From the French Quarter to the Vatican

HNOC Family Historian Jari C. Honora discovered the pope’s Creole roots hours after the papal announcement was made public. “Our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, has Creole of color roots from New Orleans on his mother’s side!” Honora wrote in a post on his Facebook page.

Prevost was born and raised in Chicago as a white man, and it’s unclear the extent to which his family discussed their Creole ancestry. That’s because when Joseph and Louise boarded that train in New Orleans, they were known as people of color. Once they arrived in Chicago, they started a new life as whites.

“They made a shift in their racial identity when they went to Chicago,” Honora says. “They were consistently listed as Black, mulatto, colored here, but once they get to Chicago it’s white, white, white, white, white.”

It’s unclear whether this change was common knowledge among Prevost’s family. In interviews, the pontiff’s brothers have stated that they knew vaguely of a New Orleans connection in their mother’s ancestry but had never discussed their Creole roots.

“They definitely grew up considering themselves white Chicagoans and still identify as that,” Honora says.

Joseph and Louise, born Louise Baquié, grew up in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, an enclave for the city’s Creoles of color. Joseph’s place of birth is unclear, from studying the records. When he was an adolescent, it was listed as Louisiana. But in several censuses during his adulthood, he claims his birthplace as Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Louise (1868–1945) was the daughter of Ferdinand Baquié, a shoemaker; her family, Honora says, had been present in Louisiana since the colonial era.

Census records identified both Joseph and Louise as mulatto, sometimes as Black. They were married in 1887 at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, a church on Annette Street that was destroyed by a hurricane in 1915. Joseph’s childhood home, bounded by North Prieur, Aubry, O’Reilly, and North Roman Streets, was demolished to make way for the Interstate 10 overpass in the mid-20th century.

Joseph worked as a clerk in an office and as a cigarmaker, Louise as a homemaker. By 1910, they were residing in the French Quarter, in the Upper Pontalba Building overlooking Jackson Square on St. Peter Street. At the time, Joseph was 45 and Louise was 42. They had six children—all girls—ranging in age from 14 to one, and the following year they welcomed a seventh, Mildred (1912–1990), who would go on to become the mother of the Holy Father.

Throughout the 19th century, Creoles of color occupied the middle rung in the city’s tripartite caste system, with whites at the top and African American Blacks at the bottom. Creoles overlapped with the gens de couleur libres (free people of color) of the colonial era; they held better jobs, many of them in skilled trades, and enjoyed greater freedom of movement and opportunity than formerly enslaved Blacks.

However, with the dawn of Jim Crow segregation following the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, that three-tiered racial caste system shifted to a binary, undergirded by the “one-drop rule” declaring any person of mixed ancestry to be Black. (Technically, the law set the bar at one-sixteenth of a person’s bloodline.) As the white supremacy of Jim Crow hardened across the South, people of color began leaving in droves, spurring what’s known today as the Great Migration. Between 1915 and 1960, roughly five million people fled the south for greater opportunity in the west and north—particularly Chicago.

Such was the case for Pope Leo XIV’s grandparents, the Martinezes. There, Joseph continued his work as a cigarmaker. The family lived on East Cedar Street in the city’s North Side, several blocks from the lakefront. Chicago offered the Martinezes a fresh start, and they put down roots that remain strong today. Like many people of color at the time, the Martinezes left behind the strictures of the Jim Crow south, but today, that forgotten New Orleans connection gives Louisiana Catholics and Catholics of color everywhere a reason to celebrate.

“I think that a lot of New Orleanians have a much stronger connection to the Holy Father now, beyond being people of faith or people of well meaning,” Honora says. “They now consider him a homeboy—and a definite Saints fan at this point.”