Taking care of others’ waste: Racialised and gendered bodily politics of household recycling infrastructural labour in Cartagena, Colombia

In the pursuit of sustainable urban development, household waste recycling has become a major concern. Carried out in the intimacy of the home, beyond official waste collection infrastructures, this form of waste infrastructural labour often goes unnoticed. In Cartagena, Colombia, where socio-economic and racialised inequalities are sharply spatialised, household recycling in elite urban spaces largely depends on the racialised and gendered labour of domestic workers and waste pickers. Drawing on theoretical engagements with embodied Urban Political Ecology and feminist decolonial Latin American scholarship, the paper explores how bodily politics of household recycling labour are entrenched in racialised and gendered hierarchisation of labour, and historical articulations of coloniality, eugenics and disposability. Based on 11 months of ethnographic research, the paper argues domestic workers and waste pickers’ embodied infrastructural waste labour is woven to care labour in constituting a concealed waste infrastructure in the city. In particular, their anonymous and devalued embodied infrastructural labour extends household recycling infrastructures into the homes in elite urban spaces, further embodying and enacting forms of infrastructural violence in relation to intimate household spaces. Overall, the article draws attention to the historical continuities and afterlives of racialised violence and patriarchy in shaping new forms of concealed infrastructural labour and blurring distinctions between infrastructural labour and care work. The article concludes that pluralising accounts of embodied UPE from different epistemic locations are necessary for understanding the concealed bodily politics and temporality of endurance underpinning waste infrastructures.