Candidate Hoping to Be First Hispanic Mayor May Be 100 Years Too Late

Paul Thompson Morgue John Purroy Mitchel being sworn in as the mayor of New York in 1913.

The demography of the New York City mayoral campaign may already have shifted under at least one candidate’s prospective feat, even before November, when Adolfo Carrión Jr. hopes to be elected the city’s first Hispanic mayor.

Seems he may have been beaten to the title by 100 years.

Researchers at Fordham University Preparatory School in the Bronx discovered that an alumnus, John Purroy Mitchel, the “boy mayor” who was 34 when he took office, had Hispanic roots.

“With the mayoral race beginning to take shape, there has been a lot of talk in the media about the possibility of New York City having its first Latino mayor,” said Louis DiGiorno, the archivist at Fordham Prep. “This has puzzled us here at the Prep, because as far as we are concerned, New York had its first Latin mayor almost 100 years ago: John Purroy Mitchel, Fordham Prep Class of 1894 and mayor of New York from 1914-1917.”

While Mitchel was born in the Bronx, he was descended from Spanish nobility. A great-grandfather emigrated from Spain at the end of the 18th century.

“Mitchel’s maternal great-grandfather was José Joaquin de Purroy, a lawyer from Spain who would settle for a time in Venezuela, where his son, Juan Bautista Purroy, was born,” Mr. DiGiorno said. “Juan Bautista, the father of Mitchel’s mother, Mary Purroy Mitchel, would serve for many years as the Venezuelan consul to the United States. The mayor’s mother grew up in a bilingual home.”

The New York Herald quoted Mitchel, at a 1913 meeting with dignitaries from the Caribbean and Central and South America, as acknowledging his roots and cultural ties to Latin America:

“I have personally a very deep interest in South America that springs of family ties and personal experience, as well as from that friendship which we all feel here for our neighbors to the south. My grandfather, John B. Purroy, was born in Venezuela and, though an American citizen, represented that government here for a number of years as its consul, and I look back as among the most pleasurable and interesting experiences of my life to my visits to South and Central America.”

Beginning with the 1969 campaign, Herman Badillo, another former Bronx borough president, was billed as the first Puerto Rican candidate for mayor. Mr. Carrión, a former Bronx borough president also of Puerto Rican descent, is running in November as the Independence Party candidate and has been seeking to enter the Republican primary, too. He was unfazed about Mitchel’s ancestry.

“We’re big fans of Mitchel,” a campaign spokesman said. “He was an anti-Tammany Hall reformer who had an independent streak and became mayor as a fusion candidate bringing together New York’s various religious groups and Republicans.”

The spokesman, Thomas J. Basile, questioned the depth of Mitchel’s Latino heritage, adding that it was “unlikely he or anyone else at the time viewed him as such or whether he ever had any direct, personal experience with Latino culture or communities.”

“Clearly, one’s ‘racial’ roots and one’s cultural heritage are very different,” the spokesman said. “Mayor Mitchel had Hispanic ancestry by virtue of a connection to Spain, but was certainly not Latino. Mitchel didn’t identify himself culturally during his public life with the broader Latino population globally or in the city. It’s not just about who someone’s great-grandfather was but much more about how you connect not only racially but also with the culture, people and lives of those who share that common heritage. It’s not just about where you’re from but how you live and perceive yourself in relation to others of that heritage.”

“Latino or not,” Mr. Basile added, “Mitchel deserves credit for bringing people together to reform our politics and fight corruption. Both those things need to be done today a century later.”