Classification Struggles of Informal Workers: How Waste Pickers became Proletarianized in Brazil and Indigenized in Colombia

• In Event: 30426 - Cultural Processes of Worker Mobilization

Abstract

This article draws on 28 months of ethnographic research to examine factors that shaped organizational innovations within two of the world’s oldest and most influential waste picker movements: Brazil’s National Movement of Waste Pickers and Colombia’s National Association of Waste Pickers. Despite sharing parallel origins, the Colombian and Brazilian movements progressively diverged in their self-conceptions, strategies and demands. In both countries, activists used popular education, dramatic protest, and media campaigns to publicly recast waste pickers from beggars and criminals to environmental champions. This reclassification helped movements recruit members, build coalitions, mobilize elite resources, gain public support, and—ultimately—win legal rights. However, as the movements became integrated into distinct national political fields, they increasingly diverged in how they classified their constituents and opponents. In Brazil, the movement matured with support from the leftist Worker’s Party, and adopted a discourse of “class struggle,” portraying waste pickers as subordinated workers threatened by capitalist exploitation. The Colombian movement lacked allies in elected office, and instead pursued a human rights strategy, portraying waste pickers as akin to an indigenous group facing dispossession by the state from an ancestral territory. As these divergent classifications were refracted within the Brazilian and Colombian states, they resulted in radically different laws, policies, and impacts on the everyday lives of waste pickers.

Author

• Manuel Zimbalist Rosaldo, Stanford University