Chávez

Chaves is a town on the river Tâmega in the district of Vila Real, in the old borderland where northern Portugal runs up against Galicia. The Romans built it as Aquae Flaviae, the waters of Flavius, a resort laid out around warm springs and named for the family of the emperor Vespasian. The Latin wore down through Galician-Portuguese speech until only the second half was left standing, Flaviae becoming Chaves.

A reader who knows a little Spanish will expect the -ez to mean "son of", as it does in Rodríguez and González. It does not. In American Spanish z and s sound alike, so the Iberian Chaves slid into Chávez without passing through anybody's father. The name never described a man. It described a place, and Galicia and the Portuguese north made surnames out of ground more readily than anywhere else in Iberia, from regions like Salnés to parishes like Andrade.

The lineage's own account of itself begins in 1160. Two brothers, Garci López and Rui López, took part in the conquest of the town of Chaves, and King Alfonso Enríquez charged them with peopling it afterwards. Holding a frontier town meant filling it with settlers who would stay; the reward was the town itself, the brothers took its name for a surname, and the house of Chaves dates from that.

This is family tradition rather than charter, and reads best as one. What it preserves accurately is the mechanism: Chaves could only be held by being lived in, the crown handed that job to men it could name, and the men were known by the job ever after. The surname is frontier administration that outlasted the frontier by eight hundred years.

From the Tâmega the name travelled south, and a long way south. Ancestral houses are recorded in Portugal, at Ciudad Rodrigo on the Castilian side of the border, and then down into the south-west: Trujillo and Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Extremadura, Bienvenida and Llerena on the road into Andalusia. That is the dry quarter of Spain which emptied itself westward.

Naming a man for his place was the ordinary Castilian form of the age, with the particle de doing the work of an address, a pattern thick on the conquistador rolls, because men crossing an ocean carried the only identification they had. A Chávez needed no de. The place had swallowed the whole name.

Follow it across and the surname turns back into geography. Chaves County sits in New Mexico; Adolfo Gonzales Chaves is a town and a partido in the province of Buenos Aires; Chaves is a municipality in the Brazilian state of Pará. Chaves is also the 113th commonest surname in Brazil, carried by 376,383 people, with the Spanish-spelled Chávez at 4,260.

Two men of the name reached a presidency. Coronado Chávez, born in 1807 and a carpenter by trade, was made Vice President of Honduras by Francisco Ferrera in 1841, held the finance, foreign and war ministries in 1843, and took office as President of Honduras on 8 January 1845. He pushed coffee growing and hat manufacture, exempted military veterans from tithes and first fruits, and in 1846 founded the Literary Society of Honduras, which became the country's state university in 1850. He died in 1881, aged 73.

Federico Chaves Careaga is the crossing in one life. Born at Paraguarí in 1882 to a Portuguese father, also Federico Chaves, he took his law degree in 1905, went on to Paraguay's Supreme Court in 1946 and the foreign ministry in 1947, and became President of Paraguay in September 1949, holding office until a coup led by General Alfredo Stroessner ended it on 4 May 1954. He died in Asunción in 1978, aged 96.

Dionisio Chávez was born on 8 April 1888 at Los Chavez in the New Mexico Territory, a village that already carried his surname, into families who had lived there for generations. There was no school in the place. In 1895 his father David moved them to the Barelas section of Albuquerque to work on the railroad, and Dennis, as he became, left school in the seventh grade.

He studied engineering and surveying at night at the University of New Mexico and worked for years as a city engineer. In 1916 he was hired as a Spanish interpreter for Senator Andrieus Jones's campaign; the next year Jones offered him a clerk's post in the Senate in Washington. He sat a special admission exam at Georgetown, read law at night, and graduated in 1920 as the first Latino lawyer in the United States.

Back in Albuquerque he built a practice defending organised labour, reached the New Mexico legislature in 1922 and the United States House in 1930. In 1935 he was appointed to the Senate seat left vacant by Bronson Cutting's death, won the balance of that term in 1936, and in 1940 took a full term of his own: the first person of Hispanic descent ever elected to one. Returned in 1946, 1952 and 1958, he chaired the Committee on Public Works and served until his death in 1962, by a wide margin the longest-serving Hispanic senator there has been.

Carlos Antonio de Padua Chávez y Ramírez was born on Tacuba Avenue in Mexico City on 13 June 1899, the seventh child of a criollo family. His grandfather, José María Chávez Alonso, had been governor of Aguascalientes and was executed by the French army in April 1864, during the second French invasion of Mexico. His father Agustín, who died when Carlos was barely three, invented a plough that was manufactured and used in the United States.

He started a cultural journal, Gladios, in 1916 and joined the Mexico City paper El Universal in 1924, writing more than five hundred pieces for it. Returning from New York in 1928 he took charge of the Orquesta Sinfónica Mexicana, the country's first permanent orchestra, and toured it through rural Mexico. That December he was appointed director of the National Conservatory of Music, where he set up three research academies, two of them collecting indigenous music.

His Second Symphony, the Sinfonía india of 1935–36, scored with Yaqui percussion, is the work of his that travelled furthest; Diego Rivera designed the sets for his ballet H.P. at its Philadelphia premiere in 1932. He ran Mexico's National Institute of Fine Arts from 1947 to 1952 and founded the National Symphony Orchestra there.

Georges Antoine Chavez was born in Paris on 13 January 1887 to Peruvian parents, Manuel Chávez Moreyra and María Rosa Dartnell y Guisse. He learned to fly at the school run by the Farman brothers, made his first flight at Reims in February 1910, and that August took a Blériot monoplane to Blackpool and climbed to 1,647 metres. Over Issy in September he reached 2,700.

The Aero Club of Italy had put up 20,000 dollars for the first aviator to fly the Pennine Alps and come out alive. "Whatever happens, I shall be found on the other side of the Alps," he said, and took off from Ried-Brig on 23 September 1910, threading the Simplon Pass. Fifty-one minutes later he was over Domodossola, where the aircraft broke up as he came down. Declared winner of the prize in his hospital bed, he died four days afterwards, saying "Arriba, siempre arriba, hasta las estrellas": higher, always higher, up to the stars.

Peru brought his remains home in 1957, and when Lima's international airport opened in 1960 it was named for him, with a full-size replica of his Blériot XI in the terminal.

César Chávez (1927–1993) founded the National Farm Workers Association, which grew into the United Farm Workers, and is remembered as a labour leader and civil rights campaigner. The name he carried had come a long road to reach a California field: a Roman spa on a Portuguese border river, fixed on men ordered to settle the town in 1160, carried south into Extremadura, respelled with a z on the far side of the Atlantic.

Angélico Chávez (1910–1996) was an American Franciscan priest, historian, poet and painter; Fermín Chávez (1924–2006) an Argentinian historian, poet and journalist; Gerardo Chávez (1937–2025) a Peruvian painter and sculptor. And the town is still on the Tâmega with its warm springs, wearing the last syllables of a Roman emperor's family name.