“It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.” — W.C. Fields
When I was a young boy, my grandfather taught me to never allow anyone to mispronounce our family name. He said, “You are a Bo-az, which means your schoolteachers will call out your name near the beginning of roll call and when they mispronounce it, which they will inevitably do, you kindly correct them, straight away.” This was quite the power move for a prepubescent kid, but it made me feel so much more confident about who I was and where I was from, as I grew up.
People have butchered my last name throughout my life: Bo-ass, Boze, Bozo, Booze…I could go on. Some were well deserved epithets. What I never did was allow anyone to call me these things without immediately correcting them. When I met my Honduran American wife, I could see her name was spelled Mar-tha, like Martha Stewart, but she is clearly a Latina and is full of much more spice than Martha Stewart. Her name is properly pronounced the Spanish way, “Mar-ta” where the “h” is silent.
Before we met, Martha was at a professional work event and introduced herself in the full glory of her given name, “I am Mar-ta Maria (roll the R) Contrrrrreras Di-az.” An ignorant “Karen” in the group piped in with a bigoted question, “Yeah, but what’s your English name?” When the other participants responded with finger-wagging “Oh, no you didn’t” disgust, “Karen” turned from pale white to fire engine red. Martha kept her cool and moved on.
I wonder if the European explorers, when they first arrived to North America, were asked by the indigenous people, “I know you call yourself Christopher, but what is your Taíno name?” Sadly, even the name Christopher Columbus is the Anglicization of Cristoforo Colombo. And we now know ignorant “Chris,” convinced he had arrived on the shores of South Asia, mistakenly used the term “Indios” to refer to the Taíno people, which later became why we wrongly referred to all native Americans as Indians for centuries.
There is a myth about Ellis Island in New York Harbor, once America’s busiest immigration inspection station, that the xenophobic Federal agents processing people would force them to Anglicize their names, especially if it was something uncommon or hard to pronounce. Historians are not able to find much evidence proving this, however, that does not mean that countless immigrants didn’t change their own names before arriving to America to better assimilate.
Fast forward to modern times and there is the sad, funny, and true NPR story told by Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez about how Hispanic names were changed by his teachers at his public California elementary school in the 1950’s in an attempt to “Americanize” them (so much for the “melting pot”). “Rrrrrrra-mon” was changed to “Raymond,” Juanita was changed to “Jane,” and even “Maria” was changed to “Mary.” Along came a kid named “Facundo” who literally f’d it up for his racist teachers — at least the ones at this school.
They couldn’t call him “Fac” for short. “Fac, where’s your homework?” “Fac, where have you been?” While I am sure it would elicit some laughs from the students and faculty, using “Fac” sounded too much like the teachers were swearing. So, Facundo went by Facundo (as he Fac-ing should).
All of this inspired my wife and I to choose names for our two boys that were meaningful to our multi-cultural family and us personally, and that could not be easily changed. Names like “Matias” get turned in to “Matt.” Names like “Gabriel” are too often shortened to “Gabe.” We named our first son Miguel Santiago. Michael is my middle name, San Miguel is the archangel who battled the devil, and the Camino de Santiago (the Way of Saint James) has special meaning to my wife who completed the spiritual pilgrimage.
Our newest addition to the family is Diego Martín born a week ago. Diego and Santiago, in Spanish culture, are believed to be derivations of the same name, where Diego becomes Tiago and San-Tiago in English is Saint James, thus linking these two brothers together by name. Martín (pronounced Mar-teen) comes from two personal heroes of our family. For my wife, it is Saint Martín de Porres, the patron saint of mixed-race people and all those seeking racial harmony. For me it is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
So, dear world, this is Diego Martín who won’t answer to any other name and in the words of the late Notorious B.I.G., “And if you don’t know, now you know.”
