Prologue

THROUGH HISTORY’S CRACKS

IN 1909, the fastest way to make the three-thousand-mile journey from Mexico City to Manhattan was via the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México’s Aztec Limited. New York–bound passengers boarded the train in the evening at Buenavista Station, located just a short streetcar ride away from the Mexican capital’s bustling central plazas. After picking their way through the vendors who thronged the station, offering everything from newspapers to tamales, ticketholders settled into all the comforts that first-class travel at the dawn of the twentieth century could provide: fully stocked library, smoking room, buffet car serving multicourse meals, and Pullman sleepers with private compartments and beds. As the train steamed its way north, and night gave way to the first light of a new day, the vista rolling by the windows slowly began to shift. In place of colonial cities with baroque cathedrals and cobblestone streets, passengers could glimpse haciendas with lowing herds of cattle and long rows of agave plants, then the dusty, far-flung villages, rugged mountains, and forbidding deserts of the Mexican North.

Near noon on their third day aboard the Aztec Limited, travelers reached the international borderline. Here, the twin settlements of Ciudad Porfirio Díaz and Eagle Pass faced one another across the river known alternatively as the Rio Grande and the Río Bravo del Norte, depending on whether one followed US or Mexican practice. Despite such squabbles over terminology, for much of the nineteenth century, the residents of these isolated communities had interacted more with one another than with the outside world, shuttling back and forth across the shallow, blue-green waters dividing their respective nations via a flat-bottomed ferry. With the coming of the railroad in 1882, however, this venerable ferry service found itself supplanted by the new iron bridge that enabled that marvel of the industrial age, the steam-powered engine, to complete the journey from Mexico to the United States in just a few revolutions of its piston-driven wheels. The railroad remade the geography of Eagle Pass and other border towns along the Rio Bravo del Norte such as Laredo and El Paso in other ways, too. Almost overnight, these remote outposts at the periphery of the nation were transformed, in the language of the day, to “gateways” between North America’s two “sister republics.”

For the passengers aboard the Aztec Limited, crossing the border was at once routine yet momentous. After the train journeyed across the bridge spanning the Rio Grande and pulled into the one-story depot on the eastern edge of Eagle Pass, agents of the recently created US Department of Commerce and Labor, dressed in their regulation dark blue uniforms with brass buttons, climbed aboard to inspect the passengers and their luggage. Agents evinced no interest in narcotics like heroin, marijuana, or cocaine—all legal in 1909—but sought instead imported delicacies: in an era of high tariffs and no income tax, the federal government raised the bulk of its revenue through duties on luxuries such as lace, silk, jewels, watches, and cigars.

Next, in a measure that spoke volumes as to the border’s role in establishing personal identity as well as national territory, these same agents compiled a “report of inspection” on all incoming passengers, detailing each arrival’s name, place of birth, occupation, and final destination. The United States would not require passports until 1914, so rather than focusing on reading one’s documents, this procedure hinged instead on reading, as it were, one’s person: determining the truth of an individual’s stated identity through language, dress, physical traits, and other clues. On ordinary passenger trains, agents exercised particular vigilance against Chinese or Japanese laborers—who in an effort to evade the United States’ restrictions on Asians often disguised themselves as Mexicans—as well as immigrants considered “anarchists,” “paupers likely to become public charges,” or the possessors of “loathsome or dangerous” diseases. But on a luxury train like the Aztec Limited, catering to well-to-do businessmen and upper-class tourists, agents more often than not took individuals’ declarations of identity at face value.

On the morning of March 14, 1909, however, a tall man with penetrating brown eyes and carefully groomed mustache, attired in the latest fashion—spats, top hat, tailored three-piece suit, gold watch chain and jeweled fob draped across a powerful barrel chest—caught the eye of authorities in Eagle Pass. Like the others on the Aztec Limited, the passenger had begun his journey from Mexico City in a first-class Pullman. Once he crossed the border into the United States, however, a new question arose. What race was he? For despite his elegant appearance, his skin had a somewhat swarthy tone—and, unlike Mexico, the Texas of 1909 possessed segregation laws, designed to limit contact between blacks and whites in everything from schools, restaurants, libraries, graveyards, and hotels to railroad cars.

