IT GOES AGAINST the instincts of historians to insert ourselves into the stories we tell. Yet the past has a way of grabbing hold of the present in spite of our efforts to separate the two. Over the decades I spent researching William Ellis’s life, I logged more time than I care to recall squinting at old documents, trying to make sense of faded words from a vanished era. With time, however, Ellis’s twisting trail led not only to dusty papers in distant archives but also to living, flesh-and-blood members of his extended family—first his grandnieces, descendants of Ellis’s sister Elizabeth, and then his grandchildren, offspring of Ellis’s youngest son, Fernando.
Almost as soon as I met them, it became clear to me that each side of the family was intensely curious about the other. The American branch had preserved a surprisingly large number of stories about William Ellis as well as a number of family names (Fanny, Marguerita) passed down from earlier generations. But they knew nothing about their cousins across the border in Mexico. For their part, the Mexican Ellises, although they were aware their grandfather was from the United States, did not realize that he was of African American descent until I shared this information with them during an early phone call.
So it was, through such unexpected interactions, that I, a historian, found myself setting in motion a transborder family reunion. One Saturday in the spring of 2015, twenty-five or so of William Ellis’s long-scattered family members—the lone outsiders myself and my wife—gathered in the backyard of a suburban Los Angeles home. This meeting would be the first time in almost a century that the cousins, long divided by the international boundary, were once again in contact with one another. William Ellis’s grandson and his wife had braved the Tijuana border crossing, the busiest in the world, to drive up and spend the weekend with the American side of the family, who had gathered from near (Pasadena) and far (Baltimore) to join the celebration. Under a brilliant blue Southern California sky, the family members mingled in the carefully tended garden of one of William Ellis’s grandnieces, conversing in a jumble of Spanish and English, their words punctuated by laughter and hugs. After talks and toasts, those assembled produced treasured picture albums, filled with faded black-and-white photos, the images within revealing ancestors of varied hues in settings as disparate as Texas, Mexico, and New York. Other family members gathered around a television in the living room to watch a rare movie from 1940s Mexico, featuring a young Victoria Ellis tap-dancing across the classroom of a girls’ boarding school in Internado para señoritas. The reunion began over brunch, but it ended up stretching into the twilight hours, as family members lingered over food and drink or sat quietly in the shade, contemplating a family circle restored. As the participants drifted off into the evening stillness, those present began to make plans to repeat the event again soon—only next time, in Mexico.
A crossing of borders, a search for connections, a conversation: these may seem like small acts. But even as the reunion laid bare the forces that had splintered William Ellis’s family so many years ago—divides of citizenship, of language, of ethnicity—it also demonstrated the possibility of forging new connections. What will flow from such encounters? For now, the answer lies beyond the realm of history. It is a future waiting to unfold, a story still to be written.