Nhe’ery sings.¹ An assemblage of rhythms, sounds, and tones form Nhe’ery—the wind, the singing of birds, the steps of insects upon leaves. Nhe’ery sustains all forest beings—including its trees, sounds, shadows, fog, rivers, rocks, air, ground, underground lives, and spirits—in reciprocity. As Guarani Mbya spiritual leader and filmmaker Carlos Papá says, knowing how to walk in Nhe’ery demands a harmony with each surrounding element: the wind, the path of ants, the trail of boars.² Nhe’ery is also Ka’aguy.³ According to Papá, Ka’aguy Rupa means the existence of an atmosphere upon and below the trees that flows as an energy through the forest and the forest floor. Nhe’ery is the space where Nhanderu created everything the Guarani need for nourishment and living, with no dependence on external supply. With its fog and humidity, fabricated by twenty thousand different plant species and made up of trees up to fifty metres high and roots up to eighteen metres deep, Nhe’ery is where the spirits bathe.⁴

A thick, interwoven network of infrastructures hold the singing of Nhe’ery. As Guarani Mbya leader Timóteo Verá Tupã Popygua elaborates in his book A Terra é uma só, Nhamandu created the xingyre (armadillos) as one of the first inhabitants of yvy (Earth).¹ The xingyre excavated the first hole in yvy to raise their cubs.² Armadillos are savvy ground engineers. With their long and sharp frontal claws, they can build a five-metre-deep underground tunnel in about twenty minutes. At night, when the xingyre leave their tunnels to find food, another seventy species co-inhabit the tunnels, where they can rest without the risk of being chased. Xingyre tunnels repeat all over Nhe’ery‘s original 1 300 000 km2, as underground networks of multispecies care.

Interwoven with xingyre‘s tunnels are those of leafcutter ants. Experts in building chambers for growing fungus, their main food source, leafcutter ants maintain complex underground networks for mobility and food supply. Their tunnels collaborate with the growth of plants, making the soil more penetrable by roots. Leafcutter ants find most of their food in the litterfall, a ten-centimetre-thick layer on Nhe’ery‘s topsoil. The litterfall assembles a deep ecosystem, with microbial lives, leaves, branches, and barks, decomposing and fabricating humus. More than one million beings inhabit one square metre of ten-centimetre-deep litterfall. Xingyre and leafcutter ant tunnels are two among thousands of Nhe’ery‘s ground-underground infrastructural webs.

In the 1500s, colonizers renamed Nhe’ery to Mata Atlântica or “Atlantic Forest,” a biome in “Brazil.”¹ Translating Nhe’ery (the space where spirits bathe, where the xingyre build their tunnels, and which sustains the Guarani way of life) to Atlantic Forest (a source of resources for juruá² colonial extraction) was one method through which colonialism promoted the dispossession of the Guarani Mbya and other-than-human lives from their territories.

In October 1976, surrounding Jaraguá Peak, earth scrapers muted Nhe’ery. From 1976–1978, machines demolished xingyre and leafcutter ant tunnels to build Rodovia dos Bandeirantes.

Inaugurated on 28 October 1978, the Rodovia dos Bandeirantes opened for traffic in the middle of the Brazilian military dictatorship, with two roadways, six lanes for traffic, and a capacity for seventy thousand vehicles per day. Precisely nine hours after construction concluded, then-Brazilian president Ernesto Geisel and his successor João Batista Figueiredo travelled for three hours along the 88.46 kilometre road, symbolically activating it for public use.¹ DERSA (Desenvolvimento Rodoviário S/A), the public company responsible for the road construction, distributed 2,200 invitations for the inauguration. The event culminated at the Obelisco Diamante dos Bandeirantes—a forty-metre-high concrete tower—where, accompanied by the São Paulo orchestra, Geisel untied the ribbon to officially open the Rodovia dos Bandeirantes for car traffic.²

The road’s namesake, the Bandeirantes, were sixteenth and seventeenth century settlers who organized expeditions to expand the Portuguese empire. Departing from São Paulo de Piratininga, as the region that would become the city of São Paulo was known in the 1550s, the Bandeirantes walked through Indigenous trails to chase and enslave Indigenous peoples for the production of sugar, transport of agricultural products, and building of Portuguese villages.¹ The Bandeirantes enslaved and displaced Guarani, Tupiniquim, Guaianá, Tabajara, Tamoio, Temiminó, Guarulhos, and Caiapó do Sul communities, families, nations, who had been living and traveling for centuries through these lands. The name Rodovia dos Bandeirantes remains vastly criticized by Guarani activists and leaders who denounce the colonial violence that the road maintains. Rodovia dos Bandeirantes pays homage to genocidal colonizers.

