Colombian adolescents who attended the workshops and told their stories of migration through cartonera forms were themselves employed in London’s gig economy, as janitors and couriers, domestic workers and delivery drivers. Like other academics associated with the University of London either directly or indirectly, we were faced with a dilemma. Could we fathom the cancellation of our cartonera events if we were unable to fi nd an alternative venue on such short notice, dashing the hopes of our cartonera partners, many of whom had set their sights on visiting London since the start of the project in 2017? Then again, if we went ahead with the events in the original venue, would we be pitting Latin American workers against cartoneras whose very modi operandi were premised on working with and making literature accessible to workingclass and marginal groups? After much discussion with all involved, we proposed a middle ground, moving the venue and extending an invitation to hold cartonera workshops with the striking workers, in reference to the gesture of socially transformative forms. Like Dulcinéia’s collaboration with residents of the Morro da Providência favela in Rio de Janeiro, such a workshop would allow those whose voices were often shouted down to tell their stories; like the migrant women’s group collaboration in São Paulo, the resulting publication might be turned into a tool for protest and mobilization. While we moved the venue and our cartoneras came, the dreamed-of collaboration ultimately proved impossible for logistical reasons, yet the cartonera festival did allow for fostering new connections such as the attendance at the workshops of Save Latin Village, a campaign to preserve the beating heart of Lon-

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don’s Colombian and wider Latin American community from the threat of developers.

Journeys of Understanding The way we organized the London Cartonera Book Festival and attempted to respond spontaneously but thoughtfully to multiple material and ethical issues as they came up shows something of what we have learned as academics from our cartonera partners. For Lucy, the cartonera project has transformed her relation with the discipline of literary and cultural studies, taking her from a practice of critical reading to a process of collective reading rooted in coproduction, affording her and an emerging group of literary scholars a different perspective on “close reading,” one that not only pays close attention to the detail, textures, and forms of literary texts but does so in close collaboration with the communities that produce literature as part of their day-today existence. Like cartonera itself, the modes of reading she has developed have stemmed from necessity. Working with cartonera writers and makers, she has had to confront, head-on and hands-on, Eve Sedgwick’s notion that the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a mode of interpretation identified by Paul Ricoeur (1970) that has prevailed in literary studies over the past five decades, has “made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller” (Sedgwick 2003, 124). There are obvious practical impediments to reading cartoneras suspiciously, given that most people in the community of writers and readers are compas, cartonera kin, teachers, coworkers, community elders, or loyal allies, people who, as a reader and coproducer, you do trust. But more than that, the cartonera project has really forced Lucy to ask herself, following Sedgwick (2003, 124), “What does knowledge do?” Lucy’s concern was not so much that she risked fi nding out something that she already knew. Rather it was that as an active interlocutor in and contributor to the cartonera world, which has always included academics as well as practitioners and indeed academic practitioners and practicing academics, she needed to be sure that the knowledge she gained from the project would do something rather than undo it; that the research would construct something valuable for her interlocutors, with her interlocutors, rather than deconstruct it; that ultimately, the pres-

Conclusion 263

ence of the project’s researchers in the eminently practice-based world of cartonera would be beneficial to their practices rather than detrimental to them. The particular modality of postcritical reading Lucy had to develop, therefore, was a form of commitment to codesign, coproduction, and the ethics proposed by Dulcinéia in its Vocabulário vivido (Rosa 2017); anything she did with her anthropologist colleagues needed to be based on a careful consideration of the narrative/epistemological entailments for the cartonera communities with which she was working. And so she has worked ever more closely with her cartonera partners, facilitating and co-organizing encuentros, workshops, and exhibitions on both sides of the pond in settings as diverse as schools and prisons, public squares and university classrooms, public libraries and drug rehabilitation centers, and more recently in virtual spaces like Zoom and StreamYard. The outcome? A mode of reading relationally, through the material sociality of collective practice. For Alex, cartonera was always somehow connected to art. His fi rst connection to cardboard publishing was contributing a text to a cartonera book as part of the artist Ícaro Lira’s project for the Residência Artística Cambridge in São Paulo. And yet, cartonera didn’t seem much like the other art projects going on in Brazil. It was street, but it wasn’t graffiti; it pointed toward resistance, but it didn’t involve demonstrative protest; it was participatory, but it didn’t confi ne itself to a gallery for a three-month period; and it was pictorial while also articulating a much broader field of gestures that ultimately sought a complex imbrication with the social. Working primarily with Dulcinéia Catadora and Catapoesia and being fortunate enough to have interlocutors such as Beatriz Lemos and Isadora Brant, Alex became conversant with the very particular artistic proposition that cartonera puts forward: a discursive practice; an open and fun way of being together; a socioartistic gesture premised on accessibility; a commitment to breaking with traditional canons; a means of making meaning. Or more simply, a way of working that Javier Barilaro said “is more beautiful when there is inclusion.” Cartonera reinforced for Alex how the ethnographic research process could benefit from longitudinal art work that immerses itself in the social, how material and conceptual work are closely tied together, and how literary texts, contemporary art practice, and a collaborative anthropology can productively intersect to put forward methodologies that enter into dialogue with the complex forms of cultural expression that characterize the pluriversal and postcanonical. Working day after day in the Glicério co-op, Alex experienced the complex circulation and

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stigma that accompanied Dulcinéia Catadora’s practice. Sometimes it seemed that the whole city passed through that space, the fragments of a collective subjectivity materialized in discarded personal photos, bank statements, cosmetics, children’s toys. Cartonera points to the multiplicity of what is discarded and allegorically refers back to this through the open-endedness of its practice; one never knows which idea or object will return from whence it was issued, perhaps with a single voice to proclaim it, perhaps a thousand. Patrick, meanwhile, came from a background of working with waste pickers (cartoneros or clasifi cadores) in Uruguay and Argentina. Initially, he moved within a sphere of relative suspicion: Who were these very different characters who seemed to have appropriated the name “cartonera” but now, in Mexico at least, seemed so far removed from that world of hardship and repression, scrap yards and struggle? Yet just as he had gotten his hands dirty in the landfills of Montevideo and Buenos Aires, it was through engagement in cartonera’s material sociality of practice that Patrick came to understand the precious interventions made on recycled material that also spilled out into and spun new social worlds. Taken under Sergio’s wing as yet another apprentice and surrogate son, Patrick traversed the city of Guadalajara with him, entering the past and present world of barrios and birotes that informed Sergio’s interlinked cartonera forms: texts, workshops, books, covers, and readings.* Soon the world that surrounded him, La Rueda’s café and books, its personalities and mysticism, were finding their way into his first short story in Spanish, created at Sergio’s insistence and included in his regular collection of writings from visitors to his bookshop. Shortly after that, the workshop form in particular was incorporated into Patrick’s own practice as he created cartonera books with teenagers in Manchester, England, children at the Hay Book Festival in Wales, and families at Cambridge University Library. Though he never created his own cartonera, Patrick felt as though he had successfully graduated from his apprenticeship, confident of taking his own Mexican-flavored version of cartonera into the world and his own work beyond the bounds of academia. Over the months and years, our cartonera journeys have brought us hand in hand—or during the latter, Covid-restricted parts of the project, screen to screen—with four very special collectives: Catapoesia, La Cartonera, Dulcinéia Catadora, and La Rueda Cartonera. Each contributed something unique to our research, just as each brings something * A birote is Guadalajara’s signature sourdough bread.

