When my mother was pregnant with her fourth child, who would be born eleven months apart from the third, my paternal grandmother advised, “If it’s a girl, call her Dominga. That way you won’t get pregnant again.” Mom, however, perhaps doubting the contraceptive abilities of the Holy Day’s allusion, named the baby María del Carmen.

When she told me this story during one of my visits to Spain, Mom assured me she hadn’t meant to be rebellious. She just wanted to honor her own mother, Carmen.

“I did include Dominga as one of your sister’s other names, so Abuelita wouldn’t get upset,” added Mom, referring to the now outdated tradition of giving babies a string of three or four names honoring various saints and relatives. Then she looked up from her knitting and let out a little chuckle. “It looks like using Dominga didn’t do much good.”

Mom ended up having ten kids. Four were girls and three had María as part of their first name: María del Carmen, María Isidra, and María de los Ángeles.

She wasn’t the only mother favoring María. It was a common choice at the time.

Here is a list of the top ten baby girl names in Spain in the 1950s:

1.     María Carmen

2.     María

3.     Carmen

4.     Josefa

5.     Isabel

6.     Ana María

7.     María Pilar

8.     María Dolores

9.     Laura

10.  María Teresa

As you can see, six out of the top ten names include María, and five of those have María as the first name. This trend expanded dramatically in the 1960s, when nine out of the top ten names for baby girls included María, and seven of those had María as the first name.

Having several daughters with the same first name wasn’t confusing because in Spain double names are considered one name, not two separate entities. At home, for example, we called my sister Mari Carmen for short, but we didn’t drop Carmen or reduce it to a “C.” in official documents, as you would in the US. I was called by my full name, María Isidra, at home and in school, which came in handy since every grade had so many girls called María Something or Other.

Although confusion wasn’t an issue, you can’t help but wonder: Why would millions of Spanish parents, in the span of two decades, give their daughters a double name including María? The fact is, from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, choosing your daughter’s name wasn’t really a choice. It was just another step in a long journey marked by the church and the state’s branding of people by means of their name.

Spain forged its identity off religious wars, so the church’s influence on people’s lives was always outsized. Until the fifteenth century, the Iberian Peninsula was a potpourri of independent Christian states battling a common enemy, the Muslims, who had invaded the land in 711. The country became more unified when monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabela of Castile married in 1469, joining their kingdoms. In 1492, they seized Granada, the last Muslim bastion. That same year, after eight centuries of coexistence by Christians, Arabs, and Jews, the monarchs expelled all people of Moorish or Jewish descent—unless they converted to Catholicism.

Arabic and Jewish first names suddenly disappeared from the registries, they were altered to resemble Christian names or were displaced into surnames. It’s not hard to imagine that just as many converted Jews and Muslims continued professing their religion in hiding, they may have held on to their original names in the privacy of home, haunted by their concealed identities.

Religion was also central to the invasion of the New World. The conversion of natives, in the eyes of the conquerors, justified colonization. As priests baptized the natives with a Christian first name, their brand (and branding) new names settled their identity as subjects of the Crown, but their indigenous surnames defied erasure.

These details didn’t make it into my history classes, which posed the knights and soldiers who reconquered Spain from the Moors as awe-inspiring heroes, and the discoverers of the New World as admirable victors. I didn’t know that the conquered and the oppressed had been renamed to suppress their identity, just as I didn’t question the identity that my own name had etched on me. That would come later.

The church’s dominion over names extended to the population as a whole in the sixteenth century, when the Council of Trent required that all baby names come from the Book of Saints. This imposition made the deepest impact in the Basque region. Basque was spoken in the north of Spain thousands of years before Christ was born, and the most popular names in the region before the Council of Trent were of Basque origin. After the Council of Trent, however, Basque names disappeared or had to adapt to a saint’s name, for example, Enako became Ignacio. The old names briefly reappeared during the non-denominational Second Republic in 1931-1936, only to be banned again during Franco’s dictatorship, when names in Basque, Catalan, or Galician were considered separatist.

In the mid-1950s, another—unspoken—rule was added: parents were “encouraged” to give the name of the Virgin to girls, either by choosing one of its incarnations—Begoña, Rosario, Asunción, and so on—or by adding María to another name. Researcher Antonio Abellán García speculates that it may have been Pope Pío XXII’s encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam from 1954, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, that inspired this naming fervor in the Spanish Catholic Church.

Many Spaniards who had children in the 50’s and 60’s have stories about this crushing pressure to fit the mold. Protestant blogger Juan Antonio Monroy explains that when he tried to register his daughter as Loida Abigail—both names of biblical origin but not of saints or the Virgin—the civil servant refused unless a priest signed off on his choice. The priest, when consulted, insisted on adding María. The little girl’s name ended up registered as María Loida. The alternative was having a child whose existence wouldn’t be officially acknowledged.

As for me, when I was growing up, my name seemed as predestined as my eye color, but when I went to college, I started to question its fit. María Isidra sounded old-fashioned, and the length made it cumbersome. It was also my mother’s name, which felt like a burden, as if I should embody the dreams she never fulfilled.

Over time, my name went through multiple changes, becoming the cipher of a deeper rebellion. The first deviation popped out, perhaps inevitably, far from the tight corset of Spanish traditions. At nineteen, I spent four months working in a hotel in France. My name’s pronunciation challenged the staff and the guests, so the boss’ wife came up with a nickname: Maya. I loved it. It was short, fun, and irreverent. The perfect door to a new me, suddenly plopped in a space where I wasn’t expected to attend Sunday masses or remain a virgin. But when I returned home, my Christian name covered me again like a mantle.

