Black, enslaved, young, mother of two and separated from her husband in the interior of Piauí. This is the profile of the first woman to practice law in the country, back in the 18th century, as made official in December by the Federal Council of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB). This month, recognition culminated with the installation of a bust in honor of Esperança Garcia at the national headquarters of the OAB, in Brasília. The symbolic act marked the conclusion of decades of historical rescue, but it also resulted from a political struggle by black lawyers, points out jurist Vera Lúcia Araújo. “There is a historical recovery, but this process is also due to political action by black men and women advocacy, in this situation especially, it is not something that comes from one hour to another”, says the lawyer, who is a member of the of the Human Rights Commission of the national OAB. The expectation is that the symbolic achievement, however, is a harbinger of more effective measures to increase the presence of blacks in the legal world, says Vera Lúcia. “For us, it is extremely exciting and rewarding to see this consecration. Now, we cannot remain only symbolic, it is necessary to have a materialization of this struggle.” For Vera Lúcia, the path to follow begins at the OAB itself. Despite the growing number of black lawyers, for example, today there is only one black counselor on the entity’s Federal Council, among the 81 full members of the collegiate. According to the jurist, the OAB should ensure compliance with quotas for the election of its directors, or for the choice of directors of the Federal Council, which has never been chaired by a black person. On the other hand, the OAB could also “use the representative power of Brazilian law and position itself in defense of a black jurist in the composition of the Federal Supreme Court”, says the lawyer. First petition Even so, the formal justification for the recognition of Esperança Garcia also derived from an arduous work of historical recovery, which began with the discovery, in 1979, by the anthropologist Luiz Mott, of a letter written by her on September 6, 1770 , addressed to the governor of the captaincy of Piauí. Inauguration of Esperança Garcia Bust during the Full Council Session – Photos: Eugenio Novaes/ OAB In the document, Esperança begged for measures to be taken against the abuses committed by her administrator, the captain of the ordinance Antônio Vieira do Couto, who subjected her and her young children to abuse physical treatment, in addition to prohibiting slaves from the Poções farm from confessing and baptizing their descendants. “The first is that there are great thunderstorms of blows to one of my children, being a child who made him draw blood through his mouth, I cannot explain that I am a mattress of blows, so much so that I once fell from the floor below; by God’s mercy I escaped. The second is me and my partners for confessing three years ago. And a child of mine and two more to be baptized”, wrote Esperança. She probably learned to read and write with the Jesuits who passed through Piauí in the 18th century. It is assumed that this also gave rise to her notions of law, since, even though she was aware of her precarious condition as a slave, she demonstrated that she knew that submission to Portuguese crown and the Catholic Church implied certain minimal prerogatives, such as the need to confess and baptize children. “Aware of her world and the limits that her condition as a slave could provide, Esperança Garcia used the strategy of the conquerors to defend her rights, gain advantages and, with that, (re)plan her destiny close to her children and her husband ”, says the Esperança Garcia Dossier, produced between 2016 and 2018 by a commission of jurists and historians. Allied to other records of the time, of people who interceded in the cause pleaded by Esperança, the document was recognized by the Sectional of the OAB of Piauí as a legal petition, for bringing all the necessary elements: addressing, identification, narrative of the facts, foundation in the law and order. This led the enslaved woman to receive the title of the state’s first lawyer, in 2017. It took five years of campaign until the Federal Council of the OAB approved the recognition of the document written in 1770 as a petition, and of Esperança Garcia as the first female lawyer in Brazil , in December last year. Previously, the post was occupied by Myrthe Gomes, who joined the law more than 100 years later, in 1899.
Agência Brasil
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