Mixed Race Studies
Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
recent posts
- 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.
about
Tag: Guillermo Enrique 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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Karl Jacoby talked about his book, “The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire.” He spoke at the 5th annual San Antonio Book Festival.
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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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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.
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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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A prize-winning historian tells a new story of the black experience in America through the life of a mysterious entrepreneur.
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Texas slave passes as Mexican millionaire San Antonio Express-News San Antonio, Texas 2016-06-11 Joe O’Connell Former slave passes as Mexican millionaire 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,…
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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…