Column: For years, I Anglicized my Mexican last name. MAGA trolls inspired me to reclaim it
LA TimesAs a child, I learned to mangle my last name: Guerrero. I became Jean “greh-roh.” My first name, “Jean,” was already in English — from my mother’s “Jeannette,” a product of colonial U.S. policies in Puerto Rico that mandated English and cast it as superior to Spanish. “The general promotion of English was rationalized to secure Anglo ‘American’ identity dominance, used to develop and maintain white privilege,” according to Reynaldo Macías, a UCLA professor of linguistics. In “For Brown Girls With Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts,” the Nicaraguan American author Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez explains embracing her middle and mother’s maiden name, a Latin American custom. “I’ve never corrected how English speakers pronounce my last name, and further concealed my identity by introducing myself as the Anglicized ‘loo,’” wrote Marian Chia-Ming Liu, a Chinese American editor at the Washington Post.
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