Ramírez

Ramírez is a Spanish patronymic of Germanic origin, and it means one thing only: son of Ramiro. The given name behind it is the Gothic Ranimir, 'famous in counsel': a man valued for what he advised, not what he carried. It came into Iberia with the Goths and was worn down by centuries of Romance speech into the short, hard Ramiro that Castilian still uses.

That Gothic layer is not decoration. The Christian principalities that formed in the north after the Visigothic kingdom fell kept Germanic names among their ruling families, and Ramiro was one of them. A reader whose surname is Ramírez is carrying, at one remove, a name that was already old when Castile was new.

Ramiro is one of the oldest royal names of Christian Spain. It belonged to the early kings of Asturias, León and Aragon, in the first generations of the Reconquista. Ramiro I of Asturias fought the emirate of Córdoba; Ramiro I of Aragon founded that kingdom's royal line, the first of the Aragonese kings.

Being royal is exactly why the name became common. A name worn by kings is copied by their vassals, then by their vassals' tenants, until half the men in a valley answer to it, and every one of them is a father whose sons need distinguishing.

For a long time Ramírez was not a surname at all. It was a live description that changed every generation. After the Visigothic period the population of Iberia took up a patronymic system built on the Latin genitive suffix -icī, 'son of', fixed to the father's forename; it evolved into Castilian -ez, Basque -itz, Catalan -is and Galician-Portuguese -es, and it ran thickest of all through central Castile. A man called Ramírez in the eleventh century was not a member of a Ramírez family. He was, specifically and only, the son of a man named Ramiro.

The royal records catch the system while it was still working. Sancho Ramírez, King of Aragon (1042–1094), carries the pairing in its plain sense, in the generation after Ramiro I founded that line. So does Sancho Ramírez, Count of Ribagorza, who died in 1117, and García Ramírez of Navarre (1112–1150), of the Jiménez dynasty. None of them would have called Ramírez a family name; their own sons would have been Sánchez in turn.

When the wheel stopped and surnames became hereditary, Ramírez was left fixed on families with no Ramiro anywhere in living memory. It is worth knowing the name is a true patronymic, because many Spanish surnames that look like one are not: z and s sound alike in American Spanish, so Chávez, Cortez and Valdez are only respellings of Chaves, Cortés and Valdés. Ramírez is the real thing, suffix and all.

Once the patronymic hardened, Spanish practice gave families a way to say which Ramírez they were: the particle de and a place, the same formula behind Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba and Pedro López de Ayala. It produced compound house-names that read as one surname. Luis Ramírez de Lucena was a sixteenth-century Spanish chess grandmaster; Ángel de Saavedra y Ramírez de Baquedano, 3rd Duke of Rivas (1791–1865), was a Spanish poet and politician.

The Ramírez de Haro line still holds title today, in Fernando Ramírez de Haro, 16th Count of Bornos, and Fernando Ramírez de Haro, 10th Marquis of Villanueva del Duero. Because a Spaniard carries two surnames and a woman does not surrender hers at marriage, compounds like these pass down the generations instead of being absorbed.

Ramírez is the 28th most common surname in Spain, but it is not densest where the Ramiros were kings. The heaviest concentrations are the Canary Islands, at one resident in 149, and Andalusia at one in 179, then La Rioja, Castilla-La Mancha, Ceuta and Madrid. The Atlantic islands and the south: ground taken and resettled during the Reconquista, and the ports that afterwards faced the Americas.

The accent matters. Written properly the name is Ramírez, with an acute on the i, and the stress falls there. English-language records drop it so routinely that many bearers abroad have never seen their own name spelled correctly.

Only 2.8 per cent of all Ramírezes now live in Spain, against 40.1 per cent in Mexico alone, where it is the ninth most common surname in the country and reaches one person in every 32 in Guanajuato. Colombia holds 10.2 per cent, Venezuela 5.4, Guatemala 5.3, Peru 4.3, Argentina 3.6, and 2.7 per cent are in the Philippines, the far end of the same Spanish reach. The 8.3 per cent in the United States make it the 42nd most common surname there.

The bearers follow that map. Pedro Pablo Ramírez (1884–1962) was the 27th President of Argentina, and Ariel Ramírez (1921–2010) an Argentinian composer and pianist. Sergio Ramírez, born 1942, is a writer who served as vice-president of Nicaragua. Raúl Ramírez, born 1953, was a Mexican tennis player of the front rank.

For a diaspora reader the arithmetic is the whole story. The name is Mexican, Colombian, Venezuelan, Filipino and American by weight of numbers now, and every one of those lines runs back through a Spanish port to a boy in a northern Iberian village whose father was called Ramiro, after a king.