If white women have encountered silencing throughout history, imagine the extent of the silencing of black women.
Today's story is a way of giving visibility to women's history, but also honoring the memory and identity of black people.
Esperança Garcia lived as a slave on the Algodões farm, in Piauí, Brazil, where she learned to read and write from Jesuit priests.
Years later, she was transferred to the Poções farm. Separated from her family, she lived amid mistreatment and abuse.
To ask for help, she wrote a twenty-line letter by hand, reporting her situation and asking Gonçalo Lourenço Botelho de Castro, then president of the captaincy of Piauí, that her daughter be baptized, that she could practice religious confession to the priests and that she could also return to the farm where the rest of her family was.
It is believed she was 19 years old when she wrote the letter.
This letter is considered the first petition written by a woman in Brazil.
In November 2022, the Federal Council of the Brazilian Bar Association granted the Piauí native the title of First Female Lawyer in Brazil, which previously belonged to Myrthes Gomes, who joined the law in 1899.
At a time when resistance strategies were unfortunately escapes, suicides and murders, she challenged the system by claiming what was her right according to the laws of that time.
She did not cry out to stop being an enslaved woman, but demanded what the law assured her: baptism, confession and the possibility of starting a family. Their arguments are strategic to convince the authorities.
Even without specific training, she writes a document with all the basic elements of a petition: address, identification, narrative of facts, basis in current law and a request.
There is no indication that she received any kind of response. However, in a list of slaves on the Algodões farm, her name appears indicating that she had managed to return. This document states thats he was 27 years old. The date of her death is still unknown.
The letter took 209 years to be found. Historian Luiz Mott found it when he carried out his research for his master's degree, at the Public Archives of Piauí.
There are no photographs or paintings that give details of what her face would have looked like. Despite this, telling Esperança Garcia's story is understanding how racism and sexism deny the right to one's own story.