THE SUMMER OF 1905 found New York immersed in one of the rites of a modern bureaucracy: the taking of a decennial census. Canvassers fanned out across the state, intent on tallying the name, age, race, and profession of each of its eight million residents. On the first day of June, census takers reached one of Manhattan’s premier addresses, the El Dorado, an eight-story apartment complex located at 300 Central Park West. Here, canvassers noted, dwelled such prominent New Yorkers as William Strang, a railroad promoter, and Xavier Fontura, the consul general of Brazil. Each, as was customary among upper-class Manhattanites at the time, headed a household that included a cohort of European-born servants. Living between Strang and Fontura in apartment number 33 was a figure seemingly much like his neighbors: a prosperous banker and his young family. Census takers dutifully recorded the presence in the household of one William Ellis; his wife, Maude; their year-old son, Guillermo; and two maids, both German immigrants, Ida Werner and Clara Witekammen. Although one of the key categories the census was designed to measure was race, the canvassers discerned only one individual of color in the entire El Dorado: an African American maid employed by another neighbor, the cigar dealer Henry Cobb. Fontura, the Brazilian, was recorded as white, as were Ellis, Maude, and, of course, the infant Guillermo.
ONE OF THE factors that rendered the Gilded Age a golden era for passing was the limited nature of government record keeping. Even at the turn of the century, birth certificates, passports, and driver’s licenses remained rare and little-used documents, meaning that there was almost no reliable way to verify a stranger’s stated identity. The ensuing slipperiness between appearances and realities bewildered many Americans. Given the era’s unprecedented mobility, which swept up individuals from near and far and tossed them into greater proximity with one another than ever before, how was one to know without official proof whether a new acquaintance was a respectable member of society—or a possible con artist, whose pleasant dress and demeanor masked a malicious intent?
Nascent efforts to fix identity by regularizing record keeping, however, possessed their own liabilities. If one could play the trickster and hack the process, these new bureaucratic procedures could be converted into potent tools of subterfuge. Such was the case for Ellis. Now the head of a growing family, he managed to persuade authorities to generate a stream of census reports, birth certificates, and other documents that established his and his children’s status as white. Each record built on the other, each serving as one more brick in an ever-higher wall meant to keep his family safely on the white side of the color line. The boy who had been listed in the 1880 federal census as a mulatto had now ventured permanently across the border dividing the races. For the rest of his life, he would appear in the census and other official records as white. Ellis’s passing now took place not only in the improvisational realm of day-to-day personal interactions but also on paper in the equally, if not more, important arena of state record keeping.
This new facet to Ellis’s passing came at a moment of peculiar juxtapositions. Now in his early forties, Ellis found himself assuming the role of patriarch. Guillermo Jr. was soon joined by other children: Carlos Sherwood, born September 10, 1905; Maude Victoria, born June 8, 1909; a pair of twins, Porfirio Diaz and Sherwood Ellis, who died shortly after their premature birth on May 25, 1912; and Fernando Demetrio, born on May 14, 1915. Ellis and Maude selected each child’s name with care. Guillermo was, of course, named for his father (or, to put matters more accurately, for his father’s Mexican alter ego). Carlos’s given name was the Spanish version of his grandfather’s name, Charles, his middle name an homage to his mother. Victoria’s name included a sly reference to Ellis’s hometown while simultaneously honoring her mother and making another veiled connection to Ellis’s time in Texas: Norris Cuney’s daughter, Maud. Porfirio was named for the Mexican dictator, while Fernando Demetrio’s middle name summoned up a less obvious link to the Porfiriato: Ellis’s longtime lawyer in Mexico City, Demetrio Salazar, the son-in-law of General Pacheco, the minister of fomento who had approved Ellis and Ferguson’s colonization scheme in 1889. The children appeared as white on their birth certificates, their father’s race recorded as “Mexican (Spanish),” “White Cuban,” “Cuban White,” or some variation thereof.
Like most parents, Ellis took great pleasure in his progeny. Previously, he had shied away from photographers, wary at creating a lasting image that might undermine his masquerades. (His 1900 entry in The Successful American, for instance, was one of the few in the entire volume not accompanied by a portrait, and although he splurged on an elegant studio photo of Maude on her wedding day, she appears in the image alone, without her new husband.) Once Ellis became a father, however, his vigilance relaxed. Of the handful of pictures of Ellis that do survive, almost all of them feature him proudly posing with his two oldest boys, Guillermo and Carlos. One shot from the early 1900s captures the children, outfitted in spats, belted tunics, and crushed velvet hats, while Ellis sits between them in his customary tailored three-piece suit, complete with watch fob and pocket square. In another, taken in Mexico City in 1910, the boys, again exquisitely costumed—this time, in matching sailor suits with embroidered collars—are joined by their grandfather Charles: rare photographic evidence of Ellis’s continuing contact with family members who identified as black (although Charles appears light enough that he could have passed had he so desired). Ellis signed a copy of this image “For Father, from his boys” and sent it to Charles in San Antonio. As this inscription hints, Ellis seems to have hoped the births of his children might mend relations with the Texas branch of his family, who may well have suffered bruised feelings from the distancing—geographic and emotional—that Ellis’s passing required. Confessed Ellis in a letter to his sister Fannie: “Tell Dad I hope he [Guillermo Jr.] will not give me as much trouble as I have given him.”
With their brood growing, Ellis and Maude opted in the early 1900s to move out of Manhattan to nearby Mount Vernon. Nicknamed the “City of Happy Homes” for its comfortable single-family houses and quiet tree-lined streets, Mount Vernon, just a thirty-minute train ride north of New York, represented the first ripple in an incipient wave of suburbanization washing over Westchester County. The family settled into a three-story home at 540 East Third Street. Theirs was an exclusively white neighborhood—a segregation achieved primarily by pricing homes beyond the reach of African Americans, although racial covenants were not unknown in the Westchester of the early twentieth century.
Once ensconced in their new home, the Ellis family settled into the routines of suburban middle-class life. The pages of the local newspaper, the Mount Vernon Argus, offer occasional glimpses of the children’s lives: birthday parties attended by all in the neighborhood; piano recitals at the nearby Congregational church; YMCA athletics; amateur plays; graduations from school. The events are remarkable for their unremarkableness: there is not the faintest hint that the family residing at 540 East Third Street was perceived as different from any other family of upward strivers in Mount Vernon. (The fact that Ellis, the least white-appearing member of the family, was often away in Mexico on business may have facilitated the family’s seamless entry into Mount Vernon: “I was always alone . . . except for the children,” recalled Maude.) Like their counterparts in San Antonio or in the American colony in Mexico City, the compilers of the Mount Vernon city directory in the early 1900s appended “(col)” after the names of all of the town’s African Americans. Yet this designation never appeared next to Ellis’s name or those of his family members. The songs that the children played at their recitals were not the spirituals or jazz tunes that might have been assigned to African Americans but rather ditties with names like “Dance Around the Snow Man,” “Merry Boys,” and “Honeybell Polka.” When school board members visited their school, it was Carlos, a member of the honor club, whom the teachers selected to give a speech on “The Value of Good Literature.” The boys even managed over time to shed their birth names for more Anglo-sounding alternatives, with Guillermo Jr. going by Ermo, and Carlos turning to his middle name, Sherwood.