When asked, the newcomer insisted that he was a Mexican entrepreneur, on his way back to his office on Wall Street after negotiating the purchase of several rubber plantations in his homeland. His name, he offered, was Guillermo Enrique Eliseo—which, for those who might have trouble with foreign pronunciations, could be translated into English as William Henry Ellis. Moreover, as an ethnic Mexican, he was legally white and not subject to Texas’s segregation statutes.

At least a few on the train, however, had caught wind of half-whispered rumors circulating along the border that, for all his obvious wealth and sophistication, Eliseo might not be the well-to-do Mexican he claimed to be. Could it be that his olive complexion was a product not of a Hispanic background but rather of a covert African American one? Dismissing such assertions, Eliseo refused the conductors’ attempts to relocate him to the “negro coach” after the Aztec Limited reached US soil. Only once the train crew summoned the local sheriff, charged with enforcing Texas’s segregation statutes, did Eliseo grudgingly oblige—but not before vowing to all within earshot that he would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if necessary, to sue the railway for the humiliation of forcing him to ride in the “Jim Crow” car.

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WHO WAS GUILLERMO Enrique Eliseo? Such was the question many found themselves asking at the turn of the last century as this dapper yet enigmatic figure flitted in and out of an astonishing array of the era’s most noteworthy events—scandalous trials, unexpected disappearances, diplomatic controversies—most linked in one way or another to Latin America. Uncertainties about his ethnicity did not confine themselves to his 1909 border crossing at Eagle Pass. During his years in the public eye, commentators proffered a kaleidoscope of possibilities. The New York World observed that Eliseo “has the looks and dash of a Spaniard and speaks several languages.” Denver’s Evening Post asserted that Eliseo was a “wealthy Mexican”—in fact, “without doubt the wealthiest resident of the City of Mexico.” Others maintained that he was “of Hawaiian blood” or “a Cuban gentleman of high degree.” Editors at the Kansas City Star, however, cautioned that “the stories of his Hawaiian ancestry are not to be credited,” while an equally suspicious correspondent to the Baltimore Sun discounted the rumors that Eliseo was of “Cuban, Brazilian, Mexican and no one knows what other Latin-American extraction.” Concluded the New York Sun: “Just where [Eliseo] came from no one hereabouts seems to know.”

My introduction to the riddle of Guillermo Eliseo and what contemporaries termed “his life of romance and adventure” came through the records of the US State Department. Reading through old consuls’ reports from Mexico, I stumbled across a long-forgotten diplomatic exchange from the 1890s concerning Eliseo’s attempt to resettle thousands of African Americans on Mexican haciendas. Many in the United States and Mexico alike believed that this effort presaged a mass migration of Southern blacks to Mexico, setting in motion a reconfiguration of labor conditions and race relations that would have dramatic consequences for both nations. As officials struggled to make sense of a movement that seemed to emerge out of nowhere, they wondered most of all about the elusive individual behind this audacious scheme. With little more to go on than mere conjecture, however, the State Department’s investigations soon trailed off, leaving most of the puzzles connected to Eliseo unanswered.

Faced with a century-old mystery, one that conjured up a borderlands rife with mistaken identities, outrageous rumors, and unexpected migrations from North to South, I resolved to unravel Eliseo’s story myself. I soon found, however, that over time this once-famous figure had slipped through the cracks of history into oblivion. Eliseo’s efforts to obscure his background had, it seems, succeeded all too well. “Mystery,” observed the Los Angeles Times in 1904, “hides the greater part of [his] life history.” The truths, half-truths, and outright fabrications swirling around him frustrated most attempts to write a study of him, and in at least one case, family members, anxious to avoid being linked to such a disruptive character, apparently destroyed papers relating to him. But Eliseo also slipped through the fault lines that run through our ways of imagining the past. Because the historical discipline and nationalism have often worked hand in hand, the US-Mexico border divides not only two nations but also two historiographical traditions. Even today, most everything that happens north of the border is considered American history, while everything occurring south of the border remains Latin American history. The creation of two such separate containers means that those who move between the United States and Mexico like Eliseo tend to elude historians, their experiences falling through the artificial partitions we impose on the past.

