Cruz

Most common Spanish surnames answer one of two questions: whose son are you, which gives Rodríguez and Martínez, or where are you from, which gives Torres and Castillo. Cruz answers neither. It is the ordinary Spanish and Portuguese word for a cross, and as a family name it records a devotion rather than a descent. The fuller forms spell it out: De la Cruz, of the Cross; Santa Cruz, the Holy Cross; Vera Cruz, the True Cross. First found in Castile, it went out with the empires far enough that in the Philippines the Spanish spelling survives as a surname beside the borrowed everyday word, krus.

Two pressures put that word on ordinary households. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 and the widening work of the Inquisition pushed New Christian families, with Crypto-Jewish or Moorish backgrounds behind them, towards surnames that could not be read as anything but Catholic, and nothing in Spanish was less ambiguous than the cross. Registrars naming children nobody had claimed reached for the same word, so Cruz stood on the church orphanage's short list beside Iglesias and Blanco. The third route was an adult's choice: anyone entering a religious order put down the surname they were born with and took a devotion instead.

Juan de Yepes Álvarez was born on 24 June 1542 at Fontiveros, on the plain of Ávila. His father's people came from Torrijos, where they held land and an oil mill and had reached hidalgo standing, and his father settled at Fontiveros and married Catalina Álvarez there around 1527. That father was descended from judeoconversos, and it is worth saying plainly: the surname of the Cross his son carried across Europe did not come down from him. They lived as what Juan later called poor weavers of buratos, the fine silk veils rich women wore.

The father died about 1543 and a brother at roughly ten, when Juan was six. In 1551 Catalina moved the household to Medina del Campo, which held one of the great commercial fairs of Europe for three months a year. Registered there as a pauper, Juan boarded at the Colegio de los Niños de la Doctrina, which fed and clothed him in exchange for serving at Mass and begging alms. He was tried as a carpenter, a carver and a printer and was clumsy at all three; what he was good at was books, and in 1559 he entered the town's Jesuit college.

In 1563 he entered the Carmelite convent of Santa Ana at Medina del Campo and professed the next year as fray Juan de Santo Matía. He read philosophy and letters at Salamanca until 1567, then returned to Medina, newly ordained, to say his first Mass in front of his mother. Teresa de Jesús was in the town founding her second reformed convent, which meant dropping the mitigated Carmelite rule of 1432 for stricter constitutions built on the rule of 1247. She wanted a male branch to match it; Juan, half decided to turn Carthusian, agreed on the condition that she did not keep him waiting.

In August 1568 he left Salamanca for good and travelled with Teresa to Valladolid, where he spent weeks learning how a reformed community ran. It was there that he put on the habit of a discalced Carmelite and changed his name to Juan de la Cruz. On 28 November 1568 the first house of the reform opened in a half ruined building at Duruelo, with Juan as subprior and master of novices. Visiting in the spring of 1569, Teresa found the prior, Antonio de Jesús, sweeping the doorway and asked what had become of his honour; he answered, smiling, that he cursed the time he had ever had any.

The unreformed Carmelites moved to stop the reform. In October 1577 the nuns of the Encarnación at Ávila, where Juan had been confessor since 1572, met to elect a prioress: fifty five voted for Teresa in the face of threatened excommunication, and the provincial burned their ballots and installed the losing candidate. Juan was arrested that December. Teresa wrote to Philip II asking for his release, and told the archbishop of Évora that Juan was a tower of strength.

He was taken to Toledo blindfolded by night and shut in a room six feet by ten, lit by a slit three fingers wide near the ceiling, so that he could read the office only at midday, standing on a bench to hold the book up to it. He was there nine months, and after six of them a new jailer took pity and gave him pen and ink. On the night of 14 August 1578, the eve of the Assumption, he loosened the screws holding the lock, let himself down on a rope cut from his blankets and got over a wall into the street, carrying a notebook with the stanzas of the Cántico espiritual he had written in that cell.

A chapter of seven friars at Almodóvar del Campo on 9 October 1578 made him prior of Nuestra Señora del Monte Calvario near Beas de Segura, a house of about thirty men, some of them former hermits. Every Saturday he walked the ten kilometres to the discalced nuns at Beas to hear confessions. There he wrote the poem that opens En una noche oscura and all but six of the remaining stanzas of the Cántico, and began the prose Subida del monte Carmelo as a commentary on his own verse.

The quarrel was settled above his head: Gregory XIII gave the discalced Carmelites their own province by the brief Pia Consideratione of 22 June 1580, and a brief of 1587 made them an autonomous congregation. Juan founded a college at Baeza in 1579 and reached Granada in 1582 as prior of the Santos Mártires, which gave him his best years: he finished the Subida, wrote La noche oscura del alma and Llama de amor viva, and completed the first prose commentary on the Cántico. He died at Úbeda as midnight struck on 14 December 1591. Canonised in 1726 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1926, he has been patron of poets writing in Spanish since 1952.

Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana was born on 12 November 1648 at San Miguel Nepantla near Mexico City, daughter of a Spanish naval captain from the Canary Islands and of a criolla mother whose father leased the hacienda of Panoayán. She grew up with the run of her grandfather's library, hiding in the chapel to read books girls were not meant to open. Sent to Mexico City at sixteen in 1664, she asked to dress as a male student so that she could enter the university, and was refused. At the viceregal court instead she was examined in public by theologians, jurists and poets, answered them unprepared, and was famous across New Spain by seventeen.

In 1667 she entered the discalced Carmelites as a postulant and left within months. In 1669 she entered the Hieronymites, whose rule was easier, and took the name Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, probably for the Spanish nun Juana de la Cruz Vázquez Gutiérrez, who had won one of the few dispensations allowing a woman to preach. She chose the cloister, she wrote, so as to have no fixed occupation that might curtail her freedom to study, and made her quarters a salon for the intellectual women of New Spain. Out of it came Primero Sueño, the satire Hombres necios, and the Respuesta a Sor Filotea, an argument that women had a right to formal education. She died on 17 April 1695, having caught the plague nursing her own sisters through it.

By the nineteenth century the name was inherited like any other. José María de la Cruz Prieto, born at Concepción on 25 March 1799 and son of Luis de la Cruz, joined the Chilean army as a boy on 27 October 1811 and fought at Chacabuco, Maipú and Pangal in the war of independence. In the War of the Confederation he was second in command of the Restoration Army under his cousin Manuel Bulnes, with a particular share in the victory at Yungay, and was afterwards Intendant of Valparaíso and of Concepción.

In Spain the name kept quieter company: Ramón de la Cruz, 1731 to 1794, a neoclassical dramatist, and Juana Cruz, born in 1917, a Spanish bullfighter at a time when almost no women were. That is the shape of the thing: a word for an object rather than a person, taken by families who needed a name nobody could question, given to children who had no name at all, and chosen outright by a Castilian weaver's son and a Mexican nun who each wanted to be known by the Cross.