Creating Waste and Resisting Recovery: Contested Practices and Metaphors in Post-neoliberal Argentina

Abstract

This article focuses on a ‘register of recovery’ that emerged in post-crisis and post-neoliberal Argentina as a way of imagining and framing an increasingly disparate collection of persons, things, and ideas, from young workers, to green space, to hose pipes. Drawing on ethnography conducted at the NuevaMente recycling cooperative in Morón, Greater Buenos Aires, the article attends to the material implications stemming from the adoption of the rather hopeful concept of recovery, and the counter-models proposed by young workers, who view the workplace as a space not of cathartic recovery, but of temporary care and respite from the complications of family life. By emphasising the recovery of workers into the formal economy, their rich labour histories are deliberately unknown, while a focus on the recoverability of things ignores not only their lack of value, but also their potential hazardousness.