A year later my name went through another metamorphosis. It was 1978. After almost four decades of cultural, sexual, and political repression, Franco’s death three years prior had burst open the country. Naked breasts invaded magazine covers and TV shows, Catalan, Basque, and Galician became part of the school curriculum in their regions, and the 1978 constitution ushered in democracy. A new law also gave Spaniards the freedom to choose whatever baby name they pleased in whichever language they wanted.

At home, however, my name was still subject to censorship.

That same year I discovered salsa music and I fell in love with dancing. My friends started calling me Isadora, in reference to dancer Isadora Duncan.

I was in college and living with my parents, so this change didn’t go unnoticed. Just as the arrivals at daylight after a night partying were received with frosty silence, averted eyes, and occasional head shaking, my new name was not acknowledged or discussed, but collided regularly with a cold shoulder.

Whenever my friends called me, and Dad picked up the phone, the conversation went like this:

“¿Diga?”

Pause.

“No, aquí no vive ninguna Isadora.”

 Click. He hung up before I could make it to the receiver.

“Who was it?” I’d ask, exasperated.

“I don’t know,” Dad would answer, opening the newspaper again, “but I told them no Isadora lived in this house.”

I had to instruct my friends to inquire for María Isidra.

As I was fighting to shed my given name, others were fighting to reclaim theirs. In an article published in BBC Mundo, writer Beatriz Díez recounts her mother’s story. Named Alma by her agnostic parents before the civil war, she lost her name at eight years old, when she started school after the war. Schooling required a certificate of baptism, but the priest refused to baptize her unless she had a saint’s name. Her parents improvised on the spot. They renamed the child Berta, her mother’s name, condemning the girl to a dislocated existence where she couldn’t recognize her own self. Once the Franco era was over, she recovered the name she had mourned, reclaiming the child who had shadowed her for decades.

My parents, unlike Alma’s, had no intention of changing my name, but I exiled myself into Isadora just as I exiled myself to our home’s basement, appropriating an abandoned room. Isadora Duncan had liberated dancing from the constraints of classic ballet. Now her name was liberating me from the Catholic Church’s centuries-long meddling with identity markers and opening up a trench between me and my family, me dancing away on one side, they a row of silent backs on the other, hazier with every step I took.

The last transformation of my name happened when I came to live in the US. Having left behind the bohemia of my youth, it seemed fitting to abandon the name that defined it. Isadora had been my friends’ happy choice. Now I wanted to choose for myself.

I knew in the US the slow dance of María with Isidra would be broken, and Isidra destined to vanish, with only the wraith of a lonely “I.” shaking in the wind. María, a chaperone imposed by the times, was out of the question, so from the first day I introduced myself as Isidra.

Twenty-nine years into my new life I haven’t changed my name legally and I doubt I’ll ever take that step. On US credit cards, bank statements, and my driving license, María dominates. Even though the split between my legal and private names is often inconvenient, I keep María—alive only on paper—because it anchors me to my past.

Nostalgia, however, is not a factor when Spanish parents name their babies nowadays. The influence of institutions—and especially of the Virgin Mary—has diminished. Parents choose short names, often inspired by the media. Looking at the ten most popular baby girl names in the year 2020 (the last year with official data from the Civil Register) María—all by itself—has gone down to position number four. Many of the other names are not related to the Virgin, and none of them is a double name with María in front:

1.     Lucía

2.     Sofía

3.     Martina

4.     María

5.     Julia

6.     Paula

7.     Valeria

8.     Emma

9.     Daniela

10.  Carla

Ironically, it’s in the Basque country where parents suffer the heaviest pressure when choosing their baby’s name. If they want a name of Basque origin, they have to choose from the Euskal Izendeguia, the dictionary of Basque first names compiled by Mikel Gorrotxategi and Patxi Salaberri in 2001.

Parents are often turned down at the Municipal Civil Registrar when the civil servant gets out the dictionary and discovers they have taken liberties in the spelling or chosen a supposedly feminine noun such as Ilargi (Moon) for a boy, or a masculine noun for a girl. Frustrated parents have resorted to traveling to different municipalities until they find a civil servant lenient enough to accept the name they want.

Basque names are imbued with the responsibility to represent the purity of the culture, just as my given name, in my parents’ eyes, proved I belonged to their tribe. But belonging doesn’t sprout from rules and impositions. It’s rooted in the gut. Basque parents who prefer a unique spelling are as much Basque as I am part of my family, no matter what I call myself.

Some people see their name as an intrinsic part of their identity, even though they didn’t choose it. Others drop the name that no longer represents them. I find myself with a plethora of names still used in different circles. María Isidra, Maya, Isadora, María, Isi, Isidra, these ghostly layers only I can hear conversing with each other, evoke disparate stretches of a path that I alone will walk from beginning to end.

We are one only to ourselves. To everybody else, we are always a slightly different version.

————————————
————————————

Originally from Spain, Isidra Mencos has lived in the US since 1992. She holds a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Contemporary Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught Spanish language, literature, culture, and creative writing for twelve years. Her essays have been published in literary journals like Diálogo, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Penmen Review, Newfound, The Manifest-Station and Front Porch Journal. Her piece “My Books and I” was listed as Notable in the Best American Essays Anthology (2019). Her work has also appeared in widely read online publications like The Huffington Post, Wisdom Well, WIRED, and Better After Fifty. Her debut memoir Promenade of Desire—A Barcelona Memoir will come out October 2022 (She Writes Press).