Thainara Faria: Black and bisexual debuts as deputy – 06/03/2023 – Politics

Black, daughter of a builder and maid, Thainara Faria (PT), 28, elected state deputy in São Paulo, was 21 when she debuted in politics and was elected councilor in her city, Araraquara. In the first session, a councilor, referring to her, offered chocolate to colleagues.

Other racist and sexist attacks would become part of his routine in the Chamber. A politician told him that “now we can have a samba school”. Another, as she climbed the pulpit, said “I hope your skirt bursts”.

He was once denied water in the plenary. The city’s first black councilor, she also began to suffer criminal persecution on social media. “Slut”, “Monkey”, “Looks like a cleaning lady”, “Broom hair”, she read in comments.

The first and most difficult year of the mandate was also the fifth and last of the law course at Uniara (University of Araraquara) and the same in which he passed the OAB test, even before graduating. Tired of the attacks, she decided that she would hand over the position of councilwoman. As she prepared to speak, people from the black and LGBTQIA+ community held up a sign that read “Resist for Us”.

She cried and gave up giving up. “I reconfigured my energies, stopped looking at the attacks and started focusing on who needs me,” she tells the Sheetin an interview with Alesp (Legislative Assembly).

LGBTQIA+ support took place before Thainara came out as bisexual, which she would do in the campaign for re-election as councilwoman, in 2020, which she also won.

He chose the PT to join because the story of his life is linked to the party’s social programs.

“We’ve always been very poor and we only started to eat right after Bolsa Família”, he says. “My parents are separated, and my mother was beaten by partners throughout her life. She submitted to violence to provide a roof for me and my two brothers. She only got rid of that when she bought a house through Minha Casa Minha Vida.”

Finally, Thainara went to college thanks to Prouni, a program created by Lula in 2004 that offers scholarships to low-income students at private universities. “My college would cost around R$48,000. How is a family of a domestic worker and a bricklayer going to pay that?”

At 15, Thainara lived with an uncle’s family in São Paulo to take the Macunaíma theater course. She wanted to be a model and actress. “But the market for black people wasn’t cool,” she says.

“I gave up on that idea when I went to spend the end of the year at my house and saw that there was only a bag of rice and a liter of oil. I started working. I made truffles and sold them at school, I helped with a hot dog cart, I worked in store, bakery, beauty salon and, at college, I was a clothes bag.”

Thainara’s friend since high school, Gabrielle Abreu Nunes, 28, was part of the loyal group of truffle buyers. “She didn’t have to deal with the normal problems of adolescence, but with much greater difficulties due to the context in which she has always lived, on the periphery”, says her friend, a researcher in ecology at USP.

Gabrielle recalls that the class jokingly called her councilwoman. “She talked to everyone, teachers, students, from the back to the front where she sat,” she says.

Her interest in politics arose at the time when her mother, in addition to her job as a housemaid, started working as an electoral supporter, which Thainara started to do in her teens. “In 2014, I decided that I was no longer going to wave the flag and hand out flyers for others,” she says. “Especially because many politicians for whom we worked, after being elected, did not serve our interests.”

In 2016, when he ran for office, he had no money, but he knew how to campaign. “I did for myself what other politicians pay them to do for them”, says Thainara, who now has the support of Edinho Silva, one of the founders of the PT in Araraquara, today the mayor of the city.

Elected, she gained visibility beyond Araraquara by questioning the practice of reading the Bible in all sessions of the Chamber.

“I’m Catholic, almost a devout. But I chose not to read and explained in plenary why”, she recalls. “I said that, instead of the Bible, we had to read the Constitution there. The Chamber is the people’s house, and the people are atheists, spiritualists, Christians… A religion does not contemplate the mass”, he ponders. The video went viral. “Even Fátima Bernardes’ program showed it, it had a crazy repercussion.”

Thainara became close with Erika Hilton (PSOL-SP), the first black transvestite elected federal deputy in the country. Once, after an event in Araraquara, they decided to go get a tattoo together.

“Each one now has a tattooed giraffe, Ruth and Raquel”, jokes Thainara, in reference to the twins played by Glória Pires in “Mulheres de Areia” (1993).

The joke has a serious side: “I got a tattoo of a giraffe with black hair as a remedy for another tattoo I got when I was 16, of a Mexican skull with straight hair, like I used to. That hurts me, it’s a mark of racism in my skin”.

In college, he was part of the Nucleus of Afro-Brazilian Studies. “She was very active in the group’s meetings, events and research, and did her CBT [Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso] about legislation from an ethnic-racial point of view”, says Edmundo Alves de Oliveira, professor of legal sociology at Uniara, who was his advisor.

Thainara was elected with 91,388 votes, and her campaign is at the top of the official spending ranking of those elected to Alesp.

The collection registered in the TSE was R$ 1.4 million. The biggest donor was the national directorate of the PT (R$ 503 thousand), followed by José Seripieri Filho (R$ 300 thousand), who, in July 2020, was arrested for three days as a result of an operation that investigated payments in slush funds for Serra’s (PSDB) Senate campaign in 2014.

Founder of Qualicorp, the businessman confessed to the electoral crime and signed a plea agreement approved by the STF (Federal Supreme Court), which provided for the payment of R$ 200 million as compensation to the public coffers. At the end of 2022, Seripieri lent Lula a jet for his trip to COP27, resulting in criticism of the then president-elect.

About this donation, which was the subject of reports, Thainara says: “People try to make an anomaly something that happens in several campaigns and no one questions it. I am part of a group that went after collections and I am grateful for that. All the money goes to my campaign was collected within the legislation”.

Abilio Diniz, owner of Carrefour Brasil, is also among the donors of his campaign, with R$ 80 thousand.

At Alesp, Thainara claims to be “very willing to dialogue with the Tarcísio government [de Freitas, do Republicanos]”. “My will is not just to scream, fight and point out what’s wrong, even if I’m going to do that.”

His expectation is that the governor will detach himself from Bolsonarism. “Tarcísio was in the Dilma government, we can’t forget, so he has the ability to dialogue.”

According to her, anti-racist and LGBTQIA+ agendas “are fundamental”, but she intends to use this perspective for other issues. “I want to talk about this place of women, black, bisexual in the debate on economic and urban development, security, health and education.”

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X-ray | Thainara Faria, 28

She graduated in law from Uniara (University of Araraquara), has a postgraduate degree in constitutional law with an extension in economics. In college, she was part of the Nucleus of Afro-Brazilian Studies. Born in Araraquara, in the interior of São Paulo, she was a city councilor at the age of 21. In the last election, she was elected state deputy for the PT with more than 90,000 votes.