Conclusion 265

truly irreplaceable to the plural worlds of cartonera. As we came to conclude the project with this book, we were aware that we were writing about and with practitioners whose distinctly open-ended, ever-evolving practices resisted any kind of conclusion and whose worlds continue to be forged every day through physical actions and affective gestures, perforating, threading, binding, painting, cutting, sticking. But we hope that through the pages of this book, we have offered a window onto the ways these worlds take form through different configurations of creative expression that, through gesture, embodiment, and relationality, easily become or simply are social interventions: collective writing, cartonera binding, horizontal coworking, joyful workshopping, literary exchange, inclusive cultural encounters. What we have found out not only by working with cartonera through innovative, sometimes daring methods over several years, but also through this collaborative writing process is that all these forms are inevitably connected to one another. This means that the chapters of this book are very closely interwoven and sometimes seep into one another, occupying one another’s territories. A collective text encloses all the signs and marks of coproduction, can inspire a new collective, and may well bring together diverse groups and individuals at a community level, whether through face-to-face or digital exchanges. A workshop can easily turn into an encounter, as in the Guadalajara neighborhood of Polanco, and might lead to a new collective text such as Rancheros vs gángsteres. An encounter like the ones we have described in Santiago, Cuernavaca, and São Paulo is a perfect opportunity for an exhibition, further workshops, and putting together a new collective text. And a cartonera exhibition always involves a constellation of unique book-objects and diverse actors, from local collectives to international organizations. On a basic but fundamental level, cartonera forms of action require more than one person, more than one tool, and more than one place. Let’s go back to the first two scenes, the first two worlds we describe. In São Paulo, how could the Arquipélago collages have been made without the four women who selected the visual fragments and put them together through dialogue and exchanges? How could the books have been assembled at the recycling site without a pair of hands to do the sticking while another pair held down the cardboard? How could the books have found their readers at the book fairs without one person working the stand while another brought back the coffee and the water to get through the long day in the stifl ing heat? Similarly, in Cuernavaca, the exhibition and its accompanying workshop were fruit not only

266 Taking Form, Making Worlds

of Dany and Nayeli’s efforts but also of those of founding members Raúl and Rocato and the thousands of hands, bodies, and subjectivities that passed through the Casona Spencer, fueled by coffee, cake, and mezcal and transforming their enthusiasm into the colors that spilled out of cardboard books. The worlds of cartonera are the new relations, meanings, and communities that emerge from these processes that in turn assemble alternative versions of the subjects, materials, and environments involved and stitch together new social fabrics. The practitioners themselves exhibit an irreducible diversity and a proud autonomy, and yet these figures have in common an unfettered creativity and a fearless spirit. Each in their own way, they have shown us their commitment to the interwoven worlds of art and literature. Within these worlds, alternative social formations, relations, and exchanges—from autonomy-inducing apprenticeship to radical nonhierarchy, from productive dissonance to generative resonance—can be seen, practiced, and experienced. Within these blurred contours, an inherently creative political ontology takes form in which designs for the pluriverse emerge cover by cover, through day-to-day practice, and hand-to-hand cooperation. In this practice, the acts of writing, speaking, and being in the world make a mark on the page but also on the contours of an uncommon community, just as making a book by hand from recovered cardboard leaves fingerprints, dents, and bends, whether heavy marks laden with intent or soft signs imprinted with care. Across these various modi operandi, resistance doesn’t necessarily involve a march or a run-in with the police. Many of the cartonera interlocutors we met have engaged and are still engaging in more squarely political forms of protest. Some have become disillusioned with more traditional and even much newer modes of political action, while others have never even gone there. All, however, display a common will to search for what the cartonera-academic Aurelio Meza has termed “other ways of doing things” (2014). What makes cartonera unique is the particular way in which they act, work, and live through forms, modes, and gestures that cannot be extricated from the day-to-day gesture of artistic practice, a practice that is stubbornly community based, joyfully collective, and irreverently autonomous.

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About the Authors

Since completing her PhD in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2013, Lucy Bell has been based at the University of Surrey teaching and researching in Hispanic Studies. Her research focuses on the use of literature, publishing, and art practice as modes of alternative knowledge production, decolonial practice, and activism in Latin America. She has led the Cartonera Publishing project (2017– 2020), supported by two research grants from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Prisoner Publishing project (2020–present), also funded by the AHRC. Working collaboratively with grassroots publishers, writers, librarians, artists, filmmakers, and activists, the aim of her research is to gain a deeper understanding of, and to support, literary and artistic collectives that use their creative practice to build new relations, networks, and futures in, with, and for vulnerable communities. A lex U ngpr at eeb Fly n n is an Assistant Professor at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, University of California, Los Angeles. Working as an anthropologist and curator, Alex’s practice explores the intersection of ethnographic and curatorial modes of inquiry. Researching collaboratively with activists, curators, and artists in Brazil since 2007, Alex explores the prefigurative potential of art in community contexts, prompting the theorization of fields such as the production of knowledge, utopian horizons, and the social and aesthetic dimensions of form. Alex was cocurator of the Residência Artística Cambridge, an artistic residency program based within an occupied building in downtown São Paulo. For this project Alex received the São Paulo Association of Art Critics 2016 APCA Trophy.

288

About the Authors

Pat r ick O’H a r e is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. For over a decade he has engaged in academic and activist collaborations with Latin American communities and has conducted longitudinal ethnographic research in in Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico. Through working with urban recyclers in particular, Patrick has sought to create theory and practice that reimagines the relationship between waste, labor, and dignified life. An ongoing interest in socio-material transformation at the margins led him to cartonera, and to his most recent research on plastic economies.

Index

Photos and illustrations are indicated by italicized page numbers. Abraham, Philip, 255 activism: artivism, 30–31; against Bolsonaro, 178–179; cartoneras as, 63–66, 67, 68–73, 71, 210–212; against colonialism, 125–133, 128, 132; in Cuernavaca, 149–150; cultural, 28, 99–100; epistemology of, 95–97; extractivism, 96–97, 126– 127, 131, 137–148, 258; grassroots, 74–75, 85–87, 169; in Latin America, 112–113, 173–174; for marginalized populations, 141–142; in Minas Gerais, 157–158; Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, 37, 149–150; Nahuatl language for, 138–139; for Pensaré Cartoneras collective, 171–172; politics and, 75–76, 142–150, 148; scholarship on, 23, 186; in workshops, 191–192 aesthetics, 82–83, 100–105, 180, 216– 222; and beauty, 27; and politics, 98, 193 Africa, 60, 75 African Americans, 80 agency, 29 Aguirre, Carlos, 84–85 Aguirre, Ruth Pérez, 199 Aira, César, 9–10, 43–45, 50 Akademia Cartonera (cartonera), 59– 60, 63

Alaimo, Stacy, 186, 204 alinhados, 22 A My Me Vale Verga (Saucedo), 163, 164–165 Ángel, Miguel, 162 Animita Cartonera, 24, 52, 53–54, 63–64 Anker, Elizabeth, 95–96 anthropology, 79–83, 94–96, 109, 186–187 Arab Spring movement, 30 Arcoiris de la palabra (cartonera), 118, 133, 200 Argentina: art in, 9–10; Brazil and, 51–52, 169; Buenos Aires, 16, 46– 50; culture of, 46–47; piqueteros in, 65; politics in, 181. See also specifi c topics Arnaiz, Idalia Morejón, 62–63 Arnez Cuéllar, Marco, 193–194 Arquipélago collages: as art, 121–122, 123, 150, 250, 265–266; for community, 1–3, 2, 7, 265–266 art: aesthetics and, 216–222; in Argentina, 9–10; Arquipélago collages as, 121–122, 123, 150, 250, 265–266; artivism, 30–31; Belleza y Felicidad collective for, 48–49; in Buenos Aires, 16; cartoneras as, 27– 31, 100–105, 107–108, 213–216,