Such suburban tranquility, however, masked the turmoil roiling Ellis’s business dealings by the early twentieth century. His grand plans for Ethiopia had stalled. In 1906, Menelik suffered the first in a series of debilitating strokes that effectively ended his rule. Even before this unwelcome turn of events, however, Ellis found himself hamstrung by the same issue that had bedeviled his earlier colonization efforts in Mexico—lack of capital—and the harsh economic reality that it made little sense to develop mines or cotton farms in Africa when the same enterprises could be undertaken far more cheaply closer to home.
As if the collapse of his Ethiopian projects were not enough, Ellis had also begun to suffer money woes. He would continue to present an impressive front, maintaining an office on Wall Street and dressing himself and his family in the finest fashions. But legal records from the early 1900s reveal that his financial situation had begun to crumble—or, as Ellis admitted to his sister Fannie, “I have had some of the sweets out of life and am now reaping some of the bitters.” In 1905, Ellis would be sued by two of his neighbors in Mexico City, Elena Blake and Florencia Blackmore, who demanded that Ellis brick up the windows in his Balderas Avenue workshop that opened onto their adjoining house. During the trial—which Ellis lost, requiring him to pay court costs and damages—it emerged that his furniture factory had been out of operation for some time. The following year witnessed Ellis back in Mexico City’s tribunal superior de justicia, embroiled in a string of legal battles: a long-running case with the Mexican Alberto Niquet over a mortgage on this same Balderas Avenue property; a dispute with a US citizen named Elias Delafond over an option Delafond had taken on Ellis’s La Olvidada mine in Michoacán; and a suit brought by two Mexicans against Ellis for nonpayment of the rent on an office he had opened on La Calle del Colegio de Niñas. By 1907, Ellis’s woes had expanded still further to include a fine from the Mexican government for failing to pay the taxes due on his defunct factory. Even meeting personally with José Yves Limantour, the Porfiriato’s powerful secretary of finance and an avid supporter of foreign investment, did little to help Ellis shore up his eroding position. By the end of the year, the Mexico City court declared “el Sr. Guillermo H. Ellis” to have defaulted on the mortgage on his Balderas Avenue holdings. The property and all its furnishings were sold at auction to help Ellis pay off a debt of $145,169.75.
Ellis’s financial embarrassments did not confine themselves south of the border. In 1909, a bill collector named Leprelette Sweet appeared at Ellis’s Wall Street office, demanding payment for a debt owed to a local coal company. When Ellis tried to hustle Sweet out the door, the two ended up in a physical altercation. Sweet’s eyeglasses were broken in the scuffle, injuring his eye, and he sued Ellis for assault. The case bounced through various courts for close to a decade, running up legal fees and a $50,000 fine that further diminished Ellis’s already fragile finances.
The growing instability in Ellis’s life mirrored conditions in the country that had become his second home. Over time, the vaunted orden y progreso of the Díaz regime planted the seeds of disorder and chaos, for the Porfiriato proved unable to resolve Mexico’s fundamental paradox: how to create a more modern nation, one that would be better able to resist US expansion, while also relying on its northern neighbor for the overwhelming majority of its trade and investment. By the 1900s, Mexico could point to multiple signs of progress under Díaz: an expanded federal budget; a rising export sector; an array of new factories churning out goods for a growing consumer market; a nationwide network of railroads and telegraphs. Yet in spite of these developments, Mexicans across the social spectrum believed that the fruits of their nation’s economic expansion had been unevenly distributed. Observed El Nuevo Mundo in 1908: “There is prosperity in Mexico, but it is Yankee prosperity; there is poverty and misery in Mexico and that belongs totally to Mexicans.”
In central and southern Mexico, the Porfiriato’s policy of declaring vast expanses of the Mexican countryside terreno baldío—vacant land available for development by domestic or foreign investors—pushed hundreds of thousands of peasants off their lands. Cast into the republic’s labor market, many of these newly landless campesinos drifted north to such booming new settlements as Torreón, finding employment in the region’s US-owned firms. These companies, however, imposed a two-tiered wage system on their employees, paying Mexican workers far less than Americans for the same jobs. Unsurprisingly, Mexico’s laborers loathed such pay scales for their economic unfairness and racism alike. By the early 1900s, outrage with the two-tiered wage system exploded into a spate of strikes, including a bloody uprising at the US-owned Cananea Consolidated Copper Company, the republic’s second-largest enterprise. Strikers at Cananea distributed handbills targeting Mexico’s outsiders: “Curse the thought that a Mexican is worth less than a Yankee; that a negro or Chinaman is to be compared with a Mexican. . . . MEXICANS, AWAKEN! The Country and our dignity demand it.”
Over time, even segments of the Mexican elite came to side with working-class calls for México para los mexicanos. The Díaz administration’s opening of the country to outside investors had had the effect of creating formidable rivals for the republic’s homegrown capitalists. A leading illustration of the ensuing tensions could be found in the Comarca Lagunera, where the foreign-owned Tlahualilo hacienda proved a fierce competitor with Mexican hacendados for the region’s limited supply of water and agricultural workers. A leader of the Mexican faction in these battles was Francisco Madero, the cotton-growing scion of a Coahuila family that traced its wealth back to cross-border dealings with the Confederates in the 1860s. By 1908, Madero’s focus had expanded beyond the Comarca Lagunera to national politics as he spearheaded the movement to prevent Díaz’s sixth reelection as president of Mexico. A lifelong vegetarian and teetotaler, the moderate Madero sought only to institute a more democratic politics in his homeland. But the removal of Mexico’s longtime dictator unleashed a maelstrom that consumed Mexico for more than a decade, as the era’s long-hidden pressures surged to the surface. Madero’s revolution against Díaz became many revolutions, as rebel factions clashed with each other over their competing visions for Mexico. The ensuing conflict cost upwards of two million lives, sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing north across the border, and once again raised the specter of US invasion and occupation of Mexico.
IF THE REVOLUTION possessed multiple meanings for Mexico, for Ellis it posed but a single puzzle. For more than twenty years, his strategy in Mexico had hinged on ingratiating himself with the Porfiriato’s close-knit inner circle. In addition to his lawyer, Demetrio Salazar, Ellis’s leading contacts included Luis Fernández Castello—a nephew of Díaz’s whose father was Justino Fernández, Mexico’s minister of justice—and Felix Díaz, Mexico City’s chief of police and another of the president’s nephews. The utility of such connections, however, depended upon the Porfirian regime remaining in power. Once political circumstances shifted, these onetime assets were transformed into potent liabilities, forcing Ellis to improvise his way in a strange new Mexico.
For Ellis, the 1910s were a particularly inopportune moment for his adopted homeland to be convulsed with popular unrest. Ellis’s previous moneymaking endeavors—representing Hotchkiss Arms, directing the New York and Westchester Water Company, managing the Ellis furniture factory—had tapered off years earlier. As a result, he had recently thrown himself into a number of new projects, each of which promised to restore his tarnished luster as a Latin American entrepreneur.
