Women’s Work: Chica Da Silva, Leopoldina, and the Creation of Brazil

This paper deconstructs the telling of much-mythologized Afro-Brazilian Chica da Silva and Habsburg princess-turned-empress of Brazil Leopoldina who helped secure Brazil’s independence from Portugal. What do their histories, and the way they’ve been told in and beyond Portuguese America, tell us about Brazil in Atlantic and world history? What do they reveal about colonial and state-building challenges? How can we teach a survey through and with elite and marginalized women, whose voices—when they break through the record—have been ignored by or co-opted for state and world-historical narratives?

The presenter will also share and model instructional strategies for including Brazil in world history survey courses. Building and using biographies—in this case, through contemporary Portuguese language source material—can help advanced high school and undergraduate students better engage in historical methods. Chica da Silva, for instance, is often presented as a scandalous caricature or victim; the ways in which she secured freedom, status and fortune for herself and her children has been, at turns, sensationalized and submerged. But from biography emerges a layered story of labor, society, economy, and culture. Beyond this, the way in which Chica has been written in and out of the late colonial history serves as a historiographical reminder of women’s lives: their stories have been put to use when it served the state. Histories of Brazil have cast Princess Leopoldina as a martyr for a noble cause: by crossing the Atlantic to meet her future husband Dom Pedro I, encouraging him to break with Portugal, and by mothering his children and heir to the throne. Yet post-independence, and as Empress of Brazil, she worked to secure Brazil’s recognition on an international stage.