The Strange Career of William Ellis: Texas Slave to Mexican MillionairePosted in Articles, Biography, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Mexico, Passing, Texas, United States on 2017-03-12 01:45Z by Steven |
The Strange Career of William Ellis: Texas Slave to Mexican Millionaire
Columbia News: Office of Communications and Public Affairs
Columbia University, New York, New York
2016-06-28
 Karl Jacoby |
The odds were certainly against William Henry Ellis, who was born into slavery on a Texas cotton plantation near the Mexico border.
But a combination of sheer moxie, an ability to speak Spanish and an olive skin allowed Ellis to reinvent himself. By the turn of the 20th century, he was Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, a successful Mexican entrepreneur with an office on Wall Street, an apartment on Central Park West and business dealings with companies and corporations halfway around the world.
His unusual life story is told in a new book titled The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire by Karl Jacoby, a professor in the history department and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Ellis “learned how to be what people wanted him to be, and how to be sure that people would see what they want to see,” Jacoby said…
Read the entire article here.