Chapter 2 Legacies of the ‘bridge man’: Catholic accompaniment, inter-class relations and the classification of surplus in Montevideo

Those who come bearing gifts

It was early January 2014 and I had only been at my fieldsite in Montevideo, Uruguay, for a few weeks. The families of the Cooperativa de Vivienda de Familias Unidas (COVIFU) housing cooperative where I lived were gathered around the red-brick Cañales after-school club, chatting excitedly on a day Latin American children await more excitedly than Christmas: the Epiphany, or Reyes Magos. On this hot summer’s afternoon, I stood around with the others on the expansive sports fields waiting for the nativity to get under way. Teachers, children and benefactors had been preparing for the event over the past week, fitting costumes out of long pieces of shiny synthetic material, crowns out of crepe paper, and a nativity of palm leaves sunk with concrete into used car tyres. Some little girls appeared as angels with wings, other personifications were unclear, but all the child actors gathered in a procession behind Mary and Joseph, who were mounted with a plastic doll on my neighbour’s mare, proudly lent for the occasion.

The director of the centre, a softly spoken teacher trained in the Salesian tradition, offered a few words about the importance of the day for those of Christian faith. Representatives of the audience (a pupil, an educator, a nun and benefactor) were then asked to come forward with pieces of coloured card onto which they had fixed photographs of important figures to be remembered that day. Those profiled made for rather strange companions: a mixture of persons of local, national and international stature, from Sister Raquel, who had spent many years volunteering at the centre, to the recently deceased Nelson Mandela. Those who came forward read out a sentence on why each figure was inspirational for them. ‘Ruso’ Pérez, benefactor of the Cañales and one of the upper-class Catholic Montevideans who ‘accompanied’ the families through their resettlement from a shantytown to COVIFU, moved to the front holding up a picture of Padre Cacho.

Ruso, dressed in trousers and checked shirt, with a simple wooden cross around his neck, which mirrored that worn by the figure who appeared in the photo, told those present that the Uruguayan priest had been an inspiration for his social commitment and acompañamiento (accompaniment) of the poor since Ruso had lived with him in a shantytown as a young man. The crowd nodded in recognition. It was the first time I had met Ruso, and I was intrigued but not surprised to find the presence of Padre Cacho, known for his association with the poor and informal sector recyclers (known as clasificadores or classifiers, in Uruguay). A majority of COVIFU residents were clasificadores after all, and the peak of the municipal landfill rising above the flat Montevidean landscape formed a backdrop to the ceremonies.

The event ended with the families being presented with large hampers with which they posed for photographs, smiling. I made my way back across the fields to COVIFU rural with my neighbours, who had hoisted the colourful boxes onto their shoulders. Back at home, they tore them open to find a selection of crisps, fizzy drinks, games, footballs and pan dulce. The children kept hold of their toys while the foodstuffs were collected by the adults for a celebration later on that night. Those who had contributed the gifts on the occasion of the Epiphany were not kings or even necessarily wise men, but the Cañales’ benefactors – principally upper-class Montevidean Catholics – some of whom had known the families for at least a decade.

What brought people like Ruso Pérez and Monja Raquel to the neighbourhood and of what did their ‘accompaniment’ of the poor consist? Why did upper-class Montevideans cross the geographically short but symbolically enormous gulf which separates their affluent Carrasco neighbourhood (poverty levels 1 per cent), to establish relations with residents of Cruz de Carrasco and Flor de Maroñas (poverty levels of 15 per cent and 24 per cent respectively) (INE 2009)? By exploring the dynamics of religious social work conducted with the poor at the COVIFU housing cooperative, this paper seeks to understand why the upper class and religious engage with the poor at my fieldsite; it asks what is the nature of that engagement; and explores how such relations are sustained. I argue that upper-class Catholic engagement with the poor must be understood in relation to the genealogy of the Catholic ‘preferential option for the poor’ and the particular manifestation that it took in Uruguay in the work of Uruguayan priest Padre Cacho, as well as to post-dictatorship mechanisms for managing social polarisation. I outline how the nature of the engagement with the poor in my fieldsite is characterised by the concept of acompañamiento (accompaniment) and reciprocity which, I argue, sit tensely with both the Catholic prerogative to engage in unconditional charity and the continued existence of hierarchy and what liberation theologians denounced as ‘structural sin’ (Aguilar 2008, 124). Finally, I argue that engagement with the poor is sustained through the appropriation and rechanneling of surplus, not as waste but as donation. Following the model established by Padre Cacho, Ruso and others act as bridges between rich and poor, but materials themselves can also be understood as constituting non-human bridges which connect different social strata.

Much has been written in Southern Cone anthropology about the effects of neoliberalism and casino capitalism, social exclusion, poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor (e.g., Abelin 2012; Álvarez-Rivadulla 2007; Grimson 2008; Saravi and Makowski 2011; Svampa 2008 [2001]). Less has been written about initiatives that seek in various ways to connect the rich and poor, and the texture of inter-class relations. Uruguay, the least unequal country in Latin America (CEPAL 2014), is an appropriate ground for such an endeavour. Known not only for its relative equality but also for its secularism, the influence of Catholicism there has been historically downplayed (Caetano 2013). In recent years, as elsewhere in Latin America, Catholics in Uruguay have also struggled to compete with the increasing appeal of Pentecostal and Evangelical Christianity, especially among the popular classes. The magnetic appeal of Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism has also driven the social science research agenda (Lehmann 2016). Yet Catholicism has remained strong among the influential and affluent Uruguayan upper and middle classes and, as I go on to describe, plays a key role in shaping the praxis of social and charity work with the poor.

In exploring the nature of the church-mediated relation between rich and poor at my fieldsite, I set out to make a contribution to lacunae in several areas. First, I attempt to complement ethnographic writing on social exclusion with a focus on attempts to build bridges between different social classes. Second, I examine class not by focusing on a particular class, as is the norm even for those who espouse a class perspective (as in many contributions in Kalb and Carrier 2015), but by focusing on the relation between classes. Third, my interest lies in Catholic theology and praxis, the study of which has been marginalised in the growing literature on the anthropology of Christianity.

Roots of Catholic confluence in the Cruz

I visited and volunteered at the Cañales throughout my fieldwork year, and the nativity was about as religious an activity as I encountered. The centre was explicitly secular, featuring barely a cross or representation of Jesus Christ, and religious observance was required neither of its teaching staff, nor of the children who attended. The grounds included only a simple clearing with a statue of the Virgin of Guadeloupe where those who wished could engage in contemplative prayer. Such subtle signs of religion suited the parents of COVIFU rather well, for although most residents were baptised as Catholics, few if any were practising, and many were hostile to religion altogether. It also fitted well into Uruguay’s secular climate.

Yet as I came to realise, Catholic faith and organisation played a key role in framing the social and charitable work conducted with COVIFU residents and, in particular, in shaping the nature of the relation between my low-income neighbours and the upper-class Catholics who visited them regularly at the Cañales and their homes. The socio-religious fabric which facilitated the creation of COVIFU (and subsequently Los Cañales) was stitched of threads of Franciscan, Salesian and Ignatian charisms and owed a debt to the lingering influence of liberation theology and the mythical figure of Padre Cacho. Before moving on to the discussion of these religious roots, it is important to briefly survey the Catholic presence at my fieldsite.

