Common Names; Common Problem

The following is a column I wrote for the Hispanic Link news service that was never distributed.

Common Names; Common Problem
September 7, 2005
In last year's movie "Hitch," Will Smith plays a matchmaker of sorts who is so smitten by Sarah – a celebrity gossip columnist played by Eva Mendes - he resorts to Googling her.
By turning to Google, Smith's character Alex relyed on the most popular search engine by market share in the world today.

A query on Google is as authoritative as it gets in the Internet age, so much so that at least one commercial service has sprouted up to enhance the chances of getting links to individual's official site higher in the results.

So I wondered, what would I get if I Googled my name – Enrique Gonzales. My name's so common among Latinos that it could be compared to Bob Smith in the states or or Jose da Silva in Brazil.

Putting in the terms "Enrique Gonzales", I kind of felt like I was playing a slot machine on the Las Vegas strip. I never gamble, but I do watch CSI: Las Vegas on occasion. So then, instead of hitting the Google Search button, I clicked the "I'm feeling lucky" button immediately to the right.

Lo and behold, Google brought up the site of a famous Enrique Gonzales, one who works as a sound engineer for musicians such as Joan Baez, the Dave Matthews Band, the Doobie Brothers and MC Hammer.

Ok, enough about him. What about me? I went back to the Google search page and hit the search button this time. Nope. Nothing about me. But I did find a whole lot of other Enrique Gonzaleses; a couple of doctors, a lawyer turned amateur magician in Chile, a Miami dentist, a now deceased poet from Guadaljara, a Methodist pastor from Illinois, a Catholic priest from Colombia and a retiring assistant chief of police from Weslaco, Texas, among others. One even runs a popular restaurant in Cabo San Lucas.

A name is like a brand identity, a unique identifier in the professional world. Think Walter Chronkite or Edward R. Murrow. So how did I a get such a common monikor. Like most Latinos, I have half assumed that I have some distant relative in Spain. In the movie Hitch, Mendes' character finds her ancestor's signature of an entry log at Ellis Island, an immigrant from Cadiz, Spain. Gonzales, in one of the most common definitions of the name, means son of Gonzalo. So I could be looking for some long lost Gonzalo Gonzales.

The thought made me poke around the Internet some more, using Google to filter through to an answer. What I found is what I long suspected as a Mexican-American; the Spanish in colonizing Mexico, the Carribean, Central and South America, the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea in Africa, did what ever it took to give the locals their language, their faith and their names.

In Christianizing the native peoples of Mexico, the Spanish gave European names to the natives. The most famous example is Cuauhtlatoatzin. Who? Juan Diego, the indigenous Mexican beatified by the Catholic Church as a saint for witnessing the apparation of the Virgen de Guadalupe in 1531. I've always wondered why the most famous Apache has a Spanish name – Geronimo.

My Google search also turned up an article by Donna Morales and John Schmal, the co-authors of "Mexican-American Genealogical Research: Following the Paper Trail to Mexico". In it, Ms. Morales traces her ancestry to various native peoples of Jalisco in the late 1600s and her name to one given to her family, most likely by the local Catholic priest. At the same, she traced others in her family to the first Spanish immigrants from Europe to Aguascalietes in the late 1590s.

So if I really digged deep, I could find Gonzalo or could have as much luck as Will Smith finding an original ancestor named Smith. When tracing ancestors, Mexican-Americans with names like Gonzales, Martinez, Lopez or Moreno could be in the same boat as African Americans with names like Brown, Jackson, Washington or Lewis. Hmm.

In the Philippines, the Spanish made naming even more systematic in 1849 when the local authorities created a list of acceptable names for Christianized Filipinos. As a result, in some small villages, everyone has a last name beginning with the same letter, according to one web site.

In recent times, the Filipino naming scheme has resulted in the same identify crisis as I'm experiencing in my Google search. According to a colorful Wall Street Journal report in 2002, some Filipinos have taken to renaming themselves to stand out in a crowd, with one even adopting the first name "Hitler."

That's a bit drastic, but my search did find an "Enrique Gonzales" mentioned in a court case in Manila.

I guess I can't worry. If Will Smith can live with an appelido as common as his, I can live with mine. I might go have a drink with my tocayo in Cabo San Lucas.