When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Brazil's runoff on October 25, 2026, one of the loudest celebrations came from a federal deputy from São Paulo whose life story reads like a map of everything Brazil's far right wanted to defeat. Erika Hilton is Black, she is a travesti, and she grew up poor on the edge of a megacity. A little more than a decade ago she was sleeping on the street. Today she sits in the National Congress.
Her rise is not only a personal triumph. It is a window onto a country that elects trans women to office while also leading the world in the killing of trans people, and onto the way race decides who among Brazil's trans population is most likely to die.
From Franco da Rocha to the Streets
Erika Santos Silva was born on December 9, 1992, in Franco da Rocha, in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, according to her official congressional biography. She grew up on the periphery, in an evangelical family, raised by her mother, aunts and grandmothers. As a teenager, living in Itu in the interior of the state, she was taken to church so that relatives could try to "cure" her. At 15 she was thrown out of the house. She lived on the streets and survived through sex work, as she told UOL after her 2022 election.
That path is painfully common. Trans activists in Brazil estimate that most trans women are pushed out of their homes young and that sex work becomes the only income open to many of them, because schools and employers close their doors first. After about six years, Hilton reconciled with her mother, returned to school and entered university to study education.
A Black Trans Woman in the Halls of Power
Hilton entered politics through student and movement organizing and joined the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). In 2020 she was elected to São Paulo's city council as the most-voted woman in the country's largest city. In 2022 she won a seat in the federal Chamber of Deputies, sworn in on February 1, 2023. She and Duda Salabert of Minas Gerais became the first openly trans women elected to Brazil's Congress.
In Brasília, Hilton has refused to be a single-issue legislator. She has pressed for the rights of trans people, but also for Black workers, poor women and people on the periphery, including a high-profile campaign to end Brazil's grueling six-day work week. Her politics follow a simple idea: the people at the bottom of the hierarchy see the whole structure most clearly.
In October 2026 that campaign became law. The Senate approved the constitutional amendment ending the six-day work schedule on October 14, by 75 votes in both rounds, with only one senator, Hamilton Mourão, voting against; Congress completed the approval the next day. The amendment cuts the working week from 44 hours to 40 and guarantees two days of rest without cutting pay, according to Folha de S.Paulo and the BBC. The proposal was authored by Hilton herself, and it landed eleven days before the runoff, a concrete deliverable for the left to point to in the peripheries where this election was decided. Her own re-election made history in the bargain: she finished with 1,596,472 votes in São Paulo, the most votes ever cast for a woman running for the Chamber of Deputies and the second-highest total in the state, according to G1.
Why Being Black and Trans Changes Everything
Brazil has made real legal gains. In 2018 the Supreme Federal Court allowed trans people to change their name and gender on documents without surgery or a judge's order, and in 2019 it ruled that homophobia and transphobia must be punished under the law against racism. Yet law on paper has not stopped violence in the street.
According to the National Association of Travestis and Transsexuals (ANTRA), at least 80 trans people were murdered in Brazil in 2025. That was a drop of about a third from the year before, but it still keeps Brazil at or near the top of the world list. Of the 57 victims whose race was recorded, at least 40, or 70 percent, were Black (preta or parda). Black trans people have made up the majority of victims every year since ANTRA began this count in 2017, according to its 2025 dossier and CNN Brasil.
The pattern is no accident. Black Brazilians are already the large majority of homicide victims nationwide. Add transphobia to racism, and the risks multiply: family rejection, school dropout, street-based sex work, police suspicion and the absence of protection all fall hardest on Black travestis. In Afro-Brazilian communities, where evangelical churches have grown fast in the same peripheries Hilton came from, many trans girls face rejection inside the very institutions that sustain their neighbors.
An Old Story: Xica Manicongo and Black Gender Freedom
Trans life in Brazil did not begin with modern politics. Historians and activists honor Xica Manicongo, an enslaved Central African in sixteenth-century Salvador, Bahia, as the first recorded travesti in Brazil. Denounced to the Portuguese Inquisition for wearing women's clothing, she was forced to dress as a man to escape death, according to historian Luiz Mott's research in the Inquisition records. Brazil's trans movement now calls her a founding ancestor.
