Spanish Surnames Surge- Garcias Are Catching Up With Joneses

More from the NYTImes on the "culture of naming" in this case, about the encroaching list of Spanish surnames that appear on the US census of most common names. As someone with a so-called Hispanic surname, I find this very gratifying although my name doesn't appear in the interactive graphic (to go to the graphic, follow the permalink below). Now we're up to 13% (of those counted on the Census there must be millions more on the DL?) of the population, Lou Dobbs must be apoplectic over this. As usual with the NYTimes, buried within the text there is a completely absurd moment:

"As recently as 1950, more Americans were employed as blacksmiths than as psychotherapists." What, then, are we supposed to do with this factoid? Move to Buenos Aires, where there is "the highest ratio of psychologists and psychotherapists per person in the world"? (source: http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/37/10/15)

I can only hope that some of the Venezuelans with the names no longer approved by the dictator Chavez's Revolutionary Bolivarian Nomenclature (see below for post under Real News/Miss Universe) will find a means to emigrate to the US so that they can not only have "freedom" but also add to our percentage of Hispanic sunames: Iroshima Perez - welcome!
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In U.S. Name Count, Garcias Are Catching Up With Joneses

By SAM ROBERTS
Published: November 17, 2007
Step aside Moore and Taylor. Welcome Garcia and Rodriguez.

Smith remains the most common surname in the United States, according to a new analysis released yesterday by the Census Bureau. But for the first time, two Hispanic surnames — Garcia and Rodriguez — are among the top 10 most common in the nation, and Martinez nearly edged out Wilson for 10th place.

The number of Hispanics living in the United States grew by 58 percent in the 1990s to nearly 13 percent of the total population, and cracking the list of top 10 names suggests just how pervasively the Latino migration has permeated everyday American culture.

Garcia moved to No. 8 in 2000, up from No. 18, and Rodriguez jumped to No. 9 from 22nd place. The number of Hispanic surnames among the top 25 doubled, to 6.

Compiling the rankings is a cumbersome task, in part because of confidentiality and accuracy issues, according to the Census Bureau, and it is only the second time it has prepared such a list. While the historical record is sketchy, several demographers said it was probably the first time that any non-Anglo name was among the 10 most common in the nation. “It’s difficult to say, but it’s probably likely,” said Robert A. Kominski, assistant chief of social characteristics for the census.

Luis Padilla, 48, a banker who has lived in Miami since he arrived from Colombia 14 years ago, greeted the ascendance of Hispanic surnames enthusiastically.

“It shows we’re getting stronger,” Mr. Padilla said. “If there’s that many of us to outnumber the Anglo names, it’s a great thing.”

Reinaldo M. Valdes, a board member of the Miami-based Spanish American League Against Discrimination, said the milestone “gives the Hispanic community a standing within the social structure of the country.”

“People of Hispanic descent who hardly speak Spanish are more eager to take their Hispanic last names,” he said. “Today, kids identify more with their roots than they did before.”

Demographers pointed to more than one factor in explaining the increase in Hispanic surnames.

Generations ago, immigration officials sometimes arbitrarily Anglicized or simplified names when foreigners arrived from Europe.

“The movie studios used to demand that their employees have standard Waspy names,” said Justin Kaplan, an historian and co-author of “The Language of Names.”

“Now, look at Renée Zellweger,” Mr. Kaplan said.

And because recent Hispanic and Asian immigrants might consider themselves more identifiable by their physical characteristics than Europeans do, they are less likely to change their surnames, though they often choose Anglicized first names for their children.

The latest surname count also signaled the growing number of Asians in America. The surname Lee ranked No. 22, with the number of Lees about equally divided between whites and Asians. Lee is a familiar name in China and Korea and in all its variations is described as the most common surname in the world.

Altogether, the census found six million surnames in the United States. Among those, 151,000 were shared by a hundred or more Americans. Four million were held by only one person.

“The names tell us that we’re a richly diverse culture,” Mr. Kominski said.