The religious figure I had known longest was David, nicknamed ‘the monk’, a self-styled ‘lay missionary’ who had come back to Uruguay in the early 2000s after a long misión in El Salvador, where he was strongly influenced by the teachings of slain Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero. David relocated to the Cruz de Carrasco, staying in a house belonging to a small order of nuns. The nuns had a base nearby where the relatives of many of my neighbours and informants lived and the sisters often welcomed us round for a cup of coffee or a hot meal, amidst catechism and a flurry of visits from neighbourhood children. These women were the first to ‘insert’ themselves into the neighbourhood in the 1980s under the influence of radical Catholic social thought, including liberation theology but also adjacent political and pedagogical concepts like Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. The current congregation stalwart, María Inés, explained in our interview that ‘insertion’ into the community and living closely with the poor stemmed from the model of ecclesial base communities, which were popularised throughout Latin America from the 1980s.

As a nun with the congregation in the 1970s and 1980s, the COVIFU social worker founded the house where the sisters would live for the following decades, while the nuns also supported the first cooperative housing project in the neighbourhood, COVICRUZ. One of the houses in the cooperative was granted to the nuns, but since the congregation already had a base, a priest from the nearby Catholic private school was invited to take up residence. The ‘brother’ thus also opted to insert himself into a poor and humble neighbourhood, thereby initiating a long-lasting association between underprivileged neighbourhood residents and the privileged pupils of the school. It was in this house that David now lived, its walls decorated with images of Archbishop Romero, Jesus Christ, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and Camilo Torres. David had been granted a house in COVIFU but was reluctant to leave his home in the Cruz, and so had agreed to let me stay there while conducting my fieldwork.

David ‘discovered’ the Villa del Cerdo (pig town) – so-called because of the pigs raised there atop an old, contaminated landfill – soon after he arrived in the neighbourhood in 2004. He collaborated with another social worker, applying for funds for a relocation project on a cooperative housing model, and he also brought together several social actors in the neighbourhood to create a working group focused on improving the quality of lives of Villa residents and securing relocation. These included the nuns and alumni of the private school, like Ruso Pérez. The relocation was achieved over the course of several years with Villa del Cerdo residents building their cooperative homes on land acquired nearby, a section of which was donated by Opus Dei in Uruguay through its Asociación Técnica y Cultural. This donation was secured by the Catholic connections of the alumni. The bulk of the funding for the construction of the houses, some US$600,000, came from the United States government’s independent overseas aid programme, administered by a local NGO run by affluent Catholic mothers of Carrasco. Other supporters included the Ministry of Social Development (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social, MIDES), the embassies of Ireland and Japan, and organisations that brought together the alumni of the Christian Brothers school.

Thus, Villa del Cerdo became COVIFU and the Catholic acompañantes whom I encountered in the neighbourhood were the legacy of this relocation project, consisting principally of upper-class alumni of Stella Maris, the Franciscan nuns, David, social worker and former nun Sara, the staff of the Cañales, and local Cruz de Carrasco priest Pablo Bonavía. The Cañales had been partly financed by the upper-class acompañantes in the years after the completion of the homes in order to maintain a connection with parents and children who would attend the centre. To the different charisms and theological approaches present was added that of the Salesians, to which the centre’s director and many of its teaching staff belonged. Social and charity work was monopolised by these Catholic actors, with other faith or state actors largely absent.

The arrival in the neighbourhood of Catholic activists and social workers cannot be understood without reference to the changes which took place in the Catholic Church in the second half of the twentieth century. The Second Vatican Council (1962–5) ended with a call to take the Church out of the institutions and into the world, while a group of bishops signed the ‘Catacombs Pact’, which committed them to living in poverty, rejecting symbols of power and privilege, and placing the poor at the centre of the Church. Three years later, in 1968, the Latin American episcopal conference (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano y Caribeño, CELAM) held in Medellín was pivotal in shaping the orientation that many radical and progressive Latin American Catholics would take towards ‘the poor’. Specifically, it marked the beginning of Marxist-influenced ‘liberation theology’ and a ‘preferential option for the poor’. Liberation theologians drew extensively on the words and acts of Jesus in the Bible to justify their focus on the poor, using Bible citations such as ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’ (Luke 6: 20).¹ The 1979 Puebla CELAM conference then resulted in the publication of the so-called ‘Puebla Document’ (‘Evangelisation in the Latin American present and future’) that, although considered a compromise between traditional Catholicism and liberation theology, nevertheless condemned repressive governments and international capitalism while asserting the importance of ecclesial base communities and a preferential option for the poor.

For liberation theologians, the poor were seen as the chosen people of God, whose ‘crying out’ caused the intervention of God in the Bible and might well also provide the key for the return of Jesus Christ. The foremost passage of the Old Testament referred to in order to support this claim was from Exodus, where the ‘Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry [clamor] for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard them in their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob’ (Ex 2: 23–24). In the words of Jon Sobrino (1992), ‘to experience God’s revelation it is necessary to experience the reality of the poor’ (Sobrino 1992, 55), while José Porfirio Miranda argues that ‘God … presents himself as knowable exclusively in the cries of the poor and weak who demand justice’ (Miranda 1975, 115).

Theologians like Ricardo Antoncich have argued that different times and places require different biblical exegesis and hermeneutics. The 1970s conditions of dictatorship, repression, savage inequality and extreme poverty called for a specific ‘Latin American reading of Catholic social teaching’ (1987 [1980]). The anchor for this reading, he writes, was ‘the perspective of the cause of the poor’ (83) and he notes that the bishops at Puebla had urged not only clergy but all ‘without distinction of classes, to accept and make their own the cause of the poor as if they were accepting and making their own the cause of Christ himself’ (in Antoncich 1987, 82). Poor-centred Latin American Catholic theological praxis was not, Antoncich asserts, simply one acceptable variant of Catholic social work among many but a return to the ‘original intention of the church’s social teaching’ (83) as evidenced in the example of Christ. That is to say, for Antoncich, liberation theology was the particular Latin American expression of Catholic social teaching, responding to the urgent contemporary demands of poverty, exclusion and repression. In so doing, the bishops at Medellín also coined the concept of ‘structural sin’ to argue that ‘within the salvific and theological context of Latin America, there were social structures that were sinful because they discriminated among God’s children’ (Aguilar 2008, 124).

Catholics influenced by liberation theology were also inspired by the attention Jesus paid to the poor, marginalised and excluded. Such was the case for Cruz de Carrasco priest Pablo Bonavía, who writes that Jesus got close to ‘the poor, the blind, lepers, sinners, widows, prostitutes … the New Testament singles out the “poor” and “sinners” as privileged recipients of Jesus’ work’ (1994, 18). Bonavía’s view is that the latter were not ‘vague categories’ but ‘perfectly identifiable groups who shared an implacable marginalisation as well as being systematically and explicitly blamed and disdained’ (1994, 18). Not only was the group’s status identified in the Bible, argues Bonavía, but the book also demonstrated the praxis to be adopted towards them. ‘More than charitable “help” which did nothing more than deepen their dependency and victimisation’, he writes, ‘these people needed to recover consciousness of their dignity, worth and personhood’ (1994, 18). Liberation theology, alongside the pedagogy of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, played an important role in directing development trends in the continent away from supposedly disempowering charity (asistencialismo) towards reciprocal aid (promoción social). It contributed to ‘shifting the idea of charity – with its connotations of short-term alleviation – toward structural change as a more enduring way of caring for one’s neighbor’ (Lehmann 2016, 747).

