Hi Swistle,
My husband and I have been debating this particular baby-name quandary for years, and now that we’re relatively close to starting a family I’d really like some outside opinions. We agree that we would like to use family names for our children, but our preferences differ wildly. My husband would rather we gave our kids culture-spanning classics, whereas I’m drawn to heritage-specific names. For the record, our families have been in the US for one and three generations respectively, and our last name is his family’s Ellis Island adoption. His argument is that our overly common surname lends a comical effect to heritage choices (his go-to example is Juan-Pablo Jones, which I honestly don’t find that jarring!) He also thinks that trying to pull off an ethnic name rings of cultural-appropriation, even if that culture is historically our family’s. I think our surname justifies using a more daring (in this country at least) given name. Getting him to talk about it seriously has been like trying to put socks on a cat. He gets squirmy and distracted, and pulls the “we’ve still got time” card, when all I want is to have my hypothetical children’s names decided a good year in advance so that I can devote that corner of my brain to other things. Is that too much to ask, Swistle? But honestly, I’m not sure how to go about convincing him just yet. For one thing, what if his claims are valid? Am I so distracted by pretty, foreign-sounding names that I can’t see a potentially awkward situation in the making? I’d love to know your thoughts on pairing an ethnic family name with a run-of-the-mill surname. Are there any situations in which you think it should be avoided?Sincerely, H
It’s very likely your husband will be much more willing to discuss these issues when a baby is on the way. (Or, if he’s like Paul, sometime in the third trimester.) In the meantime, discussing them with others is EXACTLY what this blog is for.
I think it’s unnecessary for him to bring cultural appropriation into it when what you’re discussing is using names FROM YOUR OWN CULTURES. It sounds as if his concern is that other people will THINK it’s cultural appropriation: that is, if someone didn’t realize your cultural background, they might think you shouldn’t have used the name. I am generally on the side of worrying what other people think and of taking into account the society we live in (I don’t want to give a child a name that will make people think badly of her or of us), but this doesn’t seem like an issue here. First/last-name incompatibility could happen any time the parents didn’t come from the same cultural background, or any time a surname gets married out of usage. It seems like even (or especially) people hyper-aware of cultural appropriation issues would also be aware that the current particular surname doesn’t tell the story of the family background.
One possibility that may be more trouble than it’s worth is to go back to the family’s pre-Ellis-Island surname. But this doesn’t solve the problem if you want to use names that represent YOUR heritage. And I assume he doesn’t want to argue that only the surname branch of the family can be represented.
Furthermore, matching the first name and surname can lead to another problem, which I’ve heard referred to as the “just off the boat” problem: Juan-Pablo Rodriguez might encounter more trouble in life than Juan-Pablo Jones. It SHOULDN’T be that way, but it can be.
So far it sounds like I’m absolutely against your husband, but actually I see his point; it’s only that I think his arguments don’t fit or help his point. If I were him, I’d stick to saying that I just don’t like the way it sounds when the first name and surname have a cultural clash, or when a very unusual/exotic first name is paired with a very plain/common surname. I have a very Dutch surname, and combining it with, say, a very French or very Chinese first name, gives a combination I find comical/jarring/unpleasant. It’s not that I worry people will think I’m trying to steal from another culture (for example, let’s say my family’s heritage was French or Chinese, and I had taken my husband’s Dutch surname); it’s just that I don’t like the sound of it. And “not liking the sound of it” is a completely legitimate reason not to want a certain kind of baby name: there’s no need to escalate it beyond that.
What I’d suggest, if you both would like to represent your family/cultural backgrounds but he doesn’t like the way your favorites sound with the surname, is to use those names as middle names—perhaps with a culture-spanning family first name. I think if I were you, I’d offer this in the form of a compromise: you’ll put the names in the middle name position, but then you get to choose ones that sound even more culturally representative. For example, I love the Dutch name Thijs (pronounced Tice, to rhyme with ice), and it’s a name from Paul’s cultural background AND mine, and it fits culturally with our surname—but we didn’t want to use that as a first name in the United States, where it would cause no end of hassle. If I’d had my heart set on using it, it would have made a spectacular middle name.
Name update:
Hi again Swistle!