290

Index

art (continued) 263–264; for community, 28, 208– 209; in Cuernavaca, 4–8, 7; at Dulcinéia Catadora, 1–4, 2, 7, 12; Glicério recycling cooperative for, 119, 202; in Latin America, 21–22, 26, 40–41, 192–193; for Levine, 11, 26, 105; Melanesian, 29; plurality in, 15–21, 20; resistance from, 149–150; in São Paulo, 8, 41; São Paulo Art Biennial, 9, 27, 33–34, 55, 106, 217, 239–241; social justice from, 30–31; theory, 13, 26–29, 98–99. See also specifi c topics Art and Agency (Gell), 29 Artaud, Edgar, 135–136, 142, 165, 201, 205 arte de contar histórias, A (cartonera), 218 Asia, 75 autobiographical collages, 112 autonomy, 170–172, 194–195, 266 Baker, Lorena, 34–35. See also Rueda Cartonera, La Bancescu, María Eugenia, 68 Bañuelos, Raul, 35 Barad, Karen, 21, 186–188, 208 Barilaro, Javier, 9, 27, 37–38; activism for, 178; Beuys for, 218–219; cardboard for, 50–51; Cucurto and, 101–102, 108, 167–168, 213–215, 220; exhibitions for, 221; Laguna and, 47–48; and publishing, 53, 55; social sculpture for, 97. See also Eloísa Cartonera Barreto, Sol, 22, 32, 125–133, 154–160; Brabo and, 229, 259; collaboration for, 256; exhibitions for, 218. See also Catapoesia de Barros, Pombo, 175–176 Barthes, Roland, 198 Beau Geste Press, 191 Becerra, José, 145 Beckett, Samuel, 118 Bejerman, Gabriela, 9–10 Bellatín, Mario, 136–137

Belleza y Felicidad collective, 48–49 Benedict, Ruth, 80 Benjamin, Walter, 44 Bennett, Jane, 131–132 Berndt, Filipe, 240–242 Beuys, Joseph, 27, 47, 99, 214–215, 218–220 Beverley, John, 52, 113 Beyond the Pink Tide (Gómez-Barris), 192 “Beyond the Third World” (Escobar), 22–23 binding techniques, 20–21, 116–118, 117 Birth of the Penitentiary, The (Aguirre, C.), 84–85 Blanchard, Remi, 36 Blanes, Ruy, 27–28 Blaser, Mario, 16, 40, 176–177, 251 Bloco MIRA, 249–250 Boal, Augusto, 51 Boas, Franz, 80 Bogarín, 83–85 Bolaño, Roberto, 57 Bolsonaro, Jair, 40, 69–70, 97–98, 178–179, 253 Bonito Oliva, Achille, 99 Book in Movement (Rabasa), 23 books: binding techniques for, 20– 21; book fairs, 153–154, 264–266; by La Cartonera, 5–7, 7; for Eloísa Cartonera, 27; for FIL, 205–206; Ixtlahuacán del Río book festival, 183, 184, 185; in Latin America, 229–236, 232, 235; London Cartonera Book Festival, 42, 255–260, 258–259, 262–266; poetry, 35; in Rio de Janeiro, 33–34; scholarship on, 39; in Senate House Library, 42; for women, 85. See also cartoneras; publishing Born, Georgina, 216–217 Bote Cartonero, 39, 91–92 botecos, 229–236, 232, 235, 254 Botero, Maria Paula, 243 Bourdieu, Pierre, 216 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 28, 237–238

Index 291

BR (cartonera), 179–182 Brabo, Júlio, 23–24, 32, 97, 125– 133, 156–160, 229, 259. See also Catapoesia Brant, Isadora, 38, 213, 239, 263. See also Cartoneras (Brant) Brazil: Argentina and, 51–52, 169; Bolsonaro for, 97–98; botecos in, 229–236, 232, 235, 254; Colectivx Ch’ixi in, 193–194; community in, 106, 117–118; culture of, 178–180; Jardim Gramacho dump in, 26; Mexico and, 40, 72, 109, 112, 152– 153, 158–162, 163, 164–165, 256; politics in, 69–70; Rio de Janeiro, 33–34, 180, 218, 230, 261; Sem Terra movement in, 194; women in, 3–4. See also specifi c topics Bruscky, Paulo, 34, 121, 168, 222 Buendía, Cala, 111–112 Buenos Aires, 16, 46–50 Burman, Anders, 96 Cadena, Marisol de la, 40, 106, 176–177 Caffé, Carolina, 88 Calderón, Felipe, 143 Calvin and Hobbes, 198 Campos, Horaldo de, 118 cardboard: activism in, 50; affordability of, 8; for cartoneras, 183, 184, 185–187, 204–210, 207–208; for community, 195–204, 197; economics of, 102–103, 170–171; from Glicério recycling cooperative, 240–241; in Los Angeles, 18; poetry on, 52; publishing, 12–13, 37, 63; from recycling, 1–2, 4–7; technology with, 188–189; in United States, 18–19 Cardboard House Press, 75 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 143 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 143 Carlos, José, 140–141 Cartonera, La, 5–7, 7; collaboration with, 13–14, 264–266; for community, 153; Dulcinéia Catadora and,

46, 222–226, 226–227, 228–229; exhibitions for, 254; for Latin America, 189–190; literature for, 97; philosophy of, 35–37, 36–37; for plurality, 133–142; publishing for, 199–200; La Ratona Cartonera and, 72; La Rueda Cartonera and, 161–162 cartoneras: as activism, 63–66, 67, 68–73, 71, 210–212; anthropology of, 186–187; as art, 27–31, 100– 105, 107–108, 213–216, 263–264; in Buenos Aires, 46–50; cardboard for, 183, 184, 185–187, 204–210, 207–208; Catapoesia for, 125–133, 128, 132; for community, 23–24, 43–45, 96–97, 152–153, 161–162, 163, 164–165, 176–182; covers for, 85–88; in culture, 13–15, 37–42, 53–60, 61, 62–63, 74–76, 79–83, 98–100; for decolonialism, 15–21, 20; Dulcinéia Catadora for, 118– 125, 123; economics of, 168–170; encounters with, 165–176, 167; encuentro, 59–60, 62–63; exhibitions for, 222–226, 226–227, 228– 236, 232, 235, 253–254; Fong, S., for, 34–35, 60–61; francachelas, 60, 61, 62; history of, 8–13, 183, 184, 185; Indigenous languages in, 36–37; in Latin America, 1–7, 2, 7, 21–26, 38, 72–73, 260–262; literature and, 56–57, 110–113, 115–118, 117; London Cartonera Book Festival, 42, 255–260, 258–259, 262– 266; plurality in, 150–151; poetry in, 133–135; and public space, 153– 161, 159; publishing of, 50–53, 77– 79, 78, 105–109, 180, 195–204, 197; research on, 31–37, 33, 36–37; La Rueda Cartonera for, 142–150, 148; for social justice, 133–142; as social sculpture, 216–222; sociopolitical structures for, 83–87, 86, 88–89, 89–94; as testimonios, 113– 115; trans-formal research on, 94– 98; at University of Wisconsin–

