![]() Only five years later there were eight cartonera publishers in seven Latin American countries, and since then some 300 new ones were founded and are making books in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. Little did I know that day towards the end of the Fall of 2003 when I told him that he should definitely write his paper about it, that the idea of making books by hand out of recycled cardboard-bought at five times the market price from those whose daily survival depended on its collection, thereby creating jobs for their family members-would resonate beyond the Argentine capital and that UW-Madison would become one of its protagonists. Not only did he want to write his paper about an iconoclastic, new publisher called Eloisa Cartonera, but he wanted to tell the story to as many people as possible. ![]() But there was also something in the voice of this student that I will never forget: passion, excitement, the urge to tell the story of a brilliant idea and become part of it. The combination of nearly one-fifth of the citizens of Buenos Aires living below the poverty line together with an explosive increase in the price of paper gave birth to a new occupation: cartoneros, or cardboard pickers. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their source of income, thereby losing their place in the system of production. The Argentine peso lost parity with the US dollar, saving accounts were frozen and therefore many small and midsized businesses went bankrupt. The class I was teaching was about Argentina and the post-Menem economic crisis of 2001, a time when four presidents were replaced in two weeks. My friend paid 5 pesos for this book, but she would have paid double,” he continued. They get together in the back of grocery stores and cut and paint the book covers. “And they also pay 3 pesos an hour to the kids who would otherwise collect cardboard from the streets. Eloisa Cartonera pays them five times more and makes book covers out of that recycled material,” he said, already out of breath. ![]() “Every night cartoneros pick up cardboard ( cartón) from the streets of Buenos Aires,” my student continued, eager to add some tell to his show, “and push their heavy loaded carts to the outskirts of the city of 14 million people where they are paid about 30 cents for two pounds of cardboard. I was puzzled when he explained that a friend of his had just brought it from Buenos Aires, that she bought it on the street from a cartonero, and that it contained the unpublished story El pianista by a renowned Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia. Some twenty years ago, in 2003, a student in one of my undergraduate classes brought to my attention a strange 14-page long book that looked like something his grade school sister could have made at home (hand painted cover included!) and asked me if he could write a final class paper about it. ![]()
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