Latin-American Studies

In her book, Junia Ferreira Furtado comes up with a fascinating research on the study of the world of a freed woman of color from a small town in Brazil where former slaves, itinerant merchants, concubines and Portuguese administrators interact across cultural and social lines. She represents Chica da Silva who is a child from a mixed marriage between a Brazilian military noblemen and an African slave from Costa da Mina and Chica da Silva won her freedom by using her marital and social strategies. The story of Chica da Silver is neither  merely a personal  story of an individual woman nor the social history of a colonial Brzilian town but it rather provides a particular historic perspective of a womans cultural universe in which she inhabited, her agency, and those myths that were created around her in each given century. Chica da Silver for example came to symbolize an example of both the stereotype of sensuality and licentiousness, and racial democracy which was always attributed to the mullato and black female according to a popular Brazilian imagination.
According to Junia Ferreira Furtados myth of Chica da Silva is that marriage and concubinage between the white male and black female during the colonial Brazilian society was a means that was found by the slaves as the best way of changing their social position in the society and to escape from racial stigma that the slaves were attached to. In Brazil, Chica was used as a symbol for racial democracy. Many scholars have also recorded that she used Miscegenation to achieve the social status she desired as it has been happening with other African Brazilian slaves of the time.

The marriage between Chica da Silva and Joao Fernandes was regarded as a scandal according to the colonial society. This was due to the fact that the black Brazilian women of this time saw sex as the best way to facilitate access to concubinage and freedom while the white men offered advantages to these black women because once they were free, they could reduce the stigma of color and the slavery for both of them and their descendants. This is what Chica da Silva used and this made her a very successful woman of black origin. Chica da Silva was successful in fitting in to the white society and brought up her children and family. It is reported from the book that she also had slaves

Life was very poor for the African slave in eighteenth century Minas Gerais. They worked under very hard conditions and there was no freedom. Slaves were segregated from the white and were not allowed to mix. In the building of Estrada real, many people died as the road construction required a lot of labor. The slaves were regarded as the property of their masters who owned mines from where some of the slaves worked ( Laird, 56). There was color segregation and the black slaves were not allowed to mix with the whites. There were places designated for the whites where black slaves were not allowed.

Later in the century, some black slave women started marrying whites and they started getting some privileges with their children. Those from these mixed marriages started seeing themselves as they were becoming whiter than their counterparts and this led to more segregation among the blacks and those from mixed marriages.

Slaves worked for very little money and in some instances, slaves were not paid at all and were only use the produce from the firms as source of food. Some slave owners lowly valued their slaves while others were relatively well treated by their masters. It is a fact that slaves were roughed up to accomplish their jobs through canning and all sorts of abuses. This highly affected the self esteem of these slaves who were handled like animals.