IN JANUARY 1895, the small Southern town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, hummed with a peculiar, almost invisible energy. Usually, the beginning of a new year brought a lull to this community of four thousand located in the rolling hills on the fringes of Alabama’s black belt. Cotton picking was finished, the holidays had come and gone, and the spring cotton planting remained several months in the future. This year, however, wherever the county’s African Americans gathered—be it in church, in town, or in the run-down sharecroppers’ shacks that dotted the countryside—one subject dominated their whispered conversations, carefully carried out beyond the reach of white ears: Should they go?
For the past month, a number of newcomers, most prominent among them the one-legged African American labor agent “Peg-Leg” Williams, had been holding meetings with the area’s blacks, distributing flyers that told of a place quite unlike their native Alabama. It was, promised the circular, a land abounding in “all kinds of fine game, such as deer, bear, duck, wild geese, and all manner of small game, as well as opossum.” This profusion of wildlife was matched by the fecundity of the terrain. “The soil being rich and fertile, cotton has only to be replanted every four or seven years, and can easily raise a bale to the acre, and corn 50 to 75 bushels to the acres.” Best of all, it was a land that “extends to all of its citizens the same treatment—equal rights to all, special privileges to none. . . . They need labor badly, and prefer the colored people.”
Where was this wondrous place? “Mexico,” answered the circular, “which is better known as the country of ‘God and Liberty,’ and which offers unequaled inducements for agricultural laborers in the growth of cotton and corn.” All those who wanted to leave, urged Williams, should “send in your lists of families and names at once.” Otherwise, they would miss out on “the greatest opportunity ever offered to the colored people of the United States.”
The success of William’s surreptitious organizing efforts became clear on the day selected for departure from Tuscaloosa, January 25. To the shock of local whites, this otherwise normal Friday morning witnessed hundreds of blacks crowding into the railroad depot to board the “paradise train” to Mexico—a six-car special, routed direct for the border, complete with large signs on its sides spelling out MEXICO, TLAHUALILO, MEXICO—THE LAND OF LIBERTY FOR THE BLACK MAN and fluttering flags bearing similar messages. As befitted such an extraordinary event, the mood among the emigrants was jubilant. Informed by Williams that their Mexican sponsors would supply them with clothing, furniture, and farming implements, many had sold or given away whatever they could not carry with them. They now stood in the depot amid the meager possessions they hoped to use to rebuild their lives south of the border: piles of quilts and blankets, baskets of live chickens, old flintlock rifles, saddle bags, yapping dogs of all shapes and sizes. A few broke into song—an “old-time plantation jubilee”—to celebrate their near-biblical exodus from bondage, while others took advantage of their upcoming departure to express long-pent-up critiques of their oppressors. Local whites, drawn to the train station by the tumult, pronounced themselves unamused by “the most open and insulting abuse of the white men of the community.” “Had it not been that they [the emigrants] were on the eve of what was sincerely hoped to be their permanent departure,” noted one in a statement that made manifest the tensions the colonists hoped to leave behind, “they would have been roughly handled, for their utterances called for such treatment.”
Stunned by the sudden appearance in their midst of a plan to “Mexicanize . . . the black labor of the south,” Tuscaloosa’s whites could only ponder whether the day’s events represented the first wave in a much larger movement. Might “the Mexico emigration fever” spread far beyond Tuscaloosa, drawing much of the South’s black labor into Mexico? This dawning realization electrified the region. Black migration, in the words of the San Antonio Express, “promise[d] . . . a solution of the labor question in the new cotton fields of Northern Mexico.” But it threatened to do so by depriving the American South of the workforce it had depended upon for several centuries.
Even more mysterious was the riddle of who was behind the unexpected departure of so many of Tuscaloosa’s African Americans. Peg-Leg Williams was well known throughout the ex-Confederacy—so much so, in fact, that in 1891, North Carolina passed the “Peg-Leg Williams Law” specifically to prevent the contractor from “taking negro laborers from the State.” But Williams never worked alone, only for others. “It is not known exactly who is at the bottom of the movement,” related one observer. “Several local colored men are working in the affair, but it is thought some enterprising railroad agent is the father of the whole scheme.”
THE PERSON BEHIND this extraordinary exodus from Tuscaloosa, of course, was not some white railroad agent, intent on increasing the number of goods and peoples traveling along his rail line. Rather, it was William Ellis, who by design remained in the shadows, meeting quietly with interested emigrants in Tuscaloosa out of view of local whites, while Williams served as the movement’s public face. More than four years after the Mexican government canceled his colonization contract, and little more than a year after the ambiguous close of Bishop Turner’s conference in Cincinnati, Ellis had managed to orchestrate one of the most audacious African American emigration efforts in US history. Ellis’s mentor Turner, famed as the nation’s leading colonization advocate, had needed several decades to relocate a thousand or so African Americans to Liberia. (Noted Ellis: “Bishop Turner, it will be remembered, shipped 1096 negroes to Africa.”) In contrast, in just a few short months in early 1895, Ellis colonized over eight hundred blacks in Mexico, with the promise of many more to come. In a little more than ten years, as many as “two-thirds of the Southern negroes will be in Mexico,” predicted Ellis, who presented his “plan of shipping negroes . . . [as] the only solution of the race problem.”
The development that made this unprecedented turn of events possible came about in late 1894. During one of his journeys through Mexico, Ellis learned about a vast hacienda in the Mexican North with an equally vast labor problem. Moreover, he realized that there might be a way in which the hacienda’s needs and those of African Americans could be brought into alignment to the benefit of both. The hacienda that attracted Ellis’s attention—La Compañía Agrícola Limitada del Tlahualilo—epitomized the transformations sweeping across northern Mexico during the Porfiriato. Located in the so-called Comarca Lagunera (lagoon region) along the Coahuila-Durango border, it had not so long before lain at the very heart of the vast “Comanche Empire” that dominated the American Southwest/Mexican North for much of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1830s, bands of Comanche Indians would depart the Great Plains and rendezvous in la Laguna before raiding deep into Mexico’s interior in search of livestock and captives.
The hard-fought conflict with the powerful Comanche came to an end in the 1870s through the combined efforts of the Texas rangers and the US and Mexican militaries. The Comanches’ decline and Porfirio Díaz’s rise facilitated in turn the entrance of investors, many of them from Spain and England, into the region. These entrepreneurs sought to reengineer the Comarca Lagunera’s desert landscape—long derided as little more than untamed “mesquite wilderness”—into sprawling estates, dedicated to cotton production. Although the region was among the most arid in all of Mexico, the Comarca Lagunera nonetheless experienced a short rainy season, which had generated the latticework of temporary lagoons that Comanche raiders once relied upon to water their animals. The region’s newly arrived investors planned to use the nearby Nazas River to irrigate the fertile beds of silt produced by these lagoons—but to do so, they needed to locate enough hands to work the hundred thousand acres of new farmland that they expected to bring into production.