The first of these targeted one of the nascent automobile age’s most important resources and the favorite commodity of tropical speculators: rubber. At the time, this essential raw material could only be produced from a few plants, including the Brazilian rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis), the predominant plant on southern Mexico’s rubber plantations, and guayule (Parthenium argentatum), a low-lying shrub found in the deserts of northern Mexico—including on the Madero family’s extensive landholdings in the Comarca Lagunera. Ellis, who bragged of “large rubber holdings in Africa,” dedicated considerable time and money to searching for an alternative to these two sources, even going so far as to bring Professor Henry Hurd Rusby of Columbia University, the United States’ leading tropical botanist, to Mexico to assist on his quest.
Finally, Ellis seemed to find what he was looking for in Mexico’s palo amarillo (Euphorbia fulva). He licensed the patent on refining the tree’s sap into rubber from its English inventor and established a number of companies dedicated to the process. The corporations’ names varied from the Continental Palo Amarillo Rubber Company to the Compañía Mexicana Consolidada de Hule de Palo Amarillo; the associated board members ranged from Ellis’s nephew Charles Starnes to Felix Díaz. The one constant, however, was Ellis’s role as president and director. In January 1909, Ellis signed a ten-year contract with the Díaz government for the establishment of a factory “to extract, refine, and manufacture the rubber obtained from the Palo Amarillo and Amate trees.” This agreement allowed Ellis to import all the necessary machinery for his factory duty free and exempted his company from all taxes for a decade—a boon for Ellis, but precisely the sort of sweetheart deal that caused so many Mexicans to grumble about the Porfiriato’s preference for well-connected foreign capitalists.
A few months later, Ellis secured another concession, this time to construct hydropower dams on several rivers in the mountains west of Mexico City. “This is one of the most valuable water powers in the Republic,” enthused Ellis, “on account of being situated so near this Capital, also on account of the power not being dependent solely on rain fall, but on the snows melting from the Toluca mountains.” Ellis named his new enterprise the Mexico and Toluca Light and Power Company. With the Díaz administration intent on electrifying cities across the nation as part of its modernization efforts, Ellis expected that within a number of years his hydropower plant would be worth “over Twenty million dollars, gold.” Others in the republic, however, saw this concession as yet another valuable economic opportunity that had slipped into foreign hands.
In this same period, Ellis also managed to secure the rights to the fabled Manning and MacKintosh claim. This deed dated back to the 1850s when one of Mexico’s short-lived, cash-strapped governments struck an agreement with two British entrepreneurs, Robert Manning and Ewen MacKintosh, for a loan of several million dollars. Later Mexican governments felt little inclination to cover an obligation run up by a fleeting predecessor, and the republic repudiated Manning and MacKintosh’s claim in 1886. Nonetheless, Great Britain exerted periodic pressure on Mexico to honor its debt. To Ellis, this festering controversy offered a potentially vast opportunity. During a visit to Mexico in the early 1900s, Ellis tracked down the elderly heir to the claim, one Enrique G. MacKintosh, and—after consulting with his contacts in the Díaz administration as to the likelihood of Mexico’s repayment—purchased MacKintosh’s interest in the loan. Next, Ellis transferred the claim to one of the corporations he controlled, the Mexican Securities and Construction Company, and sold off shares in the company. With the funds raised, he hired the same high-powered law firm that represented J. P. Morgan & Company to recover Manning and MacKintosh’s debt from Mexico. In the prospectus for possible investors, Ellis calculated that Mexico owed the holders of the Manning and MacKintosh claim more than $105 million in compensation to cover both the original loan and half a century of accrued interest. “A single claim of this size is conceded to be formidable,” observed the New York Times in its extensive coverage of Ellis’s latest Mexican sensation. “Wall Street regarded it as significant.”
Each of these undertakings—the rubber factory, the hydroelectric plant, and the Manning and MacKintosh claim—positioned Ellis on the cusp of his greatest successes in Mexico ever. To be sure, measuring success in these cases required a different metric than in earlier projects. Ellis had never been averse to making money, but his 1889 colonization contract and his 1895 effort to resettle sharecroppers on the Tlahualilo hacienda had also embraced a liberatory politics that promised to transform the status of peoples of African descent on both sides of the US-Mexico border. In contrast, the objective of his current projects was limited to improving the financial status of Ellis himself. As if to celebrate his imminent return to prosperity, in the early months of 1910, Ellis took his only known trip south of the border with his entire family, even bringing along the family’s Irish American maid. (To avoid potential embarrassments like the one at Eagle Pass in 1909, the family traveled together by steamship rather than by railroad.) During this same journey, Ellis met up with his father in Mexico City, and the three generations of Ellis men posed for their collective portrait.
Although Ellis had no way of knowing it as he and his family took in the sights in the Mexican capital, 1910 would prove to be a watershed year, one that altered forever the course of the republic’s history. In July, an American named Edward Doheny drilled the first of several oil gushers in the jungles of Veracruz. Within a few years, Mexico would explode into prominence as the world’s second-largest exporter of oil, attracting the interest of numerous American corporations intent on gaining access to Mexico’s latest tropical riches. In September, the Díaz administration ushered in the hundredth anniversary of Mexico’s independence with a gala celebration in Mexico City, complete with military bands, a forest of Mexican flags, and a massive display of red, green, and white electric lights that spelled out “1810 Libertad” and “1910 Progreso.” And in October, after fleeing across the border to the relative safety of San Antonio—an escape made possible by the intervention of family friend José Yves Limantour—Madero issued the Plan of San Luis Potosí, calling for an armed rebellion against the Díaz regime to start on November 20. Even before Madero’s deadline, uprisings erupted across northern Mexico. The revolution had begun.
IN THE FACE of Mexico’s political upheaval, Ellis’s agenda narrowed to a single goal: the restoration of a stable central government that would allow him to continue his development schemes. “The revolution in Mexico that has made my business awfully bad is no fault of mine,” confided Ellis to his family, “but at the same time I am helping to . . . protect my own interest.” Doing so required all of Ellis’s considerable skill in navigating across borders, for he found himself forced to forge relationships with a shifting, mutually suspicious array of revolutionary cliques. Setting aside his ties to Díaz, Ellis began by entering into negotiations with the Madero administration over the Manning and MacKintosh claim. In 1913, however, the conservative general Victoriano Huerta deposed the president. Ellis quickly ingratiated himself with Mexico’s new leader. Immediately after Huerta’s coup, he telegraphed the general’s co-conspirator, his longtime acquaintance Felix Díaz, to offer his support. “With your strong hand,” Ellis wrote, “I hope that you and President Huerta will bring peace and prosperity to the republic. You will have no trouble in getting all financial assistance that you need.” If accounts in the New York press are to be believed, Ellis was also part of a secretive circle of Mexican politicians and US businessmen that attempted to broker a rapprochement between Huerta and Woodrow Wilson, who had refused to recognize the new Mexican president and had discouraged Americans from traveling south of the border. In the press (which described Ellis as “a New York capitalist and personal friend of General Huerta”), Ellis depicted relations between the United States and Mexico in terms that spoke volumes as to his own situation. “The present administration did not take into consideration that by ordering these thousands of Americans out of the country it was ruining them financially,” he contended. After years spent living south of the border, many Americans “have no connection to this country [the United States], although it is their own.” As for remedies, Ellis, like many American investors, longed for the days when a single strongman ruled Mexico. “Mexico is not wanting for intelligent men. But it is in want of a military leader. The people are accustomed to being ruled by an iron hand.”