292

Index

cartoneras (continued) Madison, 59–60, 104; workshops for, 187–195. See also specifi c topics Cartoneras (Brant), 38, 159–160, 178; exhibitions in, 238–239; interviews for, 213–216; purpose in, 150–151 Cartoneras exhibition: for community, 170–176; encounters at, 165–170, 167; as research, 237–247, 239– 242, 244, 248, 249–252, 250 Cartoneras in Translation, 70, 115–119, 117, 142–143, 169–170 Casa do Povo, 165–166, 178, 238, 239, 242–244, 247, 254 Casona Spencer museum, 37, 164– 165, 204–206, 225 catadores. See waste pickers Catapoesia: for cartoneras, 125–133, 128, 132; collaboration with, 13– 14, 264–266; for community, 19, 32; Dulcinéia Catadora and, 263; encounters for, 155–160, 159; exhibitions for, 229–236, 232, 235, 254; for Minas Gerais, 153; workshops at, 258. See also cartoneras exhibition Cedillo, Misael, 136 Celis Carbajal, Paloma, 51, 59–60, 62, 74, 104, 171, 255–256. See also University of Wisconsin–Madison Century of Artists’ Books (Drucker), 220 “Ce tlalli” (Domínguez García), 97, 133–135 Chandler, Mielle, 204 Chapultepec park, 4–7, 35–36, 162, 163, 164, 223, 240 Chávez, Hugo, 192 Chicano and Chicana Art (González), 220–221 Chicano movement, 30 Chile, 52–54, 57, 61. See also Animita Cartonera China, 75 Christianity, 130–131 civil rights, 30

clasificador. See waste pickers Clemente Jiménez, Tirso, 141–142 Clements, Paul, 27–28 coexistence, 17 Cohen, Phil, 79–80 Colectivo Feminista de Argentinxsen São Paulo, 246–247 Colectivx Ch’ixi, 193–194 collective behavior, 24 colonialism: activism against, 125– 133, 128, 132; hierarchies from, 103–104; metanarrative of, 16–17; Nahuatl language and, 133–134; postcolonialism, 113–114; power from, 94–95; publishing and, 39; quilombo in, 49; technology from, 207–208. See also decolonialism Comaroff, Jean & John, 25 community: in Amazon, 129; Arquipélago collages for, 1–3, 2, 7, 265– 266; art for, 28, 208–209; in Brazil, 106, 117–118; cardboard for, 195–204, 197; La Cartonera for, 153; Cartoneras exhibition for, 170– 176; cartoneras for, 23–24, 43–45, 96–97, 152–153, 161–162, 163, 164– 165, 176–182; Casa do Povo for, 165–166, 178, 238, 239, 242–244, 247, 254; Catapoesia for, 19, 32; in Cuernavaca, 72, 161–162; Dulcinéia Catadora for, 263–264; encounters for, 152–155; for Fong, S., 145–146; Glicério recycling cooperative for, 33, 33, 161; Morro da Providência, 225–226, 227, 261; museums, 229–236, 232, 235; networks in, 21–22; organizers, 69; politics of, 40; of practice, 195– 196; public space in, 153–161, 159; publishing for, 103–104, 162, 163, 164; recycling for, 71–72; La Rueda Cartonera for, 60, 61, 62, 264; La Rueda Libros y Café for, 90; for Sánchez, 5–7, 7; workshops for, 183, 184, 185–187, 256–257, 258; Xakriabá, 157–158; in Xoxocotla, 37

Index 293

contracultura como protesta, La (Marroquín), 143–144 co-publishing, 58 “Coração magoado” (Toco Pequi), 129–130 cordel literature, 49–50 cotton industry, 137–138 covers, for cartoneras, 85–88 criminology, 93 critical design, 17 Cuba, 52 Cucurto, Washington, 9, 47, 72; artists for, 51; Barilaro and, 101–102, 108, 167–168, 213–215, 220; Eloísa Cartonera for, 260; reputation of, 112 Cuentos de nuestra América (Valenzuela), 201 Cuernavaca: activism in, 149–150; art in, 4–8, 7; community in, 72, 161– 162; culture of, 35–36; history of, 18; São Paulo and, 42. See also Cartonera, La culture: Bolsonaro for, 69–70; of Brazil, 178–180; cartoneras in, 13–15, 37–42, 53–60, 61, 62–63, 74–76, 79–83, 98–100; coexistence in, 17; of Cuernavaca, 35–36; cultural activism, 28, 99–100; cultural studies, 79–83, 95; of Dulcinéia Catadora, 19, 22; of Eloísa Cartonera, 55–56; encounters and, 152–153, 161–162, 163, 164–165; exhibitions for, 213–216; for Fong, S., 147–148; Glicério recycling cooperative and, 120–121, 263–264; of global North, 18; Indigenous languages for, 134–135; in Latin America, 74, 90; of Mexico, 24, 138–139; of Minas Gerais, 253–254; profane, 79–80; publishing and, 11–14; recycling for, 195–204, 197; resistance for, 161–162, 163, 164–165; of São Paulo, 1–3, 15, 70, 155; uncommonality for, 176–182; of waste pickers, 97; workshops for, 162, 164, 190–191

Dagognet, François, 199 Danto, Arthur, 44 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 43–44 decolonialism: cartoneras for, 15–21, 20; epistemology and, 125–133, 128, 132; history of, 111; scholarship on, 176 Delcan Albors, Marc, 173–174 Deleuze, Gilles, 123 Deloria, Ella Cara, 80 Demarchi, Ademir, 3 democracy, 24–25, 30, 142–145 demonstrations, 24 Denning, Michael, 12 DeNora, Tia, 217 Denzin, Norman, 95 Descola, Phillipe, 127, 129 Designs for the Pluriverse (Escobar), 17 Dias da Costa, Maria Aparecida, 1–4, 4, 8, 33, 86–87, 97, 119–121, 123, 255 Diegues, Douglas, 12, 52, 66, 68, 168–169 Dietrich, Maíra, 121, 222 Dillon, Marta, 179, 181 Diniz, Clarissa, 228 direct democracy, 144–145 dissent, for resistance, 165–176, 167 diversity, 176–182, 190–191 Divisor (Pape), 107–108 DIY-zines, 47 Domador de Yacarés, El, 68 Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Scott), 64–65 Domínguez García, Rigoberto, 97, 133–135 dos Santos, Eminéia, 4, 19, 22, 33, 117, 119, 121–122 double fold, 12–13, 83–87, 86, 88–89, 89–94, 98–100 Drucker, Johanna, 215–216, 220, 222 Duhalde, Eduardo, 46 Dulcinéia (Honório), 19–20, 20 Dulcinéia Catadora: art at, 1–4, 2, 7, 12; autobiographical collages by, 112; autonomy for, 116–117; La Cartonera and, 46, 222–226, 226–

294 Index

Dulcinéia Catadora (continued) 227, 228–229; Catapoesia and, 263; collaboration with, 8–9, 13–14, 33–34, 56, 202–204, 261, 264–266; for community, 263–264; covers for, 86–87; Eloísa Cartonera and, 217–218, 221; encounters for, 155; exhibitions for, 242–243; for feminism, 243–247, 244, 248, 249–252; history of, 38; manifesto, 29–30, 153–154; politics for, 178–179; social justice for, 99; for waste pickers, 32–33, 33, 70, 199. See also Cartoneras exhibition Echeverría, Luis, 143 economics, 102–103, 168–171, 194–195 Ediciones del Varrio Xino, 190 Ediciones El Mendrugo, 52 Ediciones Eloísa, 47 Ediciones Vigía, 52 Ehrenberg, Felipe, 191, 202 Eloísa Cartonera, 8–9; aesthetics for, 102–103; for artists, 220–222; books for, 27; collaboration for, 193–194; for Cucurto, 260; culture of, 55–56; Dulcinéia Catadora and, 217–218, 221; history of, 46– 54, 192, 213–216; influence of, 41, 66, 67; literature for, 151; methodology of, 101–102; Mil gotas, 44– 45; posters for, 67, 87; production at, 189; for São Paulo, 33, 159, 159–160 Elston, Cherilyn, 122 Emboava, Andreia, 33, 70, 71, 115– 118, 117, 119–120, 226 Emboava, Peterson, 33 Emilio, Pablo, 90 Encontro do Livro de Cartão, 60 encounters: at Cartoneras (exhibition), 165–170, 167; for Catapoesia, 155– 160, 159; at Chapultepec park, 162, 163, 164; for community, 152– 155; culture and, 152–153, 161–162, 163, 164–165; diversity of, 176–