The first of these problems was solved with help from Porfirio Díaz. Anxious to boost Mexico’s cotton industry, which had prospered during the 1860s when the Civil War had expanded Mexico’s access to US-grown fiber, and make the republic an exporter of cotton, the president raised tariffs on imported cotton goods. He also extended to a group of entrepreneurs led by the Spaniard Juan Llamedo access to water from the Nazas River and a right-of-way to construct a canal to their property some thirty miles distant. To prevent the sometimes-violent feuds that had arisen between different hacienda owners over access to the Nazas, in 1888 the Mexican federal government even assumed a new role as regulator of the region’s scarce water.
In certain respects, Llamedo’s enterprise looked across the border for inspiration, seeking to transplant technology and techniques from the most successful cotton-growing region in the world, the American South, to the Mexican North. But in others, it foreshadowed the spread of state-supported dam building and irrigation in the American West: not until the establishment of the Reclamation Service in 1902 would the US government inaugurate its first irrigation project for cotton cultivators along the Rio Grande. With irrigation in the borderlands in its infancy, Llamedo brought in José Farjas, a Spanish engineer, to oversee construction at Tlahualilo. Farjas employed some three thousand laborers to dig a massive six-foot-deep canal from the Nazas to the hacienda and to chop down acres of mesquite and cactus. In the meantime, the hacienda imported to the Comarca Lagunera the latest agricultural implements from the United States and Great Britain: a steam gin to clean and bale cotton; an oil mill to process the cottonseed from the ginning process; a factory to transform the cottonseed into oil and soap; an electric generator; seven thousand American plows; and “modern sowing, weeding, and cultivating machines.”
To many observers, the vista of cotton fields stretching toward the horizon—“thousands of acres ‘white to the harvest’ . . . dotted with Mexican laborers”—on what had been not so long before a barren desert epitomized Porfirio Díaz’s success in transforming Mexico. Yale Scientific Monthly featured a glowing dispatch about the hacienda that commended Mexico “for converting dry and waste lands into fertile reproducing lands.” Engineering Magazine carried a similarly complimentary piece that labeled Tlahualilo an “impulse of progress” and “a typical modern enterprise . . . the largest as yet undertaken in the republic.” Mexican commentators, as much in thrall to the ideas of modernity and progress as their counterparts north of the border, echoed this enthusiasm, hailing the region as “privileged [and] prodigiously rich,” a showcase for the works of “civilized man.”
All across northern Mexico, one could find similar projects, spurred by Mexican desires to link what had long been a remote hinterland, beset by indigenous raiders, to the rest of the nation, and by American hopes of tapping the rich natural resources just across the international boundary. With development came population growth: some three hundred thousand Mexicans would immigrate to Mexico’s North during the Porfiriato, as would more than fifteen thousand Americans and a scattering of other nationalities as well. Many of these newcomers clustered in the region’s surging cities, places like Torreón, the closest urban center to the Comarca Lagunera. Torreón derived its name from the tower (torre) that its inhabitants had constructed in the mid-nineteenth century to protect themselves from Comanche raids. Although it contained just a handful of residents in 1883, in a mere decade and a half Torreón morphed into Mexico’s fastest-growing city—a booming industrial center and rail hub, with a population of almost twelve thousand. Tlahualilo’s proximity encouraged the construction of such factories as La Alianza, a cottonseed-oil and soap producer founded in 1890, and La Constancia, a textile mill that opened in Torreón the same year. Proud residents took to calling their city “El Chicago de Coahuila” in honor of its industrial prowess and the array of immigrants from Europe, China, and the United States strolling its dusty streets. “There [in Torreón] is forming a new society, the members of diverse nationalities, advanced together on the path of mutual respect and honoring the land of Mexico,” enthused one of the city’s first chroniclers, C. Amado Prado, in 1899. Torreón, observed another booster, was “a city of the new Mexico, not of the old.”
Tlahualilo’s population grew, too, during these years, albeit more slowly. In 1890, with the main canal from the Nazas complete, Llamedo decided to divide the corporation’s sprawling property into ten separate sitios. Each was akin to a self-contained hacienda, complete with storehouses, barns, and housing for laborers. Telephone lines and wagon roads running alongside the freshly dug irrigation canals connected each sitio to the central hacienda of Zaragoza, where Tlahualilo’s hospital, electric plant, and main offices clustered. By 1894, Tlahualilo had some four thousand workers scattered across its various sitios. Yet this number was not nearly enough to bring all the corporation’s fields into production, especially as the expanding canal system brought water to more and more land. One obstacle to attracting campesinos may have been the “military discipline” that Tlahualilo’s managers sought to impose on all workers in their settlements. But the more basic problem was that because of the area’s virtual depopulation in the face of Comanche raids in the mid-nineteenth century and the preference of most newcomers for the region’s fast-growing cities, there remained but a small pool of rural laborers from which to draw. Tlahualilo thus embodied in miniature what many during the Porfiriato considered Mexico’s most pressing problem: the lack of sufficient labor to unlock the country’s rich natural resources.
“THE YEAR 94–95 began auspiciously,” Llamedo soon related to the Tlahualilo Corporation’s shareholders. There was abundant water in the haciendas’ canals, enough to irrigate even the recent “enormous extension of more than 125 square kilometers” of the company’s holdings. Moreover, the labor problem finally seemed to be on its way to being solved. Although “the population [of Mexican workers] was not enough to cultivate so many fields,” a promising new development augured the end of the Tlahualilo’s woes. “In view of the scarcity of hands,” explained Llamedo, “we considered a foreign immigration.” And not just any migrants, but experienced sharecroppers from the American South. “The agitation of the negro colonization question, especially in the southern press,” along with Ellis’s descriptions of the virtues of African Americans as cotton cultivators, “gave [the corporation] the impression that the best type of negro labor was ready to emigrate from the States.” On December 11, 1894, the Tlahualilo Corporation signed a contract with “el señor Guillermo H. Ellis,” in which he agreed to bring at least “one hundred colored families, experienced in the cultivation of cotton,” to the hacienda.
The passage of time has obscured the path that first brought Ellis into contact with Llamedo. Although the hacienda’s cotton fields were in northern Mexico, the contract itself was signed at the Tlahualilo Corporation’s headquarters in Mexico City. Ellis’s apparent familiarity with both locales hints at the regularity of his visits south of the border, even in the wake of his first failed colonization attempt. For a black man, especially an aspiring and talented one like Ellis, the appeals of Mexico were multiple. South of the international border, Ellis escaped the constant artifice that passing required: the eschewing of contact with family members; the avoidance of other African Americans for fear they might reveal his deception; the constant, nagging worry about the consequences should his pose be unmasked. Ironically, it was in Mexico where Ellis most securely inhabited his American identity, for he never passed as a Mexican while south of the border. Rather, he took pains to emphasize his US citizenship, which, together with his position as a well-connected businessman, gave him a certain cachet at a time when Mexico avidly courted foreign investors. To elevate his status in Mexico all the more, Ellis sometimes asserted that he was not just any entrepreneur but in fact the illegitimate son of the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington. He and his alleged father, he intimated to acquaintances, were actively pursuing various railroad concessions throughout the republic.
