An abandoned sharecropper shack on the former Weisiger plantation in Victoria, Texas, where William H. Ellis was born and witnessed slavery’s demise amid the chaos of Reconstruction.
An abandoned sharecropper shack on the former Weisiger plantation in Victoria, Texas, where William H. Ellis was born and witnessed slavery’s demise amid the chaos of Reconstruction.
Ellis’s dramatic full-page ad in the San Antonio city directory, announcing his transformation into a transborder entrepreneur, buying and selling hides, cotton, and other goods across southern Texas and northern Mexico.
San Antonio’s military plaza in the 1890s, with its mix of food vendors and wagon trains bound for Mexico. Ellis maintained an office on the plaza, the heart of San Antonio’s commercial and political life, for almost a decade.
Norris Wright Cuney and Henry McNeal Turner, who would introduce Ellis to the fierce debates swirling around Republican Party politics and black emigration.
Ellis’s home in Mexico City for almost thirty years: the Hotel Gillow. Staying at the British-owned Gillow allowed Ellis to maintain his distance from most other Americans in Mexico during the Porfiriato.
The Tlahualilo hacienda. The need for hands to work the hacienda’s thousands of acres of irrigated fields led its managers to sign a contract with Ellis in 1894 that would bring more than eight hundred African American sharecroppers to Tlahualilo.
Mexican overseers in one of the Tlahualilo hacienda’s cotton fields. Many of the sharecroppers who accompanied Ellis found the presence of such guards a disquieting reminder of the labor controls they had hoped to escape by emigrating to Mexico.
The former colonists from Tlahualilo during their internment at Camp Jenner outside Eagle Pass. Because of fears of smallpox, the US Marine Hospital Service quarantined all the returning colonists at the border.
William Henry Ellis as Guillermo Enrique Eliseo. Ellis’s ability to persuade Americans of his Latin background depended not only on his fluent Spanish but also on his elegant dress.
A drawing of Ellis from the 1901 New York World. Such images convey Ellis’s remarkable success in obscuring his African American ancestry and passing as an elite Latin American.
Maude Sherwood as she appeared at the time of her wedding to Ellis in 1903. There is no marriage photo of Ellis and Sherwood together, most likely because Ellis did not want to create a visual record of his transgressions against the color line.
The interior of Ellis’s Wall Street office, located just down the street from the era’s preeminent financial firm, J. P. Morgan & Company.
Emperor Menelik II and members of his court in a photograph taken just days after Ellis, the first African American to journey to Ethiopia, arrived in Addis Ababa.
Ellis’s nephew Charles Starnes, who accompanied his uncle to Ethiopia. Following Ellis’s example, Starnes would soon portray himself as Mexican and change his name to Carlos Eliséo Estarñez.
Ellis in Mexico City with his two oldest sons and his father, Charles. This image was taken in 1910, just before the Mexican Revolution disrupted Ellis’s close ties with Porfirio Díaz’s inner circle.
Maude in the backyard of the family’s house in Mount Vernon, New York, with her and Ellis’s four surviving children (from left): Victoria, Ermo, Fernando, and Sherwood.
Victoria Ellis dancing with José Manero in the 1936 Mexican melodrama Irma la mala, one of the numerous films from the golden age of Mexican cinema in which she appeared.