Latin American "cartonera publishers": Transnational cultural networks

KUNIN, JOHANA

Albuquerque

Congreso; Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting; 2014

Society for Applied Anthropology

It was the year 2003 in Buenos Aires and the brand-new publisher Eloísa Cartonera began buying cardboard from the cartoneros with the objective of transforming it into book covers. Cartonero is the word used in Argentina for people who collect cardboard and garbage thrown into the street and then sell it by kilo. They were one of the most important symbols of the great socio-economic crisis which Argentina suffered in 2001. In the publisher Eloísa Cartonera, young cartoneros often collaborated in the process of producing examples too. Latin American writers decided to join the project, ceding the rights to the reproduction of their works to the publisher so that they could publish a cartonera edition of their stories. Two years after "the crisis of 2001", with the price of paper going through the roof, and a fractured society, they managed to sell books at very affordable prices. A project that was presented as being collective, made up of writers, artists, students, cartoneros and whoever else wanted to join up, began to be portrayed by the journalistic world both at home and abroad. Both Argentinean and foreign postgraduate students came to interview them in order to write papers and dissertations. And people bought books from them. Concentrating on their daily work in the workshop, the members of Eloísa Cartonera never thought that, only seven years after the creation of their publishing house and as a result of reading about it in the media or having talked informally with them, 47 cartonera publishers would be founded in different parts of the world, from Africa to Europe, through most of Latin America.