THE IMAGINED OFTEN has a way of proving all too real. Just as the stories that Ellis spun about himself took on a life all their own, shaping events on both sides of the border, so, too, did race, that momentous yet absurd human invention that had so defined Ellis’s career, retain its power in the years after his death, becoming, if anything, more entrenched. Once it had been possible, as in the Texas legal code of 1866, to have some African American ancestry yet still be considered white. By the early twentieth century, however, the United States had come to embrace the “one drop” rule. Alarmed that “many thousands of white negroes . . . were quietly and persistently passing over the line,” numerous states enacted laws classifying anyone with an African American forbear, no matter how remote, as black. By 1920, the Census Bureau, in accordance with this new logic, confined the category of whiteness solely “to persons understood to be pure-blooded whites,” while classifying an individual of mixed black-white ancestry “as . . . a Negro . . . regardless of the amount of white blood.” This relentless drive for racial purity undermined the viability of any intermediate category between black and white. As late as 1890, the Census Bureau utilized “mulatto,” “quadroon,” and “octoroon” to describe individuals of varying degrees of African ancestry. By 1930, however, these terms dropped from the census altogether. From now on, such persons were simply black.
Across the color line, some African Americans articulated their own versions of this doctrine. Marcus Garvey, the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the most popular organization among peoples of African descent in the early twentieth century, appealed for all persons with black ancestry, no matter how small, to join together as a “united Negro race.” “We desire to have every shade of color, even those with one drop of African blood, in our fold; because we believe that none of us, as we are, is responsible for our birth,” wrote Garvey in 1923. “We believe that every Negro racially is just alike.”
Ironically, at the very moment that many in the United States sought to create purer, more discrete races, Mexico deepened its celebration of racial mixing. In 1925, Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos published his influential La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race), a work that argued that a “new universal era of Humanity” would only come about through the blending of races. “The ulterior goal of History,” asserted Vasconcelos, “[is] to attain the fusion of peoples and cultures.” Vasconcelos’s work situated Mexico on a trajectory toward future glories while leaving its northern neighbor doomed to stagnation because of its “inflexible line that separates the Blacks from the Whites.”
That two such different ways of thinking about race should arise along a shared borderline was more than mere coincidence. As neighboring New World republics, the United States and Mexico possessed a number of common historical features: participation in the Atlantic slave trade, wars of independence against European colonial powers, the expropriation of Indian lands. Paradoxically, however, these points of congruence rendered each nation an especially potent foil for the other—a mirror of sorts in which one could glimpse one’s imagined other, and in so doing, oneself as well. As a result of this dynamic, the United States and Mexico’s growing interaction during the nineteenth century led not to a blurring of distinctions but rather to a heightening of difference. This was particularly manifest in the realm of race relations. As the United States and Mexico engaged in parallel projects of national reconstruction, designed to forge a unified citizenry out of diverse collections of inhabitants, each conceptualized itself in opposition to the other. In portraying itself as a white nation, unlike “mongrel Mexico,” the United States obscured the existence of its many nonwhite residents, not to mention the racial mixing and passing that rendered the very notion of a pure white race untenable. And in casting itself as a mestizo nation of Spanish and Indian origin, unmarred by the slavery that had fueled the violent land grabs of its northern neighbor, Mexico erased the presence of its considerable Afro-Mexican population as well as those other ethnic groups, such as Arabs and Asians, who likewise fell outside its definition of mestizaje.
This intimate interplay ensured that even though the border was situated on the physical perimeter of the two countries, it played a central role in each nation’s process of racial formation. The periphery defined the core, and the borderline evinced the color line. Less than a year after Ellis’s death, the United States passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, establishing an intricate quota system for who could legally cross its borders that favored immigrants from Western Europe while outlawing the immigration of “colored races” from Asia. As befitted a measure that spawned vast categories of “illegal aliens,” the act also established a Border Patrol to police the nation’s boundaries and keep out unwanted migrants.
