Chica Da Silva Essay

Indigenous people have been oppressed throughout history and in terms of stratification, if you are a women you also experience higher discrimination. Indigenous women have suffered greatly, losing their culture and identity and have been subjected to a devaluation of their beauty, forced to succumb to the colonized characteristics of beauty in order to be accepted. Chica da Silva was a slave who climbed up the social ladder by marriage to João Fernandes, a Portuguese explorer and slave owner. While Chica da Silva was able to use her gender and race to rank up in society, misogynist values were prevalent in her freedom. Not only this but, upon her marriage, she lost her black identity and assimilated to the values of the elite, or in this

explores what is beautiful in the salons of Brazil. Women usually come into these salons asking for their curly hair to be fixed. The problem with this, is that you can not fix something that is not broken, however, these women are taught to believe that the hair they were born with is not worthy enough, because of the colonial standard of beauty. These internalizations come from many sources such as an underrepresentation of curly haired women in media, which in turn ingrains into the minds of people who pass it down to younger generations that the qualities that are not European should not be embraced. Not only is this detrimental to their esteem of the women affected but it goes deeper and develops a sense of inferiority, limiting them from believing they can not achieve greater or that they will never be worthy enough.

Although this normalization of Colonial standards is not directly used to rank up in the society as in the case with Chica da Silva, it is indirect. For example, curly hair (a hair texture more dominant in minorities), is deemed to be unkempt, especially in a professional setting such as the work place or a job interview. On the other hand, straighter hair does not provoke similar reactions. If one loses future employment because of his or her “unruly”, it can be assumed that something as simple as hair, can prevent one from climbing the social