Karl Jacoby is a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of several books, including The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (W.W. Norton), from which this piece is adapted. His Twitter handle is @karl_jacoby.

If there is one issue that has steered 2016 in a startling direction, it has been immigration. The GOP’s strategy to increase its appeal to Latinos after Mitt Romney’s upset in 2012 quickly unraveled once the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, charged that Mexico was sending “criminals, drug dealers, rapists” to the United States. Before long, chants of “Build that wall!”—a reference to Trump’s promise to construct a “beautiful” concrete wall along the Mexican border—could be heard at political rallies, high school sporting events and beyond. The GOP’s concerns about inclusion, it seems, pale in comparison to Americans’ anxieties about jobs, crime, national security and the sense that there is a teeming mass of people desperate to burst across the border.

It hasn’t always been this way; for much of American history, the U.S.-Mexico border has been largely unprotected. Only in 1891 did the United States start deporting illegal immigrants (a category at the time limited principally to Chinese workers as well as felons, paupers and the insane), and it wasn’t until 1924 that Congress formed the Border Patrol. And at one point, remarkably, our contemporary debate was even flipped: Hordes of Americans wanted to escape their bleak prospects for a better life—and the place they wanted to flee to was Mexico.


But Mexico didn’t want them. The story unfolded in the late 19th century, in the form of a little-known black migration scheme to the low-lying, underdeveloped parts of south and central Mexico—Veracruz, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacán and San Luis Potosi—and was spearheaded by a man sparingly remembered by history. He intended to relocate thousands of black families to start a new colony in Mexico, which would have radically changed the demographics and the economy of that region, if not all of Mexico. The plan provoked sensationalist, often racist, reports in the Mexican press—one warned of a “race war”—and fiery fights in the country’s Senate. In the end, it failed—no such colony was ever settled. But the history lesson, of a time when our current debate was flipped on its head, is a timely reminder of those fluid identities, and just how easily these centuries-old, deeply ingrained fears can be stoked—on either side of the border.

Born as a slave in 1864 on a cotton plantation in the small South Texas town of Victoria, William Henry Ellis managed in his early 20s to transform himself into a successful merchant in San Antonio. To do so, however, he had to craft an alternative persona for himself as a Mexican named Guillermo Enrique Eliseo (his name translated into Spanish) to gain entry to the all-white business settings that would have otherwise been closed to him. To further his ethnic charades, Ellis cultivated a showy Mexican-style mustache, dressed in the Mexican fashion, and used the fluent Spanish that he had learned in Victoria as a child.

In the 19th century, during the administration of President Porifirio Díaz, Mexico was hoping to modernize its economy by attracting more immigrants. Ellis did much of his business across the border in Mexico, and he saw the United States’ southern neighbor, with its lack of legal segregation, as a place of great promise not only for himself but for other African-Americans as well. He thus set in motion in 1889 an ambitious plan to facilitate the large-scale migration of African-Americans to Mexico.

Taking advantage of new railroad connections between the U.S. and Mexico, Ellis journeyed to Mexico City. Tucked in his luggage, he carried letters of introduction from the Mexican consul in San Antonio to Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Ignacio Mariscal, and Secretary of Fomento (Public Works), Carlos Pacheco Villalobos. Once in the Mexican capital, Ellis persuaded Pacheco, a grizzled former general who had lost both an arm and a leg in Mexico’s recent war against the French-backed emperor Maximilian, to grant him a 10-year contract to colonize up to twenty thousand settlers in Mexico. Although the race and nationality of the colonists was not specified in the contract—only that each colonist would have a certificate attesting to their “morality, honesty and diligence”—Ellis’s comments to the press left little doubt that he intended to fill the colonists’ ranks with African-Americans.

The colonization movement represented one of the most divisive fault lines running through African-American politics in the late 19th century. Even as they defended the right of blacks to live wherever they pleased, most black leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Norris Wright Cuney, the influential chairman of the Texas’ Republican Party, decried efforts to relocate African-Americans (a movement known in the language of the day as colonization). These figures charged that colonization not only diminished the pool of African-American voters in the United States; it also encouraged long-standing white fantasies of solving the United States’ “race problem” by ethnically cleansing all blacks from the nation. Even the great liberator Abraham Lincoln had briefly entertained thoughts of colonizing freed slaves on Mexico’s Tehuantepec isthmus or Yucatán peninsula. Above all, by presenting blacks’ real home as elsewhere, emigration diverted attention from what many African-Americans perceived as the more pressing task: achieving their full civil rights in the United States. “I cannot see wherein [African-Americans] would gain anything [by colonization],” contended Cuney. “They are so thoroughly identified with the perpetuity of our American institutions, that it seems to me to be rather late for them now to seek homes in a new country with the customs, government and people of which they are thoroughly unacquainted. There is much more glory, honor and gain for the colored man here in the land of his birth, and here he should stay and fight his way to the front.”

