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 Who’s Who books that were popular at the turn of the twentieth century, his name, in one form or another, appeared regularly. He was a “Banker, Broker, and Miner,” who came to New York from the “Mexican frontier,” an exemplar of the self-made man.
It was one of his life’s 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, 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 “c” (for “colored”), 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. He started telling people that he was Mexican, and that he had anglicized his name for their convenience, as Karl Jacoby recounts in his fascinating new book, “The Strange Career of William Ellis.” Having grown up just south of San Antonio, 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 South.
Throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, the porous border with Mexico blurred the stark dividing line between white and black in America. In 1850, in Texas, there were twenty-five thousand “Tejanos”—that is, American residents of the state who came from Mexico and spoke Spanish. The U.S. had acquired a large swath of the borderlands from its southern neighbor two years before, so a certain haziness was inevitable. In 1857, a runaway slave named Dolores Brown argued in court that she was born south of the border, “upon the Guadalupe River, of Mexican parents.” Unable to prove otherwise, the judge had no choice but to pronounce her “a free person of Mexican descent.”