Ellis’s peculiar inversion of citizenship rights—claiming to be Mexican in the United States, and American in Mexico—highlighted the central, if contradictory, place of borders in his world. As much as the drawing of boundaries, be they political or racial, facilitated the creation of invidious distinctions, it also opened up opportunities for those who could move across them. Yet passing between black and white or moving between Mexican and US citizenship only acquired its utility by transgressing what were thought to be distinct, mutually exclusive categories. Thus, even as Ellis thrived by exploiting ambiguities, be they in his appearance or his personal history, he did not aspire to blur the boundaries in his world until they possessed no meaning. Rather, he sought to capitalize on their hidden vulnerabilities and inconsistencies.
Above all, it was Ellis’s particular genius to grasp the advantages that could accrue to being a foreigner in whatever nation-state he happened to be inhabiting at the moment. If his alien status did not allow him access to local citizenship rights, it did permit him to step outside of the prevailing racial regimes in both the United States and Mexico. In addition, at a moment of growing economic engagement between the two countries, there were considerable advantages to being someone who could translate the desires of American investors and Mexican elites alike, facilitating their access to resources that otherwise hovered tantalizingly out of reach across the border.
Yet there was also a cost to Ellis’s masquerades. Portraying himself as a well-to-do Mexican while in the United States and an American capitalist while in Mexico forced Ellis into the position of the perpetual outsider in both countries, never truly at home in either. This perennial sojourner status was one of the key distinctions between Ellis and his era’s other signature border crosser: the “boodler,” or embezzler. Much like the passer, the boodler embodied the late nineteenth century’s unprecedented mobility, taking advantage of the new steamship lines and railways spanning North America to flee across the border and, if all went according to plan, escape prosecution by assuming a new identity. Ellis’s time in Mexico City coincided with a number of noted boodlers. Charles Kratz, a former member of the St. Louis City Council, escaped to Guadalajara after being indicted for bribery, while Chester W. Rowe, a onetime county treasurer from Iowa, absconded with $30,000 in public funds and moved to the Mexican capital, where he opened a cantina.
Unlike such boodlers, Ellis did not seek a permanent refuge in Mexico. Yet even his temporary visits to the Mexican capital exposed him to a world far larger, older, and more sophisticated than his adopted hometown of San Antonio—a world, in fact, more cosmopolitan than most urban centers in the United States. In 1895, when San Antonio totaled sixty thousand inhabitants, Mexico City possessed well over three hundred thousand, making it the largest city in Mexico, and for that matter, one of the largest on the North American continent, exceeded at the time only by New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. During his short-lived rule, Emperor Maximilian had initiated the process—continued by Díaz—of refashioning the Mexican capital into a more European-style metropolis, most notably by constructing the grand boulevard Paseo de la Reforma. Modeled on Paris’s Champs-Élysées, Reforma cut diagonally across Mexico City, linking Chapultepec Park to the colonial alameda and expanding the capital west beyond its Spanish colonial core. Elegant new suburbs, required to maintain eight meters of garden space along their front facades, sprouted off Paseo de la Reforma for Mexico City’s elite. Sewers, paved streets, and trolleys followed, giving the neighborhood the feel, in the words of one visitor, of “a little corner of Europe that was somehow transposed to Mexico.” For its part, Reforma’s eastern anchor, the alameda, was transformed into a site of upper-class leisure, complete with bandstand, fountains, and, after 1892, electric lights—the place for the well-to-do to see and be seen. In keeping with Mexico’s vogue for “Latin” culture, the capital boasted several major theaters that hosted visits by French and Italian opera companies, while at the Jockey Club, the city’s most exclusive resort, elite Mexicans showed off the latest Parisian styles: tight-waisted skirts and billowing blouses for the women, frock coats and top hats for the men—a sartorial style that Ellis soon adopted as his own.
For someone who had come of age in Victoria and San Antonio, towns with their own Spanish and Mexican legacies, there was much that proved familiar about Mexico City. Despite its antiquity and sophistication, the Mexican capital followed essentially the same layout as Ellis’s dwelling places in Texas, albeit on a far grander scale: a grid radiating out from a handful of central plazas, upon which most of the city’s commercial, religious, and administrative functions were concentrated. Yet as he wandered Mexico’s metropolis, Ellis could not avoid noticing that he was in a very different place: two snow-capped volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, jutted up to the capital’s east; the city’s enormous markets boasted a multitude of vendors selling a dazzling variety of products; along the streets, one could glimpse Mexico’s indigenous peoples, clad in white cotton and speaking a number of different native tongues; beyond the central plazas beckoned the rougher pleasures of the capital’s working-class districts, with their pulquerías, cheap eateries, and brothels. But most striking of all, the capital was notable for the absence of a color line. “Mexico has no race prejudice from a social standpoint,” Ellis related. “The negro may occupy any position he is able to fill, and there is no discrimination against him either at hotels or places of amusements or in public conveyances.”
Ellis took advantage of the color line’s absence to become a regular at the Hotel Gillow, an elegant Italianate building situated only steps away from the zócalo. Opened in 1875 by the Englishman Thomas Gillow, the hotel catered to the capital’s British colony, permitting Ellis to be in a setting known for English-speaking foreign visitors while simultaneously avoiding most other Americans, who might have raised troublesome questions about his life in the United States. Mexico City’s American colony, which numbered some 1,400 in 1895, was not the capital’s largest, being outnumbered at the time by the Spanish (9,000) and the French (4,000) alike. But it was arguably the most insular, with its own press, benevolent society, schools, and cemetery. One could shop for canned delicacies from the United States at the American Market, enjoy ten-pin bowling at the American Club, and be treated by US-trained doctors at the American Hospital. As one observer put it: “[Members of the American colony] live as nearly as possible the life they would be living if they had never come to Mexico at all.”
Dominated by US businessmen, the American colony mirrored class and racial concerns north of the border. Members of the American Club entertained one another with blackface minstrel productions, referred to the club’s doorman—and sole African American employee—as “Big Joe,” and even attempted to draw the color line against Mexico City’s handful of African Americans. The Massey-Gilbert Blue Book of Mexico, an American-authored directory of the US citizens in Mexico City, following US custom, labeled all the capital’s known African American residents (most of them Pullman car porters) with a “col.” for colored. In 1895, the US-born owner of the café at the Hotel Iturbide—one of the city’s principal hostelries, situated in a refurbished colonial palace—refused service to three American blacks, generating a firestorm of controversy. The Mexican press excoriated the “introduction into our soil of a concern [segregation] that has dominated our neighbor” and boasted that “on this point we are much more civilized than them.” Even so, members of the American colony staged a protest against the arrest of the waiter who had denied the three men their drinks.
Such behavior caused Ellis to avoid the American colony whenever possible. He does not appear in The Massey-Gilbert Blue Book, and on those rare occasions when he mixed with other Americans, he finessed questions about his citizenship by asserting he was a “Cuban-American, born in Santiago de Cuba, but now of San Antonio, Texas.” Ellis did manage, however, to forge relationships with European members of Mexico’s foreign community, such as the Spaniard Llamedo and his British backers at the Bank of London. To Ellis, Llamedo’s well-financed Tlahualilo Corporation at last seemed to offer a solution to the issue that had so bedeviled him and Ferguson (and, indeed, all of the era’s colonizers, black or white): the shortage of funds. Upon signing the contract to furnish Tlahualilo with workers, Llamedo advanced Ellis $5,500 (some $150,000 today). Using this windfall, Ellis hired Peg-Leg Williams to recruit African Americans for Tlahualilo’s cotton fields.
