Latin American and Caribbean Library

loisa Cartonera Exhibit

April 1-April 30
Emily Shaw & Noah Lenstra

In April 2009, an exhibit on the Eloísa Cartonera project will be on display in the Marshall Gallery and in the exhibit case outside the Latin American & Caribbean Library. This project combining social justice with literary and artistic creativity began in Buenos Aires in 2003 as the country of Argentina was reeling from the painful social effects of a serious economic crisis. With millions of Argentines struggling to make ends meet, the cartoneros, who first emerged in the 1980s, became common fixtures of the urban landscape and powerful symbols of the hard times. Pushing their towering shopping carts through the crowded streets of Buenos Aires, cartoneros make a small living by collecting discarded cardboard and selling it by the pound for recycling.

The Eloisa Cartonera project has turned the work of cartoneros into a community-based nonprofit publishing operation that produces unique, usable art objects. The cartoneros sell their cardboard to the project at a competitive rate. This cardboard provides the material for the covers of small books, each hand-painted in bright colors by community members and by the cartoneros themselves. These one-of-a-kind books are then sold on the street at a lower cost than most commercially produced books. The works published by Eloisa Cartonera include poems, short stories, essays and plays produced by Latin American writers who grant the project rights to reproduce their works at no cost.

The Eloisa Cartonera project has spread throughout Latin American, with sister projects now operating in Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay and Brazil. The University of Illinois Library owns some fifty of these unique books, and this exhibit will include a selection from the Argentine and Brazilian projects. Photos from the projects will demonstrate the ways in which the books are produced and offer a glimpse into the lives of cartoneros. Additionally, the exhibit will touch on the some of the challenges libraries face in collecting and preserving these unique items.