In late 1914, Venustiano Carranza, a former maderista, overthrew Huerta. Ellis promptly reached out to this newest Mexican president to offer his congratulations and to wish that “you will yet succeed in safely and soundly establishing your Government.” “Having lived in Mexico, enjoying the hospitality of the country and people for over thirty years,” Ellis continued, “being connected with no political party but simply at all times willing and ready to recognize and be loyal and royal to any government that the Mexican people chose . . . I offer you my heartfelt and earnest support to do anything to maintain your Government.” When Pancho Villa’s followers executed seventeen American mining engineers in the town of Santa Isabel in January 1916, Ellis contacted his “distinguished Friend” Carranza and promised to do all he could to dissuade the United States from intervening, provided the Mexican government issued an official statement “saying that these bandits would be immediately run down and put to death and good Americans in other parts of the Republic need not feel any alarm.”
Events elsewhere, however, soon overwhelmed Ellis’s attempts at backroom diplomacy. In March 1916, Villa attacked the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing sixteen more US citizens. President Wilson responded with a “punitive expedition,” dispatching ten thousand soldiers led by General John J. Pershing, who had begun his military career chasing Apaches along the border, hundreds of miles into Mexico in a fruitless pursuit of Villa. This violation of Mexico’s sovereignty brought the two nations to the brink of war. The US War College drew up plans “for the occupation and pacification of northern Mexico”; the Army Air Service enlisted the new technology of the airplane to patrol the skies along the border; and Senator Albert Fall, an influential member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, called for “the immediate organization of an army of 500,000 men, ostensibly for the policing of Mexico or for the invasion of that country to protect our citizens if necessary.”
Carranza survived long enough to oversee the writing of the Constitution of 1917, which continues to govern Mexico today. This document built on the prior Constitution of 1857, even opening with the same injunction against slavery: “Slaves that set foot on national territory recover their liberty by this fact alone.” In keeping with the revolutionary ferment of the time, however, the new constitution expanded the rights of all Mexicans to education, labor, and health care, rendering it one of the most progressive charters in the world at the time—a model eventually emulated by much of the rest of Latin America. The new constitution also proclaimed the right of the Mexican state to regulate property within the nation’s boundaries. Article 27 stated that “all land and water within national territory is originally owned by the nation, which has the right to transfer this ownership to individuals”—a measure that empowered the state to nationalize resources or redistribute them through agrarian reform.
By itself, however, the new constitution could not end Mexico’s instability. In 1920, Alvaro Obregón, a onetime chickpea farmer from the border state of Sonora turned revolutionary general, deposed his former ally Carranza. Joining Carranza as he fled Mexico City via train with a handful of supporters—and, according to observers, much of the gold from the national treasury—was none other than Ellis. Intent on having Carranza approve his latest Mexican development plan, a series of free trade ports, Ellis remained with the president’s party until an attack by pro-Obregón troops forced them to abandon the train near the village of Aljibes. Carranza headed into the mountains on horseback, only to meet his death a few days later, while Ellis constructed a white flag from bedsheets purloined from the presidential train, requisitioned an automobile from the loot the carrancistas had loaded on the railroad cars, and made his way to safety. According to rumor, not only did he manage to secure Carranza’s signature on his port agreement before he departed the train; he also pocketed a few coins from the Mexican treasury, which Carranza’s forces had abandoned in their haste to escape.
Beyond these potentially apocryphal gold coins, however, Ellis’s involvement in the Mexican Revolution yielded few tangible dividends. Indeed, the era’s frequent changes in government made simply holding on to those assets he already possessed a profound challenge. “On account of the very disturbed conditions in Mexico I am at a loss to know what to do regarding certain mining properties that I own in that republic,” complained Ellis in 1914. “I have one very valuable mine and several other claims that are very important. The taxes on these mines according to the last decree issued by President Huerta is over $1,676, Mexican money. . . . General Carranza has issued an order, so I am informed, that all taxes paid to the Huerta Government have to be repaid to him. The Huerta Government issued an order that if the taxes are not paid the mines will be confiscated, so I am at a loss to know what to do.” Adding to the confusion was the fact that the various revolutionary factions all issued their own currency. “In what money . . . shall [I] pay the taxes [?]” inquired Ellis. “I am informed that Carranza refused to take the Huerta money and Villa now refuses to take the Carranza money.”
Ellis’s customary strategy to address such uncertainties—working his way into the good graces of whoever happened to be in power in Mexico City—posed its own risks. His contacts could all too readily transform into liabilities if the political landscape shifted, turning Ellis in the eyes of Mexico’s new leaders into a meddlesome foreigner with dubiously acquired assets. In 1913, in fact, such a turn of events led to the cancellation of Ellis’s Toluca hydropower contract. Ellis was outraged at watching his prized investment slip from his grasp—“One of the departments of the Federal Government of the Republic of Mexico . . . attacked [the] concession . . . [of] this Company [Toluca Light and Power]. . . .We have spent many thousands of dollars on these falls”—but he was powerless to change the government’s decision.
Across the border, Ellis’s involvement in Mexico subjected him to renewed scrutiny as well. American authorities had grown increasingly concerned that the chaos in Mexico might seep into the United States. For years, almost by its very existence, the international boundary had fostered dissent. US radicals fled across the border to escape the police or the draft; Mexican agitators crossed over to the United States, where they maintained a vibrant Spanish-language press devoted to criticizing the Porfiriato. Some of these activists, such as the Flores Magón brothers, the anarchist publishers of Regeneración, had endured raids and harassment by US law enforcement well before the outbreak of hostilities in Mexico. But as events across the border spiraled into greater violence, Congress, led by Senator Fall, launched investigations into the “radical socialism movement in Mexico,” and the federal government empowered a raft of agencies to investigate possible violators of the era’s newly expanded espionage and neutrality acts.
Among these new police forces was the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI. In 1916, agents charged with investigating “Mexican Revolutionary Matters” initiated surreptitious surveillance of Ellis. Agents dug through Ellis’s finances and watched his offices in New York and Mexico City. They tracked his correspondence, noting that he “receive[d] many letters and telegrams from Mexico.” Bureau employees even broke into Ellis’s Wall Street headquarters to search for evidence of plotting with radicals. Although agents opined that Ellis was “a pretty slick institution” with “his lines out on practically every phase of Latin-American revolutions,” they had little luck in making any definitive findings as to his finances or background. Agents reported inconclusively that Ellis was “apparently a negro married to a white woman.” Or “may be a Mexican.” Or perhaps “the illegitimate son of some white woman in Texas.”
During his long career, Ellis had learned to be wary of strangers: each new person he encountered represented one more individual who needed to be convinced of his various identities. The caution he had acquired as a passer left him well prepared for his encounters with the Bureau. One agent, having arranged to run into Ellis on a Wall Street sidewalk, tried to lure him into a conversation about affairs in Mexico. Ellis, however, quickly detected something odd afoot. After telling the agent that “all he knew as regards happenings in Mexico he obtained from the daily papers,” he excused himself, saying that he “was in a hurry” to deal with some pressing business.
