Names and Other Abstractions

Before I was born, my mother had chosen my name: Marco Antonio. Within hours of my birth, it was gone.

She had chosen my twin sister’s name as well, after her great-grandmother. We were born in an agricultural town in Northern California, to parents whose lives were still closely bound to farm labor and to whoever would give them work. In the maternity ward, my father’s employer, Clyde, and his wife, who had no children of their own, persuaded him to give us their names instead, despite my mother’s wishes. He readily agreed. My mother protested. She managed to preserve the name she had chosen for my sister as her middle name.

My parents were not close to the couple. Within months, we moved south and never heard from them again.

Nevertheless, I became Clyde, named for a man I never knew, spending much of my life offering onomastic explanations that ranged from the River Clyde in Scotland to the more awkward truth of my father’s employer.

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.

A name is one of the first identities assigned to us, long before we are capable of choosing one for ourselves. It can carry ancestry, culture, aspiration, and circumstance.

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, it seemed, had been working from a theory not entirely different from my father’s.

For years, I treated the origins of my own name as an amusing footnote. But the older I became, and especially as writing my memoir forced me to revisit my past through the lens of agency, the less incidental the story became.

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 have come to 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 might have shaped his decision that day: deference toward a powerful 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.

But after a lifetime of living with the cultural dissonance the name created, Clyde no longer suits me. 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. But comfort inclines us to preserve the past. Choosing a new name after carrying one for most of a lifetime comes at a substantial cost. It means unsettling a name attached to nearly every friendship, accomplishment, professional relationship, public record, and memory others carry of me. Yet the boy in the fields, the student at Berkeley, the engineer, the executive, the colleague, the friend, the husband, and the father all 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 does not necessarily 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.

I have come to believe that exercising our innate agency begins with recognizing the difference between what has been given to us or even imposed upon us and what remains ours to choose. We can honor what brought us here while still deciding what we will carry forward.

For those who have known me as Clyde for many years, I know old habits will take time to change. Our muscle memory can be quite strong, and a name does not disappear with a simple edit on a page.

But for the chapters ahead, 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 removed her given first name and restored our mother's choice to its proper place.