Genealogists quickly dug into Leo XIV’s ancestry and traced his maternal grandparents to a diverse Creole community in New Orleans, as the Washington Post reports:
At the turn of the 20th century, the pope’s maternal grandparents, Louise Baquie and Joseph Martinez, were living in New Orleans and listed as Black in the 1900 Census, with Martinez’s place of birth listed as “Hayti” and his occupation as “cigar maker,” according to census records. They lived in New Orleans’s 7th Ward, then the heartbeat of the city’s Creole community.
The couple eventually left the 7th Ward, according to the 1910 Census, in which they were listed as White. Martinez’s birthplace was listed as “Santo Domingo” — potentially referencing the Dominican Republic or the historical term “Saint-Domingue” for Haiti, according to Andre Kearns, founder and chief executive of Black Ancestries, a company that researches the ancestry of people of African descent.
In the 1920 Census, the family, then living in Chicago, was once again listed as White and Martinez’s birthplace was identified as Haiti. Leo’s mother, Mildred Martinez, was the couple’s only child to be born in Chicago; her siblings were all born in New Orleans.
The New York Times gives an overview of the Louisiana Creoles’ complex (and uniquely American) history:
Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié married at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans. Until it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1915, the church building was on Annette Street in the city’s Seventh Ward, a historic center of Afro-Creole culture.
Creoles, also known as “Creole people of color,” have a history almost as old as Louisiana. While the word Creole can refer to people of European descent who were born in the Americas, it commonly describes mixed-race people of color.
Many Louisiana Creoles were known in the 18th and 19th centuries as “gens de couleur libres,” or free people of color. Many were well educated, French-speaking and Roman Catholic.
Over the decades, they established a foothold in business, the building trades and the arts, particularly music, with significant contributions to the development of jazz. They continue to be an important strand in the city’s famously heterogeneous culture.
The pope’s brother told the Times that his family doesn’t identify as Black and they didn’t discuss their Creole roots. Historians point out that many families of color, and particularly those who migrated from the South, left behind their mixed-race identities if they could pass for white. It’s not clear if that was also the Prevost family’s experience, but regardless, the new pope’s Creole ancestry has already become an inspiration to many in New Orleans and to Catholics of color around the world.