Relocating to Mexico, however, did not necessarily represent a retreat from politics in Ellis’s eyes. Rather, it highlighted the shortcomings of Reconstruction—in particular, the federal government’s failure to support blacks’ economic aspirations. Whites blamed the poverty in which blacks found themselves trapped after Emancipation on a lack of work ethic. Ellis, in contrast, knew that the problem lay not with African-American character but rather with their lack of access to land, the foundation of wealth in a predominantly agricultural society. If the place of their birth would not facilitate black access to property, perhaps Mexico, in its desire to attract immigrants, would. “The idea of Mr. Ellis,” explained one observer, “is that the colonists will become self-sustaining farmers.”

Colonization tended to draw its support from the most marginalized members of the black community—those, unsurprisingly, who suffered the worst oppressions and therefore had the least to lose in relocating to an unfamiliar land. Even before Ellis finalized his contract with the Mexican government, he had compiled a list of several hundred families from four adjoining Texas counties— Fort Bend, Matagorda, Brazoria and Wharton, all “places where the colored people have been having trouble” in Ellis’s apt phrase—who had expressed interest in moving to Mexico. These counties were home to the largest African-American majorities in all of Texas. Not only had these conditions led unsympathetic whites to dub the region “Senegambia”; it also spawned fierce racial strife as local whites endeavored, despite the demographic imbalance, to “free . . . themselves from Negro rule” by threatening the area’s black elected officials.

***

For Mexicans, the question of colonization had two profoundly different meanings. For a country that had long perceived itself at risk of being swallowed up by its more populous northern neighbor, colonization signified the attracting of new immigrants. As the Mexico City newspaper El Siglo Diez y Nueve asserted in 1881, colonization was one of Mexico’s “great projects.” New immigrants would “not only increase the scant population that we possess,” but also aid in “the exploitation of our agricultural elements, whose richness will pour out . . . in the principal markets of the world.”

Despite such rhetoric, the total number of immigrants to Mexico remained modest. Commentators reported that even though “representatives of most every other nation are also found in Mexico, such as Turks, Arabs, Greeks and Swedes . . . they are in small numbers and scattered all over the country.” Forced to compete with the United States in immigration as in so much else, Mexico decided in the late 1870s to adopt more aggressive measures. Porfirio Díaz’s government negotiated 19 colonization contracts between 1878 and 1882, offering a generous package of subsidies—free passage, land, tools and freedom from taxes, custom duties and military service—to organizers who agreed to plant colonies of immigrants on Mexican soil, especially in the republic’s less-inhabited, more vulnerable northern states. Once this initial investment primed the pump, it was hoped that an increased flow of immigrants would come to Mexico on their own accord.

The Mexican government identified a range of ethnic groups, from Egyptians to Canary Islanders, as possible colonists. But it placed particular emphasis on attracting immigrants from Italy, who supposedly shared Mexico’s “Latin” identity. “The Europeans who most identify with our habits and our way of life are, without doubt . . . the Italians,” opined one observer.

William Henry Ellis. | Courtesy of Karl Jacoby

The government’s plans, however, did not produce the hoped for results, with most immigrants still preferring the U.S. or Argentina over Mexico. “Some of the assisted colonists, especially Italians,” reported the U.S. consul at Matamoros, “have walked and begged their way across and out of the country.”

These disappointing results created an opening for Ellis. For reasons of race and nationality alike, Mexico had never viewed African-Americans as a desirable group for colonization. In 1879, the intellectual Francisco Pimentel contended that the presence of blacks would “increase one of the ills our country suffers from, the heterogeneity of population.” The Mexican press echoed this stance, with commentators contending that, given the “natural differences” dividing the races and Mexico’s need to “improve its social, economic, and political status . . . the immigration that we need is that of the enterprising, robust, and civilized white race.”

Yet despite this hostility towards peoples of African descent, not long after Ellis’ arrival in Mexico City reports began to circulate that “Gen. Pacheco, Minister of Public Works, is greatly interested in Ellis’s plan, and heartily in favor of granting the concession.” If this startling departure from the Díaz administration’s earlier goal of whitening Mexico’s population offers compelling evidence of Ellis’ charm and powers of persuasion, it also underscores the challenges he faced in making his plans a reality. Pacheco’s proposed contract restricted Ellis’s colonies to low-lying regions of Veracruz, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacán and San Luis Potosi, all places where tropical diseases had long hindered development. “The object of this colonization is to populate and cultivate the hot and unhealthy places along our coasts that cannot be cultivated by our nation’s inhabitants,” asserted Mexican officials. “It will be convenient to see, as way of a test, if by bringing some blacks to these coasts it will be possible to transform them from uncultivated to productive.” In addition, the Department of Fomento structured its contract so that rather than making a large initial investment, as had been done with Italian immigrants, most of Mexico’s contributions came later, after Ellis had established one thousand colonists in the republic and the president determined that the newcomers had farmed or mined successfully for at least a year. Such measures imposed on Ellis’s colony the greatest constraints of any such project in Mexico. “No colonization company,” stated Mexican politician Alfonso Lancáster-Jones, “has been more restricted, more limited in its privileges and its rights.”