The religious figure most recognised in Uruguay for living out a ‘preferential option for the poor’ is the one whose image Ruso Pérez had glued on to a piece of coloured card that day in the Cañales: Padre Cacho. In the years of 1970s and 1980s dictatorship, Cacho breathed the Uruguayan airs of subtle Catholic radicalism under the protection of Montevideo’s Archbishop, the quiet but virtuous Carlos Partelli (Clara 2012). Cacho lived in a poor community in provincial Salto before returning to Montevideo in 1978 where he established himself first in the shantytown of Placido Ellauri, then in neighbouring Aparicio Saravia. He lived in shacks (ranchos) ‘no different from the rest … a little house of wood and metal, a bed, a table, 3 plates, glasses, a pot and some clothes’ (2012, 35). He wanted to move to the shantytowns, he told a fellow priest, because ‘that is where God is, and I want to find him’ (2012, 29).

Cacho did not only privilege the poor, but he also prioritised a subsection within them: the informal sector waste pickers who were his neighbours. He became known as the cura de los carritos (‘the priest of the little carts’) for his close association with them and helped change their popular nomenclature from the semi-disdainful hurgador (rummager) to the more dignified clasificador (classifier). Waste pickers represented a population of special interest for the priest not only because many of his neighbours engaged in the activity but also because they appeared as particularly marginalised and scapegoated. Cacho recognised the important environmental role played by these ‘ecological agents’, arguing that ‘the injured dignity [of the clasificador] calls out for us to recognise him as a worker, prophet and citizen’ (Alonso 1992).

In many ways, Cacho’s way of relating not only to the poor but also to the rich set the tone for a certain form of Catholic social work which would resonate in Uruguay in the following decades and play a direct role in the creation of COVIFU. While he challenged the dictatorship, even finding himself briefly placed under arrest when he went to a police station to lobby for the release of a neighbour, ultimately, he focused on living humbly and ‘accompanying’ the poor. Moreover, although influenced by the preferential option for the poor and liberation theology, Cacho was no Marxist. Rather, he was what his biographer Mercedes Clara (2012) has called a ‘bridge man’ (hombre puente), forming a bridge between rich and poor. When I interviewed the then head of políticas sociales at Montevideo’s municipal council (Intendencia), a former Catholic youth activist, she told me that Cacho ‘brought together a part of the population with whom he felt a Christian sensitivity … with intellectually and economically powerful sectors of society … with people who were able to help them’. Through his ‘triangulation’, she continued, the ‘distributive role which should be the responsibility of the state also starts to emerge from civil society’.

In particular, Cacho helped to link professionals and upper-class Catholics in the Carrasco neighbourhood with Aparicio Saravia through the organisation Juntos Podemos (Together We Can). The Carrasco parishioners donated food and began fundraising for the neighbourhood, getting enough money together to pay for the breeze blocks needed for the construction of houses (2012, 70). For Mary Larrosa, who arrived in the neighbourhood via Cacho and helped in the collation of neighbourhood histories and publications, Cacho ‘made it possible to get close to the poor, because sometimes it’s not so easy … you want to but don’t know how’ (2012, 72). One of those who arrived in the neighbourhood as an eager Carrascito (posh Carrasco kid) was Ruso Pérez. Born into a family with a history of charitable Catholic work, Ruso told me that from an early age he was taken along to asentamientos and shown different realities, while at home the family opened their doors to poor children who came to beg.

Ruso’s family provided examples of traditional but also radical ways of engaging with the poor. It was his cousin Pablo Bonavía who had sent him to stay with Cacho after Ruso had expressed an interest in travelling to India to work with the poor. ‘You’re crazy, there’s as much poverty here as in India!’, Bonavía had told him. His aunt Ana was a nun in the 1970s and 1980s whose congregation became influenced by the winds of change in the Latin American Church. In our interview in Ruso’s living room, she told me that she had been teaching in the upper-class Sacred Heart girls’ school in Carrasco but from there had decided to go and live in a poor community in the Uruguayan provincial town of Durazno. She ‘took off the habit’, and visited neighbours at home, finding that ‘this is where people [were] hungry for the gospel!’ The nuns faced suspicion and hostility from religious conservatives and former pupils, who accused them of being communists.

Ana and her colleagues were inspired not by Moscow, however, but by Latin American colleagues, explaining that ‘we started to study popular education and Paulo Freire, to establish popular education networks all over Latin America, to communicate our experiences, to exchange’. María Inés, Sara and other Franciscan nuns also spent extensive periods with congregations in Brazil, where they learned of popular education methods, participative democracy and community organisation. The model of the church was one, explained María Inés, which ‘mixed the ecclesial with popular struggle’. The poor served by the missionaries in the Cruz de Carrasco were essentially those residents who came in two ‘immigration waves’ in the 1980s and 1990s from the Uruguayan countryside and the slums of Montevideo. These immigrants formed settlements or asentamientos in the land between the church and the landfill, quarries and marshes, which constitute the Cruz’s boundary.

Not all the backgrounds of those undertaking religious social work with the Villa and COVIFU can be placed within a framework of liberation theology, progressive Catholicism or opposition to dictatorship. Pedro Silva was, alongside Ruso Pérez, one of the first and most consistent Stella Maris alumni to engage with families in the neighbourhood, having been involved in three housing cooperative projects and the establishment of the Cañales. A land surveyor by profession, Silva attended the state Universidad de la República during the dictatorship, a time when, he argued, it was ‘very fashionable’ to be left wing in student circles. Silva, on the other hand, was, in his own words, a ‘posh kid, from a posh neighbourhood, right-wing, fascist’. Pedro justified his position by telling his student antagonists that he was going to take advantage of his position in life, and ‘from there, help the other [el otro]’.

At the Stella Maris school, Ruso did not remember Irish Catholic priests advocating social work with the poor, while Pedro recalled pupils being told to ‘take up, not abandon their [social] position, and from there help the poor’. Pedro’s wife, Carmen, also from an affluent family background, acted as the pro bono notary for COVIFU, the Cañales and several other neighbourhood social projects. Her trajectory in acompañamiento of the poor was different still, as she formed part of the post-dictatorship policymakers who aimed, in her words, to ‘look for mechanisms so that one sector of society was not so opposed (enfrentado) to the other, and that this wouldn’t lead to civil war again’.² One way of avoiding this ‘conflict’ resurfacing, she maintained, was to ‘ensure that one sector of society took responsibility for the other’. Ruso also held his class partly responsible for increasing social polarisation and insecurity, arguing that ‘we’ve somehow gone very wrong, not just the government but society as a whole … we’re responsible for not thinking about other people’.

