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    The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
    The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
    The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire

    Written by Karl Jacoby

    Narrated by JD Jackson

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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 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.

    The Strange Career of William Ellis offers fresh insights on the history of the Reconstruction era, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the abiding riddle of race. At a time 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781515974277
    The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
    Author

    Karl Jacoby

    Karl Jacoby is a professor in the Department of History and in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. He is the author of Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History.

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    • 5/5
      This book should be on the school curriculum (and be required reading for adults!) in both the USA and Mexico...for all those who have either forgotten, or are sadly ignorant of the true origins of "Americans".
      Here's hoping humanity can one day become La Raza Cósmica!