Mixed Race Studies
Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
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- The Routledge International Handbook of Interracial and Intercultural Relationships and Mental Health
- Loving Across Racial and Cultural Boundaries: Interracial and Intercultural Relationships and Mental Health Conference
- Call for Proposals: 2026 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at UCLA
- Participants Needed for a Paid Research Study: Up to $100
- You were either Black or white. To claim whiteness as a mixed child was to deny and hide Blackness. Our families understood that the world we were growing into would seek to denigrate this part of us and we would need a community that was made up, always and already, of all shades of Blackness.
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Tag: Guillermo Eliseo
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Jacoby’s prize-winning book tells the true story of William Ellis, a larger-than-life figure who was born on the U.S.-Mexico border in the twilight of slavery and inhabited a world divided along ambiguous racial lines.
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Guillermo Eliseo was a wealthy Mexican banker and broker who lived in New York City in the early 20th Century. But, Eliseo had a secret. He was actually born into slavery on a cotton plantation in southern Texas, and his real name was William Ellis.
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Biography: ‘The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire,’ by Karl Jacoby The Dallas Morning News 2016-06-24 Karen M. Thomas, Professor of Journalism Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas From all accounts, Guillermo Enrique Eliseo commanded attention. The elegantly dressed Mexican-born Wall Street baron in Gilded Age Manhattan was known…
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Across the Border The Nation 2016-07-21 Michael A. Elliott, Professor of English Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia William Henry Ellis, (Photo courtesy of Fanny Johnson-Griffin) A new biography of William Henry Ellis reminds us how much we still don’t know about the elusive history of racial subterfuge in America. When, in 1912, James Weldon Johnson published…
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A Tale of Racial Passing and the U.S.-Mexico Border The New Yorker 2016-07-20 Jonathan Blitzer The African-American businessman William Ellis, pictured here around the year 1900, frequently passed as Mexican. COURTESY FANNY JOHNSON-GRIFFIN Some people knew him as William Ellis, and others as Guillermo Eliseo. He could be Mexican, Cuban, or even Hawaiian, depending on…
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Leaving to learn Columbia Daily Spectator 2015-12-02 Claire Liebmann Courtesy of Karl Jacoby Several years ago while browsing newspaper clippings online, Karl Jacoby, a history professor at Columbia, came across the story of William Ellis—a Texan slave who built a million dollar fortune while posing as a Mexican millionaire in New York, essentially hacking the…
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National Affairs: Who Would Be King Time 1923-10-08 Word came to the U. S. that William Henry Ellis, who preferred to style himself Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, died in Mexico City. Mr. Ellis was one of the most remarkable men who ever acted as agent for the State Department. He was known chiefly for the famous…
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Racial Passing in the U.S. and Mexico in the Early Twentieth Century RSF Review: Research from the Russell Sage Foundation Russell Sage Foundation New York, New York 2015-01-22 This feature is part of an ongoing RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.…
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Passing the Line Karl Jacoby 2012-12-20 Karl Jacoby, Professor of History Columbia University, New York, New York Who was Guillermo Eliseo? Such was the question that any number of people asked themselves during the Gilded Age as this enigmatic figure flitted in and out of an astonishing array of the era’s most noteworthy events—scandalous trials,…