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.
Francisca lived mainly in Arraial do Tijuco (nowadays known as Diamantina) and was the daughter of a Portuguese man, Antônio Caetano de Sá and an enslaved African woman, Maria da Costa, who was probably from the Gulf of Guinea or Bahia.
[6] After being granted her freedom, Chica officially changed her name to Francisca da Silva de Oliveira in order to erase her history as a slave.
The house was adorned with many luxuries including an extensive garden, her own personal chapel, and furniture like bathtubs, armoires, mirrors and canopy beds, that were rare to households at the time.
Chica also presented herself in a very ostentatious manner in order to help differentiate herself from the other mixed[clarification needed] people in society.
[5] Sex was decisive to the relative facilitated access to freedom and concubinage with white men offered advantages to black women because, once free, they reduced the stigma of color and of slavery for them and for their descendants.
"[5] Currently, however, scholars maintain that she used miscegenation and her connections as a tool to achieve a higher social status, as did other African Brazilians at the time.
Historian Júnia Ferreira Furtado sustains that concubinage and marriage between white male and black female in colonial Brazilian society was a way found by the enslaved to change their social position.
However, as Furtado discloses, Chica attended brotherhoods exclusive to whites, as a way to try to fit into the status quo and be aware of its schemes against her and her people.
Historians view this as the main difference between the experience of Africans in Brazil and their counterparts in the United States[citation needed].
[citation needed] Although slaves didn't have any choice if the master or mistress decided to use them as sex objects, some were able to use the situation, especially in regard to their offspring who were part European.