Reyes

Reyes is the Spanish for kings, and the plural is the point: one king would be Rey. The three are the Reyes Magos, the wise men of the Epiphany, whose feast on 6 January closes the Spanish Christmas and is still the night children get their presents. The Kings bring them, not a saint. A surname taken from that feast is not a claim on royal blood; it is a claim on a date.

The font turned the date into a name. Until the 1960s it was ordinary for a Spanish child to be baptised with three forenames, one of them the saint of the day. The devotional form was still being entered in full as late as 1880, when a boy was registered in Guadalajara as José de Jesús Benjamín Buenaventura de los Reyes y Ferreira. Drop the preposition and de los Reyes becomes Reyes, which stops looking devotional and starts looking royal.

Spanish genealogical tradition puts the surname's origin in Castile, moving into Galicia and Asturias and later into Andalusia, where it is thickest today. The Instituto Nacional de Estadística makes Reyes the 69th commonest first surname in Spain.

Portuguese built the same devotional name out of its own vocabulary and got Reis. In Brazil 1,483,376 people carry Reis, 0.73 per cent of the population counted, while Reyes and Rey together account for barely five thousand. A Brazilian called Reyes is therefore almost certainly descended from a Spanish-speaking immigrant, not from the Portuguese who founded the country.

Bernardo Doroteo Reyes Ogazón was born in Guadalajara in 1850 into a household deep in Liberal politics. His father was Colonel Domingo Reyes Rovira, from Managua, and his maternal cousins Pedro Ogazón and Ignacio Vallarta both governed Jalisco between 1858 and 1875. He left his law studies at fourteen to enlist against the Second French Empire. In 1866 he fought at Zacatecas and Calvillo as an ensign; the next year, aged seventeen, he rode with the Jalisco lanceros at the Siege of Querétaro and was wounded twice. He was present at the execution of the Emperor Maximilian.

Villa Unión, in Sinaloa, in July 1880, made him. Outnumbered three to one by the rebel Ramírez Terrón, Reyes held the first attack, then charged back with a few soldiers while calling out fictitious orders to suggest a larger force behind him. He took three wounds, one of them permanent damage to his right wrist, and was presumed dead. Terrón, believing himself surrounded, killed himself, leaving word asking Reyes to look after his family; Reyes paid his daughters a pension and found his widow a job. Porfirio Díaz answered with a rare double promotion straight to brigadier general.

Reyes governed Nuevo León for more than two decades under the Porfiriato, and governed it as a builder: local industrialisation, public education, public health, and a workers' compensation law approved on his watch, when most Mexican workers had no claim on an employer at all. In 1900 Díaz brought him to the capital as Secretary of War and Navy. He enlarged the army and raised the Second Reserve, a citizens' militia the Científicos around Díaz read as a private force loyal to Reyes, not the president. He resigned the ministry after two years.

Back in Nuevo León, Reyista clubs formed to run him for the presidency, and he was named beside José Yves Limantour as a plausible successor to Díaz. He declined to stand against his patron in 1910, was forced from office in 1909 and toured Europe until Díaz fell. He came back to a country in revolution, supported Francisco Madero and then rebelled against him. Freed from the prison of Santiago Tlatelolco on 9 February 1913, he marched on the National Palace expecting to declare Madero deposed, and was shot dead before its doors on the first day of the Ten Tragic Days.

Alfonso Reyes Ochoa, born in Monterrey on 17 May 1889, was the ninth of the general's twelve children. In 1909 he helped found the Ateneo de la Juventud with José Vasconcelos, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Martín Luis Guzmán and Julio Torri. His first book, Cuestiones estéticas, appeared in 1911; the story La Cena followed in 1912, read since as a forerunner of surrealism and of Latin American magical realism. He took his law degree in 1913, the year his father was killed, and left for the diplomatic service in France.

The German invasion of France in 1914 moved him to Madrid, where he stayed a decade and did his most productive work, on journalism and research at Ramón Menéndez Pidal's Centro de Estudios Históricos. Visión de Anáhuac (1915) carries the epigraph "Viajero: has llegado a la región más transparente del aire", from which Carlos Fuentes took a novel title in 1958. Reyes was ambassador to Argentina and to Brazil, retired from the corps in 1939 and organised what is now El Colegio de México. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Borges called him the greatest prose writer in the Spanish language of any age.

Aurora Reyes Flores was born at Hidalgo del Parral on 9 September 1908, granddaughter of the general and niece of Alfonso, daughter of the soldier León Reyes and Luisa Flores. In 1913 the revolution ruined them: her father went into hiding over his politics, and the rest went underground in Mexico City, where her mother baked bread for her daughters to sell at the Lagunilla market. "I am interested in social issues because I have suffered hunger", she said in 1953.

She was the first Mexican-born woman muralist. The earliest of her seven murals, Atentado a los maestros rurales, was finished in 1936 at the Centro Escolar Revolución; four more went up in the teachers' union auditorium between 1960 and 1972. She taught drawing and painting for the Secretariat of Public Education from 1927 until 1964, and campaigned for women's right to vote and to hold elected office, for longer maternity leave, recognised breastfeeding time and daycare centres for schoolteachers' children. She met Frida Kahlo as a fellow student at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and stood in the honour guard at her funeral. Her nickname was Magnolia Iracunda, the fiery magnolia.

The boy baptised de los Reyes y Ferreira in Guadalajara in 1880 grew up to be Chucho Reyes. Apprenticed in 1894 to the Loreto y Ancira lithography shop, he went on to the Casa Pellandina art supply store, decorating its windows and dressing halls and churches for society weddings and baptisms. When his father died in 1911 he inherited the house on Morelos Street with a collection of art, handcrafts and antiques, and turned it into a shop, a private museum and an open house for artists.

He began painting the crepe paper he wrapped his sales in, to decorate it, and customers started buying the paper for its own sake. He never accepted the title of painter, saying he did not paint but covered things in mud. He painted early, for the light, and never at an easel: roosters, circus acts, skeletons, horses and flowers, and, being religious, Christ and the Virgin, monks, saints and angels. Eighty-five per cent of his output came after he moved to Mexico City at fifty-eight. He advised Luis Barragán and Mathias Goeritz on colour, and waited until 1967, half a century in, for a first solo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The Fundación Luis Barragán holds 194 of his works.

In Spain the devotional root has not dried up: Reyes is still a given name as well as a surname, carried by the economist and politician Reyes Maroto, born in 1973, and by the 1500 metres runner Reyes Estévez, born in 1976. As a surname it belongs to the boxer Faustino Reyes, born in 1975, and to José Antonio Reyes Calderón (1983–2019), the Sevilla player capped by Spain.

It also holds down most of a band. Nicolas Reyes, born in 1958, sings lead for the Gipsy Kings, and Andre, Canut, Patchai and Paul Reyes play alongside him: a surname meaning Kings, in a group that took the word for its own.