In looking at the roots of various Catholic actors’ engagement with the poor in my fieldsite, we find a confluence of diverse Catholic activists motivated by different strands of Catholic social teaching and/or radical theological developments, who nonetheless became bedfellows in the post-dictatorship period to constitute what I would call, following Antoncich, a politically ambiguous, and particularly Uruguayan, expression of Catholic social teaching. Undoubtedly, the Second Vatican Council, the Medellín conference in 1968 and the ‘preferential option for the poor’ were important regional and global events in the genealogy of their praxis. So, too, however, were events at a national level, such as the role of the Catholic Church as a tolerated space for activism during the dictatorship. Clearly, a radical Catholic orientation toward the poor inspired by liberation theology continued to consciously influence some neighbourhood Catholic activists such as David, the Franciscan nuns and Fr. Pablo Bonavía. These collaborated closely, however, with others like Pedro and Carmen from the opposite side of the political spectrum, who sought through their work to avoid the repeat of what they understood as a ‘civil war’ sparked by social polarisation. The work of Padre Cacho in synthesising a preference for accompanying the poor – clasificadores in particular – with the creation of bridges between upper and underprivileged classes shaped the Catholic social praxis that I explore in the following sections, directly influencing figures such as Ruso Pérez and Pablo Bonavía who had worked alongside him.

Aside from family, religious and class ties, what brought diverse Catholic actors together in the neighbourhood was a commitment to what they all termed acompañamiento (accompaniment) of the poor. In the following section I seek to trace the contours of this concept for upper-class Catholics, arguing that its enactment involves balancing, on the one hand, unconditional charity with reciprocal relations, and, on the other, ‘residues’ of radical Catholicism with enduring ‘structural sin’.

Acompañamiento amid structural sin: between reciprocity and unconditional charity

‘These guys give their lives to the poor’ was the glowing endorsement by which ‘Rama’ López introduced my partner and me to friends at a dinner he had invited us to at his plush home in Carrasco. The successful owner of a large hardware wholesaler, López had for a year been ‘accompanying’ several of my COVIFU neighbours in a pig-rearing venture for which he provided financial, advisory and veterinary support. Embarrassed by the praise, we quickly tried to explain that I was living in COVIFU principally for research purposes, not as a charity worker or volunteer, religious or otherwise. Yet our objections were to no avail – we were sometimes referred to as ‘missionaries’ during the course of our stay and praised by upper-class acompañantes for our commitment to living among the poor. We were seen as following the example of Padre Cacho by enduring the hardships of the neighbourhood and enacting the aspired-to moral value of ‘accompanying the poor’.

Rama was a cousin of Ruso Pérez and it was through him that he found his way to the neighbourhood. Both were jovial, outgoing and charismatic men, just as likely to be found talking respectfully with neighbourhood women as joking with men or engaging in horseplay with some of the adolescent boys. It was Ruso who drew a connection between our presence and Cacho’s praxis, which he described as ‘putting oneself in the skin of the other’ and ‘feeling like them’:

Because when you think like the other, you … fight for a different reality, for a change. If you don’t think like the other, it’s very difficult. When we have meetings, I always say, ‘imagine that you lived here’. And not ‘I’m going home in my car to my warm house’, which is very different. You live here and you know what the cold is like … the swearing matches, the stress, and so you have to feel like the other, put yourself in their skin, as Cacho used to say, to be able to understand and act. And that’s what one tries to do, no?

As an adolescent, Ruso had spent several days a week living with poor young men in the house that Cacho shared with them in the shantytown, even covering for the priest when he was away. As he became older and married his wife Laura, Cacho told him to keep a distance from the increasingly dangerous barrio and concentrate on raising his family. Yet Ruso maintained a close friendship with a godson whom he invited, with his fiancé, to marriage preparations that Ruso and Laura were undertaking with other upper-class fiancés in Carrasco. They thus learned of the worries facing a couple from another social class, something which Ruso described as an ‘enriching experience’. ‘When you feel like the other’, he reiterated, ‘the worries of the other will be your worries … if you don’t put yourself in the other’s skin, the other’s worries are ridiculous’. Cacho and Bonavía officiated at both weddings, that of Ruso and his godson.

While acompañamiento in Ruso’s account came close to being the other, others emphasised the importance of being with the other but maintaining boundaries. Pedro and Carmen both spoke of the importance of long-term accompaniment, which they compared to accompanying a son or daughter: ‘if we are chasing after our children for 30 years, then how can we leave these others alone? They need double the amount of acompañamiento’. Carmen in particular stressed that the poor ‘couldn’t be left alone’, that they might need more or less acompañamiento in different areas but that they needed a ‘permanent model/example [referente]’. Given Carmen’s understanding of the Uruguayan ‘civil war’, this ‘permanent accompaniment’ might be understood critically as a form of surveillance which kept the behaviour of the poor in check. Rather than political activists, however, Pedro told me that he was more interested in keeping away the malandraje (rogues/criminal elements) from the housing cooperative. Others were more nuanced in their approach, with Sister Macarena pondering the diminished organisation of another neighbourhood housing cooperative when left without the acompañamiento of the nuns. It was Ruso who spoke most of acompañamiento, however, which for him meant ‘being with, listening to, sharing with, and understanding the other’.

Ruso speaks of a ‘before and after’ of work with Cacho, where his attitude changed from ‘doing social work’ and ‘giving a hand to poor folk’ to seeing the poor like equals and realising that the relationship with them was reciprocal. Ruso received as much as he gave in encounters with the poor, he told me, and without them his life felt incomplete. It could be argued that Ruso thus embodied a shift in Uruguayan Catholic social praxis, from traditional Carrasco Catholic charitable asistencialismo towards something more horizontal and reciprocal in line with Latin American Catholic thought in the late twentieth century. Yet moves towards reciprocity were not bereft of tension. How to reconcile the establishment of reciprocal, personalistic relationships with the Catholic imperative to conduct unconditional charity with the poor? How to deal with the ‘radical residues’ of Latin American Catholicism – its egalitarian and even revolutionary ethos – when structural class positions (‘structural sin’) endured in twenty-first-century Uruguay?

As noted by Laidlaw (2000), Graeber (2012, 109) and others, major religions, including Christianity, have placed an important emphasis on an unconditional and anonymous giving which does not spark reciprocal relations. Within Catholicism, this unconditional charity is linked closely with the unconditional love which Jesus felt towards humanity and which his followers should seek to emulate (Jackson 2003). For those inspired by liberation theology, much of this charity and focus should be conducted with ‘the poor’ as a theologically broad category that has been translated into a particular poor at different times and places. I argue that upper-class Catholic informants at my fieldsite thus experienced a tension in their praxis of acompañamiento between conducting unconditional charity with ‘the poor’ and establishing reciprocal bonds with particular poor residents of COVIFU.

For example, Ruso and Laura Pérez established a close friendship with the Rosas, the family who had initially taken me in to stay when I first arrived in the neighbourhood. The Rosas’ daughter had often been around to their house when she was small, and Ruso and Laura enjoyed passing by Juan Rosas’ home to drink mate tea together. The Pérez did of course spend time with other families, with Ruso supporting the pig-rearing enterprise and Laura a soap project with other women. Yet the affective bonds established between the Pérez and the Rosas meant that when the former had donations to distribute (the mechanics of which I explore later), they often found their way to the house of the latter. On several occasions, the Pérez would pass on donations to my partner and me, hoping that they would reach beyond it. The affective relations between the two families aroused jealousy among other neighbours, who appealed to the Catholic imperative to help the poor indiscriminately. ‘It seems that the more you have, the more you get around here’, complained one neighbour, making reference to the Rosas’ relatively well-off status, indicated by their ownership of a car and pick-up truck, while other families did not even possess a motorbike. ‘They [acompañantes] should be helping everyone around here’, said another, ‘but there are some families who just grab everything’.