Ellis had good reason for concern. By the 1910s, not only was the Bureau of Investigation rummaging through his affairs, so was at least one private detective agency. With the Mexican Revolution having made investment south of the border all but impossible, Ellis began to cast about for opportunities elsewhere. He seemed to find what he was looking for in Costa Rica, a nation that, like Mexico, was being torn apart by the twin disruptions of an oil boom and political unrest. In 1917, the president of Costa Rica, Alfredo González Flores, was overthrown in a coup headed by his minister of war, Federico Tinoco. González fled to New York City, where, together with his former consul general Francisco Montero, he began to organize a Costa Rican government in exile. Among the first members of González’s inner circle was Ellis, who hoped to control Costa Rica’s petroleum concessions should the former president be restored to power. A private detective hired by pro-Tinoco forces reported on Ellis’s presence in Montero’s quarters in Manhattan in April 1918:
I noticed a gathering of 10 or 12 men, all speaking Spanish. None of them seemed to be of importance except one, whom by the description given me I at once recognized as Mr. Ellis, a Mexican, whose office is at 35 Nassau Street, and who, I had been told, was interested with Montero. I followed him to his office, where I left him.
A few days later, this same detective trailed Ellis to his home in Mount Vernon and then, presenting himself as a visiting Texas oilman, set up an appointment with Ellis in his Wall Street office. During the course of their conversation, Ellis told the detective that González was organizing a rebellion, and that several of Tinoco’s generals were ready to join him as soon as Ellis hired a schooner in Mexico to smuggle arms and ammunition to the plotters.
Sharing this tale of Central American intrigue may have represented a momentary indiscretion on Ellis’s part. Or it may have been an intentional fabrication in which Ellis, intuiting his visitor’s identity, hoped to mislead Costa Rican authorities as to the plot against them. In either case, facing unrest at home and rumors of a coup abroad, Tinoco stepped down at the end of 1918. His departure, however, did not work out as Ellis had hoped. González failed to return to power, depriving Ellis of his anticipated access to Costa Rica’s petroleum fields.
Offsetting such disappointments was the slow return of stability to Mexico. Bit by bit, Obregón consolidated control at the expense of the more radical wings of the revolution. In 1919, Emiliano Zapata, the charismatic peasant leader who had inspired Mexico’s dispossessed with his calls for tierra y libertad (land and liberty), was lured into an ambush and assassinated. Four years later, the bandit-turned-revolutionary Pancho Villa suffered a similar fate while riding in his Dodge roadster through the dusty streets of Parral, Chihuahua. Obregón’s rise to power, however, left unresolved the familiar question of the republic’s relationship to the United States. The tensions that had defined affairs between the two countries before the revolution still loomed: Mexico desired American capital but worried about preserving its sovereignty; the United States sought Mexican natural resources—especially the precious new commodity, petroleum, which as the republic’s minister of foreign affairs put it, now undergirded all “industrial development and, therefore, . . . military and naval power”—but questioned the stability of its southern neighbor. In particular, alarmed at what Article 27 of Mexico’s new constitution might mean for American investments in the republic, the United States refused to recognize Obregón’s government and instituted a ban on loans from American banks at a time when Mexico was desperate for funds to rebuild its war-shattered economy.
Such disagreements, of course, only impeded Ellis’s plans, and he did what he could to mend relations between the two nations. In 1920, in an apparent effort to influence events, the usually reticent Ellis gave a lengthy interview to the New York Times, which labeled him a banker “who knows Mexicans.” Ellis attributed the recent unrest south of the border to the fact that Mexico was “without a doubt . . . the richest spot on the face of the earth,” and claimed that if Americans understood their neighbors better, they would see the wisdom of extending a “helping hand” to Mexico’s new leaders. The following year, Ellis made a behind-the-scenes appeal to one of the leading opponents of Mexican recognition, Senator Fall, to see if he could ease tensions, possibly by setting up an in-person meeting between Fall and Obregón. Ellis managed to schedule a lengthy conversation about US-Mexico relations with Fall on the Golden State Limited as the train made its way from Kansas City to El Paso (an arrangement that, as so many times before, hinged on Ellis’s ability to pass, as trains remained segregated in 1920s Texas). Afterward, the two maintained a correspondence, with Fall expressing interest in meeting Obregón “in a private way.” Ellis accordingly introduced the senator to Ignacio P. Gaxiola, “a personal friend and Power of Attorney in private business of General Obregon.” Gaxiola, explained Ellis, “has the absolute confidence of General Obregon although he is not officially connected with the Government.”
By the time the United States finally recognized Mexico in August 1923, Ellis was already south of the border, working on his latest scheme: a free-port agreement. This was the same project he had risked his life to get Carranza to approve during his flight from Mexico City in 1920. After Carranza’s death, the indefatigable Ellis had directed his appeals to Huerta before ultimately persuading Obregón of the wisdom of the plan. Under the agreement, Guaymas, Salina Cruz, and Puerto México, similar to free ports elsewhere such as Hong Kong and Singapore, were to reduce their taxes and customs duties in hopes of attracting trade and industry. Overseeing the ports was a board of five appointed managers, of which Ellis was the sole non-Mexican.
Mexico’s renewed receptivity to Ellis’s free-port idea brought to the surface the preoccupations that continued to dominate its relationship with the United States. The President of the Mexican Free Port Commission, Modesto C. Rolland, saw free ports as the way to solve the “serious problem of our northern border,” which had if anything grown more acute in the aftermath of the revolution. “Very painful experiences in our history,” opined Rolland, “should teach us that we need to proceed intelligently and efficiently to strengthen our people and to defend ourselves, no longer with weapons, but rather in the field of administration.” By making Mexican labor and resources accessible to American firms—albeit under strictly controlled circumstances—the free ports held out the promise of assisting Mexico’s reconstruction without sacrificing national sovereignty. “The free ports will be under the jurisdiction of a special commission, with police and other powers to protect American and Mexican interests,” maintained Roberto Casas Alatriste, Mexico’s financial agent in New York. “The whole system is principally devoted to the commercial relations of these two countries.” Once again, Ellis had demonstrated his uncanny ability to sniff out the newest and most promising point of intersection between the United States and Mexico.
EVEN AS ELLIS returned once more to his familiar pose of transborder entrepreneur, he found himself forced to conceal a central aspect of his life from his new business acquaintances. This time, however, it was not his background nor his place of birth, but rather the troubling fact that his health had begun to falter. Ellis’s life of disguise had extended not only to his tailored suits and glittering jewels but even to his very body, which had long exhibited the ample girth that those at the time expected of a well-fed capitalist who enjoyed all the best in life. Now, as he reached his late fifties, Ellis’s weight, combined with the stresses of his double life, had begun to take a toll.
Ellis had gotten a hint that something was not right even before he reached Mexico. Complaining of “bladder trouble,” he made a surreptitious stop in San Antonio on his way to the border so that his brother-in-law Greene Starnes could examine him. Once in Mexico, Ellis detrained at the northern city of Monterrey for a couple of days to seek further treatment before continuing on to Mexico City. But the capital’s high altitude and thin air only exacerbated his woes, although he struggled to keep news of his condition secret. “Please do not let anybody know that I had a fainting spell the other night,” confided Ellis to his lawyer in New York. “The doctor says that I am worked down and that if I do not get out of this climate within two or three days, my heart will stop. . . . The other night I sat on my bed trying to get my breath for several hours.”
