Garbage: Editor’s Letter
Religion is a topic that’s been on my ReVista theme list for a very long time. It’s constantly made its way into other issues from Fiestas to Memory and Democracy to Natural Disasters. Religion permeates Latin America…
Category: Garbage
Buenos Aires, Wasteland
English + Español
Walking down Avenida Juan de Garay last week, I passed a giant black trash bag that had ballooned and burst. Orange peels, tomatoes, candy wrappers…
First Take: Waste
Waste—its generation, collection and disposal—is a major global challenge in the 21st century. Cities are responsible for managing municipal waste. Solid…
Zero Waste in Punta Cana
I never imagined that my job at a leading Dominican resort would be so dirty—at least not at the beginning. I spent my first months as environmental director of…
A Long Way from the Dump
I am the oldest of five children, and from the time I was little I learned to look for toys and food in Guatemala City’s sprawling garbage dump. My grandmother raised pigs, and I had to be in…
Recycle the Classics
Literature is recycled material, a pretext for making more art. I learned this distillation of lots of literary criticism in workshops with children. I also learned…
Transforming Values
Mounds of garbage amassed on street corners, in front of houses. Bags splayed open, spilling onto the sidewalks, filling the city with stench. For three days…
Recycling Nature in Guatemala
O’Connor’s current works consist of imagery that addresses the reclamation of nature and the relational aspects between humankind and nature. Her other…
Recycling Livelihoods
Category: "Garbage" Recycling Livelihoods A Global Network Supports Waste Pickers in Latin America...
Living off Trash in Latin America
As a child growing up in Mexico, I often saw men, women, children and the elderly picking through other people’s trash, searching for reusable and…
Burning Messages
A bomb exploded at the entryway to artist Antonio Berni’s home and studio in Buenos Aires early one morning in 1972. Fortunately no one was injured: the…
We Make Things Happen
The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) celebrated its 20th anniversary in May 2014 during the annual meeting in Cambridge of the…
Trash in the Water
The Guna or Kuna, an indigenous people of Panama, suffer from the same waste problems as the rest of the world, with the added complications caused by life…
Trash into Treasure
In a town in northern Peru, a community has stuffed trash into 7,000 half-liter plastic bottles, also known as eco-bricks, and built a library. The town has no…
Trash as Treasure
The adage “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure” rings true for all of us who have happily devoted our professional lives to the study of archaeology…
Trash Moves
Trash moves, all the time. It becomes a steadily growing heap of clutter behind closed walls, accumulates and festers under tight lids, travels from a small trash…
Home grown Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs
Marijuana is the talk of the town, as it has recently been discovered to be innocuous. Researchers have encountered little (if any) medical proof of severe…
Thinking on Film and Trash
Latin American films have portrayed trash as an urban social issue since the 1940s, if not earlier. If the first incentive to film trash and its presence in the city…
A Recycling (of) Tradition
At first glance, the indigenous women—known as cholitas—looked like all the others who dance in the festive parades that regularly weave through the…
Privatizing Latin American Garbage?
In the early 1970s, a plucky group of 200+ pepenadores (scavengers) in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, secured a 25-year concession to recover recyclable materials…
