Exploring the testimonies and memories of cirujas (waste pickers) who lived and worked at La Quema, a dump in Buenos Aires, this article reconstructs the meanings acquired by this activity over time. Analyzing these accounts produced some thirty years after the closure of La Quema and in a new social context where the activity has become more commonplace, the text argues that the 'historical' cirujas construct their past in opposition to the present, a process that allows them to make their earlier experience of social marginalization more bearable. The analysis of these memories also enables us to focus on the discourses on being and having been a worker in Argentina.
Cirujas; Waste; Buenos Aires; Memory; Unemployment