As news of Ellis’s contract spread throughout Mexico, it reignited debates over the danger of US migration into Mexico—and of African Americans in particular—that had lain dormant since the signing of his first colonization contract in 1889. Mexican commentators trotted out the familiar argument that if even a small percentage of the United States’ population of African Americans made its way across the border into Mexico, the results would be chaos: intermarriage between Indians and blacks, giving rise to a “degenerate race of zambos,” increased crime, even armed uprisings. Layered on top of these concerns was worry that, as a foreign-owned corporation, La Compañía Agrícola Limitada del Tlahaulilo had prioritized its short-term economic gain over the long-term needs of the republic. “We grow tired of lamenting large enterprises like the one in Tlahualilo,” complained La Voz de México, “that instead of cooperating for the well-being of the country, seek to attract a great threat to its interest.” “It falls to the Compañía del Tlahualilo,” added El Tiempo, “to install the first pipe to drain the African blood that exists in our neighboring country, leading it toward our weak and almost powerless nation!”
IF FOR MANY Mexicans Ellis’s project evoked the specter of a “negro problem”—the contamination of the republic with unwanted African Americans—their counterparts across the border viewed the event through the prism of a national “negro problem” as well. Although the United States of the 1890s was home to some eight million African Americans, descended from peoples who had lived in the country for generations, white commentators persisted in casting blacks as alien to American life. Below the surface of such portrayals lurked the era’s great unacknowledged paradox: the United States’ dependence on black labor for much of its prosperity, even as the nation persisted in denying civil rights to this essential workforce. The possibility that hundreds if not thousands of black sharecroppers might leave the South’s plantation belt for Mexico thrust this dilemma onto center stage, especially in the movement’s epicenter of Tuscaloosa. Peg-Leg Williams was reputed to have relocated eighty thousand African Americans from the Carolinas to Texas just a few years before, making the migration of even larger numbers of blacks to Mexico an eminently plausible prospect. “A great deal has been said about the wholesale exodus of southern darkies to other climes,” warned the Atlanta Constitution, “but this scheme of Peg William’s is the biggest on record.” “He [Williams] represents that section of the state [Tlahualilo] to which they go as being the most productive in the world, the natural home of the negro, and the final destination of the colored race,” added New Orleans’s Times-Picayune. “The climate, he says, is entirely to the liking of the negro . . . and he finds no reason why all the negroes of the south cannot be located there.”
The specter of a mass African American emigration acquired additional power from perceptions of Mexico as a “tropical” country—the ideal climate not only for tropical plants such as cotton but also for African Americans (a “soft tropical man” in the language of the day). These ideas reflected a prominent feature of Gilded Age thinking: the use of climate to identify the proper homeland for each supposed race. Even as this discourse naturalized divisions between peoples and places, it remained capacious enough to encompass a wide range of political positions. To white supremacists, the contrast between the tropics of Africa and Latin America and the temperate climes of Europe and the United States demonstrated “the superiority of the white man to the negro in . . . the self-denial required . . . for carrying out great works” (the reasoning being that living in a temperate climate supposedly required more effort than living in the fertile tropics). To Mexican commentators, climate explained the republic’s failures in attracting European colonization and offered the hope that African American immigration might be confined to the republic’s “climas tropicales,” where blacks could withstand conditions that Mexico’s mestizos could not. And to Bishop Turner and his followers, the tropics represented a locale uniquely suited for peoples of African descent, the region’s fecundity a blessing rather than a curse. “We . . . know that the torrid regions give us a more prolific vegetation than the temperate or northern. Since nature is true to itself, it will do for man, surely, what it has done for both flora and fauna.”
Contemporary events only furthered the perception that Latin America and Africa shared a common climate and common racial destiny. At the very moment that blacks in Tuscaloosa were boarding the “freedom train” for Mexico, the International Migration Company of neighboring Birmingham was loading a fruit steamer with two hundred “negro colonists” for Liberia—a place, like Mexico, perceived to be a tropical land in need of the uplift that African Americans could provide. Ellis’s venture had become woven into a larger set of stories about climate and progress, about race and the destinies of the United States, Mexico, and Africa. Lost amid such formulations was the fact that while Liberia was a self-governing republic, in which American blacks and their descendants controlled the political and economic life, Tlahualilo was a European-owned commercial operation, located in one of the most forbidding deserts in all of North America.
THE FIRST TRAINLOADS of colonists for Tlahualilo departed from Alabama and Georgia in early February. Upon reaching New Orleans, the colonists were confined to the blacks-only part of the depot while they waited to change trains for San Antonio and the border. During this brief layover, a curious reporter from the Times-Picayune ventured into the station to interview several of the participants in this unprecedented migration. The newspaper later published some of the encounters, using the thick dialect that whites at the time imposed on black speech: “Dey tole us dat Mexico was er land of liberty—a land whar the nigger could git all he wanted to eat, and habe something to wear. Dat’s what dey told us, and that’s why I’ze gwine dar.” The lone exception was the journalist’s interview with Ellis. This exchange was in itself a rare occurrence, as most reporters at the time focused on Peg-Leg Williams—which was doubtless how Ellis preferred matters, as it allowed him to escape closer scrutiny. On those few occasions when Williams did discuss Ellis in public, he was careful to describe him as a “Cuban and Mexican.” As a result, during Ellis’s rare mentions in the press, he remained a shadowy figure: the “general agent” of the “Mexican Colonization Company,” his race unmentioned.
Within the New Orleans train station, however, the Times-Picayune reporter managed to corner Ellis and speak with him at length. Through a virtuoso performance of passing, Ellis convinced the intrusive journalist that he was an “intelligent . . . native of Cuba.” Their interaction highlighted Ellis’s adeptness at utilizing not only his appearance—mustachioed in the Latin American style and dressed in the European formal wear favored by members of the Mexico City elite—but also subtle linguistic codes to signal his racial identity. In speaking with the reporter, he made sure to describe African Americans in terms that indicated their distance from him while simultaneously employing black dialect and veiled references to his own appearance to suggest a white status. Often, he pulled off this feat in a few sentences, as when he told the Times-Picayune that “within the next sixty days, or six months at least, I hope to move 10,000 of the black people to Mexico. They want to go. As our train came along from Birmingham, great crowds gathered along the road, and many voices were heard to exclaim: ‘White man, when’s dat liberty car comin’ through here ergin?’” Ellis emerged from the interview as an accomplished entrepreneur who expected to do well while doing good: “While I admit that there is with me a sort of philanthropic spirit in the matter, still, with land which produces a bale of cotton to the acre, and seventy-five bushels of corn, we hope to make something out of the business as well as the negro.”
