Surreal/So real country

Uruguay is a strange place. It is still difficult for me to wrap my mind around the fact that just over three million people make up this tiny country, only slightly smaller than the state of Washington. Less conceivable still is the fact that an average of 20,000 (young) people have emigrated annually since 2002 (the first year of the bank crisis, simply known as “la crisis” in this part of the world), something I will address in a later blog entry. I am convinced that I will never completely understand their pathological nostalgia—especially among young people, who really only know the present—nor the compulsion of most Uruguayans to introduce themselves as a poor, depressed, and rather gray group of people.

There are other attributes of this country, though, that make it downright surreal. For example, imagine this: you’re lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, when all of sudden you hear the explosion of a car muffler as it goes rumbling by. Not such a strange sound, really, coming from a large, modern city. But wait: you try to go back to sleep, grumbling that everyone here drives a 1978 Chevrolet Better-Left-in-the-Past, when you hear the clip-clop of horse hooves. You’re suddenly relaxed, transported in an instant to your grandparents’ horse farm, the one where you spent sunny days and restful nights as a child… until you realize that what you’re hearing is totally incongruous with your surroundings. You spend the rest of the night wondering if you’ve ever heard that sound before in any of the other major cities you’ve visited. You realize you haven’t.

Before jumping to any overly exotic conclusions (or into a big steaming pile of magical realism), this is not a Gabriel García Márquez novel, and horses do not run wild through the streets of Montevideo. Rather, they pull the carriages that transport cartoneros from one on-street dumpster to another. Cartoneros provide a vital service to the city by collecting, classifying, and then selling its waste, mainly cardboard boxes, glass and plastic. And, since Montevideo has no official recycling program, cartoneros ensure that certain refuse will indeed be reused. They are a resilient group, having successfully resisted every attempt by the city to privatize trash collection and unionized under the more formal title of Clasificadores de residuos (Classifiers of Residual Waste).

Cartoneros themselves may seem to be what gives this place its hint of surrealism. However, they are precisely what make the country… well, “so real.” In one form or another, cartoneros are a universal phenomenon, synonymous with globalization, expanding cities, and mass migration. Wherever a culture of consumption and socio-economic marginalization exist, cartoneros are sure to follow. In fact, although more out of protest than necessity, “dumpster divers” in the US have taken to foraging for their food as a way of subverting consumer culture.

What makes the cartoneros of Uruguay so unique, then, is the extent to which they, like the rest of society, cling to the rustic traditions of this country’s past, traversing the city in horse-drawn carriages instead of on foot and contrasting the culture of the interior with the modern city at every pass. In fact, cartoneros confirm Chilean author Alberto Fuguet’s observation that everyday life in Latin America straddles the traditional and the hypermodern: “Latin America is quite literary, yes, almost a work of fiction, but it’s not a folk tale. It is a volatile place where the 19th century mingles with the 21st. More than magical, this place is weird.”

I have heard, in passing, that if I listen closely enough on Sunday mornings I will hear the whistle of the afiladores (or sharpeners), men who ride around the city on bike, summoning out to the street those in need of having their kitchen knives sharpened. To date, as far as I’m concerned, afiladores only exist in Uruguay’s modern urban lore.