Nor is the US-Mexico border the only peculiar divide that Eliseo’s story straddles: he likewise slipped through the fissures between the fast-evolving fields of African American and Mexican American history. Over the last few decades, both of these subjects have been fundamental to enriching our portrait of the past, especially Americans’ complicated, contradictory relationship to the concept of race. Yet to date the two fields have experienced little cross-fertilization. Those few books that do look at the interactions between African Americans and Mexican Americans tend to focus on twentieth-century tensions between the two groups around such issues as whiteness and US citizenship rather than excavate the longer history of shared interactions and ethnic intermingling that Eliseo’s experience brings to light, let alone explore Mexican ideas of blackness or the space that Mexico occupied in the African American imagination.

Not so long ago, such conditions would have ensured that the history of a figure like Eliseo remained all but irrecoverable. New methods of digital scholarship, however, made it possible to comb archives around the world for stray scraps of evidence connected to Eliseo and his various alter egos in a way that would have been inconceivable only a few years before. Likewise, powerful new Web-based genealogical tools facilitated the tracking of Eliseo’s extended family, leading me to relatives in the United States and later Mexico, who possessed a wealth of family stories, papers, and photos relating to their astonishing ancestor. By an odd twist of fate, indicative of the invisible web of circumstance surrounding any historical project, the first members of Eliseo’s family that I located lived just blocks from my former address in Los Angeles. Amid our day-to-day routines, we had passed one another without ever realizing our mutual interest in the mysterious Guillermo Eliseo.

The story that these various documents allowed me to piece together was almost too strange to be true. Gilded Age claims that Eliseo’s climb to prominence read “like a fairy tale” were in fact far more accurate than their proponents ever imagined. The man known as Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, rumored to be the fabulously wealthy owner of countless Latin American mines and haciendas had, it turns out, begun life in one of the most marginal positions imaginable: as an enslaved African American named William Henry Ellis, born amid the sweltering cotton plantations of South Texas. With the coming of emancipation, he engaged in a virtuoso act of self-invention that, through the adoption of a variety of alternative personas, propelled him far from his birthplace to New York, Mexico City, London, Ethiopia, and beyond.

To travel so far, Ellis needed to cross many boundaries, for his world, like ours, was one of borders. Among the most fundamental barriers he confronted was the color line. Slavery’s end in 1865 had liberated Ellis and four million other enslaved African Americans. But out of slavery’s ashes there arose an increasingly rigid system of segregation, designed to demarcate whites from blacks and confine the latter to a second-class status. Ellis also had to cross—at times simultaneously, as his experience at Eagle Pass reveals—the evolving borderline between the United States and Mexico. Ellis’s journey to adulthood took place as the US-Mexico borderland transitioned, as the historian Friedrich Katz once observed, from a frontier to a border: from a lightly populated, loosely controlled periphery to an increasingly important site for trade and resource extraction for both nations. This process, however, unleashed a storm of countervailing pressures. Economic integration was set against the heightened desire by each nation to police the flow of peoples, goods, and ideas from the other side. The United States’ fears of an unstable southern neighbor vied with Mexico’s concerns about American desires to annex Mexican territory. Under such conditions, Ellis’s movement between the two nations required not only the ability to be fluent in two languages; it necessitated uncommon proficiency at translating between the economics, politics, and cultures of each country as well.

As skilled as he was in such transactions, Ellis’s greatest gift lay in identifying—and, more often than not, exploiting—the unexpected porousness of the color line and the borderline. Both boundaries masqueraded as natural and inevitable, but their rigid exteriors masked unstable, uncertain cores. Race had only solidified as a concept in the nineteenth century, and it remained unclear how it should be determined. Appearance? Behavior? Social standing? Ancestry? What happened when, say, appearance was ambiguous? Social standing ambivalent? When ancestry combined several supposed races? Much as there were no clear-cut races, there were also no self-contained nations. Ecologies, family ties, trade relations: all flowed across the carefully mapped geographic boundaries that nation-states—like race, an invention of the nineteenth century—drew around themselves.

