Histories: Tracing Trajectories of Resistance

This chapter addresses Javier 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 post dictatorship 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.