At much the same time, Mexican authorities similarly narrowed the scope of who could legitimately cross their nation’s border. For all Vasconcelos’s pronouncements on the “Cosmic Race,” it turned out that the republic continued the old pattern of confining mestizaje to the mixture of Europeans and Indians. In 1925 (the same year, ironically, that La raza cosmica appeared), the Mexican congressman Gustavo Durón González opined in Problemas migratorios de México that “as we don’t have a negro problem, it is a blunder to create one artificially” by allowing the entry of African Americans. Turning such pronouncements into policy, Mexico’s Departamento de Agricultura y Fomento forbade the immigration of blacks as well as Chinese and South Asians. Zealous officials even barred African American tourists, leading Du Bois to complain that “Mexico discriminates between American citizens who wish to visit their country. . . . No person of Negro descent is allowed to make such a visit.” (These rulings also meant that, by the standards of their homeland’s one-drop rule, Ellis’s children were engaged in their own form of passing when they entered Mexico on visas that declared their race as “white.”)
In his long career journeying back and forth between Mexico and the United States—across the intertwined borderline and color line—Ellis the trickster had become a virtuoso in surmounting such boundaries and transforming them into opportunities. Moreover, as in the archetypical trickster tale, Ellis played a key role in creating the world that he inhabited. For more than three decades, he had served as the Gilded Age’s leading proponent of African American immigration to Mexico, not to mention a prominent facilitator of cross-border trade and investment. By setting in motion many of the interactions that defined the US-Mexico relationship, Ellis generated the very terrain on which he operated.
Approaching Ellis’s life through the figure of the trickster enables us not only to grasp the central roles that improvisation and dissembling played in his life as a border crosser; it also offers us a way out of the conceptual trap at the heart of the turn-of-the-century discourse on passing. Gilded Age Americans conceived of passing in dichotomous terms: the concealment of one’s true racial identity to adopt a fake, invented one. According to such logic, the fact that an individual calling himself Guillermo Enrique Eliseo spoke fluent Spanish, lived much of his life in Mexico, dressed like a member of the Porfirian elite, circulated among Mexico City’s leading politicians and entrepreneurs, and died and was buried in the Mexican capital counted for nothing. He remained what he had been at birth: an African American.
Once we realize, however, that race is a protean, ever-changing fiction, rather than an objective fact, it becomes impossible to parse identity so neatly into the authentic and the contrived. It is true that Ellis concealed elements of his background from outsiders. But the features he showed insiders were equally revealing. In two of his surviving pieces of personal correspondence—a letter to his father and another to his younger sister Fannie—Ellis signed himself “Guillermo.” In identifying himself using his Spanish name, Ellis surely did not expect to deceive his family into believing that he was Mexican. Rather, his use of Guillermo even among his closest familiars hints that his Latin American persona felt as real to him as his African American one. And why not? For by the odd alchemy of American racial thinking, in which Mexican blurred into Spanish, and Spanish blurred into white, it was Guillermo Enrique Eliseo who opened up the new worlds that would have been closed to William Henry Ellis by the harsh realities of the color line. And after so many years spent passing as Eliseo, might not the mask and the face, the person and the persona, have begun to fuse into one another?
At the same time, Ellis evinced no contradiction in claiming to be Mexican, Cuban, or Hawaiian yet being active in African American politics. Even as he and his family settled into an all-white neighborhood in Mount Vernon, Ellis maintained a link to black political life, replacing the electoral campaigns of Cuney and the colonization of Turner with the economic uplift and backroom negotiating of Booker T. Washington. In 1917, Ellis offered “one of the principal talks of the evening” at a dinner held at one of Manhattan’s premier restaurants to honor the Tuskegee Institute—an event attended by a veritable who’s who of New York’s black community, including James Weldon Johnson, author of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Fred R. Moore, editor of the New York Age, and clergyman Adam Clayton Powell. That same year, Ellis took advantage of his ties to Teddy Roosevelt, with whom he had maintained an intermittent correspondence since his foray into Ethiopia in the early 1900s, to urge the ex-president to end the horrors of lynching: “We have asked the Turks to spare the Armenians; we have asked the Russians to protect the Jews and, yet, in our own house and under our own fig-tree, we have allowed human beings to be burned at the stake. Such a thing has never happened in Russia, Turkey or Mexico or in any of the places that we are trying to reform.” When a mob of whites murdered at least eighteen blacks in Slocum, Texas, and forced many other African Americans to flee the town, Ellis dispatched a similar telegraph to President William Howard Taft, demanding that the federal government intervene: “Grover Cleveland Democratic President sent troops Illinois stop rioting. Cant you use Federal strength to stop massacre helpless blacks in Texas for humanity’s sake if nothing else?”
