While some Portuguese mestizos had asserted themselves in society through marriage with high-status Portuguese, as was the case of Dona Simoa Godinho, of Santomense origin (sixteenth century), professional prestige, for the playwright Afonso Álvares and the painter Domingos Lourenço Pardo (seventeenth century), or religious status, for Mother Cecilia of Jesus (seventeenth century) - it was in the late eighteenth century that two operations, whose antagonistic complementarity deserves to be mentioned, took place. Gradually overcoming the harshness of prejudices, many 'mixed-race' children of white and socially recognized parents, obtained social and financial support to enter Portuguese universities or clergy. While family protection, money, literary or professional prestige and careers in public administration were factors of some dilution of somatic stigma, they also caused headaches for political leaders of the following centuries, to the extent that they managed to acquire positions of arbitration in the Portuguese relational fabric. Much criticized by different sectors and personalities of Portuguese society, the mulattos, considered blacker than white, were able to strengthen their position in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, despite the emergence and consolidation of scientific theories that legitimized the hierarchization of races, geographies, and civilizations. From Pai Paulino to Fernanda do Vale (known as Preta Fernanda), Honório Barreto, Sousa Martins, Gonçalves Crespo, Costa Alegre and Virginia Lent to many other intellectuals and great professionals of the 1900s, it can be shown how important was their intense participation in Portuguese collective life. This, however, did not eliminate the ferocity of value judgments from society concerning the 'half-breeds'. In 1925, the poet Mário Saa stressed that the 'influence of black blood in Portugal, is in many people, [...] the halfbreeds dominate in Portugal by population element more than in any other nation in Europe