15: Elective Affinities

Pope Leo XIV and the Making of New Orleans

Many Roman Catholics around the world draw hope from the news that Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was born in the United States. The people of New Orleans are celebrating his Creole roots. Leave it to Jari C. Honora, New Orleans’s unofficial chief genealogist, to dive right into the sources. He brought his findings to the attention of the US mainstream media, which announced that the new pope’s ancestors were mixed-race, in other words, members in the New Orleans free community of color.¹ I wanted more detail than the articles provided, so I used my own subscription to Ancestry.com to find out more.²

One paragraph will explain what makes Robert Prevost’s family tree so unprecedented. The new pope’s mother, born Mildred Martinez, was born in 1912. Her race was designated as “white” in the 1920 U.S. Census, when she was 12 years old. Her parents, Robert Prevost’s grandparents, were Louise Baquié, born in 1868, and Joseph Nerval (sometimes spelled Norval) Martinez, born in 1864. They are identified in the 1870 census as “M” for “mulatto,” the outmoded term for “mixed race.” Ten years later, in the 1880 census, Louise and Joseph both have “W”, for “White,” next to their names. What’s more, all four of Mildred’s grandparents, her great-aunt and at least one great-uncle went through the same racial transition between 1870 and 1880. In total, at least 8 members of one family were listed as mixed race in 1870 and then white in 1880 and thereafter. When we think of mixed-race people “passing” in the 19th and 20th centuries, we tend to think of them slipping singly across the color line and often disappearing. Here we find two generations of one family moving from mixed race to white in same decade in New Orleans (Joseph Martinez and Louise Bacquié migrated to Chicago in the first years of the 20th century, where their children were born). It’s a safe bet there will be scholars who will undertake to explain how and why the process of reconfiguring the family’s racial identity took place over the 1870s. The explanation will without a doubt involve the fraught and violent history of Reconstruction in New Orleans.

Leo XIV’s family history embodies what so many people, myself included, love about New Orleans. No other city in the country is anomalous to the degree the Crescent City is. It is exceptional in architectural, musical, gastronomical, racial, and religious terms. Not every resident experiences the city in the same way, to be sure. Nevertheless, the feeling, mood, flavor, look, and humid embrace of New Orleans is the product of an ongoing, successful, and self-conscious group project, in which long-time and short-term residents, tourists, merchants, musicians, restauranteurs all take part.

The residents, both long- and short-term, put up with corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and potholes like the residents of no other city in the US. Something about this place makes it worth it. In 2023, Orleans Parish, an interchangeable term for the city of New Orleans, contained 376,000 residents. Pre-Hurricane Katrina, the population was 100,000 more. Today, fifty-five percent of the city’s inhabitants are Black, while the white population amounts to 30 percent. Almost 7 percent are foreign-born, coming mainly from Latin America and Asia. What I cannot extract from the U.S. Census Bureau or any other agency’s data is the number of people currently living in New Orleans who were born here. I have a hunch a significant proportion of the white population, now and in the past, was not born here. So, the perpetuation of the city’s unique culture has been an ongoing collective effort. Each wave of newcomers buys into the culture of New Orleans. That culture is probably why they came here.

We might ask, then, what are the elements of that culture, even if what makes New Orleans special is, in fact, hard to reduce to essential characteristics? Speaking for myself, it’s a city of gritty and gracious hospitality, cheerful drinkers, and enablers. At the risk of smoothing New Orleans’ very rough edges, I find here an open-hearted quality to human interactions, often fueled by spirits, that other cities lack. Families and friends roll out their drum barbecue grills for picnics in the parks. The social clubs hold second-lines in neighborhoods in Midcity and Center City, attended by Black and white revellers. It’s a city in which bumper stickers that read “New Orleans - a place to crawl home” are common. I have passed young Black, female mail carriers laughing in the late afternoon with old white men holding cocktails in Solo cups. Men sitting on front porches with a bottle of Bourbon on a table beside them, nod or call out to the pedestrians who pass on Prytania Street. One of my neighbors has a sign on her door, “No soliciting — unless you’re delivering a bottle of wine.” Some people would say this city has an unhealthy relationship to alcohol; others say people come here to have a good time with alcohol.³ I enjoy how strangers call me “baby” and “darlin’.” I laugh with strangers on the street and in grocery stores far, far more often here than anywhere else. Years ago, a friend from Germany, who doesn’t like jazz, paid New Orleans a visit. He couldn’t figure out what the fuss was all about. “You can walk on the streets with a beer in your hand? So what? We do that at home.” He completely missed the point.

However, like Robert Prevost’s ancestors, the city has not always been thus. New Orleans’ special character took a lot of effort to create. There were several moments over the 20th century when the city could have turned out very differently. At the turn of the century, Storyville, the red-light district, attracted a certain kind of tourist that the city leaders succeeded in shuttering at the start of World War I. Then, in the late ‘40s, the city government and the Chamber of Commerce considered razing the slum-like French Quarter, where honky tonk — that is, early country music — bars dominated Bourbon Street. Black people and the music they produced were not allowed in the Quarter. For decades, while jazz caught on elsewhere in the country, the Tourist Board resisted incorporating jazz into tourist brochures, because of its associations with the Black community. For jazz to become mainstream here, the venues where local fans and visitors could hear jazz had to be made comfortable for white patrons (i.e. segregated) before the Chamber of Commerce deployed jazz to lure white tourists. It is a painful irony that, in one of the key cities where jazz music first took shape, the Jazz Club of New Orleans did not admit Black members until the 1960s. A group of dedicated folklorists and public radio pioneers struggled to change the culture of music in New Orleans, starting with the invention of Preservation Hall in 1961.

There’s a reason why Black families, like the Prevosts, left New Orleans in the early 20th century during the Great Migration: racism. When New Orleans’ native son, Louis Armstrong, sang “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?,” people around the country came up with a sentimental answer to that question. It’s worth remembering, however, that Armstrong had to leave his hometown to have the career he did. So, the answer to his song’s question is complicated. Most of all, it depends on who you ask.

A personal note: I’m loving my time here, as I always do. Good food, good friends, good times, and the weather has been spring-like. I’m getting my fill of rain. So far, I’ve been here a month, with another 6 weeks to go before Billie and I set out on the road again for California.

1. “New Pope Has Creole Roots in New Orleans.” The New York Times, May 9, 2025.

2. Ancestry.com is an essential tool for historians and people working on their family history, although its annual subscription is not cheap. It gives you access to U.S. Census, birth, baptism, marriage, divorce, wills, death and imigration records as well as manifests of passenger ships docking at US ports there and many other sources. If you go to the National Administration and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, and ask to consult the census, an archivist will sit you down in front of a computer terminal and have you log into their Ancestry.com account, at which point you realize that you could have done the work at home (i.e., me, circa 2008).

3. Then again, at the jazz bistro Snug Harbor, there’s only one waitress to take drink orders for entire venue, thereby guaranteeing no one gets more than one drink. Nobody seems to mind.