Enedina Alves Marques

Enedina Alves Marques (13 January 1913 – between 20 and 27 August 1981) was a Brazilian engineer and teacher who worked for the Paraná State's Department of Water and Energy. Upon graduating from the Federal University of Paraná in 1945 with a degree in civil engineering, she became the first black woman to receive an engineering degree in Brazil and the first woman to receive an engineering degree in Paraná State.

Early life and education Enedina Marques was born in 1913 in Curitiba, the capital of Paraná, and was the only girl among the ten children of Paulo Marques and Virgília Alves Marques, who came to Curitiba in the 1910s as part of the larger Afro-Brazilian migration from the countryside to Brazil's cities following the abolition of slavery in 1888. The family settled in the Ahú or Portão neighbourhoods, where Virgília worked as a washerwoman and housemaid.

By the 1920s, the Marqueses had become close with the family of Domingos Nascimento Sobrinho, a mixed-race police officer and major whose household employed Virgília and boarded her children after she separated from her husband. From 1932 to 1935, together with Isabel, Marques worked as a teacher in several cities of Paraná, including Rio Negro, São Mateus do Sul, Cerro Azul, and Campo Largo.

Between 1935 and 1937, Marques came back to Curitiba to complete , a preparatory course at the time required for teachers, at the Ginásio Novo Ateneu. She taught at the Escola de Linha de Tiro in the Juvevê neighborhood during this time, and offered literacy classes out of a rented building in front of the Colégio Nossa Senhora Menina. She lived in the home of Mathias Caron, a builder, and his wife Iracema in exchange for providing domestic services. In 1938 or 1939, she took a complementary course in pre-engineering at the Ginásio Paranaense, today the Paraná State College, (Portuguese: Colégio Estadual do Paraná) at night while living at the Carons' house. Marques lived with the Carons until 1954, and the family has become a significant source for the biographical scholarship that exists about her early life.

In 1939, Marques wrote to the director of the Faculty of Engineering of the Federal University of Paraná (Portuguese: Universidade Federal do Paraná, UFPR) to request registration for the qualification exams required to enroll in a civil engineering degree.

Death and legacy In 1981, Marques died of a heart attack at her longtime home in the Lido Building in downtown Curitiba, at the age of 68. She never married and had no immediate family, and it took at least a week to find her body. Diário Popular, a local tabloid, depicted her as an eccentric older woman and a complete unknown, provoking anger among the faculty and students of Paraná's School of Engineering, who rallied around her historic legacy.

In 2006, the Instituto de Mulheres Negras Enedina Alves Marques, in Maringá, was founded and named in her honor.