A Fiorito Piba in Congress: past and present of Natalia Zaracho, the deputy who cartoneous since the age of 12

Natalia entered the Centennial Building of the Nation Congress, raised her head and was surrounded, almost stalked, by the presence of marbles of clear tones and monumental columns. Había pasado tantas veces por afuera arrastrando con el carro una torre de cartón, le había dedicado tantas miradas embroncadas a esa cúpula, que se quedó quieta y se preguntó a sí misma, en silencio: “¿Qué hago acá?”.He looked around and there were men and women in a suit, some greeted her, they gave her the "welcome".She smiled and responded with kind shyness, brand new deputy, inside her blue cartonera work clothes.

The impulse, almost scenic panic, took his body and his mind.He felt that he did not belong to this legislative, comfortable and formal universe, that the castle of the thread and mystery where he just arrived was expelled.He went through his head disappear forever. Tomar el colectivo, cruzar el puente La Noria y volver ya mismo a su casa, a Villa Fiorito, a tomar mate con los viejos y las viejas del centro de jubilados del barrio.

Fear however a click lasted.So many times he got angry because the word of the poor had been thrown in there, so many he brought he heard when they spoke on behalf of the excluded deputies and deputies who never passed or near a popular neighborhood, that a torrent of blood courage invaded her,The fear of the investiture disintegrated and Zaracho did not go home or dynamited any bridge.That day he swore his bank.Some do it for God. Ella lo hizo “por la patria cartonera y por la lucha de los pobres en esta tierra”.

“Cómo me voy a ir si vinimos a patear el tablero y traer esa realidad acá”, ríe con cierto pudor un mes después de su asunción, cuando recuerda aquel momento, sentada en un sillón de la pequeña oficina que le corresponde, en un piso 11 con vista al Palacio, bajo dos pequeños cuadros Perón y de Evita, el hombre y la mujer cuyos nombres siempre flotaron como presencias en la casa que hace casi 40 años sus padres levantaron sobre un basural en Villa Fiorito.

The conviction of Natalia Zaracho, 32, is personal. Es diputada.It is poor.It is cartonera.He is a social militant and political reference of his people. Por eso su compromiso es colectivo.It is the voice of many who support their representation.When his voice trona, it is the echo of the 10 thousand men and women who walk from here to there throughout the AMBA joining cartons and those of all the excluded and informal workers of the country. “Tenemos que ser más acá nosotros”, invita la diputada del Frente de Todos.

Natalia travels in time to 2001 to hold her conviction. Ella es, en sí misma, una cicatriz de la crisis política, económica y social que estalló en diciembre de aquel año.Two decades ago more or less the age that their children are currently dilated (15) and Iara (13).The mirror works to see over time. “A mí me robaron la posibilidad de pensar, vivíamos en el día a día, eso no puede volver a pasar con los chicos de ahora”, desafía.

When everything exploded, twenty years ago, the Table of the family of Natalia Zaracho also exploded.The social earthquake disorder everything at home and in the entire neighborhood. Juan, su papá, chaqueño, que ya no vivía con ellos en la casa, fue despedido de la fábrica metalúrgica donde era operario y se dedicó a sobrevivir con changas. María, la mamá, perdió sus dos trabajos como empleada doméstica en cuestión de semanas, apenas entrado el 2002.

The disaster first hit the neighborhoods like Villa Fiorito.In a short time they were all in the same.Without anything.On the edge of the precipice.And everyone did the same as Maria.They went out to look for the key that allowed them to survive and feed their children. Una peregrinación de nadies en busca de algo para comer, para vender, para sostener la existencia.

Maria went for a walk to find food or gather some clothes. Caminaba con sol, con lluvia, con frío, hasta que se hacía de noche y al otro día volvía a empezar. El impulso desesperado de salir para sobrevivir al poco tiempo derivó en un oficio, también desesperado: la reventa de cartones y plásticos para reciclar.And that naturalized a system: learn which streets give better results, what are the neighborhoods, the best hours to go and return.

Natalia saw him, lived it and suffered it in his own way.It was a girl when everything collapsed and social collapse transformed family dynamics.The neighborhood had bitten.Maria could not leave Natalia at home, in the custody of her older brothers, all those street hours.It was too dangerous and, at the same time, more hands could bring more volume of cartons.And more cartons were something else on the table.