The tendency of upper-class families to establish personalistic relations with particular families is, I would argue, to a large extent due to attempts to introduce reciprocity into relationships, establishing a flow of affects, materials and obligations. At events such as the Epiphany celebration with which I started this paper, they were caught between attempting the perhaps unrealisable ideal of the ‘free gift’ and the Maussian gift which ‘makes friends’, entails reciprocity, and establishes and maintains social relations (Benedict XVI 2005, no. 31; Laidlaw 2000; Mauss 1990 [1925]; Sahlins 1972). As Laidlaw notes, ‘religious charity and philanthropy in all the great religions have repeatedly rediscovered the supreme value of the anonymous donation, only to find that time and time again donors have been more attracted to the benefits of the socially entangling Maussian gift, which does make friends’ (2000, 632). The relation of reciprocity was specifically sought by Catholic actors, with priest Pablo Bonavía arguing in our interview that the ‘heart of the social and anthropological problem is that of moving from relations of dependence to relations of reciprocity’.

Upper-class informants did not demand any direct spiritual return for their charity: no receiver was obliged to go to church or profess a belief in Christ or a Catholic God. Nor was there a vote-winning or political dimension or a direct obligation to labour involved which would link this relationship with anthropological literature on patronage and clientelism. If Padre Bonavía and Ruso aimed for reciprocity, of what, then, did this consist? When upper-class Catholics gave their time, money, gifts and contacts to COVIFU residents, what did they expect or receive in return? This is as much an ethnographic as an analytical question, as my poor neighbours often expressed suspicion about what rich volunteers were getting out of a connection with them:

It’s hard to understand, isn’t it? A bit untrustworthy. You don’t know if it’s done in good faith or for their own benefit. Like with Rama López. There’s a lot of stuff like, if you set up an NGO then the government excuses you from taxes and things like that. I’m not sure exactly how it works though. They discount some of your taxes if you’re good to the plebs [pichaje], I think that’s what they do.

To recap, acompañantes pass on gifts to the poor as part of their acompañamiento, but the counter-gifts in kind, characteristic of gift exchange economies, are neither expected nor possible because of structural and class differences. Reciprocity is nevertheless sought out and thus returns on gifts cannot be in kind but must vary. It is at this point that I turn to the writings of David Graeber (2001; 2010; 2012) on the different moral logics that underlie gifts, modifying somewhat his schema. In the first instance, Graeber argues for the existence of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ reciprocity, where closed reciprocity is closer to market exchange and open reciprocity is more balanced (2001). Elsewhere, Graeber has sketched out communism, exchange and hierarchy as different moral logics underlying forms of gifting (2010; 2012).

For Graeber, ‘baseline’ or ‘everyday’ communism can be found in instances where the principle of ‘to each according to his need, from each according their ability’ are in operation and where people are in ‘permanent mutual debt’ with one another (2010, 9). Ironically, this description fits rather nicely with my upper-class informants’ conceptualisation of long-term, permanent accompaniment. Within this relationship, the upper class provide what they believe is within the scope of their abilities – money, materials, contacts, encouragement – and expect in return from the poor only what was within their sphere of capability. The description of such a relation as a form of communism is ironic, of course, because it entails a long-term relationship of mutual commitment which does not approximate equality or the end of class society but rather thrives on it.

With regard to what the poor might give back, acompañantes expected neighbours to demonstrate a ‘willingness to labour’ in cooperative ventures like the pig-rearing enterprise or the housing project that preceded it. In a particularly Uruguayan variation of the development adage taken up by James Ferguson (2015), Pedro Rodríguez said that the poor should be taught to fish alone, but be accompanied and served mate as they did so. A scenario to be avoided, however, was the acompañante fishing for the poor, while the latter sat drinking mate. Padre Bonavía had indeed witnessed something akin to this scenario when a group of Swiss volunteers had visited the COVIFU construction site for several weeks. ‘I visited the site and the Swiss were working while the neighbours sat drinking mate. What was promocional (empowering) about that?!’

In some instances, the poor were meant to deliver a clear output in exchange for accompaniment. ‘There are conditions (contraprestaciones) [for our help]’, Carmen clarified: ‘the kids who go to the Cañales have to go to school and everything’. During the COVIFU building project, one donor, a philanthropist founder of a local charity, wanted stringent conditions in exchange for his donation of land. The sugar magnate demanded that parents report directly to him every year with paperwork demonstrating that they had given their children vaccinations and sent them to school. This conditionality was too personal even for the other acompañantes, and he was pressured to back down.

What happened when the poor did not meet their side of the bargain? This is perhaps where Graeber’s logic of exchange enters the fray. ‘Exchange’, as Graeber argues, ‘allows us to cancel our debts’ (2010, 9). He makes this assertion with reference to a framework of equivalence: if one gift is equivalent to another, it can cancel it out and therefore stop the flow of social relations in its tracks. Yet as we know, gift and contraprestación might continually be renewed even as they neutralise each other, as long demonstrated by the literature on the gift in anthropology. In the case of the pig-rearing cooperative, if my poor neighbours carried out a week’s labour, they would not expect the flow of financial and other support to be extinguished but rather renewed. In order to break off relations with my neighbours, then, upper-class Catholics instead had to find an instance of lack of equivalence, where the poor failed to reciprocate with an expected contraprestación.

Given their emphasis on and commitment to long-term relations of acompañamiento, it is not surprising that Pedro, Ruso and others did not often seek to break off relations with my neighbours. Rama, on the other hand, did not have experience in working with the poor and soon found himself frustrated with the discord and lack of progress and indeed cooperation in the pig-rearing cooperative. After coming back from a trip to Europe to find a dead pig, which had apparently been floating in a pool of water for days without anyone seeking to remove it, he decided to cut his losses. The lack of commitment to the project, hard work and care for the animals with which the cooperativists should have reciprocated his time, money and energy was cited as cause for disengagement. Expectations of reciprocity can thus be mobilised as a way of introducing conditionalities into supposedly unconditional Catholic charitable engagement.

When questioned about the affective relations and friendships established between the poor and acompañantes like cousin Ruso, Pablo Bonavía emphasised the structural opposition between classes: ‘the interests and the causes of the world of the poor, whatever the good relations that might exist … are opposed to the interests and causes of the world of richest sectors’. In such circumstances, he warned, relations of reciprocity might slip into those of dependence. Indeed, Graeber (2010) has argued that hierarchy might be considered the opposite of reciprocity, involving mostly uni-directional flows of materials such as tribute sustained by custom and habit. How, then, did upper-class acompañantes reconcile pronounced social hierarchies – what liberation theologians considered ‘structural sin’ – with an attempt to maintain reciprocal relations partly inspired by residues of radical Catholicism? I would argue that in their relations to the poor, the upper class sought to resolve this tension by engaging in strategies to underplay hierarchies and temporarily reverse them.

