The Texas slave who passed as Mexican

On the morning of March 14, 1909 …a tall man with penetrating brown eyes and carefully groomed mustache, attired in the latest fashion…caught the eye of authorities in Eagle Pass. Like the others on the Aztec Limited, the passenger had begun his journey from Mexico City in a first-class Pullman. Once he crossed the border into the United States, however, a new question arose. What race was he? For despite his elegant appearance, his skin had a somewhat swarthy tone—and, unlike Mexico, the Texas of 1909 possessed segregation laws, designed to limit contact between black and whites in everything from schools, restaurants, libraries, graveyards, and hotels to railroad cars. 

When asked, the newcomer insisted that he was a Mexican entrepreneur, on his way back to his office on Wall Street after negotiating the purchase of several rubber plantations in his homeland. His name, he offered, was Guillermo Enrique Eliseo—which,… could be translated into English as William Henry Ellis. Moreover, as an ethnic Mexican, he was legally white and not subject to Texas’s segregation statutes.

 Karl Jacoby , The Strange Career of William Ellis : The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire ( New York : W.W. Norton , 2016 )

The Jim Crow Accomplices

 

By 1948 a nine-square-mile community of 25,000 blacks, Mexican Americans, and poor whites lived on a low flood plain in West Dallas...

Desperation forced relatively prosperous blacks again to venture in the early 1950s in the Exline Park neighborhood, scene of the 1940-41 bombings. Twelve bombings in the next year and a half targeted homes sold to blacks in formerly all-white neighborhoods in a two-square-mile area of South Dallas. Not expecting white protection, African Americans armed themselves...

Dallas police arrested a series of suspects beginning in September 1951. The accused shared a decidedly working-class background and included parts pressers, machinists, and garage mechanics...

Yet only one of the suspects was ever put on trial- Pete Garcia, a member os Moore's South Dallas Adjustment League. Garcia was one of two Hispanics indicted in the bombings...

Garcia claimed Caucasian status, painting "For Whites Only"signs and placing them in the yards of families agreeing to not sell their South Dallas homes to black families. Garcia threatened other families at knifepoint to maintain the ban. Dallas newspapers, which had a policy of identifying black and Mexican American crime suspects by race, acknowledged Garcia's whiteness by frequently not mentioning his ethnicity. A chief witness at Garcia's trial testified that she had seen Garcia enter a vacant house moments before an explosion. She recanted her testimony, however. A jury deliberated for twelve hours before acquitting Garcia. 

Phillips, Michael. White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001. United States, University of Texas Press, 2010.