Names/Nombres

“Names/Nombres” is a short autobiographical essay by Dominican American author Julia Alvarez. First published in NUESTRO magazine in 1985, the essay tells of Alvarez’s arrival in New York City as a young girl with her family and the subsequent transformation of her Spanish name in the English-speaking United States. The essay explores The Connection Between Language and Identity, The Desire to Assimilate Versus Staying Connected to One’s Culture, and The Power Dynamics of Pronunciation. 

This guide uses the version of “Names/Nombres” published in Glencoe Literature 2, published by McGraw Hill in 2007 and available online here.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of anti-immigrant bias, racism, and death.

When Alvarez and her family arrive in New York City, the immigration officer calls her father “Mister Elbures.” Alvarez is surprised at this mistaken pronunciation, but she doesn’t correct the officer, afraid they won’t be let into the country. Later, Alvarez hears more English takes on her family’s name. People call her mother “Jew- lee-ah” instead of “Hoo-lee-ah,” and Alvarez, named after her mother, is called Judy, Judith, or Juliet at school. Alvarez wants to correct these mispronunciations, but her mother quotes Shakespeare, insisting that “A rose by any other name would be as sweet” (Paragraph 4).

Alvarez adjusts to her life in New York, and by high school, she is a popular girl with many nicknames. Her friends call her “Jules,” “Hey Jude,” or even “Alcatraz.” At home, to her parents, aunts, and uncles, she is still “Hoo-lee-tah,” but she imagines that the wanted poster for the “mischief” she will get into in the United States will read “Judy Alcatraz.”

Alvarez’s older sister, Mauricia, has a harder time Americanizing her name. Like Alvarez, Mauricia was born in New York before their parents decided to return to the Dominican Republic. Her father wanted to name his first daughter after his recently deceased mother, Mauran, but her mother hated the name, so she combined it with her own mother’s name, Felica. However, when Alvarez’s mother was in the hospital chatting with other new mothers, she was suddenly ashamed of Mauricia’s name and told the other women her baby was called Maureen. When they wondered why she had chosen an Irish name when there were “so many pretty Spanish” ones (Paragraph 8), Alvarez’s mother revealed her daughter’s real name, and the other women cooed over “Moor-ee-sha.”

Alvarez’s little sister, Ana, has a name that translates to English very well. She is a blond “American beauty,” but her boyfriends give her “affectionate” Hispanic nicknames like “Anita.” When Ana is in college, “there [is] a push to pronounce Third World names correctly” (Paragraph 13); Alvarez once calls her sister’s house, and the roommate who answers corrects Alvarez’s Americanized pronunciation of her sister’s name and calls for “Ah-nah.” 

During Alvarez’s adolescence, however, “ethnicity [is] not yet ‘in’” (Paragraph 16), and she quickly loses her desire to be referred to by her Dominican name. She “want[s] to be Judy and merge with the Sallys and the Janes in [her] class” (Paragraph 16), but her complexion and accent revealed her “foreignness.” Her classmates eagerly ask where she is “originally” from, and Alvarez answers begrudgingly. She was born in New York City, but that isn’t the answer her new friends want. She knows they are just “curious,” but her inability to fit in is a source of intense “shame” for Alvarez. Oftentimes, her friends beg her to say her full name in Spanish, which includes four generations’ worth of surnames, following Dominican tradition. 

Alvarez’s extended Dominican family also reveals her heritage when they attend school functions en masse. At Alvarez’s graduation, the front row is filled with her aunts, uncles, and cousins, all talking “among themselves in florid-sounding phrases, rococo consonants, rich, rhyming vowels” (Paragraph 27). It is “a further trial” to introduce the myriad of relatives, with their “complicated names” and “convoluted” relationships, to all of her American friends, whose families consist of “youthful, glamorous-looking couples […] who [ski] and [play] tennis” (Paragraph 28). 

After the ceremony, Alvarez and her friends say tearful goodbyes in the parking lot as they sign their yearbooks with their nicknames. Back home, Alvarez celebrates with her family. As a graduation gift, her parents give her a typewriter so she can begin to write down her poems and stories. They are sure that one day, Alvarez’s “name [will] be well-known throughout the United States.” Alvarez wonders “which one [she] [will] go by” (Paragraph 32).