Micah McKay's "Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture"

Micah McKay, assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Alabama, is coeditor of Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time: The Luso-Hispanic World.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture introduces readers to the Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec’s 1992 novel El aire, which I analyze as an example of what I call “trash works”: works of literary fiction from Latin America that meditate on the relationship between trash and work. El aire tells the story of a man named Barroso, who loses his job and spends most of the novel looking at and dealing with different kinds of trash, whether it be the old newspapers and food containers piling up in his apartment, the glass people scavenge from garbage cans, or the slums that are popping up on the rooftops of middle- and upper-class apartment buildings in Chejfec’s strangely imagined Buenos Aires.

While page 99 is narrowly focused on teasing out some of the plot points of a single novel, it does manage to suggest a crucial theme with which I engage throughout the book: the relationship between waste and space. I talk about how Barroso wanders around the city making note of where trash may or may not be found, lists specific kinds of trash, and becomes bewildered by what for him is the encroachment of trash spaces (slums) on the city. What trash does in specific spaces—both real spaces and representational ones, like novels and films—is, in large part, what Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture is about. In this sense, page 99 is representative of the book as a whole. However, another key feature of the book that this page does not emphasize is the kind of thinking that trash allows us to do when it shows up (or when we look for it) in cultural production. I argue that because trash is itself a material form that comes into being in the ambiguous limit or frontier between categories like value and uselessness, representations of trash in Latin American culture help us see the limits of normative conceptualizations of the human, community, waste management, and environmental activism. I hope readers who are intrigued by page 99 will follow the logic of trash on the preceding and following pages as it guides them along these limits.

Learn more about Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture at the University Press of Florida website.

--Marshal Zeringue