Formerly Known as Clyde

For most of my life, I was known as Clyde.

I was given the name under unusual circumstances. My twin sister and I were born in an agricultural town in Northern California. My mother had intended to name me Marco Antonio and my sister after her great-grandmother, strong names rooted in our family and culture. Within hours of our birth, however, my father’s employer, Clyde, and his wife, who had no children of their own, persuaded him to name the two of us after them instead, despite my mother’s wishes. My parents were not close to the couple, and within months of our birth, we moved south and never heard from them again.

Nevertheless, I became Clyde.

I carried the name through childhood in California’s Central Valley, through Berkeley, and into a career that eventually took me deep into the technology industry. It appears on diplomas, photographs, old correspondence, professional records, and the memories of people I have known for decades. I built a life under that name. Nothing about changing it alters that history.

But names are not merely administrative conveniences. They are among the first things given to us, usually before we have any say in the matter. They carry family history, cultural associations, expectations, and sometimes the circumstances into which we were born.

Clyde was, it turns out, a rather ambitious choice for a Rodríguez.

America is full of names that evolved as their bearers crossed oceans, borders, languages, and generations. But names create assumptions. Mine has produced persistent cultural and professional dissonance for much of my life as people have sought to pattern-match it against their expectations, and sometimes even their biases, in both English- and Spanish-speaking contexts.

Even now, I receive inquiries almost weekly from people trying, in one way or another, to place me. Where did Clyde come from? Is it a family name? Do you have Scottish ancestors? How did a Rodríguez end up with it? Sometimes the question is direct; sometimes it arrives after several minutes of conversational reconnaissance. I have become reasonably good at recognizing when someone is working their way toward it.

I was recently in Princeton, New Jersey, where a receptionist at the Graduate Hotel and I had a humorous exchange about the origins of my name. Only after she handed me my room key did I think to ask hers.

"Mary Lou," she replied. "Marvelous, my mother named me Marvelous." Rather than change it legally, she explained, she started going by Mary Lou, "Porque así me salvé," ("Because that's how I saved myself") she added. Her Colombian parents, she explained, had apparently been working from a theory not entirely different from my father’s.

For years, I treated the explanation as an amusing footnote. But the older I became, and especially as I began revisiting my past in the course of writing my memoir, the less incidental the story seemed.

When I was younger, I admit I judged my father’s decision harshly. With the passage of time, and especially after becoming a father myself, I understand his decision better than I once did.

My father was a Mexican immigrant and farmworker trying to make a life for a large family in a country that was not yet his own. I can understand the pressures that shaped his decision that day: gratitude toward an employer, the desire to belong, perhaps the instinct that proximity to American life might make his children’s passage through it a little easier. Immigrant families make countless accommodations of this kind for the chance to belong, to make it in America.

I no longer judge my father for the choice he made. But after a lifetime of living with the cultural dissonance the name created, Clyde no longer suits me. I decided it was time to choose for myself the name I would carry forward.

I have therefore chosen a new name: M. Sebastián Rodríguez, the "M." a quiet nod to the name my mother intended for me, Marco Antonio, in that maternity ward so many years ago. In daily life, I am Sebastián.

This is not an attempt to erase Clyde or to separate myself from the people who knew me by that name. Quite the opposite. Several decades of experience belong to me regardless of what name appears at the top of a page, on a CV, or on my driver’s license. The boy in the fields, the student at Berkeley, the engineer, executive, husband, father, friend, all of them remain part of the same life.

The change is instead an exercise in something I have been thinking and writing about a great deal: agency.

We inherit much of ourselves before we are capable of choosing: our families, our circumstances, our histories, and usually our names. Growing older has taught me that inheritance need not dictate our future. Even as a boy, I had formed a deep conviction that I would not be defined by the circumstances into which I had been born. That conviction carried me through years of study that ultimately opened a new world to me. We can honor what brought us here while still deciding what we will carry forward.

Sebastián is the name I have chosen for the chapters ahead.

For those who have known me as Clyde, there is no ceremony required and certainly no test of friendship. A name carried for decades does not disappear with a simple edit on a page. I expect some people will call me Clyde for a while, perhaps for quite a while. Don't worry; I will know who you mean.

But for what comes next, I am Sebastián.

A family footnote: My twin sister entered the world several minutes before I did. In what may be the least surprising development in this story, she also reached this conclusion first. Two years ago, she changed her name, choosing the one our mother had intended for her in that maternity ward so long ago.