First, Ruso and others sought out common ground with the poor. A passion for animal husbandry and country pursuits constituted a shared interest between conservative landowners such as Rama, and neighbours of the poor urban-rural periphery. Javi, who used his horse and cart to transport recyclables from the dump, often enquired after Paco’s polo performances at weekends, while Juan and Rama compared notes on how to castrate piglets. Some upper-class acompañantes clearly drew inspiration from (imagined) class relations in the countryside, with Carmen arguing that ‘in the interior, people with land or interests always “collaborated”’ and Ruso telling me that in the countryside people felt more equal given their vulnerability to the elements. Paco, whose family held the monopoly on the import of certain car brands in Uruguay, also gave mechanics classes to parents in the Cañales, trying to find mutuality in a passion for cars, motors and how they worked, quite aside from the purchasing power of each in relation to car ownership.

Acompañantes also attempted to instil a separation between the economic sphere and that in which they conducted their work with the poor. Different rules applied in each area, with professionals such as Pedro and Carmen charging for their services in their working lives, but offering them pro bono when engaged in social work with the residents of COVIFU. Rama, meanwhile, reacted strongly when Javi’s wife denounced him as the ‘boss’ of the pig-rearing cooperative, making it clear that, while he was in charge at his company, these rules did not apply in his social work, where the men or families of the pig-rearing cooperative were the ‘owners’. As might be expected, acompañantes modestly attempted to downplay wealth which they possessed, such as the large expanse of land and woods which Rama had recently acquired and which he would ultimately leave the pig enterprise to spend more time on.

Hierarchies were not always ignored, however – sometimes they were also temporarily reversed. Precedent for this is clearly found in the Catholic ideal of ‘serving the poor’ generally and specifically in the approach advocated by Padre Cacho. When challenged about being ‘used’ by the poor, Cacho countered that ‘they have been used and manipulated their whole life by those who have power, so it’s alright that sometimes things are the other way round’ (Clara 2012, 107). In my fieldwork site, Catholic social workers were worried about the poor becoming dependent upon them at the same time as they professed a model of ‘continuous accompaniment’. Yet instead of the poor seeking a relationship of dependency with the rich, what occurred in the Cruz de Carrasco was the reverse: the rich unexpectedly turned up at the door of the poor, asking if they might serve them. This was a theological praxis integral to liberation theology, where missionaries of various stripes would appear in poor neighbourhoods and attempt to ascertain, through popular education workshops, how they might best serve communities. ‘There’s something wrong with you’, asentamiento neighbours told Sara when she first appeared with other nuns in the neighbourhood, ‘we want to get out of here while you want to come and live here!’

Catholic service among the upper classes (but not the Franciscan nuns) also suggests a time-limited role reversal analogous with the carnevalesque (Bakhtin 1941; DaMatta 1997). During the week, upper-class Catholics are bosses and professional workers in positions of authority who have subordinates labouring for them – and this is also the future which awaits many young Catholic private school students. On Saturday mornings and special occasions, however, Ruso would bring groups of teenagers to carry out menial work and take orders from the poor, either at the pig-rearing enterprise, at another cooperative housing construction site, or at the Cañales. There they would bow to the knowledge of the poor over matters related to building and animal husbandry, or simply serve food and drinks in the Cañales. One particular occasion of the latter was the fifth anniversary of the Cañales, when the neighbours dressed up in their best and were served sumptuous mixed cold meats and cheese platters by Ruso and other acompañantes dressed as waiters.

Such moments of the carnevalesque allow the popular classes to enjoy a temporary status reversal but also maintain inequalities and hierarchies, as normal service is resumed after the time for licence has expired. Roberto DaMatta’s (1997) analysis of carnivals in Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans stresses the temporary transgression of societal values (egalitarianism in the United States, hierarchy in Brazil). If this is an inversion of James Ferguson’s (2015, 142) example of the Black poor in South Africa clamouring to serve and establish relations of dependency with a bemused rich American, it is hardly incidental. In this case, we might make the claim that upper-class Catholics attempting to live a moral, spiritual and ‘full’ life depend on the temporary role reversal involved in serving the poor as opposed to being served by them. While one should perhaps not exaggerate the importance of such rituals in maintaining structural inequalities, they were certainly not transformational, limited as they were to particular times and places. If a COVIFU resident appeared in the office of Rama’s wholesale hardware company and started giving him orders, she would soon find out that she was not in a position to dictate the terms of the latter’s service.

Since the ‘structural sin’ of class society endures in time, upper-class Catholics, influenced by a legacy of progressive Catholicism and its penchant for reciprocity, attempt to create spaces in which inequality and hierarchy are either temporarily downplayed or reversed. Such spaces are far removed from the revolutionary and subversive potential of liberation theology when it first emerged, but their importance in tackling social exclusion and material poverty should not be underestimated. Indeed, such direct, affective relations between rich and poor families and communities does not appear to be common in other parts of the continent, and may be a direct legacy of Padre Cacho, the ‘bridge man’. In the following section, I turn to the question of how charity with the poor was enabled through the establishment of a series of ‘bridges’ and the channelling of surplus. Prioritising and establishing certain reciprocal relations with the poor might have been desired, but it appears that such links can only materialise with the help of non-human actants (Latour 2004) diverted from the waste stream.

Bridges, networks and the (in)dignity of waste

‘Padre Cacho brought together two sectors’, said the former municipal director of environmental development Martín Ponce de León at a special parliamentary session to remember the priest in 2002: ‘He was a man who integrated neighbourhoods and the most diverse social sectors.’ The other side of the acompañantes’ attempts to find commonalities between rich and poor was an acceptance that the poor lived in a different world, with different codes and temporalities. Crossing from one side to the other necessitated the construction of bridges, and the building of relationships depended on the flow of materials across them.

Ruso and Laura Pérez became such bridges for many of their friends in Carrasco. Due to their reputation for ‘social engagement’, neighbours would drop old and unwanted things off at their house, establishing the couple as a conduit to the poor. ‘It’s like a chain, people call up, sometimes my house resembles Emaús, full of clothes, blankets, beds, televisions that people leave you, this and that – it starts filling up, you see? Because they know that it [sic] will have a good destination.’ This happened when flooding occurred in the nearby shantytown of Paso Carrasco – Ruso posted a note on Facebook calling for donations that soon streamed in from neighbours, friends and contacts. Most of these donations came from Carrasco, Ruso explained, ‘because that’s where the money is’.

Conversely, Ruso and Laura also acted as a bridge via which the poor could reach the rich. Although the pig-rearing cooperative was meant to represent a process of formalisation, the bulk of the pigs were in fact sold to friends, neighbours and relatives of the acompañantes, filling up their freezers and leading their families to complain about feeling sick from eating pork most nights of the week. In the circles of the rich, the butchered pigs could be sold for prices comparable with those of the up-market Grands Magasins supermarket rather than the poor neighbourhood almacén. At the other end of the gender (and olfactory) spectrum was Laura’s involvement in a micro-enterprise with some women from COVIFU urbano who put floral, decorative and festive transfers onto bars of soap. These were then sold on at a much higher price within Carrasco ladies’ circles.