182; at University of Wisconsin– Madison, 160–161; at workshops, 170–176, 265 Encuentro Internacional de Editoriales Cartoneras, 62 encuentros cartoneros, 59–60, 62– 63 Ene, El, 200–201 Ennis, Michael, 142–143 Envelopoema (Bruscky), 168 epistemology, 95–97, 125–133, 128, 132, 162, 164 Epplin, Craig, 50, 63, 189 Escobar, Arturo, 15, 17, 114–115, 123–124 Espejo y viento (cartonera), 77–79, 78, 81–85, 93–94, 103–104, 251 ethnography, 40–42, 64–65, 79, 96 Eu, Adrianna, 181 Europe: colonialism by, 15–16; hegemony from, 45; Latin America and, 29, 44; London Cartonera Book Festival in, 42, 255–260, 258–259, 262–266; United States and, 20 Every Story Has Its Smell (cartonera), 89 exhibitions: for cartoneras, 222–226, 226–227, 228–236, 232, 235, 253– 254; Cartoneras exhibition, 165– 176, 167, 237–247, 239–242, 244, 248, 249–252, 250; for Catapoesia, 229–236, 232, 235, 254; Farsites, 217; London Cartonera Book Festival, 42, 255–260, 258–259, 262– 266; O abrigo e o terreno, 217–218, 225, 227, 228–229; prefigurative politics of, 237–247, 239–242, 244, 248, 249–252, 250; as resistance, 253–254; social sculptures as, 216– 222; Somos mulheres imigrantes, 247, 248, 249, 251–253; staircase module, 239, 240; for women, 243–247, 244, 248, 249–252 existence: materiality for, 210–211; open-endedness of, 153–161, 159; precarity in, 11–12, 16, 42, 124,

Index 295

260–262; as resistance, 69–73, 71, 152–153, 176–182, 210–212 extractivism, 96–97, 126–127, 131, 137–148, 258 Facebook, 171–172 Facundo (Sarmiento), 113 Failure of Latin America (Beverley), 113 Faletto, Enzo, 143 Fals Borda, Orlando, 105 Farsites (exhibition), 217 Felski, Rita, 95–96 feminism: Colectivo Feminista de Argentinxsen São Paulo, 246– 247; criminology for, 93; Dulcinéia Catadora for, 243–247, 244, 248, 249–252; grassroots activism for, 169; identity in, 122; LGBTQ movements and, 49; MILBI for, 243–247, 244 Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL), 205–210 Fernández, Laura, 166, 167. See also Cartoneras exhibition Ferreyra, Gabriel, 91 Fiera, Kátia, 222 FIL. See Feria Internacional del Libro Flatley, Jonathan, 124 Flusser, Vilém, 106–107 FMI. See Frente de Mulheres Imigrantes Fong, Pavel, 35, 144, 190 Fong, Sergio: Rueda Cartonera, La: for cartoneras, 34–35, 60–61; community for, 145–146; culture for, 147–148; FIL for, 205–206, 209– 210; leadership for, 264; politics for, 144–145; production for, 197; publishing for, 77, 78, 85, 258; semi-autobiographical fiction by, 72; Soberanes and, 91–92, 99, 183, 184, 185, 189–190, 256; workshops for, 187–188, 205–207, 208. See also Puente Grande prison project formalism, 100–105 Forms (Levine), 105

“Forward Kioto” (Villoro), 58 Foucault, Michel, 64 francachelas cartoneras, 60, 61, 62 Franco, Marielle, 180 Frente de Mulheres Imigrantes (FMI), 243, 249–250 Frutinhas do cerrado (cartonera), 157–158 Fuera de foco (Artaud), 201 Gablik, Suzi, 29 GAC. See Grupo de Arte Callejero Gair, Robert, 200 Garamona, Francisco, 112 García Canclini, Néstor, 29, 97–100, 237–238 Gaudério, Gaudêncio, 175 Geertz, Clifford, 80 Gell, Alfred, 29 gender hierarchies, 84–85 geopolitics, 23 Georgia dos Reis, Isadora, 118 gestures, 106–107 Gibson, James, 102 Gill, Lesley, 12 Gledhill, John, 65, 69 Glicério recycling cooperative, 1, 12, 71–72, 88; for art, 119, 202; cardboard from, 240–241; for community, 33, 33, 161; culture and, 120– 121, 263–264 “global aCtIVISm” (Weibel), 30 global North, 18, 75, 105, 209, 217, 257–259 global South, 209, 217, 257–259 Gochez, Víctor, 223–225 Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 23, 106, 192 Gonçalves de Oliveira, Joel, 157–158 González, Jennifer, 220–221 “Gossypiumhirsutum” (Monroy), 137–138 Gould, Rebecca, 50 Graciotti, Thais, 1–2, 2, 122–125, 222 graffiti, 50 Gramsci, Antonio, 64

296

Index

Grande Sertão (Guimarães Rosa), 125, 156–157 Grandón, Tanya Núñez, 16, 53–54 grassroots activism, 74–75, 85–87, 169 Griffi n, Jane, 52 Grimshaw, Roger, 80, 95 Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC), 51 Guattari, Félix, 123, 238 Guevara, Che, 194 Gugelberger, George, 113–114 Guha, Ranajit, 64 Guimarães Rosa, João, 32, 125, 156–158 Hanisch, Carol, 94 Harlem Renaissance, 80 Harvey, David, 12 hegemony, 45–46 Heidensohn, Frances, 93 Hernandez, Raúl, 62 Hernández, Rosalva Aída, 84 Herzog, Vladimir, 179 hierarchies, 84–85, 103–104, 162, 164 history: of Animita Cartonera, 63–64; of cartoneras, 8–13, 183, 184, 185; of Cuernavaca, 18; of decolonialism, 111; of Dulcinéia Catadora, 38; of Eloísa Cartonera, 46–54, 192, 213–216; historias, 52–53, 127; of literature, 113–115; oral, 135– 136; of La Rueda Cartonera, 34– 35, 58; of social justice, 43–45 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 64 Hobson, Dorothy, 80, 95 homelessness, 14, 23, 120–121 Homenagem ao Sr. Elifa (cartonera), 157–158 Honório, Thiago, 19, 202–203 Hotel Cambridge, 8–9, 14 housing, 23 HtuRquesa Cartonera, 74, 199 Huellas de la Memoria, 147–149, 148 Hughes, Sarah, 25–26 Hugo Sánchez, Victor, 135–136 Human Observatory, The (radio show), 205