In theory, the color line and the borderline complemented one another, ensuring that all people were in their place and all places had a people. Even as a young man, however, Ellis had come to discern how each boundary could undermine rather than buttress the other. Race was supposed to be a biological fact, but it ultimately fell to government officials to sort human beings into distinct races and patrol the boundaries between these invented categories. The results only made the subjective character of race all the more apparent, for one nation might impose a strikingly divergent racial system from another. The African American writer Langston Hughes witnessed firsthand the transformative effect the border could have on race relations when he ventured into Mexico in the early 1900s: “It was strange to find that just by stepping across an invisible line into Mexico, a Negro could buy a beer in any bar, sit anywhere in the movies, or eat in any restaurant, so suddenly did Jim Crow disappear.”

Designed to delineate and control, the color line and the borderline laid bare their era’s deepest anxieties. The more whites in the United States tried to separate the races, the more they fretted that African Americans might elude segregation altogether by “passing” into white society. The ensuing preoccupation with blackness as something at once invisible yet all-powerful rendered passing one of the dominant themes of American arts and letters at the turn of the century, with writers as diverse as Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Nella Larsen parsing the color line’s brutal realities. Similarly, the creation of national borders created incentives for those willing to smuggle goods or peoples across them, much to the outrage of Mexican and US authorities alike. The Gilded Age’s tidy world of clearly defined boundaries, in other words, simultaneously conjured up a secretive realm of blurred lines and border crossers, one inextricably bound to the other.

An uncommonly gifted border crosser, William Ellis offers rare access to this shadowy realm, one that unites the micro and the macro: an individual story of racial passing with a larger account of the evolution of the US-Mexico borderlands. While often thought of as a single phenomenon, passing in fact encompassed a wide range of behaviors. Some passers did so unintentionally, when their ambiguous appearance caused others to mistake their “real” racial identity. Some passed only to gain short-term access to whites-only restaurants, hotels, theaters, and other facilities. Some passed during the day to work at whites-only jobs but returned back across the color line to their black families and friends at night. And some vanished completely into their new identities. (Many in the African American community dubbed this latter behavior going “on the other side” to differentiate it from other, more temporary forms of passing.)

Given the practice’s secrecy, precise counts of the number of passers remain elusive. Noting apparent absences in the census, early twentieth-century sociologists calculated that several thousand peoples of African descent moved across the color line each year. Anxious whites worried that “no one, of course, can estimate the number of men and women with Negro blood who have thus ‘gone over to white,’” although they brooded that “the number must be large.” No less an authority than Walter White, the aptly named African American executive secretary of the NAACP, whose light skin color enabled him to pass to investigate lynchings for the organization, estimated that twelve thousand blacks per year passed into the white world: “Nearly every one of the fourteen million discernible Negroes in the United States knows at least one member of his race who is ‘passing’—the magic word which means that some Negroes can get by as whites.”

Most passers were thought to masquerade as Anglo-Americans. But posing as a Latin American, as Ellis did in fashioning his persona of Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, was more common than most people realized. Because of passing’s clandestine nature, some of the fullest discussions of its subterfuges took place in the realm of fiction, where one could replace the ambiguities surrounding actual passers with concrete, if invented, storylines. The 1899 melodrama Don Cosme features a light-skinned African American who reinvents himself as the Mexican Cosme Olmedo. “The practice has always existed,” explains the novel’s narrator. “Any colored American above the mulatto grade and shade can go to Mexico, learn the language, adopt a Mexican name, and then return and locate in some state where they are not known; and, if his features will bear out the tale, he can, as a Mexican, be a respected member of society.” Real-world knowledge of such practices circulated clandestinely throughout the African American community. As Louis Fremont Baldwin noted in his turn-of-the-century exposé, From Negro to Caucasian, scores of American blacks managed to “‘get by’—not as a caucasian, but as a Mexican, [or] Italian.  . . . It is interesting to note how many of this class of deserters are learning to speak a foreign language to assist them in making the journey ‘across.’”