Given the powerful role of the executive in Porfirian politics—Díaz had adopted a policy of pre-selecting all legislative candidates for office—the contract’s acceptance was all but certain once Ellis secured the president’s and Pacheco’s approval. Even so, when the agreement came before the typically pliant Mexican legislature, it sparked a heated discussion that lasted days. In the face of charges that black colonization would be a “scandal” for the country—“We are going to bring blacks to our coasts,” warned Senator José María Couttolenc Cruz, “we are going to populate them with a contemptible, abject and degraded race . . . the Mexicans in these places will be forced to flee”—other legislators rejected such assessments as tainted with the “despotism and tyranny” of Mexico’s northern neighbor. In the words of Senator Pedro Díez Gutiérrez: “In the United States there still exist racial fears that violate human dignity, the foundation of true liberty; over there one encounters the fears of the American union’s southern states, in whose sources it seems that my honorable colleague has imbibed his inspiration against the black race.”

On November 7, 1889, Ellis’ contract surmounted its final legislative hurdle, passing the Mexican Senate, where opponents had manipulated quorum rules to delay a vote. Even with the limitations that the Díaz administration had placed on Ellis, Mexican critics eyed the project with deep suspicion. “We cannot believe that Secretary of the Interior would adopt a project that would bring about . . . grave difficulties for the Government and would be the breeding ground of riots and perhaps the engenderer of a race war,” warned the Mexico City newspaper El Monitor Republicano. “Certainly we need arms [brazos] to exploit the resources of our rich territory but as good and productive and desirable as the cultivation of cotton is, peace is better.”

***

Ellis was not the first African-American to contemplate the emigration of his people to Mexico. As early as 1852, Frederick Douglass’s colleague at the North Star, Martin Delany, argued passionately (if inaccurately) that since there has “never existed in the policy of any of the nations of Central or South America, an inequality on account of race or color,” Mexico and its fellow Latin American nations should serve as “the ultimate destination and future home of the colored race on this continent.” During these same years, a handful of free blacks from Florida and New Orleans, fleeing restrictions against them in the antebellum South, settled in Tampico and Veracruz. In 1886, African-Americans in Washington, D.C. organized the Afro-American Colonization Association and corresponded with Mexican Ambassador Matías Romero about moving to Baja California. Two years later, African-Americans in California incorporated “The Colored Mexican Colonization Company” for the purpose of “owning, selling, colonizing, and farming lands, and raising, buying, and selling stock. . . in the Republic of Mexico.”

Yet if Ellis was far from the only African-American to perceive Mexico as a refuge from U.S. racism, he was the first to negotiate a formal colonization contract with the Díaz government. This unprecedented turn of events reflected in part Ellis’s borderlands upbringing: his fluency in Spanish, his familiarity with Mexican culture, his long-time contacts with Mexican merchants and consuls in San Antonio. Even so, there remains something almost preternatural about Ellis’s precociousness—his ability as a young man in his mid-20s to transcend his modest beginnings as a slave born along the Guadalupe River in South Texas and operate at the highest level of Mexican society. His uncanny self-confidence and ability to present himself as others wished to see him—the same skills that enabled Ellis to pass as Mexican so successfully in Texas—were now being employed for a very different purpose: to forge new linkages between Mexican and African-American aspirations for the future.

If most other African-Americans lacked Ellis’s easy familiarity with Mexico, they nonetheless followed events south of the border with great interest. Ellis’s negotiations in Mexico City garnered extensive coverage in the black press. The Cleveland Gazette, for example, featured repeated discussion of the plan in its “race doings” column. “As Mexico is an importer of cotton and comparatively free from the prejudice which is such a barrier to our progress . . . in the South, it would not be a bad idea to make successful this colonization scheme because both would benefit by it,” noted the editors. “We are aware that arguments can and will be used against such a movement but, upon the whole, we believe it to be commendable.”

The signing of the colonization contract, however, brought burdens as well as opportunities. The agreement with the Mexican government committed Ellis to acquire croplands in Mexico and, within three years, to settle at least one thousand people on them. Every year afterwards, the total number of colonists needed to go up by at least two hundred. Only after the colonists had reached Mexico and planted their second crop would the government pay Ellis fifty dollars for each adult immigrant. And only at the end of the contract’s 10-year term would Ellis receive the handsome additional bonuses that the Mexican government had promised the would-be immigration broker.