Even as he faded over the next eight months, Ellis remained intent on not letting his health problems derail his plans to rebuild his fortune. “I fell in the room and fell in the bank and [I had to] pick myself up,” he explained to his sister Fannie. “Things here are not running smooth at all but I have got my fighting clothes on and am going to fight until the last.” After suffering a nocturnal hemorrhage, however, which caused him to “wake up and f[i]nd the bed covered with blood,” Ellis began to sense that his luck might running out. “I am beginning to fear the worst for myself,” he warned his sister. “Don’t be surprised at what may befall me, but there is one thing that you and everybody will say[:] he did the best he could, his fight in life was hard, he came into the world fighting for his rights and that of his wife and children and he went out of life doing the same.”
Increasingly unable to hide his condition, Ellis made several trips to Veracruz to recuperate at sea level, followed by bed rest in his room at the Hotel Gillow. In September 1923, in a sign of his desperation, he forewent his lifelong avoidance of the American colony in Mexico and checked into Mexico City’s American Hospital. A few days later, at 1:05 p.m. on the afternoon of September 24, under darkening skies as a hurricane gathered force in the Gulf of Mexico, he passed his final border, one that even the most consummate trickster could not evade: the divide between life and death. William Henry Ellis was fifty-nine.
EVEN IN DEATH, Ellis was not completely free of passing’s masquerades. Ironically, given Ellis’s aloofness from the American colony in Mexico City, it was the US embassy that supervised the initial response to his death, issuing a death certificate that listed Ellis as an American citizen—the pose, after all, that he had maintained in Mexico for over three decades—and telegraphing Maude to inform her of her husband’s passing. The embassy staff made an inventory of the surprisingly modest collection of effects in Ellis’s room in the Hotel Gillow. As might be expected, there was a large number of items of personal adornment: “1 gold watch, 1 gold chain with pendant, 1 gold pen, 1 gold pen-knife, 1 gold cigar cutter, 1 pair gold cuff buttons, 8 collar buttons, 2 gold rings, 1 gold pin, 1 gold pencil, 2 collar links, 1 silver case with nose-glasses.” But Ellis had only fourteen pesos in his pockets when he died, and officials calculated that despite Ellis’s reputed wealth, the value of all his belongings in the Hotel Gillow totaled less than a hundred dollars. Embassy staffers packed the deceased’s possessions into the three well-worn trunks they found in Ellis’s room for delivery to Ermo, who had arrived in Mexico City to take charge of his father’s affairs.
The first public notice of Ellis’s demise appeared five days after his death in the Mount Vernon Argus, the newspaper of his adopted hometown. The Argus’s obituary hewed closely to the script that Ellis and his family had followed for more than a decade in the City of Happy Homes. There was no direct discussion of Ellis’s ethnicity, although the paper did note that Ellis was also known as “G.E. Eliseo” and was born “near the Mexican border” to “Carlos and Margarita (Nelsonia) Ellis.” Instead, the Argus focused on Ellis’s business undertakings in both Mexico and the United States (including the Manning and MacKintosh claim for “over a $100,000,000”), his adventures as a “great explorer and traveller,” and his “personal friend[ship]” with Theodore Roosevelt. The obituary did little to disrupt the image of an elite Latin American entrepreneur that had long served Ellis as his public mask, at first in life and now in death.
But as word of Ellis’s death spread beyond the tree-lined confines of Mount Vernon, this tightly controlled narrative began to unravel. The day after his obituary debuted in the Argus, the rest of the New York City press published its announcements. While they echoed the Argus, these later treatments expanded their coverage to highlight Ellis’s connections to the Ethiopian treaty of 1904 and the still unresolved puzzle of Kent Loomis’s disappearance. “William Henry Ellis, broker and promoter of this city and Mexico . . ., will best be remembered as the man who in 1904 took the commercial treaty between this country and Abyssinia to King Menelik,” opined the Times. Ellis enjoyed a “spectacular career as a banker, promoter, and soldier of fortune,” reported the World. “He and Kent J. Loomis, brother of the then Assistant Secretary of State, started with the treaty together, but Loomis was lost mysteriously at sea and his body was washed up on the English coast.” On a more subtle level, these obituaries proved how successfully Ellis had obscured his early life in Texas. Most New York papers repeated Ellis’s decades-old assertion that “in the early days he was a cowboy on Texas ranches,” and none of the obituaries touched upon Ellis’s ties to Cuney and Turner or conveyed the slightest whisper of controversy about his racial background. The sole reference to African Americans at all could be found in a few short sentences in the New York Times: “He promoted a scheme for negro colonization in Mexico. The colony failed.”
The leading exception to this trend could be found in the African American press. Over the years, the New York Age had featured a number of articles on Ellis, always carefully excluding any discussion of his background (although astute readers surely realized why New York’s leading black newspaper elected to cover such a figure). Following Ellis’s death, however, the Age abandoned its discretion. The editors published an extended obituary on their front page of “Wm. Henry Ellis, a colored man” that explored the “career of adventure and financial success that brought him world-wide fame.” “He was at various times a cowboy, ranchman, banker, broker, promoter, and finally diplomatic envoy to King Menelik of Abyssinia, as the bearer of a treaty of amity and commerce from the State Department at Washington. Ellis possessed financial genius of a high order and made several fortunes. . . . He was a well-known figure in Wall street [sic]. He posed as a Cuban, transforming his name into ‘Guillermo Enrique Elliseo.’”
African American newspapers elsewhere followed suit. The enthusiasm of the nation’s black press for revealing Ellis’s secret laid bare the complicated emotions that passing evoked within the black community. On the one hand, there was a clear desire to show the world that an African American could beat the white man at his own game and attain the wealth and stature that defined success during the Gilded Age. “Though serviceable in small degree to the race of which he was a part,” asserted the Dallas Express, “nevertheless, from the fact that his life was spectacular, filled with strivings in a big way among the greatest of the world, some degree of satisfaction must be ours in realizing that he was of us.”
On the other hand, the alacrity with which the black press unveiled Ellis’s deception sent a clear signal to other passers: as much as they might succeed in fooling gullible whites, they could not separate themselves so easily from African Americans, who had always known their true identities. Thus, when Chicago’s Broad Axe published a wire-service obituary of Ellis, it appended an explanatory line to the otherwise boilerplate article: “Outside of transacting big business with some of the most prominent white business men in this country or the world, William Henry Ellis was a colored man.” For its part, the Chicago Defender portrayed Ellis as a model passer: someone who achieved vast fame and fortune yet still maintained close connections with African American family members. “The announcement of the death of William E. Ellis in Mexico City recalls to mind an international figure who helped to make national Race history more than a decade ago,” asserted the Defender.
[After his public role in bearing a] special message or important treaty to the court of Abyssinia . . .Ellis returned to this country and resumed his seat in the stock exchange, but dropped out of sight as far as our group was concerned. During his heyday he built his mother an elegant home in San Antonio and would occasionally return to his native home in his private car. . . .The death of Mr. Ellis brings to a close a life that was fought against many odds. But when it came to high finance he was always on the safe side of the ledger.