Hurpin, Dany, 5–7, 7, 19, 35–37, 36– 37; cardboard for, 195–197; language for, 172–173; Sánchez and, 205, 217, 224–225, 265–266. See also Cartonera, La Hurston, Zora Neale, 80 Hutching, Kimberly, 17 I, Rigoberta Menchú, 113 “I Am Searching for Field Character” (Beuys), 219 identity, 59, 122 ideology, 26 Illustrated Spinning Traumatropes (cartonera), 62 immigrants, 243–247, 244, 248, 249–252 India, 64 Indigenous languages, 6–7, 12, 36–37, 49, 112, 133–135, 138–139 Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organization, 256, 261 Industrial Revolution, 141 infrarealism, 136–137 Ingold, Tim, 19–20, 20, 118, 186–187, 196–198, 209 inscription, 152–161, 159 interlocutors, 13, 20–21, 23, 59, 70–71 irreverence, 54 Ixtlahuacán del Río book festival, 183, 184, 185 Jalisco, Mexico. See Puente Grande prison project Jara, René, 125 Jardim Gramacho dump, 26 Jiménez, Cisco, 169, 223 Johansson, Anna, 25 Jones, Jonathan, 28–29 Jordana, Elena, 52 Juris, Jeffrey, 23, 105 Kelley, Hill, Jr., 192–193 Kester, Grant, 28, 192–193 Kirchner, Néstor, 48 Kodama Cartonera, 74 Kosamalotlahtol (La Cartonera), 5–7

Index 297

Kristos (musician), 135–136, 142 Kudaibergen, Jania, 24–25, 171 Kuhn, Marc, 223 Kunin, Johana, 63 Kunsch, Graziela, 240–243 Kutsemba Cartão, 60 Laguna, Fernanda, 47–49 Landless Workers Movement, 24 language: for Hurpin, 172–173; Indigenous, 6–7, 12, 36–37, 49, 112, 133–135, 138–139; in Latin America, 166; portunhol selvagem, 12, 66, 68; for Sánchez, 135; in Yiyi Jambo collective, 63–64 Larkin, Brian, 98 Larsen, Lars Bang, 216 Latin America: activism in, 112–113, 173–174; art in, 21–22, 26, 40–41, 192–193; cardboard publishing in, 63; La Cartonera for, 189–190; cartoneras in, 1–7, 2, 7, 21–26, 38, 72–73, 260–262; collaboration in, 165–166; cotton industry for, 137– 138; for Escobar, 123–124; Europe and, 29, 44; global North and, 75, 105; immigrants in, 243–244; Industrial Revolution for, 141; literature in, 54, 201; Mexico and, 223–224; prisons in, 84–85; publishing in, 8, 16, 31–32, 106, 215; resistance in, 150–151; social justice in, 23–24; testimonios in, 39– 40; waste pickers in, 264; Zapatista movement for, 65, 110–111, 115 Latour, Bruno, 188 Lave, Jean, 186, 195–196 Law, John, 176 Learning to Labour (Willis), 64–65 Lemos, Beatriz, 165, 179–180, 213, 237–238, 263. See also Cartoneras exhibition Levine, Caroline, 11, 26, 100–101, 103, 105 Lewis, Eric, 216 LGBTQ movements, 23, 49, 243–247, 244, 253

Lien, Marianne Elizabeth, 186 Life of Brian (film), 171, 175–176 “Light in the Darkness, A” (Bogarín), 83–85 Lilja, Mona, 25 Lincoln, Yvonna, 95 Lira, Ícaro, 14, 263 literature, 29; anthologies, 80; anthropology and, 94–95; as art, 101–102, 118–125, 123; for La Cartonera, 97; cartoneras and, 56–57, 110–113, 115–118, 117; cordel, 49– 50; for Eloísa Cartonera, 151; in Latin America, 54, 201; in Mexico, 84; politics in, 145–147; semiautobiographical fiction, 72 livro para desvendar mistérios, Um ( Bruscky), 34, 168 Lix ona aldeia Sumaré (cartonera), 157–158 London Cartonera Book Festival, 42, 255–260, 258–259, 262–266 López, María José, 213 López Casanova, Alfredo, 147 López Portillo, José, 143 Los Angeles, 18 Lowry, Malcolm, 4–5, 136–137 Ludmer, Josefi na, 238, 253 Luiza, Aparelha, 180 Lyotard, Jean-François, 16–17 Maeckelbergh, Marianne, 23 Malha Fina Cartonera, 62–63 Malunguinho, Erica, 180 Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe (Spillers), 18 Mandrágora Cartonera, 54–55 marginalized populations: activism for, 141–142; poetry for, 56–57, 112, 118, 139–140; publishing for, 47–48, 151; social justice for, 70– 71, 171–172; Yiyi Jambo collective for, 66, 68 Marichal Salinas, Carlos, 207–208 Mariposa Cartonera, 63 Marroquín, Enrique, 143–144 Martín, María Araceli García, 62

298 Index

Martín, Susana María Ramírez, 62 Martínez Gamba, Carlos, 52 Martín Fierro (cartonera), 51 Martinsson, Lena, 25 Marxism, 64–65 materiality, 15–21, 20; for existence, 210–211; material sociality of practice, 183, 184, 185–187; theory, 195–204, 197; in workshops, 204– 210, 207–208 McGonagle, Declan, 27–28 McGuirk, Bernard, 156–157 Melanesian art, 29 de Melo, Wellington, 63, 168, 171–175 Mena Iturriaga, Mauricio, 53–54 Menchú, Rigoberta, 113–114 Mendoza, Cynthia García, 58 Menem, Carlos, 46 Menéndez, Óscar, 191 Merlo, Mirian Soledad, 159, 159–160 methodology: of Eloísa Cartonera, 101–102; for research, 11, 38–39, 104–105; social justice and, 39–40; for trans-formal research, 11, 39, 79–83, 105–109; undisciplined, 109 Mexico, 15, 77–79, 78, 81–82; Brazil and, 40, 72, 109, 112, 152–153, 158– 162, 163, 164–165, 256; Chile and, 57; democracy in, 142–143; Latin America and, 223–224; Mexico City, 5–6, 8, 35, 139–140; La Onda movement in, 143; prisons in, 90– 91; La Rueda Cartonera for, 153; Tlatelolco massacre in, 143–144; United States and, 52, 74, 138; violence in, 71–72; workshops in, 205–207, 207; Xoxocotla, 5, 15, 37, 137; Zapatista movement in, 65, 110–111, 115. See also specifi c topics Meza, Aurelio, 266 micro-utopias, 28 Mignolo, Walter, 15–16, 114–115, 127–130, 203–204 MILBI. See Mulheres Imigrantes Lésbicas e Bissexuais Milbrandt, Melody and Larry, 30

Mil gotas (Aira), 43–45, 54–55 Millar, Kathleen, 26 Minas Gerais, 3, 12–15, 153, 157–158, 253–254 Mittelman, David, 156–157 Mixtec language, 6–7 modernidad/colonialidad group, 15 modernism, 136–137 Mol, Annemarie, 176, 204 Mona Lisa (Da Vinci), 43–44 Monroy Rodríguez, José Carlos, 6, 36, 136–141 Morales, Evo, 192 Morcillo- García, Sonia, 255 Moreschi, Bruno, 45 Morro da Providência community, 225–226, 227, 261 Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, 37, 149–150 Mozambique, 60, 75 Mulheres Imigrantes Lésbicas e Bissexuais (MILBI), 243–247, 244 Muros (cartonera), 127–133, 132 museums: Casona Spencer museum, 37, 164–165, 204–206, 225; community, 229–236, 232, 235; Museu de Arte de Rio, 63, 218, 225–226, 227, 239, 253–254 Nahuatl language, 6–7, 12, 133–134, 138–139 Native Americans, 80 Neimanis, Astrid, 204 Nenhuma mulher é ilegal, 246, 249, 254 neoliberalism, 85–87 networks, 21–22, 58–59 new materialist scholars, 21 Ni Una Menos, 169, 179 O abrigo e o terreno (exhibition), 217– 218, 225, 227, 228–229 Occupy movement, 30 Olcese, Cristiana, 216 Olga Cartonera, 62 Onda, La movement, 143 open-endedness, 153–161, 159 oral history, 135–136