But the fact that about 1 in every 25 Americans is named Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller or Davis “suggests that there’s a durability in the family of man,” Mr. Kaplan, the author, said. A million Americans share each of those seven names. An additional 268 last names are common to 10,000 or more people. Together, those 275 names account for one in four Americans.

As the population of the United States ballooned by more than 30 million in the 1990s, more Murphys and Cohens were counted when the decade ended than when it began.

Smith — which would be even more common if all its variations, like Schmidt and Schmitt, were tallied — is among the names derived from occupations (Miller, which ranks No. 7, is another). Among the most famous early bearers of the name was Capt. John Smith, who helped establish the first permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown, Va., 400 years ago. As recently as 1950, more Americans were employed as blacksmiths than as psychotherapists.

In 1984, according to the Social Security Administration, nearly 3.4 million Smiths lived in the United States. In 1990, the census counted 2.5 million. By 2000, the Smith population had declined to fewer than 2.4 million. The durability of some of the most common names in American history may also have been perpetuated because slaves either adopted or retained the surnames of their owners. About one in five Smiths are black, as are about one in three Johnsons, Browns, and Joneses and nearly half the people named Williams.

The Census Bureau’s analysis found that some surnames were especially associated with race and ethnicity.

More than 96 percent of Yoders, Kruegers, Muellers, Kochs, Schwartzes, Schmitts and Novaks were white. Nearly 90 percent of the Washingtons were black, as were 75 percent of the Jeffersons, 66 percent of the Bookers, 54 percent of the Banks and 53 percent of the Mosleys.

Terry Aguayo contributed reporting from Miami.






http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17surnames.html?ex=1353042000&en=ec5870741a27e1e1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

New Spanish Civil War videogame

Several people who know about my obsession with the Spanish Civil War wrote or forwarded articles about a new Spanish Civil War video game. The creators claim that the game is scholarly, based on historical research, and designed it so that you can choose which side you fight on, the fascists or the Republicans. So you can fight the war over and decide who wins. My sister pointed out that no one would dare make a video game where one would fight WWII and get to choose "Hitler" or the "Allies"!

Yet when it comes to Spain, things are murky. Abroad and within the country many still minimize what happened or justify and indeed long for the longest-running fascist dictatorship of the 20th century - Franco ruled from 1939-1975. Half a million people or more fled to exile, historians estimate that another half a million were killed, tens of thousands were in concetration camps, languished for decades in prisons, worked as slave laborers, were summarily shot without trial, starved by being disallowed to work and through expropriation of their belongings. Censorship prevailed, women were denied basic freedoms (until the early 1970s they could not carry out legal procedures or obtain passports without their husband's approval, and there was no divorce until Franco died). This is just a brief summary there was more. (A great book is called Victimas de la Guerra Civil that includes essays by several historians; and La Iglesia de Franco by Julian Casanova which details the shameful collaboration of the Catholic Church in maintaing not just the state propaganda apparatus but also the prison system).

I have an "excuse" to be obsessed: my family were Republicans, many fought on that side, including my grandfather, which led me as a teen to begin to read about this event. My grandfather got angry the one time I asked about the war - he was a quiet gentle soul and this is only time I ever saw him lose his temper. Since he refused to discuss the matter, being the stubborn person that I am, I resolved to find out more. For about 26 years I have been reading and then going to archives to find papers related to relatives' military service, and political activities. This is typical for what is known as the Grandchildren's Generation. Theorists who write about the inter-generational nature of trauma discuss the ways in which those of us who didn't experience the event directly feel compelled to understand what happened when the direct survivors are too devastated, fearful or unable to discuss the matter. And the generation that follows in the case of Spain was often also kept in the dark about their parents' activities and since Franco's regime lasted 40 years, brainwashed in the schools to believe his propaganda. So, unlike other genocides, the survivors and their children have NOT been able to discuss the matter, fully understand what happened, see perpetrators prosecuted, have truth and reconciliation committees, public trials and the like.

