Leilane Menezes Rodrigues, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Communication, Media, and Journalism at Suffolk University. An award-winning human rights journalist for over two decades, she now brings that frontline experience to her scholarship, which critically examines the intersections of race, representation, and media power. Dr. Rodrigues is also a documentary filmmaker, currently pursuing multiple projects that explore immigration narratives in the U.S. and the archival preservation of Black media history in Brazil.

What can archival precarity, loss and historical erasure tell us about the structural and systemic conditions that have perpetuated racial inequality in Brazil? Dr. Leilane Menezes Rodrigues’ project “Our TV, Our Memory: Recovering the Lost Archive of ‘TV da Gente’ and its Significance for Black Representation in Brazilian Media” speaks to this phenomenon by setting out on a quest to find out what happened to the audiovisual archives of TV da Gente and in doing so, reconstructing the short-lived history of Brazil’s sole Black-owned television station.

The Media Studies Commission commends Dr. Rodrigues’ project for charting archival challenges and examining media histories of relevance and urgency to Latin America. Rather than exploring racial inequalities through the lens of archival representations, her project focuses on Black-owned media heritage and its interventions in racial politics across the region. The promised result is an understanding of how racialised violence, visible in archival imagery, is reproduced through practices of broadcast licensing and ownership, the politics of archiving and preservation and the forging of collective memory.

The project stands out for the way it grapples with archival precarity and loss by surveying existing archival traces on TV da Gente across personal collections, institutional holdings, digital repositories and press clippings, alongside generating new historical documents in the form of oral testimonies. The Media Studies Commission believe that Dr. Rodrigues’ quest to recover a television history at risk of disappearance serves as a powerful example of how academic research can contribute to the active preservation of forgotten or precarious histories. The Commission also note that the challenges, questions and methodologies at the core of the project have the potential to inspire further explorations of archival precarity, historical silences and erasures in media histories across Latin America.

– Dana Mustata, FIAT/IFTA Media Studies Commission Chair

Current Stage of Research

We have concluded the five interviews with key members of TV da Gente and are currently organizing the recovered archival materials into a structured Google Drive folder, which will eventually become a publicly accessible website. We are now transitioning into the documentary editing phase. Additionally, we are actively investigating the possibility of retrieving any surviving footage from Angola, where the station’s programming was also exhibited, adding a crucial transnational dimension to the project.

Discoveries So Far

Our research successfully located archives from the former production company responsible for the channel’s content, allowing us to recover materials from most of its shows. The archival materials span a broad spectrum of genres, ranging from news segments and culinary programs to talk shows, musical performances, and children’s content. On-air participants and interviewees included lawyers, artists, journalists, and a diverse array of other professionals. The visual archive we are now assembling constitutes a rich and multifaceted record of Blackness — encompassing discourses on fashion, politics, everyday life, and cultural symbols — as articulated by Black Brazilians themselves during this unique opportunity for narrative self-representation. We also discovered that the physical archive is far more fragmented than initially anticipated. This fragmentation makes the oral testimonies indispensable—not only for contextualizing and piecing together the collection but also for reconstructing the channel’s operational and cultural legacy.

Surprising/Unexpected Findings

Evidence and testimonies confirm that TV da Gente achieved greater on-screen diversity than any contemporary broadcaster, forging its own model of representation to counter the dominant narrative of Brazil as a predominantly white nation — exposing, in the process, the country’s deeply pluralistic reality. As researcher Tiago Vinícius observes in his interview for the documentary, “The Brazilian media system is the continuation of a historical whitening project… TV da Gente represents a rupture; it is practically a miracle that a Black person obtained a TV concession in Brazil.” The findings reinforce that public broadcasting concessions—a collective public good—have historically been concentrated among a few white families, making TV da Gente’s very existence a profound political and historical benchmark. Finally, its Afro-diasporic partnership with Angola, which we did not initially anticipate, reinforces the channel’s role as a truly transnational virtual quilombo.

Pablo Piedras holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. He is a tenured Associate Professor of Issues in Latin American Film and Audiovisual Studies in the Arts Program at the same institution, as well as an Researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). He also coordinates the Doctoral Program at the National University of the Arts. He has published numerous articles and books in Argentina and abroad. His main research interests include Latin American documentary cinema, film and memory studies, and the relationships between cinema, the cultural industries, and popular cultures. Since 2021, he has also worked as a film producer, contributing to films by Santiago Loza and Lucía Seles, among others.

Dr. Pablo Piedras’ project “Images Before Disappearance. Camera Rushes from Canal 9 News and the Archival Documentation of Argentina’s Disappeared (1972–1983)” is a testament to how an archival collection once on the brink of destruction makes vital contributions to public memory and human rights histories. Working with the Canal 9 archive preserved at the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires, Dr. Piedras’ projects researches camera rushes from television news broadcasts dating from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, the period coinciding with Argentina’s military dictatorship. The archival materials examined contain rare unedited footage of individuals who were forcibly disappeared during the dictatorial regime and for whom no other audiovisual documentation exists. The Media Studies Commission appreciate that the historical value of this archival collection is unique. Its value lies not only in preserving the public memory of repression during Argentina’s military dictatorship, but also in documenting human rights crimes and providing the families of those forcibly disappeared with rare surviving footage of their loved ones. The Commission was particularly impressed that the collection comprises news footage that was once discarded by Channel 9 and later recovered from a construction waste container by archivists at the Museo del Cine. 

Dr. Piedras’ project does so much more than solely researching the history of Argentina’s military dictatorship through the lens of a unique and once endangered archival collection. His research also actively focuses on documenting human rights crimes and providing archival evidence that can support reparative efforts for the families of victims. A broader motivation behind Dr. Piedras’ research is to return rare surviving footage of individuals who were victims of political repression to their families, as well as to human rights organisations. Such aims speak to the far-reaching public value of academic research into television archives. 

The Media Studies Commission were equally impressed that Dr. Piedras aims to corroborate his research into Canal 9 news rushes with research into human rights archives, and that this contextualisation of historical sources will be actively used to improve and enrich the metadata of the Canal 9 collection at the Museo del Cine. This is a project that grew out of a close collaboration between Dr. Piedras and the archivists at the Museo del Cine, and the Media Studies Commission highly praise this exemplary partnership between academic research and archival practice. 

– Dana Mustata, FIAT/IFTA Media Studies Commission Chair