By passing, then, Ellis was ultimately laying claim to an identity beyond a specific ethnic label, be it Mexican, Cuban, or Hawaiian. Rather, he was asserting his existence, in Earlene Stetson’s apt phrase, “as a human person with all the rights and privileges thereof.” After all, in a United States that sought to inscribe the color line through all facets of daily existence, to be caught on the black side of this boundary was to be deprived of the full measure of one’s humanity, left with few if any civil rights that the larger society was obliged to respect. It was this tension between the particular and the universal that Du Bois explored so memorably in The Souls of Black Folk when he spoke of the “double consciousness” of being African American, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Ellis the trickster at once rendered this “twoness” singular—a transcendent humanity—and refracted it through a multiplicity of identities: white, black, Cuban, Hawaiian, and Mexican. Passing added a new layer of complexity to Du Bois’s depiction of the African American predicament, one that required Ellis to preserve a coherent sense of self while also remaining exquisitely attuned to how his plethora of alternative guises was perceived by others.
This could be a difficult performance to sustain even in the best of circumstances. There were obvious reasons why Ellis—with his swarthy skin, black hair, and dark eyes, his childhood spent along the border, his fluent Spanish—favored a Mexican persona when passing. For “persons of obviously colored complexion,” counseled Langston Hughes, passing as an individual of northern European origin could prove challenging. Far easier to “go to Mexico as colored and come back as Spanish.” But Ellis’s claims to mexicanidad may have resonated on a deeper plane as well. For all its problematic erasure of the Afro-Mexican presence, the notion of mestizaje nonetheless allowed Ellis to express an identity that accessed whiteness’s legal rights while also recognizing the existence of racial ambiguity and mixed ancestry. If the resulting formulation did not reflect every facet of Ellis’s ethnic background, it nonetheless remained a far more attractive option than the constrained racial categories prevailing in the United States. Moreover, it hinted at the possibilities to be found in expanding mestizaje still further to embrace the totality of the North American experience and acknowledge the continent’s centuries-long history of miscegenation, mixing, entanglement, and creolization. Recast from this perspective, Ellis’s passing as Mexican represented not a form of social death but rather the birth of a truer, more complex self.
TODAY, MANY OF the landscapes that once would have been familiar to Ellis have changed almost beyond recognition. Former cotton fields outside Victoria now sprout the pumps and drilling equipment of the nation’s newest resource boom: fracking for oil and natural gas. One no longer finds an informal ferry shuttling residents across the river from Piedras Negras to Eagle Pass. Travelers must pass instead through computerized checkpoints along the reinforced concrete bridge linking the two nations. Below, agents of the US Border Patrol guard the waters of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo del Norte in high-speed airboats, while a spiked, black steel barrier some twenty feet high dominates the riverbank along the US side of the border. Mexico City has metatastatized into the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, an agglomeration of some twenty million people that sprawls far beyond the nineteenth-century core where Ellis once strolled, absorbing the sights and sounds of the capital’s busy streets. In the wake of the Mexican Revolution’s land reforms, a patchwork of peasant ejidos has supplanted the vast, foreign-owned hacienda in Tlahualilo. The Manhattan that possessed only a handful of Mexican residents when Ellis first arrived in the 1890s is now home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Mexico, who constitute the city’s fastest-growing ethnic group. Mount Vernon, an overwhelmingly white suburb when Ellis, Maude, and the children settled there, has become a majority minority community. One need only glance out the front door of Ellis’s former address in the City of Happy Homes to chart the demographic transformation: located across the street is a Dominican bodega specializing in “comida Hispana.”
Yet for all these transformations, the defining features of Ellis’s world reside with us still. The borderline and the color line may have assumed new guises over the years, but their power has proven remarkably resilient. Transforming our divided world, it turns out, will require more than a lone trickster. It will require us to recognize that we all inhabit a mestizo, mulatto America—and that surmounting the boundaries that separate us is our mutual project.