I wrote you the “Juan-Pablo Jones Problem” letter a few years ago, and I’m pleased to report that we successfully named a baby with minimal injury to ourselves/others! Yours and readers’ advice was very grounding, so thank you. I was really stirred up about “solving” the name at the time, but it was useful to be reminded that hearts, minds, and circumstances change once a baby is a reality. The news that we were expecting a girl coincided with a dear friend of ours falling ill, and despite all the grand declarations I made in my original email (calm down past self!) it became more important to us to honor her with a namesake than worry about the name clashing. We used our friend’s name in the middle and chose a name off the family tree for her first. And despite being a name derived from two different cultures, one of which is decidedly not ours, I can’t imagine our sweet 0ttili@ N@ida (pronounced Nye-ee-da) Jones as anyone but herself. I love her name in a way I don’t think I could have been if I’d stuck to my stipulations. She’s a reminder of our deep roots, and the most recent ones.
Sincerely, H
Am I reading correctly from your email that his family has been in the United States longer than yours? And that you took his last name? I think if you went from a very ethnic last name to a very generic one, its makes a lot of sense that there would be a limit to how thoroughly assimilated you want your children’s names to be. And even if your maiden name wasn’t that ethnic at all, actually. I think the only circumstances that I might side with your husband are if his family are the recent immigrants, his name is Vladimir, and you want to name your daughter Lbovnya because you hated being the 3rd Jennifer in your class.
But it’s not really about taking sides so much as getting him to feel comfortable with a name that he didn’t grow up expecting to name his children. You have time though, so if he knows what your favorites are now they’ll feel more familiar to him by the time you’re having kids. And if it’s not a specific family name you want to use, maybe you could do some thinking about whether you’d be ok with Tomas instead of Juan-Pablo. Or you could just start inexplicably filling your bookshelves with volumes of Joaquin Miller’s poetry.
I’ll weigh in….
I have two friends, both with Dutch backgrounds. One lives in Canada, one in the United States. Both friends were born in the Netherlands with one moving as a baby and the other as a young 20-year-old. Both married guys with Dutch backgrounds. All that to say that their naming styles have been interesting, but not peculiar given their backgrounds. It’s just that, some of the kids’ names are very hard to pronounce because they are full-on Dutch names. And I’m even completely Dutch (3rd generation) myself. I am sure these names are lovely, beautiful and even popular in the Netherlands, but they’re a little harder to swallow, pronounce and figure out here in the United States. Jouke, Thysje, Femke, Jeltje, etc…
I think the route to go would be to use a more common name and pair it with a more traditionally cultural name in the middle slot. Or use a name that is familiar in both cultures. I think it would make it much easier on the child growing up to have a name that’s somewhat familiar.
Oh dear, I can empathize with this! My partner is like yours– very concerned with making sure no one thinks we are “trying too hard” or appropriating by picking an “ethnic” name. Even one from a culture we both share heritage from. (On the other hand, he loves very out there word names…) I really like a few intense Celtic choices (Sorcha, Aine, Gwenllian), and have an Irish-born grandparent as well as relations from other parts of Britain, so it doesn’t feel out of place. But…over the years I’ve just given up my attachment to those names as potentials for my own future children. And I’m ok with it, because pragmatically speaking I’m not sure it is always so great to have such a culturally specific forename in the US. Maybe it can put too much of a constricting identity on someone. I suggest compromising with your husband by either moving the very culturally identifiable name to the middle spot, or using more of a crossover name (Paloma, Matteo, Sofia, Kai/Cai, Mai, Magnus, etc. , just thinking of examples from different cultures…)
Oh by the way, one more thing! It might be worth it to check the current popularity lists for whatever country/region you are considering drawing the ethnic name from. I have a friend whose parents picked a “heritage” name for her that turned out to be completely out of date and unfashionable in the original country; like that culture’s equivalent to Mildred or Ethel. It doesn’t matter really, but if you are that committed to continuing links to the original culture, your child may end up studying there, etc. It’s worth considering.
With a last name as common as Jones, more unique first names are definately a positive. I have a common maiden name and a common first and middle name for the year I was born and there is at least one “famous” person with exact same name. It did bug me as a kid and young adult.