Through the acompañantes, donations flowed from rich to poor, and commodities from the poor to rich. Acompañantes constituted ‘bridges’ in the social network theory definition of connectors between nodes within networks which would otherwise be separate and not in contact with each other (Wasserman and Faust 1994, 114). The connections to the upper class which allowed my neighbours to intercept the surplus material I go on to describe were, in the language of development and political science, ‘cross-cutting ties’ (Narayan-Parker 1999, 14) or ‘bridging social capital’ (Putnam 2000). The rich and poor are not always situated in discrete networks, but the existence of parallel networks of commodity circulation is clear in the case of pig rearing. Through contact with Rama, the cooperativists bought a prize hog at the exclusive Prado country fair, instead of sourcing one through contacts in informal neighbourhood networks. They initially managed to sell the pork at a high price in elite circles (Carrasco families or, in one case, a Spanish cruise ship) facilitated by their acompañantes. But when the cooperative folded, the residents had to revert to selling it to friends, family and contacts at a lower cost. Materials for the construction of pig shelters were either donated by the acompañantes at discounted rates or sourced by clasificadores from the landfill.

It was not only the poor who accessed waste materials, however; many donations were also forms of surplus which were ‘reconfigured’ as donations by passing through the hands of acompañantes or being intercepted before they entered the urban waste stream. In enumerating examples of this practice, I wish to make two points. The first is that although both rich and poor can access waste and surplus, the rich intercept them earlier in the chain which links production and disposal, when they have greater value and can be classified as ‘donations’ partly because they have not been mixed with other wastes. The second is that while those like Ruso and Rama can be seen as bridges between rich and poor, non-human material such as waste can also form bridges between people from these different classes.

Let us take the case of a ‘donation’ of seed, to be used as pig feed, organised by Ruso. Upper-class networks played an important role, since he secured the pick-up after mentioning the COVIFU project to a friend who happened to be one of the largest importers and distributors of seed in the country. This donation consisted of sweepings from the factory floor which would otherwise have to be disposed of as waste at a cost to the importer or dumped illegally. Instead, Ruso paid for the collection of the seeds which were re-routed to the cooperative and used both to feed pigs and grow eclectic mixed lawns of soy, wheat and ryegrass. Another donation secured by Laura was of surplus bread, biscuits and sandwich cuttings from Aperitivo, the catering company that supplied sandwiches to the Grands Magasins supermarket chain. On alternate days, Laura and the nuns from the Cruz would pick these up and distribute them among neighbours in COVIFU and the Cruz de Carrasco respectively. The interception of Grands Magasins food waste soon after its production (before it even reaches the supermarket) can be compared to the Grands Magasins waste received at Juan Rosas’ wife’s family recycling yard. The best of this waste had already been siphoned off by the family that collected it from the supermarket, leaving the clasificador family to cobble together sandwiches out of stale bread and the off-cuts from the supermarket delicatessen counter.

As for Rama, he arranged for the cooperative to collect surplus from a catering factory, Fresh Fare, managed by his brother. If the condition for the collection of the bakery goods was that they be converted into a donation to be consumed by the poor, it was something precisely forbidden in this case, as the factory wastes fell within the municipal waste management regulatory framework. Food waste had long fed Montevideo’s pigs in informal arrangements which the Intendencia was trying to discourage and regulate (Santandreu, Castro and Ronca 2002). Only a registered ‘waste transporter’ could collect the waste, and proof had to be shown that the plastics and cardboard with which the food waste was mixed were properly separated and disposed of, preferably in Felipe Cardoso. The arrangement would probably not have been possible without another contact of Rama’s at the Intendencia’s department of rural affairs, to whom he sent pictures of neatly classified bales of cardboard and separated food waste while the scheme lasted.

In all of these cases of acompañante-mediated transactions, waste is effectively intercepted at the source of its creation, before it has entered the waste stream. They provide examples of how the rich can access surplus of a quality and scale which is very difficult for the poor to acquire directly. In his book on household food waste, David Evans (2014) argues that food passes through the stages of ‘surplus’ then ‘excess’ before being placed in a bin and finally becoming ‘waste’. The only way COVIFU clasificadores could otherwise have intercepted the surplus secured by the acompañantes would have been at the landfill, after it had been mixed in with heterogeneous municipal solid waste. There, they would have had to struggle with other clasificadores for a share and been pushed quickly to extract as much as possible before machines sped past to spread and flatten. Quality, composition and freedom from contamination could not have been assured, and removal from the cantera might have been difficult. In Evans’ model, my informants’ connections with the upper classes – their ‘bridging social capital’ – facilitated the interception of surplus before it became waste. If figures like Padre Cacho and Ruso made it ‘easier to get close to the poor’, then material surplus also helped to grease the wheels of inter-class contact. The sticky, odorous materiality of the mixed waste bags, the expectations of acompañantes and the regulatory waste framework combined in a hybrid agency. Sometimes, a diverse array of discards fell into the hands of human actors, their materialities acting on humans and bringing about new tensions, altering relations and establishing new connections.

In studies of international charity and development work, examples of asymmetrical relationships sustained by the circulation of discards abound. In one case, Britt Halvorson (2012) looked at how American Lutherans maintained contact with a former mission site in Madagascar through the donation of medical supplies. She argues that the affirmation of moral relations through the donation of objects deemed obsolete and useless in an American hospital setting is a paradox resolved by ‘concealing the institutional life of the medical technologies’ (2012, 209) transformed into charitable donations. Echoing Thompson’s (1979) classic thesis, materials are ‘devalued’ to be subsequently ‘revalued’ or reclassified. There are clear parallels between Halvorson’s case study and the ‘surplus transactions’ made at my fieldsite. Like the American hospitals that decrease the costs of classification and disposal by passing these on to the NGOs to whom they donate materials (2012, 217), factories in my fieldsite saved money by ‘donating’ waste materials to my informants. Yet if Halvorson’s focus is the ‘redemptive economy’ of international Protestantism, to close this paper I return to the particularities of Uruguayan Catholicism, in particular the perceived relationship between (in)dignity and waste (work).

To some degree, the fact that acompañantes used surplus materials as ways of establishing relations with the poor was uncomfortable, if not paradoxical. As in Halvorson’s case, the nature of discards was thus sometimes disguised in different ways. Some materials, such as those left at Ruso’s house by his neighbours, avoided categorisation as waste altogether. In the case of the seed factory’s sweepings, these were never formally classified as waste or donation, but were referred to as the latter by informants and they escaped the costs associated with the former. Bread and cakes from Aperativo were intercepted as surplus and reconfigured as donations before they became waste, while the material from Fresh Fare was formally positioned within the framework of municipal waste management and can only secondarily be considered a donation. The stage at which surplus material was intercepted had implications with regard to perceptions of the dignity of consumption. For the acompañantes, it was clearly more dignified for acompañados to receive a donation before material had officially entered the waste stream and where they had been, we might say, ‘blessed’ by their intermediation.

Yet there is an obvious irony nonetheless. Clasificadores are identified by some Catholics as worthy of theological attention partly because of their appearance, if not actual embodiment, as the poorest of the poor, whose condition in living from society’s discards is seen as undignified. Padre Cacho is not the only religious figure to accord waste pickers such importance as the kind of marginalised group favoured by Christ. Pope Francis, formerly Archbishop Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, used to conduct mass in the city for prostitutes and cartoneros.³ He maintained a connection with waste picker organisations on assuming the papacy and invited cartonero leader Sergio Sánchez to his inauguration in Rome. In one Buenos Aires mass, Bergoglio drew a direct link between ‘throwaway society’ and those who are the ‘leftovers of society’, speaking of ‘the existential skips full of disdained men and women’ and how those who represented society’s leftovers were ‘denied work, bread and dignity’ (Clarín 2009).