The former cotton plantation in southern Texas where Ellis was born. | Photo by Karl Jacoby

The passage of the colonization act thus spurred Ellis to a frenzy of activity. He established an enterprise named “the Mexican Coffee-Cotton Colonization Company,” appointed himself director general, and tried to sell shares to finance his colonization venture. He placed ads in San Antonio newspapers, offering free transportation to African-American families who wanted to move to Mexico. In early 1890, Ellis expanded his activities to Houston and Waco, speaking to blacks in both cities. He was then off to Mexico City to speak with “members of a wealthy English syndicate” there about investing in his colonization project, before returning back to Houston. A few months later, family members in San Antonio told of receiving letters from him bearing postmarks as disparate as Albuquerque, New Mexico; Flagstaff, Arizona; and San Francisco, California.

Ellis’s urgency can be traced not only to his colonization contract but also to the exigencies of the cotton plant. Because of the cotton-cultivation cycle, which stretched from planting in the early spring to final picking in the late fall, there was only a limited window of time in the winter of each year when sharecroppers could leave their current arrangements for new homes in Mexico. Since the Mexican Congress had not approved the contract until November 1889, Ellis had had to scramble to assemble possible colonists almost immediately. When his plans did not cohere in time, he then had to wait until the following autumn before they could again have any realistic expectations of relocating Africans American field hands to Mexico. When he did not succeed over the winter of 1891, for the same reason that plagued so many black colonization efforts at the time—lack of start-up capital—his hard-won opportunity became all the more imperiled.

Almost as worrying was the fact that Ellis’s colonization effort brought unwanted publicity—and the potential to undo his carefully crafted persona as a Mexican entrepreneur that had long deployed in Texas. To most Americans, black and white, the mere fact of Ellis’s interest in African-American colonization in Mexico did not necessarily signal that he was African-American. There were also whites who supported colonization efforts, for reasons as diverse as wanting to purge the U.S. of all blacks to hopes of finding an experienced labor force for the Gilded Age’s growing trade in tropical goods. Even the black press contained a few references to Ellis and his project that betrayed an unawareness of the organizer’s background. “A citizen of Texas, W.H. Ellis brings forward still another scheme of Negro colonization,” complained one correspondent. “Of course the originator of the project had consulted everybody concerned except the Negroes.”

Yet as the “negro exodus scheme . . . became an all-absorbing topic throughout the union” some Texas newspapers began to catch on to William Henry Ellis’ fabricated Mexican identity. As the Galveston Daily News revealed to its readers, “Mr. Ellis is an attractive mulatto, about 30 years of age, and is prominent in political circles in San Antonio.” Confirmed the Dallas Morning News: “He is not a Mexican capitalist. . . . He is a rather shrewd republican politician.”

New Window The Strange Career of William Henry Ellis. (Click for more information about the book.)

This exposure of Ellis’s racial subterfuges might have been worthwhile had his plan borne fruit. In the end, however, Ellis’s aspirations exceeded his grasp. Although the plan to emigrate to Mexico excited considerable interest among blacks in Texas—by 1891, Ellis’s list of potential colonists had reportedly grown from several hundred to several thousand—he was never able to raise the funds necessary to get the project off the ground. Internal changes in Mexico hastened the scheme’s collapse. In March 1891, General Pacheco, the head of the Department of Fomento and the leading champion of colonizing African-Americans in Mexico, resigned his position because of ill health, only to pass away a few months later. Within days of his death, the Mexican government cancelled Ellis’s contract.

***

The cancellation of his colonization contract did not end Ellis’s connections to Mexico. In 1895, he would resurface as the author of an equally spectacular plan to relocate sharecroppers from Alabama and Georgia to the cotton-growing regions of northern Mexico in 1895—a development that once again brought to the fore Mexican unease about African-American immigration while simultaneously unnerving many in the United States, who thought they were on the cusp of losing an essential (if mistreated) labor force to their southern neighbor.

Ellis’s efforts to spur a mass migration from the U.S. to Mexico remind us that the cross-border pursuit of opportunity, and the xenophobic panic it can spark, is not unique to our age. But the frenzy that Ellis’s colonization plan sparked in Mexico also provides historical perspective on our contemporary moment. In hindsight, it is clear that Mexican anxieties about African-American migration were vastly misplaced. Mexico mishandled a rare moment when it could have gained thousands of hardworking, skilled and grateful new citizens by placing so many obstacles in Ellis’s way. We might hope we don’t look back with the same regret on 2016, when large portions of the electorate failed to discern how the current anti-Mexico furor prevented the U.S. from an honest reckoning with the opportunities before it.