Since the 1500s, mobility infrastructures have concretized settler-colonial expansion in Brazil. As the slogan for the São Paulo mayor, governor, and Brazilian president Washington Luís’ 1920 electoral campaign for governor declared: “to govern is to open roads.”² Rodovia dos Bandeirantes, as part of a larger network of state and federal roads, fragmented yvyrupa.³ The Guarani concept of yvyrupa determines the amplitude of the Guarani Mbya traditional territory. For the Guarani, yvyrupa means a world without frontiers, and the refusal of frontiers imposed by nation-states.⁴ It was also the name of the Guarani territory before the arrival of settlers. On this terrestrial platform, Guarani kinship is structured by spatial mobility as a fluid migration—through continuous networks and exchange of news, seeds, rituals, and plants for traditional medicines.⁵ Entangled as human and other-than-human mobility infrastructures—such as Indigenous trails connecting Guarani villages, which opened small paths in reciprocity with forest infrastructures—these mobility networks coexisted without deforesting surrounding Nhe’ery. As the Guarani Mbya Xeramoï Nelson Florentino says:

If, for the Guarani, the terrestrial platform is one unbounded, roads are as harmful as nation-state borders. Car-centred roads—like Rodovia dos Bandeirantes—crumble yvyrupa.

The first step in the construction of the Rodovia dos Bandeirantes was to negotiate the expropriation of 1,463 properties and open up fourteen million square metres to build the road.¹ The second step, as one DERSA engineer declared, was to remove more than two hundred “interferences”: “oil and gas pipelines, water mains, electricity, telephone transmission, and railway lines.”² Eerily, the Atlantic Forest was not mentioned in the list of interferences to be removed from the road’s path, erasing the deforestation process from the report. Rodovia dos Bandeirantes’ construction was also the removal of 51.5 million cubic meters of earth and forest.³ In some cases, the report strategically identified Atlantic Forest as “swamp areas,” which justified the forest removal. Technical architectural and engineering drawings depict the Atlantic Forest as empty, erasing xingyre tunnels and the Guarani Mbya families that inhabited Jaraguá Peak forest, and facilitating the invisible and uncounted expropriation of Indigenous and other-than-human inhabitants.⁴

Rodovia dos Bandeirantes performed the role of territorial financialization. A report by DERSA stated that Rodovia dos Bandeirantes’ main goal was to create new development poles along the road margins.¹ One part of the construction, nearly 21 000 metres in length, was planned to cross in the middle of Guarani villages surrounding Jaraguá Peak, dividing houses into different sides. Meanwhile, São Paulo’s government created a zoning law to regulate the road area, opening space for commercial zones, service zones, and areas destined for logistics.

In the years following the road’s inauguration, the noise of cars and trucks, bus lines, warehouses, and real estate high-rises replaced Guarani houses, forest, and areas for fishing and hunting. Real estate companies sold areas long used by the Guarani to private buyers, transforming ancestral Nhe’ery into pieces of land for sale.² Thiago Guarani Karai Djekupe, architect and Guarani Mbya leader from the Tekoa Yvy Porã in the Jaraguá Indigenous Land, describes how, before the road construction, his family walked freely:

Built on a razed portion of the Atlantic Forest, the road interrupted Guarani and other-than-human mobility flows, such as those of boars, ants, bees, and armadillos, to open space for automotive, human, and juruá (non-Indigenous) mobility. Ten-centimetre-thick Nhe’ery‘s litterfall, with more than one million inhabitants, was sterilized by a ten-centimetre-thick monoculture of asphalt. Despite the road’s claim of being the most modern and safest infrastructure, it is only safe and humanized for a select portion of the population.