Index 299

Ordaz, Gustavo, 143 Ortiz, Irene Ruelas, 77 Ortner, Sherry, 69 Osa Poderosa, La. See Eloísa Cartonera Pacella, Cecilia, 62–63 Padilla López, Raúl, 206 Palestine, 73 Palmeiro, Cecilia, 47, 112, 150–151, 169, 180 Pálsson, Gisli, 186 Palumbo, María Mercedes, 194 Pandian, Anand, 38–39 Panozzo-Zénere, Clara, 255 “Pantitlán” (Monroy), 139–141 Papasquiaro, Santiago, 136 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 99 Pape, Lygia, 107–108 participatory action research (PAR), 105–109 Passagem (Emboava, A.), 71 Paula, Maria, 243–247, 244, 249, 251–253 Pavón, Cecilia, 48–49, 112 Pensaré Cartoneras collective, 171–174 Pérez Juárez, Juan Antonio, 90–93 performative democracy, 30 Perlongher, Néstor, 9–10 “Personal is Political, The” (Hanisch), 94 Peru, 74 Piglia, Ricardo, 9–10 Pinto, Aníbal, 143 piqueteros, 65 plurality, 15–21, 20, 133–142, 150–151 pluriversality, 15–21, 20, 177–178, 196 poetry: for Artaud, 205; books, 35; in cartoneras, 133–135; in Indigenous languages, 112; for marginalized populations, 56–57, 112, 118; marginalized populations in, 139–140; Nahuatl language in, 12 politics: activism and, 75–76, 142–150, 148; in Argentina, 181; of autonomy, 170–172; of Bolsonaro, 40; in

Brazil, 69–70; of civil rights, 30; of community, 40; of difference, 49– 50; of the double fold, 83–87, 86, 88–89, 89; for Dulcinéia Catadora, 178–179; of economics, 194–195; of exhibitions, 41; for Fong, S., 144– 145; geopolitics, 23; ideology in, 26; in literature, 145–147; in Mexico, 118; prefigurative, 237–247, 239–242, 244, 248, 249–252, 250; of prisons, 92–93, 92–94; of research, 262–263; on social media, 171–172; sociopolitical structures, 83–87, 86, 88–89, 89–94; of translation, 133–142 Poniatowska, Elena, 206 Pontes, Aldemir, 71–72 portunhol selvagem (language), 12 postcolonialism, 113–114 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 23 power, 65–66, 94–95, 131–132, 132 practice, material sociality of, 183, 184, 185–187 precarity, 11–12, 16, 42, 124, 260–262 prefigurative politics, 237–247, 239– 242, 244, 248, 249–252, 250 prejudice, 3 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 64 prisons, 78, 84–85, 88, 90–94. See also Puente Grande prison project Prison Writing of Latin America (Whitfield), 78 profane culture, 79–80 Public Pages (Schwartz), 9, 45, 110 public space, 153–161, 159 publishing: art, 12; autonomy in, 194– 195; Barilaro for, 53, 55; binding techniques for, 116–118, 117; cardboard, 12–13, 37, 63; for La Cartonera, 199–200; of cartoneras, 50–53, 77–79, 78, 105–109, 180, 195–204, 197; colonialism and, 39; for community, 103–104, 162, 163, 164; co-publishing, 58; culture and, 11–14; democracy in, 24–25; for Fong, S., 77, 78, 85, 258; history of, 75; in Latin America, 8,

300

Index

publishing (continued) 16, 31–32, 106, 215; for marginalized populations, 47–48, 151; research on, 188–189; for Rosa, 71, 117–118, 153–154, 255, 257, 260; in São Paulo, 62–63; social justice and, 68–69, 160–161; workshops, 40–41. See also specifi c publishers Puente Grande prison project, 10–11, 15, 251; aesthetics for, 82–83; collaboration with, 38–39; culture of, 81; double fold in, 89–94; for Eloísa Cartonera, 81–82; Espejo y viento (cartonera), 77–79, 78; for social justice, 100; workshops for, 83–87, 86, 88–89, 89–94 Pure Heart (Eu), 181 quantitative research, 35–36 Quijano, Aníbal, 15, 114–115, 142–143 quilombo, 49 Quintilian, 107 Rabasa, Magalí, 23, 188 Raby, Fiona, 17 Ramos, Damián, 112 Ramos Wettling, Ximena, 53–54 Rancière, Jacques, 97–101, 216 Raposo, Paulo, 31 rasquachismo, 220–221 Ratona Cartonera, La, 72, 201 Razsa, Maple, 23, 192 reciclador. See waste pickers recycling: cardboard from, 1–2, 4–7; for community, 71–72; for culture, 195–204, 197; in São Paulo, 18; in Uruguay, 9; for waste pickers, 1–4, 2, 46–47, 56. See also Glicério recycling cooperative Reed, T. V., 30 reencenação, 107–108 “reference to gesture,” 83, 106–109, 112, 173, 253 Regia, La, 166. See also Cartoneras exhibition Reiter, Bernd, 139 Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud), 28

research: for anthropology, 79–83; anthropology in, 109; art, 45; on cartoneras, 31–37, 33, 36–37; Cartoneras exhibition as, 237–247, 239–242, 244, 248, 249–252, 250; challenges to, 10–11; cultural studies, 79–83, 95; on ethnography, 79; ethnography from, 41–42; with interlocutors, 13, 23; methodology for, 38–39, 104–105; for new materialist scholars, 21; PAR, 105– 109; politics of, 262–263; on publishing, 188–189; quantitative, 35– 36; social justice and, 75–76; for Viento Cartonero, 174; on workshops, 185–186. See also transformal research Residência Artística Cambridge, 14 resistance: with aesthetics, 180; from art, 149–150; in culture, 161–162, 163, 164–165; dissent and, 165–176, 167; exhibitions as, 253–254; existence as, 69–73, 71, 152–153, 176– 182, 210–212; for Graciotti, 122– 125; inscription for, 152–161, 159; in Latin America, 150–151; in theory, 63–66, 67, 68–69; Trazos de resistencia, 147–149, 148 Respiración del laberinto (Santiago Papasquiaro), 34–35, 57–58 Ricoeur, Paul, 262 Rio de Janeiro, 33–34, 180, 218, 230, 261–262 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 193 Rodríguez, Chava, 169 Rodríguez, Marcela Valdés, 62 Rodríguez, Sergio, 62 Rolnik, Suely, 123–124, 175–176, 180 Rosa, Lúcia: exhibitions for, 228, 237; publishing for, 71, 117–118, 153– 154, 255, 257, 260; reputation of, 1–2, 2, 4, 8, 11–12, 33, 56, 169–170; social justice for, 178–181. See also Dulcinéia Catadora Rosales, Pablo, 213 Rosas Ribeyro, José, 136–137 Rosetti, Dalia, 9–10