After leaving New Orleans and crossing the border at Eagle Pass, the colonists reached the Comarca Lagunera via the new Southern Pacific rail lines running through Torreón. They then traveled the last twenty-four miles in horse-drawn carts to Tlahualilo, where the hacienda managers placed the colonists at the section of the estate called Santa Rosa. The speed of events, with Ellis bringing hundreds of sharecroppers to Tlahualilo scarcely two months after signing his contract with the hacienda, seems to have caught Llamedo and his staff by surprise. The two-room adobes for each family of colonists, to be built along the same lines as those of the hacienda’s Mexican peons, remained unconstructed, so the newcomers were forced to spend their first weeks in Tlahualilo camping on the ground during one of the region’s rare rainy periods, fashioning makeshift tents out of whatever bedding they had brought with them. Even so, the initial conditions at the colony appeared promising. Santa Rosa included a space for a school, which the newcomers’ children could attend alongside Mexican youngsters, and a church, in which ministers from the three different denominations (“Methodist Episcopal, African Episcopal and Baptist,” according to Ellis) represented among the colonists took turns preaching. The hacienda also allowed the colonists to craft their own rules for themselves and select several of their members to serve as policemen. Among the migrants was even a journalist who hoped to start a newspaper in Tlahualilo. All the institutions central to African American life after Reconstruction—family, school, church, and press—were thus reconstituted in some modest way on the hacienda. The colonists’ new farmsteads had even been planted for them and were beginning to show the first green shoots of a new cotton crop.
Williams, who had never been to Mexico before, let alone seen Tlahualilo, pronounced himself delighted with the colony’s prospects when he returned to the United States a few days later, sporting a newly acquired Mexican sombrero, to pick up another trainload of colonists. “The negroes seem to like their new homes, and well they may for the country is kind to them—gives them warm weather, good lands, comfortable homes, protection of the laws, and half they can make, with plenty to eat. This is as much as the average negro wants, and more than many of them get.” Attracted by such news, scores of potential migrants lingered along the railroad tracks in Georgia and Alabama, hoping to join the next “paradise train” to Mexico. By early March, Williams was back in Tlahualilo, with another load of several hundred colonists, bringing the total on the hacienda to 816.
During Williams’s absence, Ellis took up residence in Santa Rosa’s largest building, an adobe structure located in the center of the community that featured the colony’s lone store and warehouse and, on its second floor, a private apartment. It seemed as if all Ellis’s plans were at last coming to fruition—not only the immediate project of bringing a thousand colonists a month to Tlahualilo under his contract with the hacienda, but also his larger goal of demonstrating the opportunities that awaited African Americans in Mexico. “The preachers began to perform marriages,” Ellis later recalled. “Seven children were born and the dream of my life was being realized. I had lived to see the Afro-American in the Country of God and Liberty.”
The first reports from the colonists were similarly favorable. The preacher S. F. Todd recounted that “we landed in Mexico in this vicinity the 5th day of February, 1895 and so far our experience has been that if a Negro desires his manhood recognized, and desires to live in a country where the laws are equally administered to all alike, Mexico is that land. We feel we are free men under a free government.” A. A. Adams from Tuscaloosa echoed Todd’s comments: “[Mexico] is a grand country for the negro race; the lands are rich, climate good and healthful. . . . Our people here are much pleased with the country and are satisfied and happy. Mr. Ellis, the gentleman who brought us out here, has done in every particular all that he promised to do. Each and every man is his own man and is his own boss. I framed the laws by which we are governed in our local affairs.”
Migration to Mexico allowed the colonists not only to savor, as Todd put it, “a new part of the world” but also to build lives in a place free from the “lynch law” and the other “impositions placed upon us in the land of our nativity.” Yet Ellis’s project rested upon a fragile foundation. To create his colony at Tlahualilo, Ellis had melded two discourses on colonization that had previously existed in isolation from one another across the US-Mexico border: Mexico’s desire for skilled immigrants and African Americans’ hopes for a homeland where they could live free from discrimination. Doing so, however, meant marrying an African American politics of liberation with the labor needs of a private corporation. Both the colonists and the hacienda had every reason to hope for the union to succeed, but it did not take long for the first fissures in the relationship to manifest themselves. Tlahualilo’s managers found the colonists unaccustomed to irrigation and anxious to preserve one of their few gains of the Reconstruction era—their power as sharecroppers to manage their own time and labor—rather than working in gangs as the hacienda had hoped. For their part, Ellis’s followers became increasingly unsettled by their new surroundings. In the words of John Washburn, a colonist from outside Birmingham: “[Mexico] is a different kind of country entirely from what any of us had ever been used to.” Not only were Mexico’s language and foods unfamiliar; in an era when both Mexico and the United States imposed high tariffs along the border, manufactured goods proved far more expensive than in Alabama and Georgia, eroding many of migration’s economic advantages.
Most troubling of all, as construction on the lodgings at Santa Rosa progressed, the colonists’ dwelling place took on an increasingly disconcerting appearance. The adobe structure gradually assumed the shape of a hollow square, with the housing for each family along the exterior, facing a common plaza. There were only a few exits to the fields beyond and no windows on the peripheral walls—common features in a region that had only recently been subject to Comanche attacks. This same history of Indian raiding also led many of the corporation’s managers to carry firearms and to post guards around the hacienda at night.
For a people with fresh memories of bondage in the United States, however, Tlahualilo’s fortified housing, armed overseers, and isolated position gave it an uneasy resemblance to a prison. Rumors soon surfaced among the colonists that the Mexicans planned to take advantage of Tlahualilo’s remote location to reenslave them. (This was not an entirely unreasonable fear: farther south, on the republic’s henequen and rubber plantations, Mexican hacendados fashioned a brutal debt-peonage system that approximated slavery in all but name.) The emigrants’ discontent became intense enough that in March Peg-Leg Williams returned to San Antonio and publically denounced the colony. A trickle of colonists soon followed. Unable to afford railroad tickets, they walked over three hundred miles back to the border, following the same train tracks that had brought them to Tlahualilo only a few months before. Startled passersby in El Paso, Eagle Pass, San Antonio, and other border cities encountered small knots of “half starved and scantily clad” colonists begging for supplies as they retraced their route all the way back to Alabama and Georgia.
As this flight demonstrated, Mexico could excite fears as well as fantasies among African Americans. In theory, the colony should have been able to weather such challenges, with the departure of the loudest voices of discontent strengthening the bonds among those remaining. The colonists had the unexpected misfortune, however, of being colonized by an unknown microbe. As spring gave way to summer, the migrants, weakened by the lack of shelter, the unusual food, and the stress of recent controversies, began to exhibit symptoms of a mysterious malady: shootings pains, swollen joints, fever, diarrhea. After several died, the Tlahualilo Corporation turned to the borderland’s medical center and brought Henry Trollinger, a white physician from San Antonio, to the hacienda. (One wonders at the complex family dynamics such an act invoked. Did Ellis ever consider hiring his brother-in-law, Greene Starnes, by now the leading African American doctor in the Alamo City, instead of Trollinger? Or did he avoid Greene because enlisting him might bring Ellis’s connections to San Antonio’s black community to light? To compound the irony, other African Americans in Texas, once they heard about the illnesses plaguing Tlahualilo, publically urged Starnes to go to Mexico and help the colonists, apparently without knowing that Ellis was Starnes’s brother-in-law.)