At age 12, Natalia tried not to leave school.Could not.But what he stopped learning on one side learned it in the other. Rápidamente comprendió que la organización aliviaba el peso de la angustia.By decision or need of his mother, he joined the cartoneo that every day at three in the afternoon began about twenty families in that area of Fiorito.An exodus aboard a truck towards the opulent neighborhoods of the City of Buenos Aires that was ending at midnight, when there was no house, office or restaurant that would not have left the waste of the day on the sidewalk.

As the children did not support the kilometers of walk, Maria left Natalia with other boys in a safe corner of the capital.Zaracho remembers having spent many days and many nights at the corner of Rodríguez Peña and Las Heras, full recoleta.The wait was not idle, much less playful. Los niños usaban el tiempo para separar los materiales que iban trayendo en bolsones los cartoneros del barrio.

“Lo que hizo la crisis de 2001 fue desorganizarnos como familia.There was no way to plan anything.We arrived at one in the morning home, we downloaded the bags, we bathed, we ate.The next day we woke up at 11 and you had to start separating the bags to go to work.Thus I was free for fouls at school.I tried in several but I couldn't continue, ”he recalls.That hole was like a more of the various tattoos that decorate his body.He did not forget. Y en 2019, finalmente, Zaracho terminó la primaria gracias al plan FINES.

Natalia crossed the end of childhood, adolescence and adulthood with the same routine she started with her mother in the post 2001 fire.He separated cardboard, white paper, plastic, metals, saved clothes or pulled appliances that he could sell at the neighborhood fair, in the bartering, which were larger every weekend.The task of children and adolescents was also finding the places where they could give them food that was left over.

“Teníamos identificado dónde nos daban pan o pollo e íbamos a buscar a esos lugares.It didn't happen to us because the next day we had to morpho. Éramos chicos con muchas responsabilidades.And on Mondays, Wednesday and Friday we were going to look for the milk from a neighbor of the neighborhood ”.They knew they couldn't be late because they distributed a limited amount of noodles, oil or sugar. “Lo necesitábamos, no teníamos nada”, aclara, a una distancia sideral de la romantización.

"I didn't realize inequality at that time.All I wanted was to go home.I burned part of childhood and adolescence like that, I felt rare in the city, I met the Obelisk going to card, before I had no idea what was on the other side of General Paz, ”he says.

“Pero cuando ves la película completa veníamos colgados de un camión, en muy malas condiciones, bajo la lluvia, veníamos arriba de todos los bolsones, te pegaban los cables, los árboles, estábamos expuestos a la falta de empatía de los otros”, dice Natalia y no se refiere solo a la indiferencia, a sentirse invisible o ajena en el desierto de la ciudad, como escribió Albert Camus. “Me corté un montón de veces abriendo bolsas con vidrios o jeringas, esas cosas que uno no se da cuenta en su momento y hoy lo pensás y es muy feo y muy grande la desigualdad”, vuelve al presente Natalia.

Im disgusted in myself...I'M Searching YouTube Videos On How To Wash Grapes.#Adulting

— J o r g e1V a l l e s Thu Jul 28 22:48:05 +0000 2016

Tiempo después, una noche en alguna esquina porteña Natalia se cruzó con un muchacho que le dijo que se llamaba Juan Grabois y que, junto con unos amigos, traía mate, comida e ideas para transmitirles a los cartoneros y cartoneras sobre cómo organizarse. Los invitó a reflexionar sobre lo que no veían: que cartonear era un trabajo tan digno como cualquier otro.Helped them lose shame.

“Mucha gente descreía de esas palabras, yo también al principio, pero empezamos a armar la primera cooperativa, Amanecer, con cartoneros de Fiorito y Villa Caraza.And it worked.Today we have more than 4.000 affiliates, there are seven secretariats that order the work and situations of the people: gender, drug use, health, social work, ”says Zaracho, with a screenshot of how it started and how far the idea of that boy Juan came tocorners next to mate and invoices.

It wasn't so easy. “Nos representaba la canción de Damas Gratis, ¿la tenés? Esa que dice ‘son todos unos chorros’, que dice ‘se robaron todo, son capaz de vender a su mamá'.For us, politics was in 2001 ″, laughs when he remembers the difficulties between the cartoneros and the people of the town to believe in someone's word of outside.

When he began to understand that the collective organization gave concrete results and improved day to day, Natalia slowly modified his perspective on politics and militancy.Then, already entered the first decade of the 2000.Cooked the snack with fried cake and cooked mate to distribute between the kids.And there, again, militants arrived from what from 2018 would be the Great Homeland Front, with the leadership of Juan Grabois.