In terms of finding information, I have been able to de-brief other family members, so I have vague stories that don't provide the kind of hard facts that would allow me to follow up in an archive. This type of hearsay gives me a general sense of what is for me extremely gratifying: my family were Reds! This information of course makes it extremely easy for me to process these tragedies, unanbiguous as it is, and I know many of my friends either do not know anything, or have split families, some Franco partisans or collaborators, other Republican sympathizers. Some of my dearest friends are: a child of Italian Fascists who came to support Franco during the war, a grandchild of a Republican mayor of a town who was shot, etc. But we are all friends which proves Franco didn't win despite the horrifying situation in present-day Spain, where democracy is built on forgetting and injustice.

My family research was facilitated to some extent by the fascists' extreme efficiency, which led them to create archives to document and orchestrate their repressive state apparatus. So for example in Salamanca are papers organized by province containing materials belonging to organizations loyal to the legal Republican government, left or center left political parties, groups, union members, subscribers to certain magazines and papers, Masons, etc. all collected as Franco's forces occupied areas. Obsessively organized and in many cases underlined with red pencils, with photographs taken from IDs glued onto albums, information cross-referenced in typed index cards, you can reconstruct why your grandfather was watched by the police, disallowed from working, jailed, etc. So in the case of my granfather, I found an index card (there are 3 million of them) with his name with the references to boxes, files and folios typed beneath, so Politico-Social, Alicante, etc. The documents are: records of the 1936 election where the Republican Left Popular Front alliance legally won. He was representing his party - a moderate left entity - in a district as a supervisor to vouch for the legality of the voting and he signed off on the results. I recognized his signature. He signed his sentence without knowing it. At another archive, I found his brother who has the same name as my father. This archive has some records related to prison sentences. The various papers tracked his sentence and location: he was sent to a concentration camp, then to a prison, later he was given life parole, and internal exile, which meant he could never return to his home town. He didn't live long after he was released the conditions in the camps and jails were such that many didn't survive to see parole. I still have to connect the dots, but in the Salamanca archive I found a paper where a comrade had vouched for his political reliability. This detailed the degree to which he was committed to the Republic and metioned that he joined the same moderate left party as my grandfather, in 1932. He also was at the same electoral site and signed the same document as my granfather. This apparently was enough. Imagine if you voted for Al Gore and that was enough to shoot you on sight, or send you a slave labor camp and leave your family starving.

However, because the "Transition" to "democracy" in Spain was negotiated thanks to a pact of silence and general amnesty, what scholars call a "Pact of Forgetting" was agreed to by politicians and thus the fascists remain unpunished. They have also in many cases been allowed to control access to certain archives, so the full information remains off limits. Now, thanks to the Socialists, a law is about to be passed known as the Law for the Recuperation of Historial Memory. This does not overturn sentences, call for trials for human rights abuses, promise reparations or anything of the kind, but is mostly symbolic. Public entities must remove images of Franco or of his regime, for example, and archives must give full access to victims or their families. Again, imagine that you live in Germany and there are still portaits of Hitler or swastikas in towns throughout the country. Governmental entities must not obstruct the exhumation of the tens of thousands of remains of people killed under the dictatorship. The costliness of doing DNA testing to identify remains already thwarts the volunteer efforts being carried out to return relatives' bodies to families.



Neo-Nazi and Fascist groups are allowed to hold public demonstrations in Spain. Recently, a group murdered a young man who was at an anti-fascist protest. Anti-fascists then requested a permit from the Right-Wing Madrid mayor's office to hold a demonstration but were denied. The Right-Wing Mayor of Madrid DID however grant permission to fascists who held their annual salute to Franco and the leader of the paramilitary fascist Falange Party, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera for the anniversary of their deaths November 20. This is one of countless examples of the ways in which members of the Right Wing party flagrantly display their support for the dictatorship. Several have recently stated their opposition for the Law of Historical Memory and defended Franco's dictatorship as necessary for Spain.


To see a video about the video game, pardon the redundancy, you can go to the site below:
http://videos.abc.es/informaciondecontenido.php?con=2969