Garbage
Winter 2015 | Volume XIV, Number 2
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
First Take
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…
Transformations
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…
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…
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…
Recycling Lives
Recycling Livelihoods
Recycling Livelihoods A Global Network Supports Waste Pickers in Latin America Standing for long hours in line to receive your first paycheck may sound pretty stressful. However, for recyclers in Bogotá, their first paycheck was a huge victory after more than...
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…
Ciudad Saludable
I had the privilege of being born in the jungle of Peru to campesino parents. They were people of infinite wisdom from whom I learned many things in my life…
The Sound of Garbage
English + Español
The recyclers in Cateura, Asunción’s municipal garbage dump, live from the trash and, in many cases, among the trash. The fetid odor carried along by the…
The Art of Trash
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…
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…
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 Present from the Sea
From the center of the Puerto Rican Cordillera Central’s green backbone, one can see the clear blue line of the horizon. Being on an island, we live, breathe…
Haiti in the Time of Trash
André Eugène is perched on a corroded tin box inside his downtown Port-au-Prince studio on Grand Rue, demonstrating his hammering technique on a scrap…
Daniel Lind-Ramos
The accomplished African-Puerto Rican artist Daniel Lind-Ramos paints on canvas with oil, brushes, and spatulas, meticulously blending colors, layering…
Beautiful Trash
t’s the night before collection day. The trashcan is full of rancid food mixed with wilted waste and rotten flowers. Pull the red string fast, tie a knot, and put in a…
Confronting Waste
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Book Talk
Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of New Architecture
Growing up in the midst of the Irvine Company’s unimaginative southern California, without exposure to anything other than strip malls and suburban…
Doña Lucía: La Biografía no Autorizada
The day Lucía Hiriart returned to her native Chile from Ecuador in 1959 was not a happy one. With five young children in tow, she and her husband Augusto…
Cosmopolitan Desires
In January 2015, shortly after terrorist attacks in Paris, the slogan “Je suis Charlie” began to circulate on Twitter and to appear on demonstrators’ signs in Paris and…
Building Bridges
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…