The Palimpsestic Time of Brazil's Mediascape
BY GABRIELA MAYES
It hasn’t even been three decades since I last sent or received a telegram. The grooves rainfall left in the pink dirt felt like canyons to my small body. I was six, walking what felt like a tightrope in between those channels, the four blocks to the post office feeling longer than the fifteen minutes it took my mom and her two children to walk there. It felt anticlimactic—the line was so long, the message so short. We received telegraphs too, I remember the yellow and blue of Brazil’s postal service logo, with faint orange highlighting the text, messages feeling terse and clipped, stripped of our many pronouns and affectionate diminutives that would have added too many characters.
The first electric telegraph line arrived in Brazil in 1852, connecting the emperor Dom Pedro II’s palace to the army’s general headquarters. Lines started crisscrossing the continent-sized country after the Paraguayan War in 1864. A decade later, Brazil had its first transatlantic connection, inciting a veritable boom in newspapers, which now could publish news all the way from Europe with a news cycle delay of less than 24 hours—before, letters and newspapers carrying news arrived in Brazil by steamship, taking between 15 to 40 days to reach the country.
But what remains in much of the North American and European imaginary about Brazil’s telegraph system is more fantastical. Theodore Roosevelt’s Brazil was a wild land of peril, of a force of nature that was only matched by Marshal Cândido Rondon: “Colonel Rondon immediately showed that he was all, and more than all, that could be desired.” As Roosevelt narrates in Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914), Rondon’s telegraph commission achieved unprecedented feats: they single-handedly connected the most isolated parts of the Earth to civilization. During their joint expedition, Roosevelt and Rondon would traverse over 2,500 miles, much of it unmapped. But over his decades of exploration, Rondon traveled some 14,000 miles, most of which were uncharted and untroddeneaded by “civilized man,” and built over 3,000 miles of telegraph lines across Brazil’s interior. Wooden posts and cables now brought the heart of extreme wilderness into contact with mustachioed men in uniforms who conversed in Morse code. This infrastructure ushered in what Roosevelt saw as a new age of progress—they also thought they had finally connected uncontacted indigenous peoples to the rest of civilization. Man conquering nature and other men, at the heart of which we found media infrastructure.
Claude Lévi-Strauss was less enthusiastic about the Rondon Commission’s efforts in Tristes Tropiques (1955). What he found was evidence of man’s conceit and fitting failure: the telegraph line was in disrepair, “it became useless as soon as it was set up, it sags between posts which are not replaced when they collapse, through having been either eaten away by termites or destroyed by Indians [sic], who mistake the characteristic hum of the telegraph wire for the buzzing of a hive of wild bees at work.” In other places, vining plants relentlessly reclaimed every structure in their domain, props upon which they could grow, flourish, remake what man made after their own image, wires “hooked on to nearby shrubs.” These ruins made the erratic ambitions and punishing failures of colonial progress all the more visible, the force of nature all the more extreme. The forest consumes communication lines: infrastructure doesn’t just break down but gets actively reclaimed, rewritten by the environment itself.
The Rondon telegraph is a picture of the living ruins of media in Brazil, much like what Beatriz Jaguaribe has called the “modernist ruins” of Brazilian modernism, of our own brand of alternative modernity. And yet, the excavation of these living, modern ruins, particularly of media ruins, reveals something about the nature of the mediatic and mediated experience of life at the margins of Western modernity. In the first quarter of 2024, 490,000 telegrams were sent in Brazil, most of them sent through the Brazilian postal service’s web portal. But you can still walk up to a brick-and-mortar Correio, wait in one of their infamous lines, and post a telegram, paying cash, debit, or credit. The recipient gets their blue and yellow paper telegram within four hours.
I remember the unfinished clay bricks and the gray cement in between them that surrounded me in the church annex in an incorporated township some 35 miles from the heart of São Paulo, closer to the monkeys that we’d sometimes see on nearby walls than the skyscrapers of Avenida Paulista. We were inside those walls before they were ever finished, years of naked brick eventually giving way to decay before they could ever see paint. I was six when my family started going there. I started helping the Bible school teacher use their old mimeograph right away. I forgot about the unfinished walls and was consumed by the bright yellow and the strong smell of alcohol as I rolled the mimeograph’s handle and watched sulfite paper come out with the purple-colored lines I struggled to stay in between as I colored.
One year later, I got my first desktop computer. I was entering commands on the MS-DOS terminal in between drawing naïf pictures of modest houses with haloed suns wearing sunglasses. My short, crooked fingers and palm could barely cover the top half of the giant gray mouse my parents had purchased.
