Mixed Race Studies

Racial Passing in the U.S. and Mexico in the Early Twentieth Century

RSF Review: Research from the Russell Sage Foundation
Russell Sage Foundation
New York, New York
2015-01-22

This feature is part of an ongoing RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.

During his time in residence at the Russell Sage Foundation, Visiting Scholar Karl Jacoby (Columbia University) is completing a book that examines the changing race relations along the U.S.–Mexico border at the dawn of the twentieth century. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and the unique biographical details of one individual in particular, his book will analyze the distinct systems of racial classification found in the two countries despite their geographical proximity, and show how the border shapes race relations in both countries.

In a new interview with the Foundation, Jacoby discussed the growing field of “microhistory,” and detailed his current research on the elusive figure of Guillermo Eliseo (also known as William Ellis), an African American who was able to “pass” as an upper-class Mexican in the United States, and whose life’s story sheds critical insight on the racial regimes of both Mexico and the U.S. during the Gilded Age.

Q. Your current research fits into a practice that some have called “microhistory”. What is microhistory? How do we connect these highly detailed narratives to larger social issues of a given era?

There is, alas, no precise definition of “microhistory,” perhaps because it is a relatively new approach, with no professional association, no journal, no annual meeting. My preferred way of thinking about it is as a small story that helps us to rethink the large narratives that we tell about the past. Microhistorians tend to be drawn to quirky, peculiar events (Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre) or people (Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre) that simultaneously demonstrate the cultural practices that prevailed in the past and the capacity of individuals to evade or reshape these practices. My account of William Ellis / Guillermo Eliseo, for example, sketches the increasingly confining limits that segregation imposed on African Americans after emancipation as well as the ways in which the color line could often prove unexpectedly porous.

Microhistory may focus on discretely bounded subjects, but its aspirations are expansive. The underlying concept is that by immersing oneself in places or peoples one can lend precision and particularity to what can otherwise seem like unduly broad or abstract generalizations, allowing for more accurate discussions of past social issues.

Q. You have focused on the curious case of Guillermo Eliseo, or William Ellis, an African American who was freed from slavery and went on to “pass” as a Mexican businessman in the US during the Gilded Age. What enabled his passing during this era? Was Ellis mostly an aberration, or was “passing” a widespread phenomenon?

Passing is a profoundly difficult topic to research because it was such a secret practice. As a result, unsurprisingly, estimates of the numbers of passers from Black to white at the turn of the last century are all over the map. Sociologists working in the early twentieth century, comparing the actual count of African Americans in the census with the expected count, computed that some 25,000 blacks were passing every year. Walter White of the NAACP, who often passed (temporarily) to investigate lynchings in the South, estimated in the 1940s that the total was closer to 12,000. Other commentators admitted that “[n]o one, of course, can estimate the number of men and women with Negro blood who have thus ‘gone over to white,’” although they hastened to add that “the number must be large.”…

Read the entire interview here.

First Black Elected to Head Harvard’s Law Review

The New York Times
1990-02-06

Fox Butterfield

BOSTON, Feb. 5—  The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.

The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.

“The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,” Mr. Obama said today in an interview. “It’s encouraging.

“But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance,” he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment…

Read the entire article here.

Passing the Line

Karl Jacoby
2012-12-20

Karl Jacoby, Professor of History
Columbia University, New York, New York

Who was Guillermo Eliseo?

Such was the question that any number of people asked themselves during the Gilded Age as this enigmatic figure flitted in and out of an astonishing array of the era’s most noteworthy events—scandalous trials, unexpected disappearances, diplomatic controversies. To many, the answer was obvious. The tall, exquisitely dressed figure with the carefully coifed mustache, was an upper-class Mexican—in fact “the wealthiest resident of the City of Mexico” and “a prominent Mexican politician.”

For confirmation, one needed to look no farther than his elegant appearance and his frequent journeys south of the border. Indeed, based on his connections with Latin America, he was widely believed to be, if not a Mexican, than a “Spaniard” or “a Cuban gentleman of high degree.” At least a few observers, however, ventured a quite different answer: despite the widespread acceptance of Eliseo’s “Latin-American extraction,” he was not of Hispanic descent at all. Rather, he was just “an ordinary American mulatto” named William (or W.H.) Ellis, who had managed to play an elaborate game of racial passing…

Read the entire article here.

Not Excluded From Analyses: Ethnic and Racial Meanings and Identification Among Multiethnic/Racial Early Adolescents

Journal of Adolescent Research
Volume 30, Number 2 (March 2015)
pages 143-179
DOI: 10.1177/0743558414560626

Cari Gillen-O’Neel, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Rashmita S. Mistry, Associate Professor of Education
University of California, Los Angeles

Christia Spears Brown, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Kentucky, Lexington

Victoria C. Rodriguez
University of California, Los Angeles

Elizabeth S. White, Assistant Professor of Education
Illinois State University, Normal

Kirby A. Chow
University of California, Los Angeles; Society for Research in Child Development, Washington, DC

Because research on ethnic-racial identity development largely excludes multiethno-racial youth, we used a mixed-methods approach to examine ethno-racial meanings and identification among 102 early adolescents (M = 11.45, SD = 0.70 years) with multiethno-racial (n = 45), mono-majority (i.e., European American; n = 29), or mono-minority (e.g., Latino, African American; n = 28) heritage. Results indicated more similarity than difference between multiethno-racial and mono-minority youth—most understood their heritage through tangible connections (e.g., language). Social (e.g., stereotypes) and individual (e.g., pride) meanings of ethno-racial heritage were also discussed. Last, we observed that most multiethno-racial youth identified with either one (53.3%) or all components of their heritage (35.6%), and these identification choices were linked to tangible experiences (e.g., travel or language proficiency). Developmental and contextual reasons for these findings are discussed.

Read or purchase the article here.