The Government Ate My Name

Summary

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The Starbucks barista calls out “Joe, grande latte for Joe!” It takes him two tries before I remember I’m Joe and go pick up my coffee. A minor episode in the long history of non-Anglo immigrants changing their names after moving to America. If your family immigrated to the United States in the 19th century and/or you took middle-school social studies in the States, you’ve probably heard that officials at Ellis Island often changed newcomers’ names, either because they couldn’t spell them or because they wanted to make them sound more American. In fact, authorities in New York never actually wrote down anyone’s name, they just checked each immigrant against the ship’s passenger list, which would have been compiled by employees of the steamship companies. That means that your grandpa Szymańczyk turned into Simmons before he even set foot on the boat. My case, though, is less about forced reinvention than about bureaucratic drift. Names are bearers of our identity, history, and culture, but a lot can happen when they are run through the machinery of another culture’s bureaucracy. I was born in Mexico City, and my parents named me Leonel Giovanni García Fenech. It might sound a little baroque to Americans, but having four names is standard in Spanish-speaking countries. And it can be surprisingly useful if one of your last names happens to be García, the most common surname in Spain and the second most common in Mexico. Or if you were my former co-worker, who shared a name with someone convicted of running over a child while drunk. That was the first thing anyone saw if they Googled her, so an extra name or two could have spared her countless awkward explanations during job interviews. As the firstborn, I was named after both of my grandfathers: Leonel hints at my father’s Spanish Jewish ancestry; diaspora families with the name Yehuda often used...