Jane De León Griffin’s campus office is full of trash.
That’s not an insult about her general tidiness or a clichéd joke about the stacks of paper on a disorganized professor’s desk.
Instead, the trash stacked on De León Griffin’s desk and lining her shelves is trash only in the sense that it was at one point used and discarded.
Now, it’s trash that’s been transformed into various works of literature, visual art, politics; highly personalized statements that can teach us much about both environmental and cultural sustainability.
De León Griffin, an associate professor of modern languages at Bentley, is a scholar of cartonera, which is the act of making books by hand out of cardboard trash. Originating in Argentina’s economic crisis in 2003, cartonera is now a worldwide phenomenon with examples on every continent. Drawing its name from the cartoneros, people who salvage and sell cardboard trash to recycling plants, cartonera is especially widespread throughout Latin America. (“Carton” means “cardboard” in Spanish.)
Publishing with purpose
De León Griffin first encountered cartonera during her doctoral research in Chile, investigating alternative models of book production. In Chile and elsewhere cartonera has three main characteristics:
- Books are made from discarded, repurposed cardboard
- Books are made by hand by individuals
- Books are not made for profit
As De León Griffin says, “No one starts a cartonera press as an entrepreneur. They do so from a social justice standpoint.” Cartonera “democratizes literature,” De León Griffin says, and “people do it to make art and literature more pervasive in their societies.” Books are given away for free or sold at minimal cost to cover the costs of production. Cartonera presses often provide jobs for low-income workers, who can earn more money making books out of cardboard trash than they can selling the cardboard to salvage and recycling companies.
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The politics of publishing
Cartonera has strong political implications as well, according to De León Griffin. In Latin America, literary and publishing industries are controlled by trans-national corporations that hold sway over local markets, and it’s difficult for local authors to find publishing houses that will publish their works. In Chile in particular, mass-produced books are also very expensive, putting them out of reach of most readers. Cartonera circumvents these barriers, giving would-be authors and readers alike a means to publish and consume new work. Many cartonera books are self-publications, with entire cardboard presses being started to produce authors’ own writings and those of their friends and family.
In Chile, cartonera books hold a particular political relevance, since the military dictatorship that ruled there in the 1970s and 1980s thought books were dangerous to its rule and tightly controlled their production and dissemination. Book burnings were common and the state controlled all publishing; cartonera goes against the idea that books are dangerous objects. “Cartonera publishing believes that books should be allowed to circulate freely in society and everyone should have access to them,” says De León Griffin.
Two kinds of sustainability
More than 200 cartonera presses have started since 2003, and De León Griffin sees the movement tied to both environmental and cultural sustainability efforts. “Cartonera book production uses far fewer resources than industrial book production, even though the interior pages are still being made out of purchased photocopy paper,” she says. Covers are made from recycled, repurposed materials, and hand-production uses far less energy than large industrial presses.
Additionally, De León Griffin sees cultural sustainability as key to the cartonera ethos. Cartonera publishers “see their own local culture and cultural traditions being swallowed up by the global market; by publishing their own books they can sustain their own cultural traditions and aesthetic values.”
De León Griffin has introduced Bentley students to cartonera during study abroad cultural immersion trips to Chile, and students have tried their hand at creating their own books. (See photos accompanying this story.) Bentley is showcasing the wide range of cartonera with an exhibit at the RSM Art Gallery at the Bentley Library from April 4 to May 15, a showing of the film Carretera Cartonera on April 18, and a drop-in cardboard book-making workshop for members of the Bentley community on April 19.
