Former slave passes as Mexican millionaire

Joe O’Connell, For the Express-News

June 11, 2016

Historian Karl Jacoby was driving near the Texas-Mexico border when he was stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol, the agency charged with keeping Mexicans out of the United States.

He explained, to their dismay, that he was writing a book about a Texan who had tried desperately to cross into Mexico.

In the completed book, “The Strange Career of William Ellis,” Jacoby has pieced together of the life a former slave who transformed himself into a wealthy Mexican.

Ellis was born to a mixed-race mother on a cotton plantation in Victoria one year before slavery ended, but found transformation in San Antonio, then the hub of commerce between the United States and Mexico.

“He was born ‘in between’ in multiple ways,” Jacoby said. “There was this fault line between slavery and freedom and what that might mean. There was also a fault line between the United States and Mexico.”

Both nations were courting immigrants as business boomed in the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century.

“Victoria was the outer fringe,where the Mexican ranching frontier and United States cotton culture met,” Jacoby said. “San Antonio was the hub of transport across the border to Monterrey. Then the trains came and opened it up, and everything exploded.”

Ellis had a knack for language and soon served as an interpreter while working in the leather and wool trade.

“It’s remarkable — the boldness of what he did,” Jacoby said. “It’s easy to locate in historical records — he took out a full page ad in the city directory. He flipped the script. Instead of being a worker in someone’s store, all of a sudden he was running a large concern and doing it quite publicly.”

The newly renamed Guillermo Eliseo set up shop in the center of downtown commerce — Military Plaza.

“He wasn’t hiding on the outskirts,” Jacoby said. “He was out in the open.”

That was important to Ellis/Eliseo’s success, said the author, who teaches at Columbia University.

Slaves from Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico had been escaping in large numbers across the border to Mexico.

After being granted their freedom, African-Americans were quickly mired in Jim Crow laws that largely nullified it.

“Ellis was code-shifting,” Jacoby said. “While ‘passing’ is to completely surrender yourself to a new identity, he was strategically moving back and forth. He would rupture the stereotype of the African-American and play on the stereotype of the Mexican, so he could make his way in this world.”

Ellis’ brother-in-law was the only African-American physician in San Antonio at the time and lived just a few blocks from Ellis, but in the city directory a C next to the doctor’s name signified him as “colored.” In a San Antonio that was then a third Tejano, no such C appeared initially by Ellis/Eliseo’s name.

Ellis kept one foot in his African-American past through heavy involvement in the largely black Republican Party, but it proved his undoing, Jacoby said.

When the dots were finally connected between the freed slave and the Mexican businessman, Ellis vanished, only to reappear in New York City as an even more flamboyant Mexican businessman, this time on Wall Street.

The book plays on the trickster of African-American fiction, Jacoby said.

“The trickster is a character who simultaneously creates order and disorder,” Jacoby said. “In doing so, the trickster shows you where the boundaries are. Ellis was able to transgress every boundary U.S. culture tried to place on him.”

His dual life also reflected the differing views on race in the United States, where a single drop of African-American blood classified a person as black, and Mexico, where the mixed race Mestizo was revered, Jacoby said. Despite its own history of slavery, Mexico disavowed the concept long before the United States.

“It all underscores how basically fictional race is,” Jacoby said.

The book presents Ellis as a dreamer/schemer whose big plans proved as much fantasy as fact.

Jacoby’s initial interest in Ellis was sparked as a graduate student when he read of a plan Ellis organized to bring freed U.S. slaves to Mexico as sharecroppers. The plan eventually failed.

Ellis did have some success with controlling water companies in New York, but his far-flung adventures also included business failures, near misses and intrigue. His early trade negotiations with Ethiopia even brought him under suspicion of a murder that Jacoby gives little credence.

“You could never have made this story up,” Jacoby said of Ellis’s life. “What I love about history is its capacity to surprise me. When you can grasp the unexpected, it makes you reconsider your conceptions of the past.”

Joe O’Connell is a Texas writer.