“Dreams of Boyhood Came to My Memory”: Time and Civilization in the Construction of Brazilian Mountaineering and Outdoor Sport

The history of mountaineering and outdoor recreation in Brazil (as elsewhere in the Global South) has been excluded from scholarly literature—but these sports play an outsized role in local and national collective memories. This essay investigates the ways in which mountaineering teams and clubs in twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro coterminously reinvented landscape, space, and national identity through the creation of archives and the propagation of narrativized commemorations of climbing. Textual and photographic archives initiated in the 1910s dovetailed with decades-long efforts to foment the shared sense of a glorious, domestic legacy of altitude-based athletics. Analyzing this process raises important issues not only for the history of mountaineering and adventure sport, but for the intertwined histories of memory, sport, and spectatorship. This is doubly true given that, absent the audiences associated with other sports, record-keeping and mythification served as the principal means for rendering mountaineering public and incorporating it into local, regional, and national memories.

My research draws on the heretofore unexamined archives of four outdoor recreation associations in Rio, whose collections offer a unique opportunity for thinking about how the mountain- and wilderness-based athletes of early twentieth century Brazil conceived of and carried out their principal objectives: (1) generating, publicizing, and glorifying a national community of adventure sport; and (2) incorporating that national community into interwar and Cold War iterations of patriotism, often based in Eurocentric standards of civilization and theories of progress (and thus dependent on inscribing memory into racialized and gendered timelines).