The indignity of waste work was echoed by several religious informants. Former nun and social worker Sara found a polluting influence in any work with society’s leftovers. ‘Whatever name you stick on it, rubbish is rubbish. It’s what others throw away, what others don’t want … and working with waste leaves a mark on the person throughout their life.’ For Sara, rubbish indelibly marks those who work with it, and such an essentialist position with regard to waste (‘rubbish is rubbish’) might even amount to a critique of the surplus offered by some acompañantes as donations. A more common position was that although the work was ecologically important, conditions should be dignified. Thus, Ruso argued that ‘a clasificador is as dignified as a nuclear engineer’ and it was the conditions – such as a man pushing a cart twenty kilometres a day – which were undignified. In order to dignify such work, acompañamiento was necessary: ‘through organizing and with acompañamiento, [classification] could become a very dignified job’. My accompaniment of neighbours to the landfill and consumption of food recovered there were, for Ruso, a bridge too far.

All this points to the difficulties of enacting the biblical prerogative to help the poor, without interpreting that poverty through a value system maintained by some Catholics which presupposes that the poor must recover a dignity which they have presumably lost and which can only be recovered if they are gently taken by the hand and accompanied out of the trash. It is the relation with discards that partly justifies the theological importance paid to clasificadores and other waste workers, but upper class Catholics themselves mobilise the materiality of surplus in order to establish reciprocal relationships with them. While it is, at times, useful to distinguish between surplus, excess and waste, I suggest that we might do the opposite here, by looking to the Uruguayan word which stretches to cover recoverable waste, rubbish, surplus and perhaps even donation: requeche.

Requeche is a slang word for ‘leftover’ applied particularly to food, such as the leftovers from a Sunday lunch which one might use for the next week’s sandwiches. Amongst clasificadores, the word can refer to anything recovered from the trash, but is also customarily used for food. ‘Requeche is what rich people don’t eat but instead throw away’, explained Pato from the clasificador trade union UCRUS (Unión de Clasificadores de Residuos Urbanos Sólidos), ‘it’s what we eat’.⁴ Unlike hurgador (rummager), requechero (the word for those who live from leftovers) was not a term considered undignified or insulting by Pato or the UCRUS. ‘What bothers me is when they call us hurgadores because it’s pigs that rummage’, she explained in one interview, ‘but we are requecheros …’.⁵ Requeche (leftover); requechar (‘to gather leftovers’; ‘to create something new from leftovers’; ‘to consume other people’s leftovers’); requecheros (‘one who consumes or lives from the consumption of leftovers’): definitions of the word only make it into online regional slang dictionaries, if at all. Yet the term can perhaps be added to the waste scholar’s theoretical toolkit in order to bring together domestic and industrial surplus materials which might have similar physical characteristics but have been placed in different legal or moral classificatory regimes. Recognising the validity and dignity of the requechero performs the dual move of freeing clasificador dignity from a dependence on the intermediation of Catholic acompañantes and recognising that which all ‘leftovers’ – whether classified as surplus, donation or waste – share in common.

This discussion helps to emphasise the important role played by surplus and waste in bridging social relations between rich and poor in my fieldsite, in line with a move from recent waste scholars to reconsider the agency of their subject matter and recognise the ways in which waste is constitutive, and not a residue, of the social. Thus Gille (2010) argues that complementing the circulation of value, ‘we also find in any economy a circulation of waste’ in which ‘one form of waste metamorphoses into another’ (2010, 1060). In a critique of an economics that focuses exclusively on value production and ignores waste, Gille argues that ‘as long as the point of departure remains the assumption of value production and realisation, waste will always be a theoretical by-product, residual, epiphenomenal, and inconsequential for the understanding of the social’ (2010, 1054). My description of the movement of surplus materials – both by-products and the results of overproduction – renders these visible and central in enabling particular social relations. Rather than intra-waste metamorphosis, however, my research describes waste being transformed into donation, or being intercepted as surplus before it even becomes waste. These materials are channelled through but also help enable and modify the dynamics of a socio-religious matrix of acompañantes and acompañados.

Conclusion

The landfill has long been heralded a somewhat sacred site for the conversion or renewed faith of key religious figures, from Archbishop Romero in El Salvador to Mother Teresa (Aguilar 2008, 17). In this paper I have sought to explore what brought upper-class Catholics close to the Montevidean landfill of my fieldsite, delving into the origin and dynamics of Uruguayan religious social work and inter-class collaboration. Liberation theology’s ‘preferential option for the poor’ found its way to the Uruguayan Church and upper class via Brazil and through figures like Padre Cacho. It came together with post-dictatorship governmental attempts to encourage the upper class to ‘take responsibility’ for the poor as a mechanism for avoiding social polarisation, creating the particular configuration of the ‘Catholic social’ found in my fieldsite.

Inherent to these inter-class, church-mediated relations are a series of theological tensions which I have explored in the second part of this paper. One such tension is the attempt to reconcile Catholic doctrine that advocates the conduction of charity with a universal poor and Padre Cacho’s example of establishing relations of friendship and reciprocity with a particular poor. From the seeking out of a connection, upper-class acompañantes received a series of returns, from affects to tax rebates. Although they looked to the example of St Francis and to the Franciscan nuns in the Cruz de Carrasco, affluent acompañantes maintained their class positions as ‘structures of sin’ endured. This tension was assuaged by several strategies, from the attempted separation of the economic and social realms, to spaces of carnevalesque role reversal.

The points of contact between rich and poor in my Montevideo fieldsite are rare bridges in a continent where gated communities, favelas and social polarisation are more common topics of research. While connections with the upper classes might be considered as the poor’s ‘bridging social capital’, it is the networks of the rich which allow materials to be intercepted as ‘surplus’ before they enter the waste stream. While the intermediation of acompañantes channels this material to the acompañados in the form of ‘donations’, surplus material can also be seen as agentive in constituting a bridge through which the rich can establish and maintain relations with the poor. To a certain extent, Catholic engagement with the poor in my fieldsite was about accompanying them to recover their dignity, and certainly led to a greater standard and quality of life in the COVIFU housing cooperative. At the same time, dignity was also used as a relational concept, whereby consumption of surplus materials blessed by the early interception and intermediation of the acompañantes was regarded as more dignified than its posterior recovery from the waste stream. Even if, beyond classificatory regimes, it was all a matter of requeche.

Notes

1. 1. Uruguay was home to one of the most influential liberation theologians, the Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo, who stayed in the country during the dictatorship, writing articles calling for the release of political prisoners and the restitution of democracy (Aguilar 2008, 59).

2. 2. She described the Uruguayan dictatorship as a ‘civil war’, a position adopted by the right and related to post-dictatorship President Sanguinetti’s ‘theory of two demons’ (a thesis rejected by the left and human rights activists).

3. 3. The Argentine equivalent of clasificadores.

4. 4. Romero, Federica (Dir). 2010. Requeche, Montevideo: Calma Cine.

5. 5. Gatti, Daniel. 2013. La Vida en un Carrito. Brecha. 13 October. https://brecha.com.uy/la-vida-en-un-carrito/.

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