ABSTRACT
In his 1967 work on Race Mixture in the History of Latin America, Magnus Morner called attention to the fact that “many individuals of more or less dark skin were able to climb the social ladder because of their military merits” displayed during the Independence wars and after. 1 Citing several individuals of mixed race who reached high rank in the armies of the national period, Morner pointed to military service as one of the more promising avenues of upward mobility for black men in nineteenth century Latin America. On several subsequent occasions he has repeated this theme and called for more research on the role of black men in the Latin American military, and particularly on military service as a path of upward social mobility. 2
