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The following paper analyzes the recruitment of militias and volunteer legions, composed of foreign residents, in order to defend Montevideo between 1838 and 1851 during the Guerra Grande. This process created a very complex transnational space with considerable political and cultural consequences. On the one hand, to justify the armament of the foreign population, the local authorities plotted a cosmopolitan rhetoric which presented the legions as symbols of the fight between humanity and civilization against despotism and universal tyranny. On the other, the daily dynamics of these militias generated intense social disputes between the combatants of the different "fatherlands", threatening to provoke a "civil war" inside the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assert that there was cross - breed between the African groups that arrived to Rio de Janeiro in the XIX century, that means, that the cross - breed is not just the result of the links between black and white people but also the product of the relation between people coming from the big regions of Africa. In order to explain this phenomena we appeal to the high forced mobility of African people to Rio de Janeiro that generated a pattern of exogamy filogenetic that was saw as a cultural endogamy, and the social demanding over the ethnic origin in order to participate in the work market implied that the slaves had to make different and various attributions of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]