Words by Smiley Team
On a Saturday afternoon in early November, about 30 people are watching a documentary inside a shack in the heart of Bushwick, a post-industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn. They are all canners – people who make a living redeeming empty cans and bottles, five cents apiece. Although they all got up before the sun and have worked in the cold for hours, no one looks like they’re about to fall asleep. All eyes on the screen. The short film, streamed from YouTube and projected on a white sheet, is about a workers’ cooperative in Argentina.
The screening was organized by Ana Martínez de Luco, a Catholic nun who says she prefers to work “under the sun, not the Vatican”, and calls herself a street nun.
As the documentary finishes, she addresses the audience: “Do you now have a better idea of what a cooperative is?” People nod. “You’ve got to organize, we risk being kicked out soon, it looks like there’s no room for us,” she says in a tone of voice that barely disguises her anger.
Sure We Can, the redemption center Martínez de Luco co-founded more than a decade ago, must move somewhere else for the fifth time. Their lease in Bushwick – for which they currently pay $5,302 a month – expires at the end of February and the owner wants to sell the lot. According to Martínez de Luco, the asking price is $3m. “That’s the equivalent of 60m cans,” she jokes.
Roughly 11m pieces were redeemed at Sure We Can in 2018, brought here in shopping carts by hundreds of canners – more than 500, according to the center’s data. Surrounded by industrial buildings turned into lofts, Sure We Can is a 12,000 sq ft outpost of poverty in one of Brooklyn’s hippest neighborhoods. The workers’ voices make up a cacophony of diversity: Spanish predominates, but you can also hear English and Chinese. Every once in a while out pops a word or two in Polish. Or the cluck of a chicken.
“This here’s my second home,” says a 74-year-old woman from the Dominican Republic who’s known in the community as Morena. Next to her, an elderly woman from Beijing is moving her hips to the sound of Latin music.
Original Article by Francesca Berardi. Source: The Guardian