Such journeys “across” had as much to do with forgetting as with language or skin color. The success of Ellis’s most frequent alternative persona—the Mexican businessman Guillermo Enrique Eliseo—can be attributed to the fact that few during the Gilded Age associated African Americans with the US-Mexico borderlands. Yet for much of the nineteenth century, the spread of chattel slavery into the former Mexican province of Texas and the ensuing conflicts over fugitive slaves, territory, and emancipation dominated the politics of both nations. Expansionist pressure from the American cotton kingdom led the United States and Mexico to wage a full-fledged war with one another in the 1840s, to undergo contemporaneous and bloody civil wars in midcentury, and to engage in mutual—and increasingly intertwined—processes of national reconstruction in the decades following.

Telling the story of a border crosser like Ellis requires us to expand our frame of analysis and bring such events, usually separated into distinct US and Mexican histories, into focus alongside one another. In so doing, we can glimpse the past anew. The deeply entangled histories of the United States and Mexico contain both striking similarities (most obviously, the conquest of indigenous societies and centuries of racialized slavery) and profound disjunctures (ecologies, economics, and demographics among them). The goal of The Strange Career of William Ellis is to probe these continuities and ruptures to craft a truly American history—that is, a history not of the United States or Mexico, or even of their shared border region, but rather a history that encompasses the North American continent in its entirety.

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ELLIS LIVED A life shrouded in mysteries—most of his own devising, some that he took to the grave with him. He left no diary, and only a few of his most candid documents—his photos and his correspondence with immediate family members—survive. Compensating for this paucity of sources, especially as to Ellis’s early years as a slave, however, is the richness of the milieu in which he operated, with its startling blend of peoples and places. To reveal this context in its full complexity, the pages that follow are organized into three parts. As the parts progress, each expands in scale, from the local to the regional to the international, charting the increasing interpenetration of the United States and Mexico across time and space.

The first part analyzes Ellis’s birthplace of Victoria, Texas, during its transition from a small Mexican village to an integral part of the antebellum South’s booming plantation economy. This flourishing outpost of the Cotton Kingdom would be beset by deep tensions because of its proximity to the Mexican border, which rendered slavery vulnerable in ways that the slave owners rushing into the area from the Upper South had not foreseen. The second part brings together the US state of Texas and the northern Mexican states of Durango and Coahuila in the years after 1880 as the extension of the railroad brought the American South and the Mexican North into far more intimate contact than ever before. It was at this moment, as US-style cotton plantations began to take root on Mexican haciendas, that Ellis launched his experiment of relocating African American farmhands from the United States to Mexico—an event that would be greeted with alarm by the US State Department and the Mexican Senate alike.

The final part focuses on the early twentieth century, when Ellis maintained dual residences in the two great North American metropolises of New York and Mexico City. This was an era of profound mutual engagement between the United States and Mexico. Americans seeking raw materials and cheap labor avidly sought out investment opportunities in their southern neighbor. Mexicans looked north to the United States for capital and possible models of modernization. From his offices on New York’s Wall Street and Mexico City’s zócalo, Ellis helped orchestrate this exchange, until the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 brought the once-flourishing economic ties between the two nations to an abrupt halt. Ellis would suddenly find himself caught between the US government, which, preoccupied about radicalism seeping across its southern border, would investigate Ellis as a potential saboteur, and a volatile Mexican politics that, newly concerned with foreign intrusion, threatened to undo his life’s work.

To some, Ellis was, as one State Department official put it, little more than “a smart, unscrupulous scamp”—a smooth-talking, multilingual rogue with a “hypnotic power” of persuasion. Such assessments, however, diminish Ellis’s achievements in a world that all too often treated African Americans with disdain. Rather than representing some marginal character, Ellis in fact embodied the signature figure of his era: the Gilded Age’s self-made man. Like most self-made men, he would ascend from poverty to wealth, becoming one of the first blacks on Wall Street (even if most people at the time were unaware of his African American ancestry). But he was self-made in another sense, too: his reinvention as a member of any number of ethnicities from Mexican to Cuban to Hawaiian.