Trollinger diagnosed most of the colonists as suffering from “a disease resembling malaria,” but his prescribed treatment—mercury and quinine—offered little relief. The doctor reported that the mystery illness had left the colony “panic stricken. . . . The victims are afraid to go to bed, for they say that no one has ever arisen who has done so.” By late July, as temperatures surged into the 100s and the deaths among the colonists mounted to over forty, most of the survivors elected to flee. A few, adopting the strategy of the prior wave of departing colonists, followed the railroad tracks north, feeding themselves on mesquite pods that they foraged along the way. Most, however, headed to the closest large town, Torreón.
“El Chicago de Coahuila” not only offered stores, supplies, and medical facilities; it also contained the closest representatives of the US government. In the wake of the United States’ growing investment in Mexico, consuls’ offices had sprung up across the republic until most major towns, especially in the North, possessed an American charged with reporting on local affairs to the State Department. Usually, the consuls’ concerns centered on US-owned enterprises, such as the American mining operations near Torreón. Now, however, much to his surprise, the consular agent in Torreón, Lenious F. Poston, found himself meeting with a delegation of colonists, who insisted that despite their emigration to Mexico they remained US citizens—and that as such, the US government should cover the cost of their transportation back to their homes. Although the consul tried to get the colonists to accept positions at some of the US-owned firms in the area—“Mr. W.L. Eaton of El Oro [Mine] was wanting twelve or fourteen teamsters besides other laborers. He preferred negros”—most of the refugees, having soured on life in Mexico, preferred to stay together rather than scatter to different enterprises.
By heading for Torreón, the colonists also unintentionally engaged representatives of the Mexican state. The republic’s health services had preceded their US counterparts in accepting the germ theory of infection, with the result that Mexico’s Consejo Superior de Salubridad established quarantine and fumigation facilities in border towns such as Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, and Piedras Negras in the early 1890s, well before similar facilities existed on the US side of the line. Because of Torreón’s import as a rail hub, it became the centerpiece of the republic’s efforts to control the spread of infectious diseases from the frontier into the interior. Little more than a year before Ellis’s colony arrived, Mexican health officials had responded to an outbreak of smallpox and typhus in Torreón with an aggressive campaign of pesticide application, street cleaning, and compulsory vaccination. The arrival of scores of potentially sick African Americans from Tlahualilo threatened to undo all these efforts. In response, Mexican authorities ordered the police to detain every colonist they could locate and test them for disease.
Fifteen came back positive for smallpox, compounding what was fast turning into a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Mexico. President Grover Cleveland issued orders for the War Department to ship rations to the colonists from the US Army depot at San Antonio. But Mexican authorities, in an apparent effort to force their US counterparts to remove their sick citizens from Mexico, refused to let the rations across the border without the payment of an onerous customs duty. After some initial hesitation because of the expense involved, the US government eventually saw no other option than to transport the colonists back to US soil, with the assistance of the Mexican International Railroad Company (despite its name, an American-owned enterprise).
The return of the colonists to Eagle Pass in late July revealed the extent to which questions of border security and of public health had increasingly become intertwined. When the colonists reached the boundary line, no longer traveling in passenger trains emblazoned with banners proclaiming TLAHUALILO, MEXICO—THE LAND OF LIBERTY FOR THE BLACK MAN but rather in crowded boxcars, they were shunted onto a separate rail spur. They were then escorted four miles out of Eagle Pass to an isolated patch of chaparral along the Rio Grande, where they were placed under quarantine. Since the US federal government, unlike its counterpart in Mexico, assumed almost no responsibility for enforcing health measures along the border, the burden of supervising the colonists fell instead to the state of Texas. As transborder trade and migration surged during the Porfiriato, Texan officials grumbled at their expanding role as the nation’s sanitary guardians, especially since many of the goods and peoples crossing over from Mexico were no longer bound for the Lone Star State but for points deep in the US interior. It was as if, with Cortina and other Mexican bandits no longer troubling the Texas border, a new, microbial cast of raiders had arisen in their place. “Great as the importance of removing all needless obstacles to trade between the states and with foreign countries undoubtedly is,” proclaimed the Galveston Daily News, “even greater is the importance of . . . protect[ing] the country against invasion and diffusion of pestilence. . . . As the matter is now arranged Texas stands guard, at her expense, for the benefit of the whole United States.”
Reluctant Texas authorities expended as few resources as possible on the returning colonists, dispatching just four men to oversee the more than four hundred individuals quarantined outside Eagle Pass. These men served solely as guards, charged with preventing contact between the colonists and the residents of Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras, and did nothing to treat the infected migrants, who languished beneath mesquite bushes on tattered rags in the burning summer Texas sun. Nor did the guards do a particularly thorough job: passersby noted ethnic Mexicans coming to the camp to sell sandia (watermelon) as well as parties of colonists roaming the railroad tracks outside of town.
With many in the United States expressing concern about the “danger of the negroes stampeding and escaping to the interior,” spreading disease in their wake, federal authorities decided to take a more active role in casting the border as a medical barrier. In early August, the Marine Hospital Service, long the quarantine agent for the nation’s ports, assumed control of the camp outside Eagle Pass—its first venture into protecting the nation’s terrestrial boundaries. The Marine Hospital Service quickly instituted “military rule” over the colonists. Using an expanded force of seventy guards, the quarantine supervisor, Dr. George M. Magruder, separated the sick and the healthy into separate campgrounds, then, through the use of a tightly patrolled picket line—a border within a border—isolated the former colonists from the outside world. Within this quarantined space, dubbed “Camp Jenner” in honor of the British physician who developed the smallpox vaccine, Magruder and his aides exercised near-total control. Medical officers burned the clothes, bedding, and other belongings of the colonists, forced them to bathe with highly toxic mercury bichloride, and inspected them twice a day for signs of smallpox. Those who exhibited any symptoms of illness were then segregated with the other infected individuals. This heightened control even extended to the colonists’ immune systems: seizing upon the quarantine as “an opportunity not to be lost,” the Marine Hospital Service and the National Hygienic Laboratory, extending a long and unsavory American tradition of using blacks as medical test subjects, experimented on the colonists with a new, unproven serum for smallpox derived from the blood of calves immunized with the variola virus.
Despite—or perhaps because of—this experimental treatment, Camp Jenner exhibited a disturbingly high mortality. Of the 411 colonists interned at Eagle Pass, 178 developed smallpox. Fifty-one died from the disease (a fatality rate of 29 percent), the oldest casualty being the sixty-five-year-old Henry Thompson and the youngest a baby born in quarantine and named Jenner after the camp. Little discussed amid this tragic loss of life was the question of whether the border represented the vulnerable entry point for disease that many Americans believed it to be. Other than the cases in Camp Jenner, there were only fifteen other cases of smallpox in Texas in 1895, despite the fact that the state possessed “hundreds of miles of boundary touching upon a foreign country in which smallpox and yellow fever to a greater or less extent are always present, owing to the habits of certain classes of the people and certain climatic conditions.” Instead, the locales with the most pox cases that year were Chicago (432), Milwaukee (422), and Philadelphia (382)—all places distant from the Mexican border. Certainly from the perspective of Mexican health authorities, it was the United States, with its erratic quarantine process, that constituted the true disease threat in North America. Shortly after the departure of most of the colonists, Mexico dispatched military medical personnel to Tlahualilo, who, after burning or boiling whatever of the former colonists’ possessions they could locate, vaccinated the small community of African Americans remaining on the hacienda. Convinced that African Americans were particularly susceptible to smallpox, the officers expressed a willingness to expand their measures across la frontera should the onetime colonists remain much longer in the border region.
