According to a 2020 UN Environment Program study, Latin American landfills receive approximately 145,000 tons of garbage per day, generating greenhouse gases and perilous conditions for the communities who scavenge the sites and create dwellings near or on them. As climate change intensifies, the report concluded, the management of waste constitutes one of the main challenges facing the region in the twenty first century.

The purpose of this panel is to historicize questions of waste and waste management in Latin America. It draws on the fields of environmental and urban history and waste studies to investigate how trash has shaped understandings of citizenship, ecology, and geopolitics across the region. Through complementary papers that focus on case studies from Colombia, Argentina and Chile, the panel demonstrates the centrality of waste to nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American politics and social life in at least three ways.

First, the papers highlight how the politics of waste influenced the organization of national and local governments and institutions. Papers by Frank Molano and Jennifer Adair detail the organization of domestic trash collection services and the simultaneous evolution of municipal politics during periods of intense demographic change and urban growth in nineteenth and twentieth century Bogotá and Buenos Aires. In her exploration of the Lo Errazuriz landfill in Santiago, Chile, Alison Bruey connects political struggles over urban waste to the rise of land movements during the final years of the Pinochet regime. In a similar vein, Rebecca Herman embeds transnational campaigns over the management of nuclear waste and the creation of international norms and regulations as part of the region’s nascent environmental movements in the 1980s.

Second, the panel suggests the ways that critical explorations of waste open new histories of citizenship, rights, and sovereignty. Contributions by Jennifer Adair and Frank Molano consider urban waste management and everyday practices of trash disposal as entwined histories that illuminate shifting beliefs about development and modernity, health and ecology, and who and what belongs in the city. Likewise, as Alison Bruey reveals, waste became a focal point of local resistance against authoritarian regimes, which eventually gave way to popular demands on newly restored democratic states for environmental protections at the end of the twentieth century.

Finally, all four papers make a case for the place of Latin America in global environmental history. Spanning two centuries, the panel considers the historical origins of contemporary ecological concerns grounded in public health, social movements, urban security, and Latin America’s insertion into regional and global geopolitics. Moreover, the panel offers an opportunity to explore a long-term view of waste in Latin America, where forces of globalization often make the region a dumping ground for the developed world’s garbage and where the effects of climate crises are felt most fiercely.