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.

...as White as any Anglo-Saxon

 

LULAC leaders like [Paul] Andow clearly worried that too close an alliance with black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and endorsement of their tactics would imperil the position of Latinos and Latinas in a white supremacist society. Andow further implied that blacks succeeding in the wake of the civil rights movement did not deserve their good fortune. Meanwhile, LULAC sought a white identity for its members, campaigning against racial designations on government forms that classified Latinos as Mexicans. The term Mexican referred to a nationality, not a race, LULAC insisted, and Latinos were as white as any Anglo-Saxon. 

Jacob I. Rodriguez of LULAC bristled at the Mexican label. "There's no sense of shame in being, or being, a Mexican - IF YOU ARE A CITIZEN OF MEXICO!" Rodriguez wrote in a 1963 letter to the Sand Antonio Express. "There's just no reason why we - as U.S Citizens - should be called what we are not."

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

Expelled from LULAC

 

This ideology shaped the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929 in Corpus Christi, Texas. LULAC drew its membership from "small business owners and merchants, small landowners, skilled workers, artisans, [and] professionals." English was declared LULAC's official language. LULAC's racial politics can be deciphered by its name. By labeling themselves "Latin American," the middle-class group emphasized the community's European origins and American citizenship. 

Some LULAC chapters expressed their white identity by erecting a color line between the membership and blacks. One LULAC council expelled a member for marrying a "Negress,"and members socially shunned the interracial couple. A member of the council bitterly complained that "An American mob would lynch him. But we are not given the same opportunity to form a mob and come clean."

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

Passing for Cuban

Morton was making history, shattering the color barrier in recording for the first time, More than a decade before Benny Goodman received credit for doing so with Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson. Still, the idea of white musicians collaborating with a black man —even one as light-skinned as the Creole Morton—posed problems for all involved, particularly when it came to hotel accommodations in provincial Richmond. So Morton was asked to pass, the boys in the band saying he was Cuban.

Gaines, William, and Reich, Howard. Jelly's blues : the life, music, and redemption of Jelly Roll Morton. Cambridge, Hachette Books, 2003.

Reggie Jackson's White Girlfriend

At Arizona State I encountered another form of prejudice. My football coach there, Frank Kush, told me that the Sun Angels boosters were upset because I was dating a Mexican girl, and that I should be careful... 

 In 1966 I was on the Arizona State baseball team when Bobby Winkles called me in and said, "I want to tell you that you're probably not going to be the number one draft choice in the country, even though you're head and shoulders ahead of everyone in ability." I asked him why, because it was a prestige thing to me. "Because you're dating a white girl," Winkles told me. I asked him how he knew. He said he'd heard it from the Mets. "They think it might cause some problems in the minors," Winkles said.

"We Have a Serious Problem That Isn't going Away", Sports Illustrated, May 11, 1987.

University of Texas

 

 

In May 1945, an Anglo private in the U.S Army and graduate of the University of Texas, PFC Robert Jones, wrote to Governor Stevenson that he attended high school with many Mexicans, some of whom "obviously had traces of Negro ancestry," and that at the University of Texas he saw "boys and girls with kinky hair and Negroid features from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela and other countries... I know from almost a whole lifetime in contact with Mexicans that they deserve more. I think the same can be said for the Negros." 

Foley, N., 2010. Quest for equality. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.