IN EARLY AUGUST, Ellis, who had avoided falling prey to either smallpox or the mystery malady of the colonists, left Tlahualilo for the United States. His dream of African American colonization in Mexico had transformed itself into a nightmare, and he needed to manage the fallout, by either locating new colonists or persuading those who had left to return. His efforts at cajoling the ex-colonists collected at Camp Jenner to rejoin him, however, were rebuffed, and Ellis soon came to perceive the US government’s actions in repatriating the colonists as hostile rather than humanitarian, designed to undercut not only the Tlahualilo colony but the entire project of black migration to Mexico. “The steps the American government had taken in one sense of the word was a good one,” Ellis told the San Antonio Express, “and in another sense will prove disastrous to the entire negro race; for if their passage had not been paid hundreds of them would have remained until the harvest of this crop and would have averaged from $500 to $1000 to each family clear profit, and thus my enterprise would have been a success and proved a great benefactor to every American negro.”
As Ellis circulated through the borderlands attempting to reconstitute his colony, the former colonists at Camp Jenner languished in quarantine. Not until late October, when the Marine Hospital Service finally issued them certificates documenting that they were free of smallpox, were they allowed to leave the camp. The sight of the pox-scarred colonists, dressed in ragged clothing and clutching their meager remaining possessions—some “old dirty blankets, [and] black pots and pans”—disembarking at the same railroad stations in Alabama and Georgia they had departed from with such high expectations less than a year earlier inspired considerable comment in the Southern press. A few whites had celebrated the colonists’ departure. “They are the riff-raff of the county,” contended the Tuskaloosa Gazette. “It was an occasion for universal rejoicing when they left.” But most seized with relief upon the colonists’ experience in Tlahualilo to counter the critique of US race relations contained within the colonization movement and to dismiss what had seemed not so long before like the very real possibility of a mass migration of African Americans into Mexico.
In justifying his colony, Ellis had juxtaposed an intolerant US South, where, in his words, African Americans were “suffering more . . . than at any time since the days of slavery” with the far more welcoming conditions in northern Mexico. Coverage of the colony’s collapse in the white press inverted this contrast, suggesting that it was Mexico that represented a land of slavery for African Americans, while the United States was the land of freedom and opportunity. The Victoria Advocate (which somehow failed to recognize that the colony’s organizer had spent his early years in the town) labeled Tlahualilo “prison-like . . . a thousand times more barbarous than slavery.” Other papers were no less hyperbolic. The colonists thought “they would be treated as equals,” chided the Galveston Daily News. Instead, they were subjected to “inhuman treatment and cruelty.” The lesson to be drawn from the event was a simple one. “This is the home of the negro,” editorialized the Alabama Courier. “He should better accept the southern sun and cotton fields and make of himself a more useful citizen.”
The simultaneous return of several blacks who had left for Liberia at the same time as Ellis’s colonists departed for Tlahualilo only reinforced such visions of the tropics as the graveyard not only of individual colonists but of the entire colonization movement. “The fate of another negro colony out about the same time appears to have been similar,” asserted one commentator. “Three negroes have arrived . . . from Liberia . . ., reporting that ninety-seven colonists who sailed for the land of promise last spring were simply dumped on the shore by the colonizing society and left to shift for themselves.” The supposedly salubrious tropical climate had, in fact, proven devastating to the colonists, “and this three, seeing no hope of obtaining a living in Africa, shipped for home on a passing steamer.” Now, however, “the negroes are at home again and happy.”
Across the border, Mexico drew its own lessons about the failure of Ellis’s colony. Unsurprisingly, most observers concluded that the problem lay not with conditions in Tlahualilo but rather with African Americans themselves, who, as predicted, had made poor material for colonization. The immigrants, it was charged, lacked the promised agricultural skills—in fact, Llamedo went so far as to claim that many of the colonists Ellis brought to Tlahualilo were “bootblacks and other undesirable elements.” The illnesses that had plagued the colonists provided further proof of their unsuitability for life in Mexico. “The climate [in Tlahualilo] for Europeans and Mexicans is unsurpassed, so that they are hardly sick at all,” contended Llamedo. “[But] for blacks it was dreadful, causing them at first to become sick to their stomach because of the water and later to develop a special kind of small pox that only affects colored people.” The Mexican press called once again for colonization to be limited solely to “the healthy, robust and hard-working people of the Latin countries of Europe, who only need to amalgamate with our race and to consider this land, with time, as their second homeland.” Others spoke in favor of repatriating ethnic Mexicans from the United States—an act that would provide the republic with workers familiar with “all the modern mechanical systems in agriculture” while simultaneously rescuing them from the discrimination they faced north of the border.
Few thought to ask the returning colonists themselves about their experiences, so we know little about how the people most intimately involved with the Tlahualilo experiment assessed their time in Mexico. As the survivors settled back into their homes in Alabama and Georgia, they may have welcomed being once more among familiar peoples and places. But given the limited options available to them in the American South, there must have been days when they cast their minds back to Tlahualilo’s endless cotton fields and cloudless skies and wondered at what might have been had disease and dissent not upended Ellis’s experiment.
For all of the United States’ and Mexico’s fears of a mass transborder migration, the relocation of tens of thousands of American blacks to Tlahualilo seems unlikely. Ellis might contend that migration to Mexico opened up new avenues for land ownership and other forms of economic advancement. But such upward mobility was far more accessible to a bilingual, border-crossing entrepreneur than to sharecroppers unfamiliar with Mexico or the Spanish language. Despite Ellis’s promises—“my motive and sole object in the entire enterprise was for the good of everybody”—the colonists’ immediate prospects were to remain as a landless workforce, much as they had been north of the border, relegated to a position not that different from a Mexican peon.
Even so, given the violence and discrimination roiling the post-Reconstruction era, Mexico retained an allure. “[As long] as the negro is suppressed as he is in the United States,” explained Ellis, “the better class of them will seek new fields, and Mexico, standing at the very doors of the United States, offering inducements to all alike, will prove a welcome home.” With the Tlahualilo Corporation having eliminated one of the preeminent obstacles to black migration—the costs of traveling to and settling in a new country—Ellis’s colony had the potential to attract, if not tens of thousands of emigrants, at least a steady trickle. After all, in spite of the illness and turmoil that engulfed the colony, some sixty of the colonists elected to stay behind when their compatriots fled in 1895. As a result, even today, there are tlahualilenses who trace their ancestry to the African-American sharecroppers in the Comarca Lagunera—to people who, after moving to the land of “God and Liberty,” decided that Mexico did indeed represent the fresh start that Ellis had promised.