Despite such refashionings, Ellis, unlike many passers, never completely vanished into his new personae. (This proved fortunate for a historian like myself, as the perfect passer would be unrecoverable—a fact that explains why there are many more novels than histories about passing.) Throughout his life, Ellis remained in contact with family members who continued to identify with the African American community. He also exhibited an almost extravagant disregard for his carefully crafted new identities by periodically engaging in projects relating to African American politics that raised awkward questions about his ethnicity. Rather than adopting a form of passing, then, that involved a complete, often traumatic, erasure of the self—the trading of one’s “birthright for a mess of pottage,” as James Weldon Johnson so tellingly put it in his classic 1912 novel of passing, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man—Ellis engaged in codeshifting, the hallmark of the trickster from African American folklore. This figure deployed the quintessential weapons of the weak—charisma, deflection, improvisation—to advance his interests in a hostile world. In Ellis’s case, he succeeded against great odds in subverting the dominant society’s notions of racial authenticity, crafting a counterfeit persona that simultaneously represented a deeper, truer self.

To say that Ellis resembled a trickster does not mean he intentionally modeled himself on this figure. (Although, given the time and place in which he lived, it would have been impossible for him not to possess some familiarity with the era’s rich corpus of African American trickster folklore.) The trickster, as Lewis Hyde reminds us, is an “abstraction.  . . . Actual individuals are always more complicated than the archetype.” Viewing Ellis through the lens of the trickster, however, enables us to understand the contradictory whirl of emotions—affection and suspicion, pride and dismay—he inspired among those who knew him, not to mention Ellis’s uncanny ability to sense others’ stereotypes and preconceptions. “[Those] who ‘pass,’” observed the Harlem Renaissance writer Heba Jannath, “are usually past masters at detecting the slightest change in the thoughts and emotions of people around [them].”

In African American folklore, tricksters served simultaneously as hero and antihero—characters who through charm and guile managed to bring low the powerful, yet also figures whose self-interest rendered them disruptive and unpredictable. By passing, Ellis, much like the trickster, raised a host of challenging questions. Was passing, as Langston Hughes once put it, a joke on white supremacy: “Most colored folks think as long as white folks remain foolish, prejudiced and racially selfish, they deserve to be fooled”? Or was passing an egotistical act that harmed one’s fellow African Americans by eroding family and cultural ties? Much as the trickster at once erased and erected boundaries, Ellis and passers like him operated in contradictory ways, undermining the color line while at the same time demonstrating its continued power.

Ellis’s passing cast in sharp relief not only the peculiar tensions running through race relations in the United States but elsewhere as well. South of the border, Ellis’s activities brought to the surface the persistence of racial thinking in Mexico, even as that country insisted that it remained free of the racism of its northern neighbor. In his curious foray into Ethiopia in the early 1900s, Ellis’s encounter with Emperor Menelik II called into question the viability of a pan-African identity linking US blacks and the inhabitants of Africa. And everywhere, the fact that Ellis worked along the fringes of US empire placed him in the paradoxical position of aiding the expansion of American interests overseas even as he searched outside the United States for a refuge from his homeland’s rising tide of segregation and white supremacy.

Like other tricksters, Ellis had few resources to call upon in negotiating these challenges beyond his powers of imagination and self-presentation. The stories that he spun in response may have been rife with facts masquerading as fictions and fictions pretending to be facts. But they nonetheless illuminate stark truths about North America’s fraught transition from slavery to wage labor and its deeply intertwined peoples and places. Many across the continent may have sought to simplify this messy, hybrid reality through the imposition of clearly defined boundaries between nations and races. Ellis, in contrast, sought to test these emerging limits. As he confided to his sister not long after his forced relocation to the Jim Crow car at Eagle Pass, “My fight in life is hard, but I will win out, and the world will know your brother.”