{"id":48350,"date":"2016-07-20T21:18:25","date_gmt":"2016-07-20T21:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=48350"},"modified":"2016-12-26T22:24:45","modified_gmt":"2016-12-26T22:24:45","slug":"a-tale-of-racial-passing-and-the-u-s-mexico-border","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=48350","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of Racial Passing and the U.S.-Mexico Border"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Tale of Racial Passing and the U.S.-Mexico Border<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2016-07-20<\/p>\n

Jonathan Blitzer<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nThe African-American businessman William Ellis, pictured here around the year 1900, frequently passed as Mexican.<\/em>
\nCOURTESY FANNY JOHNSON-GRIFFIN<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Some people knew him as William Ellis, and others as Guillermo Eliseo. He could be Mexican, Cuban, or even Hawaiian, depending on whom you asked. Everyone seemed to agree that he was spectacularly wealthy and successful. In the dime-store<\/a> Who\u2019s Who books that were popular at the turn of the twentieth century, his name, in one form or another, appeared regularly. He was a \u201cBanker, Broker, and Miner,\u201d who came to New York from the \u201cMexican frontier,\u201d an exemplar of the self-made man.<\/p>\n

It was one of his life\u2019s many ironies that the pedigreed gatekeepers of American high commerce celebrated his origin story without knowing a thing about his actual origins. William Ellis was born a slave, in Texas<\/a>, in the eighteen-sixties. Like at least some of his siblings, he was light-skinned, but with a key difference: on the city census that recorded blackness with a \u201cc\u201d (for \u201ccolored\u201d), Ellis was somehow spared the label. In his early twenties, he got into the cotton trade after a brief apprenticeship with a white local businessman, shuttling back and forth to the cities in northern Mexico<\/a>. He started telling people that he was Mexican, and that he had anglicized his name for their convenience, as Karl Jacoby<\/a> recounts in his fascinating new book, \u201cThe Strange Career of William Ellis<\/a>.\u201d Having grown up just south of San Antonio<\/a>, along the border, Ellis came to speak fluent Spanish. He quickly grasped the possibilities of bilingualism in the race-riven landscape of the Reconstruction-era<\/a> South…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,21,459,8,103,6462,1249,20],"tags":[19292,22157,24541,19293,3886,19295,19294,22156],"class_list":["post-48350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","category-mexico","category-passing-2","category-texas","category-usa","tag-guillermo-eliseo","tag-guillermo-enrique-eliseo","tag-jonathan-blitzer","tag-karl-jacoby","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-w-h-ellis","tag-william-ellis","tag-william-henry-ellis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48350"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48360,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48350\/revisions\/48360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}