If I met someone named Juan-Pablo Jones, I would expect a Spanish or Hispanic individual as the mother married to a Western European (English) father. It might occur to me that the father is also of a different ethic background with a family changed name but I certainly wouldn’t dwell on the ethnicity issue.
I would worry more about pronunciation and spelling then the ethnicity of the name. Juan-Pablo Jones works for me because most people know how to pronounce/spell Juan and Pablo. Janos-Piroska Jones doesn’t work as well for me because of pronunciation and spelling confusion.
I also think there are many happy mediums in the ethnic name game. Matteo is clearly Spanish but is close enough to Matthew in sound that I am not sure anyone would given Matteo Jones a second thought. Noemi is clearly French but familiar enough that it certainly doesn’t jar with Jones. If you are looking at very obscure ethnic names,more problems arise.
Given that you are not pregnant yet, I think it makes sense to get together the list of names you love for each gender. Share them with your husband, post them on the refrigerator or someplace he will see fairly often. The more he sees the names you like before it is decision time, the less foreign or objectionable the names may seem when the time comes. I know this has worked when the husband favors 1980’s popular names while the wife prefers vintage names – the guy is usually focused on the names he heard often as a kid while the wife wants to avoid the names she heard often as a kid.
Mis-matched cultural first and last names don’t bother me. Many married women face that conundrum if they decide to take their husband’s last name. People can end up with names like Siobhan O’Malley can become Siobhan Garcia and Parvati Patel can become Parvati Finnigan.
So if a baby has mis-matched names I just assume that the baby is from a mixed heritage, which is actually extremely common where I live! I might even have met a Juan Pablo Jones in my life, and I’ve definitely met a John Paul Hernandez.
Just commenting with joy at the Harry Potter reference up there.
Seriously – you are responding to this letter? She’s not even pregnant. I wrote a letter months ago and really need help but you respond to this letter? Ugh – I’m done with this blog.
Yikes. Being rude probably doesn’t help your case. The purpose of any blog is to entertain and engage the readers with thought-provoking and novel content. Swistle pretty clearly lays out her thought process for choosing question on the submission page:
I typically choose from questions submitted during the previous week. The volume of emails we now receive means we can’t answer all the questions. (Please don’t continue to re-submit the same question.) We tend to give priority to questions that:
1) give a surname or a surname stand-in (like Neelsen for Neilson, or “it sounds like Donson, but with a J”),
2) ask for help with a boy name OR a girl name (if you don’t know the sex yet but you’ll be finding out, I suggest waiting to email until you know), and
3) ask for help with a name for a USA baby (I don’t know much at all about how names sound / seem / are used in other countries), and
4) address an issue and/or naming combination we haven’t recently covered.
This question falls squarely in the #4 category. It’s unfortunate that Swistle can’t do all things for all people on this blog that she (presumably) runs for fun in her spare time, but that’s the way it is. Internet strangers don’t owe you anything. However, there are still a ton of parenting message boards where you can get feedback on your specific naming issues if your question isn’t chosen here. Good luck!
Are you seriously complaining about something that Swistle does for free and for her own enjoyment and the enjoyment of others?
You mean Swistle doesn’t run her blog purely for the power trip? *gasp* And here I thought she spent her days rubbing her hands together and chortling maniacally over the plight of the unanswered ;)
I like Swistle’s advice to think of this issue as a matter of taste rather than cultural appropriation because it’s possible that there is a happy medium name that appeals to both of you, although it’s hard to say without specific examples. I do think taking the route of looking for an honor name might help reach a compromise — you likely have relatives with names that are common in the cultures you came from, and naming a baby after somebody else stretches our perceptions of what is totally fine and what is a little “out there.” (Consider that a full 25% of the poll respondents on the said yes.)
I once was in a class with a guest lecturer who had a traditionally Japanese surname. I admit I was a little surprised when a very white Midwestern woman walked into the room, but I quickly realized there are several very mundane reasons why her last name did not match her ethnicity — she was adopted, her husband was Japanese, etc. It took me all of about five seconds to get over it. Since America (for all its troubling weirdness about race and ethnicity) prides itself on being a cultural meeting pot, I don’t think a Juan-Pablo Jones will be much more than a temporary oddity or an interesting conversational point akin to “So what is your middle name?”