Index 301

Rúa, Fernando de la, 46 Rueda Cartonera, La: Café, 90; La Cartonera and, 161–162; for cartoneras, 142–150, 148; collaboration with, 13–14, 264–266; for community, 60, 61, 62, 264; Espejo y viento by, 81; history of, 34–35, 58; manifesto of, 118; operations at, 188–189; for social justice, 72; tools at, 19; Viento Cartonero and, 77–78, 82, 93, 222–223, 258. See also Cartoneras exhibition Ruiz, Alexis, 62 Ruta Cartonera, 74 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 141 Saldarriaga, Milagros, 53–54, 57 Sánchez, Nayeli, 19, 35–37, 36–37, 135; community for, 5–7, 7; Hurpin and, 205, 217, 224–225, 265– 266; networks for, 58–59, 162; waste pickers for, 170–171. See also Cartonera, La Sandinista Revolution, 52 Santiago Papasquiaro, Mario, 34–35, 57–58 São Paulo: Art Biennial, 9, 27, 33–34, 55, 106, 217, 239–241; art in, 8, 41; Colectivo Feminista de Argentinxsen São Paulo, 246–247; Cuernavaca and, 42; culture of, 1–3, 15, 70, 155; demonstrations in, 24; Eloísa Cartonera for, 33, 159, 159– 160; Hotel Cambridge in, 8–9, 14; LGBT movements in, 23; publishing in, 62–63; recycling in, 18; Rio de Janeiro and, 261–262. See also Cartoneras exhibition Sarau da Cooperifa (cartonera), 155 Sarita Caronera, 53–54 Saucedo, Temok, 163, 164–165 Savage, Mike, 216 Scafati, Mariela, 213 Schiocchet, Leonardo, 73 scholarship: on activism, 23, 186; on Akademia Cartonera, 59–60, 63; art in, 21; on books, 39; on culture,

25; on decolonialism, 176; for interlocutors, 70–71; on materiality, 186–187 Schwartz, Marcy, 9, 45, 110 Scott, James, 25, 64–65, 68 sculptures. See social sculpture semi-autobiographical fiction, 72 Sem Terra movement, 194 Senate House Library, 42 Sencindiver, Susan, 21 sertão, 125–127 Shroer, Sara, 187 Sicilia, Javier, 37, 72, 136–137, 149– 150, 198 Silva, Tania, 53–54, 57 Silva de la Mora, Raúl, 57–59 Sitrin, Marina, 23 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 131 Soberanes, Israel: Fong, S., and, 91– 92, 99, 183, 184, 185, 189–190, 256; leadership of, 52, 77, 88. See also Puente Grande prison project social justice: for agency, 29; from art, 30–31; cartoneras for, 133–142; in Chile, 53–54; double fold for, 89– 94; for Dulcinéia Catadora, 99; Espejo y viento for, 83–85; history of, 43–45; in Latin America, 23–24; for LGBTQ movements, 23; for marginalized populations, 70–71, 171–172; methodology and, 39– 40; Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, 37, 149–150; Ni Una Menos for, 169, 179; publishing and, 68–69, 160–161; Puente Grande prison project for, 100; research and, 75–76; for Rosa, 178– 181; La Rueda Cartonera for, 72; for waste pickers, 69–70; workshops for, 65–66 social media, 109, 171–172 social sciences, 38–39 social sculpture, 216–222 sociopolitical structures, 83–87, 86, 88–89, 89–94 Sofía Cartonera, La, 62–63 Sommer, Doris, 63

302

Index

Somos mulheres imigrantes (cartonera), 247, 248, 249, 251–253 Sotomayor, Olga, 62 Spencer, John, 204 Spillers, Hortense, 18 Spillet, Tasha, 70–71 staircase module, 239, 240 Stenger, Isabelle, 177 Stoll, David, 114 Straw, Will, 216 sumu¯d, 73 Szent- Györgyi, Albert, 136 Taboada Tabón, Francesco, 141–142 Tapia, Luis, 65 Tarrow, Sidney, 65 technology, 188–189, 207–208 Tegus, 169 testimonios, 39–40, 113–115, 119–121 theory: art, 13, 26–29, 98–99; formalism, 100–105; materiality, 195– 204, 197; resistance in, 63–66, 67, 68–69; of thing-power, 131–132, 132 thing-power theory, 131–132, 132 thirdworldism, 113–114 Thompson, Nato, 27–28 Tia Tança (cartonera), 32, 155–156 Tilly, Charles, 65 Time Out (magazine), 256 Tlatelolco massacre, 143–144 Toco Pequi, Seu, 127–133, 128, 132 Torres Guillén, Jaime, 145 transcorporeality, 204 trans-formal research: aesthetics in, 100–105; on cartoneras, 94– 100; methodology for, 11, 39, 79– 83, 105–109; for transformational practice, 77–79, 78, 83–87, 86, 88– 89, 89–94 translation, 133–142 Trazos de resistencia (cartonera), 147– 149, 148 Tucker, Herbert F., 102 Tukano, Daiara, 71 Turner, Victor, 80 Twede, Diana, 200 Twitter, 74

uncommonality, 176–182 Under the Volcano (Lowry), 4–5, 136–137 undisciplined methodology, 109 unemployment, 120–121 United Kingdom, 42, 255–260, 258– 259, 262–266 United States: cardboard in, 18–19; Europe and, 20; hegemony of, 46; Mexico and, 52, 74, 138; waste pickers in, 34 University of Wisconsin–Madison, 59–60, 104, 160–161 Uruguay, 9 Valenzuela, Luisa, 201 Vento Norte Cartonera, 63, 222–223 Viana, Laura, 244 Vidal, Hernán, 125 Vieira, Marcela, 9–10 Viento Cartonero, 52, 190; research for, 174; La Rueda Cartonera and, 77–78, 82, 93, 222–223, 258; tools at, 19 Villoro, Juan, 58 violence, 146, 154, 192, 225–226, 246– 247; in Argentina, 181; in Brazil, 3; for community, 94, 99; corruption and, 83–85; epistemic, 15; gender, 169; patriarchal, 11; against people of color, 70–72, 77–78; from politics, 142–144; structural, 53–54 Viveros, Mara, 122 Vocabulário vivido (cartonera), 14–15, 237 “Voices without Voice” (Enedina), 84–85 Von Busch, Otto, 210–211 Von Uexkull, Jacob, 187 Von Zinnenburg Carroll, Khadija, 208–209 Walsh, Catherine, 114–115 waste pickers: culture of, 97; Dulcinéia Catadora for, 32–33, 33, 70, 199; in Latin America, 264; recycling for, 1–4, 2, 46–47, 56; for Sánchez, 170–171; social justice

Index 303

for, 69–70; testimonials by, 119– 120; unemployment for, 48; workshops with, 49–50 Weapons of the Weak (Scott), 64–65 Weibel, Peter, 30 Welsh, Irvine, 206 Wenger, Étienne, 186, 195–196 Whitfield, Joey, 78, 82, 83 Williams, Raymond, 80 Willis, Paul, 64–66, 68, 79–80, 95 women: books by, 85; Bote Cartonero run by, 91–92; in Brazil, 3–4; in criminology, 93; Espejo y viento by, 93–94, 103–104; exhibitions coordinated by, 243–247, 244, 248, 249–252; FMI for, 243, 249–250; MILBI for, 243–247, 244; Ni Una Menos for, 169, 179; prison for, 78, 88, 90 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 44 workshops: activism in, 191–192; for art, 55; for cartoneras, 187–195; at Catapoesia, 258; for community, 183, 184, 185–187, 256–257, 258;

for culture, 162, 164, 190–191; encounters at, 170–176, 265; during encuentros cartoneros, 62–63; for Fong, S., 187–188, 205–207, 208; materiality in, 204–210, 207– 208; in Mexico, 205–207, 207; publishing, 40–41; for Puente Grande prison project, 83–87, 86, 88–89, 89–94; research on, 185–186; for social justice, 65–66; with waste pickers, 49–50 World of Many Worlds, A (de la Cadena & Blaser), 176–177 Xakriabá community, 157–158 Xoxocotla, Mexico, 5, 15, 37, 137 Yerba Mala Cartonera, 55 Yiyi Jambo collective, 52, 55–56, 63– 64, 66, 68 Yugoslavia, 23, 192 Zapatista movement, 65, 110–111, 115 Zaragoza, Fernando, 34–35. See also Rueda Cartonera, La Zibechi, Raúl, 23, 65