Even the Crisis, the preeminent black publication of the 1920s, planned a piece about Ellis, with whom the magazine’s founding editor, W. E. B. Du Bois, had engaged in a sporadic correspondence about Abyssinia since the 1910s. Within days of Ellis’s first obituary, Du Bois dropped a note to Judson Douglas Wetmore, inquiring, “Where can I get a picture of the late William H. Ellis and some account of his life? I trust you can help me.” The historical record does not reveal how Ellis and his family knew Wetmore, a lawyer and very light-skinned African American, so white in appearance that he was rumored to have served as the inspiration for his childhood friend James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. But in response to Du Bois’s request, Wetmore dispatched a letter of sympathy to Maude and asked that she have “her son come in and see me.” Wetmore evidentially hoped Ermo or Sherwood might provide the information Du Bois desired. The family, however, intent on preserving what it could of Ellis’s fast-eroding pose as a Cuban or Mexican, seems to have proven unwilling to cooperate.
Even so, as word of Ellis’s demise rippled out beyond New York, an increasingly suspicious tone began to filter into many obituaries. In an article that evoked Kipling with its title “Who Would Be King,” Time magazine described Ellis as “prefer[ing] to style himself Guillermo Enrique Eliseo” and noted that even though Ellis “was born in Victoria, Tex., in 1864 . . . [he] claimed to be of Cuban parentage, on account of which he used the Spanish form of his name.” “Tall, powerful, black mustached, and brown of complexion, [Ellis’s] racial antecedents were doubtful in a region where racial antecedents count for so much,” commented the Milwaukee Sentinel. “He professed himself to be a Cuban of Spanish parentage and said his name was rightly Guillermo Enriques [sic] Eliseo. . . . Texans were of the opinion that he was a native of San Antonio and was of mixed descent, largely Spanish with a dash of negro.” The Associated Press obituary of Ellis, which was picked up by papers throughout the country, similarly called its subject’s ethnicity into question. “Ellis was either a Cuban or of mixed parentage, but he preferred to be known as a Cuban, as he signed himself Guillermo Enrique Eliseo.”
Even as Ellis’s passing was posthumously called into question, his story, like all trickster tales, offered a few final surprises. Maude initially let it be known that Ellis would be interred in Woodlawn Cemetery, the same exclusive resting place the couple had selected for their short-lived twins, Porfirio Diaz and Sherwood Ellis, as well as Maude’s father. In truth, however, Ellis never joined New York’s elite in Woodlawn, but was instead buried in an unmarked grave in Mexico City’s Spanish cemetery. (More unanswered questions: Could it be that even in death Ellis identified as Spanish more than American? Or did the American colony, catching wind of the controversy over Ellis’s background, refuse to allow him into the American cemetery?) The family’s inability to fulfill its promise to transport Ellis’s body back to the United States can be explained by the shocking revelation that emerged after his death. Despite all the newspaper headlines as to how “The Story of the Life of W.H. Ellis Reads Like Fiction . . . Died Wealthy,” it turned out that the man who had once controlled corporations valued in the millions left only $5,000 to Maude. “Much surprise is expressed that his estate should be so small,” observed the New York Age. “It is all personal property, with no realty holdings.”
Among those surprised by this turn of events was Maude. Her situation was in fact far more dire than most realized, for in addition to his almost nonexistent estate, Ellis left Maude a stack of unanticipated debts. He had stopped paying property taxes on the family’s house in 1919, meaning that Maude was now several years in arrears to Mount Vernon. He had also taken out a second mortgage on the house without informing his wife. “I have found about $15,000 worth of debts that I shall have to pay off. . . . I feel I shall be paying off for the next hundred years,” confided Maude to her sister-in-law Fannie. “I often wonder how we have managed. Gerry got a lot of money, but you know how it is in Mexico—he just had to have a lot there to keep himself going and he also had to give a lot away to get his business through.”
While Maude contacted the State Department in a fruitless effort to determine the status of her husband’s fabled concessions in Abyssinia, Ermo remained in Mexico City, pursuing the Manning and MacKintosh claim as well as attempting to regain the title to the family’s hydropower concession in Toluca. Unlike his father, with his constant precautions against being unmasked as a passer, the far more white-appearing Ermo seems to have mixed freely with members of Mexico City’s American colony, which in any event had shrunk almost by half because of the revolution. Within months of his arrival, he became the “chief instructor” of an American shooting club—“quite an honor for one so young,” his mother enthused. “It is surprising how much the older men [in the American colony] like him,” added Maude. “I received a lovely letter from a man down there who used to be the consul general from the United States. He speaks so highly of Ermo’s conduct and character.”
Ermo’s efforts to restore the family’s fortunes, however, ended almost before they began. In late April 1924, Ellis’s oldest son began to experience a high fever, headache, and rash: the first signs of typhus. Like his father before him, Ermo checked into Mexico City’s American Hospital. But there was little that the doctors could do to halt the disease. On May 2, 1924, at the age of only twenty years, Ermo passed away. In a measure of how different his experience of Mexico was from that of his father, Guillermo Enrique Ellis Jr. was interred in Mexico City’s American cemetery rather than being buried beside his namesake in the Spanish cemetery. These separate burials represent the final, bittersweet fruit of Ellis’s passing: his first-born son had gained the acceptance that Ellis had long sought for himself, but at the cost of remaining apart from his father for the rest of eternity.
THE YEARS AFTER Ellis and Ermo’s deaths witnessed a slow splintering of the ties that had once bound together their extended family. Ellis’s nephew Charles Starnes would never rejoin his relatives in Texas. The young man who in 1903 accompanied his famous uncle on his trek to Ethiopia lived out his days in far less glamorous circumstances, working as a clerk for a New Jersey railway company. He continued to maintain that he was born in Monterrey, Mexico, even taking the step of having his name legally changed to Carlos Eliséo Estarñez. Like his uncle before him, he appeared as white in the federal census, married a white woman, and lived alongside whites. Even more than Ellis, however, Starnes charted a journey to the other side of the color line. After his first child died in infancy, he never had any more offspring, perhaps because of the trauma of the baby’s death, perhaps from the fear, common among passers, that any future child might possess physical features that would betray a parent’s nonwhite ancestry. Estarñez also isolated himself from the rest of his family—so much so that he even lost touch with some of his siblings. His sister Marguerite recalled that “until 1925 she heard from him occasionally by letter,” but since then she had “been unable to ascertain whether he is dead or alive. . . . her efforts to locate him have been unavailing.” As for the few relatives who did know where he was, Estarñez only permitted those who were light enough to pass to visit him in whatever all-white neighborhood he happened to be inhabiting at the moment. Estarñez lived to the age of ninety, dying in Burlington, Vermont, in 1965. His death certificate, the final documentation of the earthly existence of the individual once called Charles Starnes, listed the deceased as a white man from Mexico, mother’s and father’s names unknown.