I have, however, realized that I’m on board with using slightly unusual first names when the baby will have an extremely (e.g., top five) surname. My boss has the last name Smith, and he and his wife gave their baby an extremely uncommon (though easily pronounced and spelled) first name. At first I thought it was a little odd, but now I see how it helps set him apart from so many other people who share this surname. (Although if you want him to be un-Googleable, naming your baby Noah Smith would make that possible!)
I must say I do find a name as culturally mixed as Juan Pablo Jones quite jarring, in a negative way. But I am encountering this exact issue as a Canadian girl with British background, and my spouse is Dutch. He has a VERY Dutch surname that sounds a little weird to the North American ear. It’s really important to him for his kids to have Dutch names, and it’s really important to me that they have names that people recognize here in Canada. There’s really no way to accomplish this without using cross-over names that are familiar in both cultures and I do think it’s the best route to take in your situation as well. It was sad for me at first, because I had to give up some of my long-held favourites, but it also opened my eyes to lots of new great names that I’d never considered before. I’m sure you can find beautiful names that are common in your culture but are either similar to an American name or already used in America as well.
I wanted to name our son Giancarlo, which would have worked beautifully with my maiden name, Barranti, but isn’t so great with my husband’s name (and now mine, and our children’), Klein. We might have done it anyway if Sam hadn’t come out with pale skin and ginger hair. We just couldn’t reconcile it. Now, though? I kind of wish we had. I don’t regret naming him Sam–it’s absolutely the right name for him. But I’m sorry I chickened out on at least considering a name I really loved.
I kind of love Juan-Pablo Jones, but then, I’m a fan of distinctive, memorable names. It seems like an excellent idea to pair a more unusual first name with a very common surname. And I agree with Swistle that “cultural appropriation” really doesn’t apply when it’s your own family’s culture. I hope your husband comes around on this issue – it’s so hard when you have to let go of names you love because your spouse hates them. :/
I think the jarring aspect of this kind of name is going to fade rather quickly. After all, there was a time when Kevin and Brian were considered ethnic Irish names, but now? They may be dated, but they’re not jarring. Nobody’s going to blink at the name Kevin Hernandez, for instance. There isn’t as big a push to Anglicize names, either – Juans are more likely to stay Juans, rather than call themselves John. As the pool of names gets more diverse, diversity within a name itself is less remarkable.
But I have to say, my husband would have found any naming discussion beyond very broad generalizations ludicrous before we were actually expecting. He knew I was adamantly opposed to juniors, I knew he didn’t approve of “trade” names like Mason and Cooper, and that was it. If I’d pushed anything else, it would’ve been mocked, mercilessly. As it was, I couldnt get him off Scipio for a boy and Hippolyta for a girl until I was in my third trimester.
Good luck. Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a version of me with a son named Antonio Stew@rt. Man, I love that name
I think Juan-Pablo Jones sounds pretty cool actually so I don’t really see the problem with the “appropriation” of an “ethnic” name thing.
It sounds like the name of a famous explorer or private detective to me. Awesome!
I always think of the actor Diego Klattenhoff when this issue comes up. His parents just picked the name “Diego” because they liked it and, thus far, it’s worked pretty well for him!
Good luck!!
I am reminded of Eamon de Valera, the American-born Irish leader…his mother was Irish and his father was Spanish. It works, and is pleasantly distinctive.
I have been surprised over the years at the level of cultural approbation (for lack of another term) of names on these name fora. It’s a good surprise. I think it stems from people being more open and aware of other cultures, as well as the 1 million baby name books including every name under the sun so we get exposed to lovely names with all sorts of histories. My advice: Go with whatever you feels suits you two best; and best represents your child! If anyone finds the name jarring they’ll get over it quickly. :)
I’ve always liked mixed heritage names. They seem very American to me, in a good way. I worry about appropriation in some circumstances, such as using the name of a Native American tribe (e.g. Cheyenne) but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re thinking of doing.
My kids have been enjoying this book from the library, and it reminded me of this post: http://www.amazon.com/Marisol-McDonald-Doesnt-Match-combina/dp/0892392355/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416686897&sr=1-1&keywords=marisol+mcdonald+doesn%27t+match