Xica da silva biography

Francisca da Silva de Oliveira (known as Chica da Silva), was.
A Brazilian woman who became famous for becoming rich and powerful despite having been born into slavery.
Chica da Silva (or spelled Xica da Silva), was a Brazilian woman born into slavery, who went on to gain her freedom and become a powerful and well-known member.

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Francisca da Silva de Oliveira (known as Chica da Silva), was born enslaved and raised in Tejuco (today's Diamantina), in the captaincy of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Chica obtained manumission and social prominence, becoming an icon of Brazilian mulatto power and Brazil’s so-called racial democracy.

Chica was born between 1731 and 1735 in a small village near Tejuco. She was the illegitimate daughter of the African slave Maria da Costa and Portuguese Captain Antonio Caetano de Sá. The baptismal record referred to Francisca (no surname) as parda (of lighter skin), and she and her mother were slaves of the black freedman Domingos da Costa. At a young age, she was sold to Portuguese doctor Manuel Pires Sardinha of Tejuco. Pires Sardinha fathered Chica's first child, Simão, while she was still enslaved.

In 1753, Chica was bought by João Fernandes de Oliveira, who had just arrived in Tejuco to administer the lucrative diamond contract won by his father. Chica and Fernandes soon began a long-term relationship and he granted her freedom that December. Fr

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Chica da Silva

Brazilian freed slave (c. 1732–1796)

This article is about the biography. For the film, see Xica da Silva.

Francisca da Silva de Oliveira (c. 1732–1796), known in history by the name Chica da Silva^[1]^[2] and whose romanticized version/character is also known by the spelling Xica da Silva,^[2] was a Brazilian woman who became famous for becoming rich and powerful despite having been born into slavery. Her life has been a source of inspiration for many works in television, films, music, theater and literature. She is popularly known as the slave who became a queen.^[3] The myth of Chica da Silva is often conflated with the historical accounts of Francisca da Silva de Oliveira.

Biography

Francisca da Silva de Oliveira was a parda woman born in Vila do Príncipe (nowadays Serro), in the north of the state of Minas Gerais, in Brazil between 1730 and 1735. Not unlike many other regions in Brazil, in this region the slave population outnumbered whites by a large margin.^[4] People in the town made

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Chica da Silva without an X

Forget all you think you know about Xica da Silva. Beginning, by the way, with her name: Chica, in actual fact, Francisca da Silva, mulatto, the child of a black woman and a Portuguese man, born between 1731 and 1735 (date uncertain) in the diamond mining region of the hamlet of Tejuco, bought and freed by the diamond contractor João Fernandes de Oliveira, with whom she lived 16 years and had 13 children. The sensual black woman who would elicit howls from her Portuguese lord and horrify society is a myth invented in the 19^th century and reappropriated, in various forms at various epochs, each interested in its own vision.

Getting to know Chica with “ch” is to discover that the would-be “racial democracy” in Brazil is a myth, just as groundless as that slave herself who was a queen. “Chica would frequent the white elite of the city and all the white brotherhoods of Tejuco and, when she died, she was buried in the cemetery of the Church of St. Francis of Assis, a privilege for the well-heeled whites. All this proves t