Her story matters because it places Black gender diversity at the start of Brazilian history rather than at its margins. Colonial and religious authorities, not African cultures, treated gender difference as a crime. When Hilton speaks of herself as part of a lineage, she is pointing to this history.
Visibility as Protection, and as Target
Visibility has a price. Hilton has received death threats and racist and transphobic attacks online and in Congress, and has had to rely on security at events. Her colleague Marielle Franco, a Black, bisexual councilwoman from a Rio favela, was assassinated in 2018. That killing hangs over every Black LGBTQ+ politician in Brazil.
Still, the election results of 2026 show why her presence matters. The 10-million-vote turnaround that kept Lula in office was built in the Black peripheries and the Northeast, by voters who are poorer, darker and younger than the national average. Hilton speaks to and for that coalition. Her career is proof that the people most often cast out of Brazilian society can help decide its future.
As the Challenge Collapsed
Within a day of the runoff, the far right's effort to overturn the result had fallen apart. Flávio Bolsonaro dropped his request to annul the election after the official count showed that only about 34,300 votes were cast after 5 p.m., against Lula's winning margin of roughly 4.43 million. He said he would instead bring an abuse-of-power case against the president. His ally Nikolas Ferreira told supporters to stay off the streets and called the chance of annulment "almost zero." The head of the electoral court, Kassio Nunes Marques, whom Jair Bolsonaro himself appointed, publicly accepted the result. And on Justice Alexandre de Moraes's order, the Federal Police required Flávio to hand over his passports after he visited his father, who is serving his sentence for the coup plot.
Screenshots from Bolsonarista chat groups, widely shared by Brazilian commentators, captured the mood of the base: some talked of fleeing to Paraguay, others said they would neither camp outside army barracks nor wait for Donald Trump, and one feared a "second January 8." The contrast with Hilton's coalition could not be sharper. While the movement built on one family's grievances splintered, the Black, poor and peripheral voters who carried Lula over the line kept organizing.
What Comes Next
For trans Brazilians, the next fight is about turning court rulings into daily safety: jobs, school, housing, health care and police who protect instead of threaten. For Black Brazil, it is about recognizing that its trans daughters are part of the community, not outside it. Erika Hilton's life, from the streets of Itu to the floor of Congress, is a reminder that survival itself can be a form of leadership.
HistorianSpeaks will soon return to these questions closer to home with a series on trans lives, law and race in Puerto Rico.
Further Reading from HistorianSpeaks
Black Brazil and the 2026 election - Black Brazil at the Ballot Box: What the October 25 Runoff Means for Afro-Brazilians - The 10-Million-Vote Turnaround: How Afro-Brazilian Mobilization and Grassroots Networks Rescued Democracy in Brazil - Seeds of Marielle: Black Brazil, the Favelas and the 2026 ElectionBlack Thread · Members
Black LGBTQIA+ history - Hidden in Plain Sight: Black LGBTQIA+ Pioneers Who Shaped American Freedom
Black trans lives - Podcast interview: All Black Lives Matter: Ka’milla Harris, Trans Activism and Coding - #ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER: An Interview with Bianca Debonair - #ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER: An Interview with Jamilynn Armstrong - #All Black Lives Matter: An Interview with Yasmin "Yazzy" Bratz - #ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER: An Interview with Ms. Mikalya Denise Robinson - "They Said It Was Because I Am Trans" - Living One Dance at a Time: Meka Shabazz - A Reflection: Black Trans People and the Pandemic, TS Candii - The HIV Epidemic and Black Trans Communities, Matthew Wilmot, PhD - A Discriminatory Wave: Black Trans People and Anti-LGBTQ Laws - Marsha P. Johnson, Black Trans Activist and Stonewall Activist - Sylvia Rivera, Puerto Rican Transgender Activist - Transparent Figures: Jessica Watkins and Space Exploration - Named, Not Numbered: The Global Toll on Black Trans Lives - Struggle, Sanctuary and Sovereignty: Black Trans Women in America - Black and Trans: Counting a Community That Is Rarely Counted - The Killing of Alexa: Anti-Trans Violence in Puerto Rico - Rights on Paper: Trans Law and Daily Life in Puerto Rico - Since 1898: How Colonial Rule Shapes Trans Lives in Puerto Rico
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