The Guarani communities in the Jaraguá Indigenous Land have long organized against the colonial violence of road-making.¹ At the beginning of the 1980s, groups organized by Guarani leaders, spiritual leaders, and xondaros and xondarias (youth Guarani who are on the front line of political actions and resistance) articulated movements pressuring the government to demarcate Indigenous Lands.² Protests in 2013 and 2019 obstructed access to the Rodovia dos Bandeirantes, using the same infrastructural networks that divide their territory as tactics of resistance. According to Thiago Guarani Karai Djekupe:

This resistance also comes in the form of promoting multispecies roadmaking. In the Ytu and Yvy Porã Guarani villages in the Jaraguá Indigenous Land, Guarani communities have been reconstructing bee infrastructures. As of 2021, Guarani villages in the Jaraguá are raising twenty-eight beehives and seven different species of bees without sting. In return, the bees make aerial roads, pollinating areas as far as five to ten kilometres from Jaraguá Peak.¹ The long-term activism and resistance of the Guarani Mbya in São Paulo, and the making of Guarani infrastructures such as networks of seed exchange between Guarani villages and practices of reforestation, are the main reason that the Atlantic Forest still exists in the city.

The final activity before the Rodovia dos Bandeirantes’ inauguration was its cleaning. Roads are continuously being maintained. As one of the engineers responsible for the road construction described:

Construction problems and unpredicted system failures exist in the everyday process of roadmaking. Pruning lawns, removing debris, hand trimming, removing cutting material from the truck, covering the roadside with grass plates, cleaning and unclogging gutters, ditches, slopes, and checking conditions of inspection boxes keep the road traffic flowing. Road travellers depend on workers who keep road signs clean. Seeing a road from the perspective of the workers who build and maintain it foregrounds how roads are fragile and brittle. Reckoning the daily making and maintenance of roads also demystifies them as fixed, settled infrastructures. Instead, roads can be seen as infrastructures constantly being remade and therefore open for contestation.

How many spatial perspectives and cosmologies are left as blind spots in architecture and urban planning practices when considering only juruá standards? As DERSA’s report from Rodovia dos Bandeirantes construction has shown, creating an architectural drawing implies choosing what to depict, and what to erase. When architects, urban planners, and engineers erased the presence of the Atlantic Forest from “technical drawings”—sections, plans, and perspectives—in order to build the Rodovia dos Bandeirantes, they also designed the dispossession of Guarani and other-than-human lives, lands, and infrastructures. Architectural drawings design not only the static form of a building, but also several layers of relations: labour on the construction site, earth removal, transportation of materials, sewage and electricity connections, maintenance requirements. A line in a plan is physically situated in specific territories where complex relations between bodies, cultures, affects, and political interests keep co-existing and colliding. If architectural drawings also serve to negotiate the maintenance of lives and territorial relations with a stack of agents (public and private interests, zoning laws, and court decisions), how can architectural documents uphold the maintenance of the Atlantic Forest, Guarani land rights, and multispecies care?

The substitution, demolition, or interruption of Indigenous and other-than-human infrastructures for a juruá infrastructure that facilitates the movement of cars, trucks, and buses enables the continuation of Brazilian colonial violence in the present. Nonetheless, Guarani communities in and beyond São Paulo reclaim their territorial paths and remake Guarani geographies every day, proposing alternative infrastructural models for and beyond cities.

This essay has advocated for urban planners and architects to learn from multispecies infrastructures. Each forest inhabitant holds their own set of thick relations. The entanglements of human-bee interactions as stewarded by the Guarani communities in Jaraguá, the tunnels dug by armadillos, and the fungi chambers built by leafcutter ants are a few spatial practices that can provide clues as to how architects and urban planners can design alongside ongoing collaborative infrastructures—infrastructures of making with.¹ If, as Brazilian president Washington Luís said, “to govern is to open roads,” what other governments could take place if multispecies roads were at the centre of infrastructure and urban planning practices? If roads are axes of influence on the city that will grow around it, what other cities could be built around multispecies roads? No infrastructure is built, maintained, or functions without day-to-day collaboration. Complicating the boundaries of terms such as “road” and “infrastructure” opens space for roads to exist beyond automotive monocultures, as collaborative infrastructures of care.