At the same time that Estarñez passed permanently across the color line, others in his family initiated a voyage of their own. Enticed by conditions on the West Coast, in the early 1920s the extended Starnes family moved from San Antonio to Los Angeles—a journey that made them pioneers in the newest migration to reshape African American life: the relocation of blacks from the rural South to the urban centers of the North and West. Greene Starnes opened a medical office at the intersection of Central Avenue and Twelfth Street, and his children, many of them by now married and beginning to start families of their own, settled nearby. Their new neighborhood was popularly referred to as LA’s black belt, for its abundance of African American churches, restaurants, nightclubs, and shops, although the area contained significant numbers of Asians and Mexicans as well.
To newcomers like the Starneses, California held out the promise of being less encumbered by the color line than Texas. In the Golden State, blacks could vote, the Republican Party dominated state politics, and segregation in public places was prohibited. But shadows nonetheless lurked amid the Southern California sunshine. In 1781, the majority of the colonists who founded Los Angeles had been Afro-Mexican—a reflection both of how widespread the Afro-Mexican presence was in the colonial period and of the greater opportunities for blacks along Mexico’s frontiers. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, peoples of African descent represented only a small percentage of Los Angeles’s population. As the Starneses and increasing numbers of blacks relocated to Southern California, local whites responded with racial covenants that constrained where African Americans—and, often, Asian and Mexican Americans as well—could rent or buy homes. African Americans also faced discrimination in employment. Even though Marguerite Starnes’s husband, Richard Moore, had a college education, for instance, the best job he could find in Los Angeles was a position at the post office.
If Estarñez transformed himself into a white man and the Starneses participated in African America’s incipient urban migration and civil rights struggles, Ellis’s immediate family charted a path that propelled them beyond the boundaries of the United States altogether. In 1926, Maude and her surviving children—Sherwood, Victoria, and Fernando—boarded a steamer in Manhattan bound for Veracruz. From here they made their way to the Mexican capital for what was intended as a temporary visit to resolve Ellis’s Mexican estate. Like Ermo before them, Maude and the children easily inserted themselves into Mexico City’s American colony. (Fernando even took the step of adopting the more American-sounding moniker Bill instead of using his Hispanic name.) They lived first at the Hotel Regis, which billed itself as “the only American hotel in Mexico”—complete with an “Amer[ican] barber shop” and “American food”—before settling into a shabby gentility in a series of rented quarters off Avenida de la Reforma. Encouraged by their mother, a talented pianist and dancer who had once harbored theatrical aspirations, all three children joined one of the new dance groups that had sprung up amid the cultural ferment sweeping postrevolutionary Mexico. Artists throughout the nation were grappling with how to articulate a more “authentic” mestizo identity—one less influenced by the European models favored by the Porfiriato and more accessible to the entire population. In fine art, this movement gave rise to the famed murals of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. In dance, it birthed ballet folklórico, which blended Mexican music and dress with trained choreography to produce a new “traditional” Mexican dance.
Sherwood and Bill only participated in the ballet folklórico for a few years, but Victoria, who had taken classes in tap and other dance forms in Mount Vernon, emerged as the premier dancer of her generation. In addition to touring throughout the republic, she extended the reach of her performances via the nascent Mexican film industry, many of whose popular melodramas showcased music and dance numbers. More often than not, it was Vicky (as she came to be called) who choreographed or performed the signature bailes in everything from Una carta de amor (A Love Letter), a period piece about a brave Mexican officer battling the French in the 1860s, to El peñón de las ánimas (The Rock of Souls), a drama about star-crossed lovers from two rival families, starring Jorge Negrete and María Félix, to A la orilla de un palmar (At the Edge of a Palm Grove), a romance set in a fishing village outside Veracruz.
For all their novelty, such films as A la orilla de un palmar also brought to the surface the odd continuities in Mexican racial thinking between the Porfiriato and the postrevolutionary era. A la orilla de un palmar was set in an area that had been a center of Afro-Mexican life since the 1500s. It showcased son jarocho, a musical style derived from African antecedents. Its publicity materials boasted that the movie was “una pelicula costumbrista” (a folkloric film), with almost anthropological attention to local culture. Yet A la orilla de un palmar featured no identifiable Afro-Mexicans. As much as the Mexican Revolution had inspired a deeper appreciation of the nation’s Indian roots, the ensuing recalibration of mestizaje to increase the focus on Mexico’s indigenous peoples—a movement known throughout the republic as indigenismo—nonetheless continued the older pattern of obscuring the existence of Afro-Mexicans.
The ironies multiply all the more when one considers the prominent role of Vicky Ellis in diffusing this latest, more indigenous vision of mexicanidad. As immigrants, Vicky and her family were required to obtain visas from the Mexican government that recorded each person’s distinguishing characteristics, including color and race. In both these categories, Vicky, her mother, and siblings were denoted as blanca or blanco (white). Thus, not only was Vicky at the forefront in defusing a new, more indigenous image of Mexican culture, despite being an immigrant; she also helped embody the new ideal of mestizaje, even though by Mexican standards she was considered white (an issue that was occasionally finessed by having her wear a dark wig, as she does in the grand finale to A la orilla de un palmar). And despite her own background as the daughter of a former slave, Vicky helped solidify a notion of mestizaje that continued the marginalization of Afro-Mexicans.
Ellis had spent a lifetime crisscrossing the borderline and slipping back and forth across the color line. His children, however, made but one transition. As one year passed into the next and the long-anticipated settlement of Ellis’s claims failed to materialize, the family’s temporary visit to Mexico transformed itself into a permanent stay. Sherwood became a newspaper reporter, only to die young, like Guillermo before him, from typhus. Vicky remained single her entire life, teaching in her mentor’s studio, where she trained a generation of Mexican dancers. Fernando worked in a medical laboratory, where he met and married a young Mexican woman named Mercedes Irigoyen. They raised four children, two boys (Guillermo and Peter) and two girls (Andrea and Leticia). These children in turn had eight children of their own. Family members report that Vicky and Fernando almost never spoke about their father. In her only known interview, given to a dance magazine shortly before her death, Vicky mentioned her father only once—and described him as a banker from England. When Fernando’s youngest son, Peter, chanced upon a photograph of his grandfather seated in an elaborately carved wooden chair and became curious about W. H. Ellis’s appearance, Fernando emphatically denied that the family had any African American ancestry. It was, recalls Peter, as if his father “didn’t like the idea of being related to a black person.”
Ellis had passed as Cuban and Hawaiian, married a white woman, lived much of his life in Mexico, and maintained a lifelong interest in African American politics. Such fluidity, however, was rare in a world that sought to organize itself around clear racial divides—a reality cast in sharp relief by the gradual division of Ellis’s family into separate ethnic affiliations. While his nephew crossed the veil to the white side of the color line and his sisters and their families maintained an identity as African Americans, Ellis’s immediate descendants—his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—came to think of themselves as Mexican. Eventually, the branches of this spreading family tree became so distant as to lose contact with one another. Toward the end of her life, the elderly Victoria Ellis relocated to Tijuana to live with her nephew Peter. Although she did not know it, through an odd twist of fate, she was now little more than a hundred miles away from her aunt and relatives in Los Angeles. By this time, however, a pronounced border had arisen between the two branches of the family. Its most obvious manifestation could be found in the tightly surveilled international boundary separating Tijuana from Southern California, with its banks of searchlights, coils of razor wire, and platoons of Border Patrol agents. But it could be found, too, in the accumulated layers of history that led the members of the same family to encounter one another across an ethnic divide.