At first, again, disbelief ruled Natalia's intuition. “Yo me cagaba de risa, era muy peleadora, decía ‘estos vienen acá a lavar su conciencia y después vuelven a su casa y tiran la cadena y tienen agua, prenden la tele, tienen sus comodidades’.I was very fighting, telling you ‘you leave and we are still here '”.

Natalia did not believe those young university students who tried to accompany the organization in the neighborhoods.It ran 2008 and she was already a mother of dilan.With some Raocho reticence he had joined the Cooperativa de Cartoneros but did not want military beyond the dining room.“I was very angry, very unbalanced, like most neighborhood residents. Nos cagaron tantas veces que cuando te empiezan a hablar decís... Pero después me puse a pensar que estos pibes que venían al barrio elegían venir, elegían estar militando, pensar espacios recreativos, talleres, centros culturales, y la verdad que me interpeló.I saw them with commitment, ”he says.

In 2014 that idea was corporated in a health care room in Villa Caraza, the neighboring neighborhood to Fiorito, in Lomas de Zamora: “Gise, a doctor I met in Fiorito in the cooperative, one day he summoned me in his office in Caraza,I was going to give me some brochures to study health prevention to give the Cooperative's colleagues.I sat down and was waiting and did not attend to me anymore because although there were two more doctors came the kids from the neighborhood and said they only attended with Gise.I was used to that if the room attends until five, at half past four there was no one left.And it was seven and Gise kept receiving kids ".

A reflection, something, made it look at Gise."I started listening to another look because I was very defensive all the time, with all the things that had happened to me," he admits.Gise, as recordois, gave him another look.He invited her to the meeting of women in Mar del Plata in 2015 and thus, in addition to seeing the sea for the first time, Natalia observed the universe of organized women, popular feminism. “Antes no me cabía mucho. Me parecía que era un feminismo de clase media, o alta, que no nos interpelaba”, explica.

Something else woke up at that time in the body and mind of Zaracho.Immediately he attended the popular economy workshop that dictated, among others, recordois.Thus, he conceptualized what Natalia left under the government of her intuition. “Me di cuenta que nosotros inventamos nuestro trabajo, hoy somos trabajadores, me dejó de dar vergüenza pensar que soy cartonera.The popular economy is inventing your work to subsist, ”he reflects.

Thus, Natalia realized that to transform her reality she needed politics.That was not necessarily bad.Zaracho joined the meetings, the assemblies and quickly saw in Natalia a combative, reflexive speaker, with a projection of struggle. Se sumó a los espacios de discusión de Nueva Mayoría, dentro del Frente Patria Grande, y era capaz de decirle en la cara a cualquiera: “Dejen de hablar por nosotros, eso que vos decís acá a Fiorito no llega”.What bothers Natalia most of a certain sector of politics is to underestimate the poor.

It was not easy to be assumed as a political militant.It cost her a lot to identify because she saw that the militant was the one who arrived in the neighborhood from outside.And one day of 2019 Gise called her on the phone and asked where he was born.She replied: "At Evita de Lanús hospital".He asked why.Gise said: "Because we want you to be a candidate".Zaracho did not understand.Or did not want to understand.First he thought it was for councilor in Lomas."National Deputy," they replied.Launched an automatic "no"."I was very shit.They made us believe so much time that we are not prepared. Era muy canchera de pico en las asambleas pero me asusté”, sonríe.But he stayed thinking.

Gise said: "If you always claim a place for you, don't talk to you".They argued for a while, Natalia asked him for a day to think about it and then said yes.He entered the 26th place on the list headed by Sergio Massa.Last year, for the departure of Daniela Vilar to the Buenos Aires government, a place for her opened.And assumed the bank in December and until 2023. Representa la agenda que se sintetiza en las tres T: tierra, techo y trabajo.He militates for a universal salary, for all those like her who tried to look.

- What changed in your head since 2001?

- Nos dimos cuenta que ya no alcanza con tirar piedras. El salto a la política tiene que ver con nuestra evolución y con entender que de arriba no va a caer nada, la teoría del derrame y la de la meritocracia, eso de las oportunidades, no existe.We have to discuss that, dispute places of power, not to be able to transform reality.

- What generates you to listen to those who talk about merit?

- Para los que hablan del mérito nosotros somos un ejemplo. Pero estamos hablando de falta de oportunidades y no es lo mismo para ellos que para nosotros, por más que le pongamos voluntad.Today I am a deputy for a collective struggle, but it is not the same for a kid of the town that has no opportunities.It will not have the same ease of arriving as Pampita's husband.It is very easy to talk when you never lacked anything.

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