By the time I was ten, I was coding my own websites. One of them featured my poor Portuguese translations of content I found in early Web 2.0 websites in English. I was trying to build a community around the deity of so many kids back then, Harry Potter. Nothing else that drove me to angry tears than the dial-up connection dropping, a common hazard when you lived across the street from a tropical rainforest reserve. From an early age, I learned to coexist with a different temporal logic, one dictated by where leaves grow. To this day, the various layers of cables running on the back of my childhood home disappear into masses of greenery, narrow and broad leaves sprouting from trees, shrubs, climbing vines, ferns, tens of shades of green swallowing the polyethylene-coated copper wires. The forest carries its own palimpsestic rewriting of human communication networks.
The iPhone didn’t come out until the year after one of my blogs had caught the eye of an editor at Brazil’s largest teen magazine, and I got a writing gig there. By then, I’d learned to save documents every five minutes in Word—procured with a street peddler’s license number—since power went out nearly every time it rained (and by God, did it rain). It wasn’t just power outages—our media ecology was entangled with hydrological cycles. The magazine, a cultural touchstone of girlhood for decades, fell apart in the 2010s, only to be reborn as a digital-only zombie in the 2020s to a similarly dubiously alive readership.
I was born in Brazil in the 1990s and have been up close with technologies that are considered obsolete for Millennials in the West but were part of everyday life for much longer for Brazilians. Class had something to do with it, too—I wager the wealthier churches in the tree-lined boulevards of São Paulo proper had a Xerox machine. Today, I develop reluctant intimacies with large language models, lest one be left behind in this information processing zeitgeist. It feels absurd that I learned Python and developed my own machine learning scripts for distant reading—all that effort leading nowhere but to my own edification. Coding feels obsolete.
But the obsolescence is relative and artificial. I have living memories of telegrams, their dotted lines, how we would carefully unfold each missive. Media systems and practices still exist simultaneously, in varying levels of use, disuse, and decay. Are these technological shifts felt even more acutely for people like us, who live in these palimpsests, because they are layered? The linear narratives of technological “progress” never captured much beyond Western modernity’s hubris. They certainly don’t capture the palimpsestic reality of how media works.
There is no clean slate in the materiality of history; nothing gets erased. Older infrastructures linger in memory, under the leaves, cataphylls, stems of philodendrons. We come into our mediascape always already in the shadow of palimpsestic transformation. We live in the ruins and renewals of media systems. What happens when we stop thinking about technological “progress” as catching up and start asking what palimpsestic time and mediascapes teach us? What forms of knowledge do we get when we zero in on the media ruins that remain visible and active simultaneously? What if we attend to these contact points rather than seeking clean slates? Some of us are not lagging—we’re just living in timelines that contract and expand differently. The palimpsestic time of Brazil’s mediascape is not about the past buried under the new, but the simultaneous pulse of telegrams, smartphones, TikTok videos of people deep in the backlands—all still legible, all still alive on so many registers.
Works Cited:
Jaguaribe, Beatriz. “Modernist Ruins: National Narratives and Architectural Forms.” In Alternative Modernities, edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. Duke University Press, 2001.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Atheneum, 1984.
Roosevelt, Theodore. Through the Brazilian Wilderness. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914. https://books.google.com/books?id=lWwCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PP11#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Sá, Dominichi Miranda de, Magali Romero Sá, and Nísia Trindade Lima. “Telegraphs and an Inventory of the Territory of Brazil: The scientific work of the Rondon Commission (1907–1915).” História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos 15, no. 3 (2008): 779–811. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-59702008000300011.
Schmidt, Sarah. “The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable in Brazil.” Pesquisa FAPESP 338 (April 2024). https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/the-first-transatlantic-telegraph-cable-in-brazil.
Silva, Mauro Costa da, and Ildeu de Castro Moreira. “A introdução da telegrafia elétrica no Brasil (1852–1870).” Revista da SBHC 5, no. 1 (2007): 47–62. https://www.sbhc.org.br/arquivo/download?ID_ARQUIVO=82.
Veloso, Victor. “Após quase 200 anos, telegrama cai em desuso, mas ainda é usado no Brasil; saiba mais.” CBN (Rio de Janeiro), May 18, 2024. https://cbn.globo.com/brasil/noticia/2024/05/18/apos-quase-200-anos-telegrama-cai-em-desuso-mas-ainda-e-usado-no-brasil-saiba-mais.ghtml.
Gabriela Mayes Gabriela Mayes is Director of Graduate Initiatives and Innovation in the School of Humanities and Associate Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. A Brazilian writer and scholar, her recent essays and poetry appear in The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Northwestern University.
