Hills, Dales, and the Jaguaribe Valley

Abstract

This chapter is a commodity biography of drought-resistant carnauba wax from northeastern Brazil and primarily concerns the fabrication of wax cylinders and 78-RPM records in the early years of sound reproduction. The wax, which was sold to the nascent recording industry in the United States to be molded into cylinders or pressed into wax masters, became a profitable industry for Ceará, enabling many people in the region to acquire the very technologies of mass mediation that used the local wax. Most generally, the chapter shows the circulation of this natural resource, as well as the conditions for workers involved in the commodity chain from wax to mass-mediated sound.