Rummaging through garbage cans in the days of COVID-19

Abstract

The syndemic caused by the Covid 19 coronavirus profoundly transformed the idea of productive relationships in modern society, the obligation to lock up and work from home had profound impacts on the social and economic relationships of families, increasing poverty and especially poverty and social inequality. This article uses ethnographic interviews to describe the work carried out by a group of women who work with waste, who for months and due to the forced confinement could not go out to the streets to do their work, collect the garbage deposited in the streets. For the women who recycle garbage in the city of Quito, their backs where they carry the collected waste and their bare hands are their only work instruments, put with them they rummage through bags and containers, they are called miners because they accumulate what for the common is trash, transforming it into objects with exchange value. They work with waste, smell it, feel it, become contaminated with the liquids produced by its decomposition, with a materiality that marks their being, their identities, their life experiences and their health.