This article analyzes the aspirations of middle-income white and freed black families to achieve social recognition through ecclesiastical studies and entering the priesthood in Cartagena de Indias between 1750 and 1810. Based on primary sources from the General Archive of the Nation (Colombia), from the General Archive of Simancas, and from the Archive of the Royal Chancery of Valladolid (Spain), this article studies the creation and operation of the seminary of San Carlos Borromeo, as well as the aspirations of these families to access education in a context in which tensions and hierarchical privileges prevailed for racial and stationary reasons. It is shown how in Cartagena at the end of the Colonial period the external pressures and social conflicts opened spaces in institutions (church and militias) so that those middle sectors could position themselves, and how those institutions channeled those demands to not allow the pressures to be translated into challenges directed to the social order, negotiating a certain social mobility within institutional channels.