Octaviano Larrazolo

Mexican-born politician

• Octaviano Larrazolo
• Born: December 7, 1859
• Birthplace: El Valle de San Bartolo (now Allende), Chihuahua, Mexico
• Died: April 7, 1930
• Place of death: Albuquerque, New Mexico

• Octaviano Larrazolo
• Born: December 7, 1859
• Died: April 7, 1930

In an often controversial public career that spanned more than four decades in both Texas and New Mexico, Larrazolo tirelessly championed the political rights of Hispanics. His long, distinguished career was capped in 1928, when Larrazolo became the first Mexican American elected to the U.S. Senate.

Early Life

Octaviano Ambrosio Larrazolo (ahk-TAY-vee-ah-noh ahm-BROH-see-oh lahr-ah-ZOH-loh) was born in central El Valle de San Bartolo, Mexico, the largest city in Chihuahua, the country’s largest state. The son of a wealthy landowner, Larrazolo was born to privilege. Recognized for his devotion to his Catholic faith and his desire to enter the priesthood, eleven-year-old Octaviano was sent to live in Tucson, Arizona, under the tutelage of the bishop. Despite his young age, he showed tremendous promise in theological study and, when, five years later, the bishop accepted a posting as archbishop in Santa Fe in the New Mexico Territory, Larrazolo followed, completing his studies at St. Michael’s College (now Santa Fe University) in 1877. In 1884, he became a U.S. citizen. Abandoning the priesthood, Larrazolo turned instead to teaching, accepting an appointment as a high school principal in San Elizaro in El Paso County at the westernmost tip of Texas along the New Mexico border. He was only nineteen at the time.

Over the next seven years, Larrozolo completed his duties as a school administrator, and he also became interested in politics, working with the local Democratic Party to help advance his interest in better funding for public schools. In 1886, he was elected clerk of the U.S. district and circuit courts in El Paso. He took advantage of the opportunity to study law and was admitted to the bar in 1888. The following year he was elected (and subsequently reelected) district attorney for western Texas, his meteoric rise as much a measure of his legal acumen as of his mesmerizing power as an orator on the stump. In 1895, Larrazolo relocated to Las Vegas in the New Mexico Territory to open his own law practice.

Life’s Work

Once in New Mexico, Larrazolo became a fixture in Democratic Party politics. In 1900, 1906, and 1908, he was the party’s nominee as the territory’s delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, but he lost each time. However, he was a force in party politics, he wrote tirelessly for regional newspapers, and his voice helped shape public opinion. In the years leading up to New Mexico’s statehood in 1912, Larrazolo pressured the committees meeting to shape the state’s constitution to guarantee that the state would protect both the bilingual status of its education system and the voting rights of its Hispanic population. A dispute with party leadership over the representation of Hispanics on the party’s state ballots led Larrazolo to leave the party in 1911. Because Hispanics accounted for nearly two-thirds of the state’s population, Larrazolo argued passionately that half the party’s nominees for state offices should be Hispanic. When the Democrats refused to support his request, Larrazolo left the party.

Larrazolo decided to seek the state’s governorship, running as a Republican. Given his accomplished oratory abilities and his wide appeal among Hispanic voters, Larrazolo was elected the state’s fourth governor in November, 1918. His campaign was heated and ugly, turning on his opponent’s xenophobic assertions that Larrazolo’s foreign birth made it impossible for him to understand the needs of his constituents. Larrazolo won a narrow victory, even though East Coast political pundits had written off his candidacy, but he would serve only a single term. In that time, Larrazolo successfully shepherded landmark legislation that protected children from harsh labor practices, guaranteed state aid to distressed farmers, established the state’s first Board of Health in response to the influenza pandemic, and promoted medical benefits and job opportunities for the state’s World War I veterans. However, he fell out of favor with his own party because of his advocacy of a controversial state income tax bill, his veto of a bill that denounced the League of Nations, his passionate defense of bilingual education, and his promotion of the Nineteenth Amendment, which would guarantee women’s suffrage. In 1920, the Republicans did not renominate him. Larrazolo briefly returned to El Paso to practice law before returning to New Mexico in 1922.

Larrazolo ran unsuccessfully for the state’s Supreme Court in 1924 but did serve two terms in the state’s House of Representatives in 1927 and 1928. However, his career changed dramatically when Andrieus A. Jones, a Tennessee-born lawyer in the last year of his second term as New Mexico’s junior senator, died suddenly in Washington, D.C., at the age of sixty-five on December 27, 1927. A special election was called to fill out the unexpired term. Larrazolo ran as a Republican and was elected. Larrazolo would serve barely six months in the U.S. Senate, from December 7, 1928, to March 3, 1929, but he was the first Hispanic to serve in this body. It was a cause of great celebration for New Mexico’s Hispanic population and a personal vindication for Larrazolo and the many controversial stands he had taken in his long public career. Concerned over his own failing health and the intemperate climate of Washington, he opted not to run for a full term. He returned to Albuquerque and for the next several years maintained a limited law practice until his death on April 7, 1930.

Significance

Octaviano Larrazolo defied the caricatures of a career politician of his era. Neither a crusading quixotic idealist, nor a close-minded party toady, nor an ambitious self-serving egoist, Larrazolo was a pragmatic populist. His ambitious agenda was driven by his deep compassion for Hispanics and for safeguarding their opportunity to succeed in their adopted land, as well as by his humanitarian concern for all marginalized people—women, the poor, tenant farmers, forgotten veterans, the uneducated, and children—whose concerns the political establishment of his era seldom acknowledged. Trained to be a priest, he more often followed his conscience than political expediency. Such concern, of course, made for an uneven record of political success. However, through his gift of stirring eloquence and his charismatic persona—handsome and vigorous, he was the epitome of Spanish aristocratic gentility—Larrazolo became a force in New Mexico politics at the crucial time when, through the process of its admission to the union, it was initially defining itself as a bilingual state.

Bibliography

Chavez, Thomas E. An Illustrated History of New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Authoritative and comprehensive look at the cultural and political context of Larrazolo’s long career of public service. Particularly helpful in summarizing the contentious debate over bilingual education and voting rights.

Cordova, Alfred G. Octaviano Ambrosio Larrazolo, the Prophet of Transition in NewMexico: An Analysis of His Political Life. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1950. Still considered the seminal look at Larrazolo’s evolving political sensibility and his impact on shaping New Mexico.

Prince, L. Bradford. New Mexico’s Struggle for Statehood. 1910. Reprint. Santa Fe, N.M.: Sunstone Press, 2010. A reissue of a landmark study, first published in 1910, by one of early New Mexico’s most distinguished and controversial politicians. Provides a helpful introduction.

Zannos, Susan. Octaviano Larrazolo. Hockessin, Del.: Mitchell Lane, 2003. Although designed for young adult readers, this slender volume is an effective look at Larrazolo’s Catholicism and his passionate defense of Hispanic causes.