Cartonera Publishers  Tags: ibero-america latin_america cartonera  

The landscape of Latin American Cartoneras is constantly changing and growing.  Our aim is to update this guide as often as possible, to provide a starting point for researchers and to gather together influential resources on this movement.

Even though all Cartoneras publish most, if not all, of their titles in print, due to the nature of Cartoneras and the information landscape in Latin America a majority of resources about them will be electronic, in the form of blogs, wikis, forum postings, newsletters and newspaper or journal articles.  New material is published daily, as new Cartoneras also form daily.  A majority of the material is in Spanish or Portuguese language. 

Please consult our Delicious account below for updated resources, as well as looking at the resources for specific cartoneras through our RefWorks shared folders.

The newest information on Cartoneras will be posted here.

Please submit links to any useful resources you've found below.

  

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The Spanish word cartón translates into English as cardboard.

Cartoneros is the word used in Argentina to refer to people who make their living by collecting cardboard and other materials to recycle. This word can vary significantly in each Spanish speaking country.

Cartoneras refers to publishing houses that have grown out of this recycling or salvage economy.  These small, independent publishers provide a better return on recycled cardboard by turning that cardboard into books.  These books are then made available to people at prices lower than that of large publishing houses, broadening people's access to literature.

This Research Guide was created by Laura Schmidli, Lauren Pagel and Paloma Celis Carbajal.