In the end, the colony’s fragility can be attributed not only to bad luck but also to some of the unforeseen consequences of Ellis’s decision to pass. Ellis had begun life in circumstances not dissimilar to those of the Tlahualilo colonists, laboring in his family’s laundry and picking cotton in the fields. But his subsequent refashioning of himself into Guillermo Enrique Eliseo opened up a chasm between himself and the colonists that in retrospect proved almost impossible to bridge. Even had he attempted to identify himself as sharing the same background as the colonists, they could not have failed to note the ease with which Ellis circulated among elite European capitalists south of the border—or the fact that, according to his contract with Llamedo, Ellis was slated to receive a portion of the hacienda’s crop and stood to profit handsomely should the colony become a success. Nor could it have escaped the colonists’ attention that when the reporter from the Times-Picayune chanced upon Ellis at the New Orleans depot, he took pains to portray himself as Cuban rather than as black. Ellis’s behavior as an accomplished passer, in short, rendered his allegiance to other African Americans suspect. When bad times came, the already uneasy colonists proved unwilling to rally to Ellis’s leadership and trust the genuineness of his concern for them—for it was no longer clear whether the colonists’ fate and Ellis’s fate were one and the same.
ELLIS’S COLONY MAY have been short-lived, but the relationship between the US South and the Mexican North proved enduring. Together, the two regions came to constitute interlocking pieces of a massive North American cotton belt, organized around the parallel institutions of the plantation and hacienda. For additional evidence of the era’s new cross-border interconnections, one needed only to note the unexpected migrant heading north at much the same time that Ellis and the colonists were heading south: the Mexican boll weevil. A quarter-inch-long beetle, the weevil was native to Mesoamerica, where it had been found on pre-Columbian cotton plants as early as 900 CE. The spread of cotton cultivation across northern Mexico and the southern United States, however, dramatically expanded the insect’s range. By the 1890s, the weevil had hopscotched north across the Rio Grande; by the early twentieth century, “this enemy from Mexico” could be found throughout the US South.
The beetle’s ravenous appetite for seedpods and leaf buds devastated the American cotton crop. Yet even as they watched their plantings wither away before the weevil’s onslaught, many African Americans admitted a grudging admiration for the tiny, dark insect that had managed to bring low so many of the South’s most powerful whites. “They were a proud and selfish people, those plantation owners,” recalled the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. “I believe that . . . God finally sent the boll weevil to jumble them. When the boll weevil came, it ate right through thousands of fields of cotton and most of those big plantation owners went bankrupt.” Soon, throughout the South, one could hear blues songs that incorporated the weevil—a seemingly defenseless insect who nonetheless managed to triumph over his larger, more violent opponents—into the extensive African American folklore on the trickster.
The boll weevil is a little black bug
Came from Mexico they say,
All the way to Texas
Just a-lookin’ for a place to stay
Just a-lookin’ for a home, just a-lookin’ for a home.
. . .
So they took the little boll-weevil and put him on the ice
He sez to the farmers, “I say, but ain’t this nice!
But it ain’t my home, though; no, it ain’t my home.”
Then he took the little boll-weevil and put him in hot sand.
He sez to the farmers, “Will, and I’ll stand it like a man,
Though it ain’t my home, Baby; no, it ain’t my home.”
The linkages between Mexico and the US South inscribed themselves not only into the rough new music circulating through the sharecroppers’ shacks and juke joints of the plantation belt but also into some of the era’s most celebrated public events. In 1895, just as most of Ellis’s would-be colonists were returning to the United States, Atlanta hosted the Cotton States and International Exposition. The event’s backers intended it to showcase the rise of a “New South”—one rooted in cotton cultivation but with industry and foreign trade playing increasingly prominent roles.
This New South, however, continued many old habits. The desire to claim Latin American resources had not vanished, even if calls for annexation were now supplanted by the vision of an informal empire based on economic exchange. “The central idea of the ‘Cotton States and International Exposition,’” maintained the event’s promoters, “is to increase the trade and secure closer commercial relations between this country and Central and South America, Mexico, and the West Indies”—a concept exemplified by a widely circulated map that pictured Atlanta as the hub of a hemispheric trade network, with Mexico and Cuba its subsidiary spokes. The sense of Mexico as a tropical nation, with all that implied, remained as well. Although the Mexican government constructed an elegant pavilion on the fairgrounds, designed to showcase Mexico’s modernization under Díaz, it proved far less popular than an unsanctioned three-acre “Mexican village” created by the American concessionaire James Porteous. (In a gesture toward authenticity, Porteous had collected his original curios and workers in Mexico, passing through Eagle Pass on his way to Atlanta at the very moment that the Marine Hospital Service was quarantining the Tlahualilo colonists.) With its burros, mock-up of Mayan ruins, and simulated coffee plantation, Porteous’s village proved to be one of the fair’s most popular exhibits, attracting crowds of whites and blacks alike. Most of the latter viewed the village through the prism of the recent news about Ellis’s experiment, wondering aloud at the dangers for blacks in Mexico and whether the Mexican government had given the colonists on Tlahualilo smallpox on purpose.
As might be expected, an event labeled a “cotton exposition” was as much about race as it was about plant fiber. The fairgrounds included an exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution demonstrating the four “types of mankind”—black, red, yellow, and white—a schema that in its rigid divisions signaled the uncertain place of mestizos from Mexico or mulattoes like the Ellis family in the US racial order. The centerpiece of the campaign to demonstrate that the US South had surmounted its “negro problem” was the address delivered by Booker T. Washington at the fair’s opening ceremony. Before a mixed audience, albeit one seated in separate black and white areas, Washington offered what came to be known as the Atlanta compromise: in exchange for white support for black education and employment, African Americans would accommodate themselves to Southern segregation. “In all things that are purely social,” proposed Washington in the speech’s best-known phrase, “we can be separate as fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Although the “Wizard of Tuskegee” did not reference Tlahualilo by name, recent events in Mexico and Liberia were clearly on his mind. Instead of “bettering their condition in a foreign land” through colonization, Washington contended, African Americans should instead “cast down your bucket where you are.” (While the exposition is best remembered for Washington’s speech, both of Ellis’s mentors featured in it as well: Bishop Turner delivered a lecture at the convention’s “negro building” in favor of emigration and—in a possible rebuke to his one-time protégé—against those “miscegenated [African Americans who] pass for white,” while Cuney served as one of the fair’s “negro commissioners.”)
Among those who refused to follow Washington’s advice to cast down their bucket in their present location was Ellis. The winds of notoriety surrounding events in Tlahualilo had blown away whatever shreds of credibility still clung to his persona as a Mexican businessman. In April 1896, Ellis and Cuney entered a cantina on San Antonio’s Alamo Plaza, located just down the street from Ellis’s longtime office, only to be refused service because of their race. Shortly afterward, the new city directory for San Antonio was released. For the first time, Ellis’s name appeared with a c after it for “colored.”
Some individuals might have felt a certain relief at such revelations, which offered an end to the endless webs of deception inherent to passing. “There aren’t any more secrets, nothing to be afraid of,” related one passer upon finally acknowledging his African American ancestry. Ellis, however, followed a far different path. Rather than remaining in San Antonio and living in the African American community with the rest of his family, he vanished. He would not reappear until he was hundreds of miles from Texas, in a locale where he believed it would be safe for him to reinvent himself—and his connection to Mexico—once again.