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The strange career of William Ellis : the Texas slave who became a Mexican millionaire / Karl Jacoby.

by Jacoby, Karl, 1965- author.

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New York : W.W. Norton & Company, c2016.

Ellis, William Henry, 1864-1923.

African Americans -- Biography.

Enslaved persons -- Texas -- Biography.

Businessmen -- Mexico -- Biography.

Millionaires -- Mexico -- Biography.

Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877) -- Biography.

Passing (Identity) -- United States -- History.

African Americans -- Texas -- Politics and government.

Mexican-American Border Region -- Biography.

United States -- Race relations -- History.

9780393239256 (hardcover) :

039323925X (hardcover)

xxviii, 304 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Prologue: Through history's cracks -- Part I. Victoria -- Gone to Texas -- Juneteenth -- Part II. San Antonio/Tlahualilo -- Military Plaza -- The land of God and liberty -- Part III. Manhattan/Mexico City -- A picturesque figure -- The city of happy homes -- Epilogue: Trickster makes this world.

"A prize-winning historian tells a new story of the black experience in America through the life of a mysterious entrepreneur. To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: he was not, in fact, from Mexico at all. Rather, he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in southern Texas during the waning years of King Cotton. After emancipation, Ellis, capitalizing on the Spanish he learned during his childhood along the Mexican border and his ambivalent appearance, engaged in a virtuoso act of reinvention. He crafted an alter ego, the Mexican Guillermo Eliseo, who was able to access many of the privileges denied to African Americans at the time: traveling in first-class train berths, staying in upscale hotels, and eating in the finest restaurants. The Strange Career of William Ellis reads like a novel but offers fresh insights on the history of the Reconstruction era, the US-Mexico border, and the abiding riddle of race. At a moment when the United States is deepening its connections with Latin America and recognizing that race is more than simply black or white, Ellis's story could not be more timely or important"--Provided by publisher.

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